It's time to break out of the straight jacket of incremental progress or none at all. We are told that we must support the establishment democrat or get stuck with a crazy republican. Either way, the establishment wins. And the people lose.

What are we to do? Rise up and start fighting back, that's what. As Bernie says, he can’t do it alone. If all we do is elect him and then sit back and expect him to do it, we’re sunk. It’s the uprising, the grassroots movement to not only elect Sanders but to also fill the house and senate with politicians who will work with him and continue to be involved at the citizen activist level that’s important. This is what Bernie is exhorting us to do.

More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It's the rest of us who are lost.

Matt Taibbi in RollingStone

Yes, President Obama (not to take from him any of the credit he is due) said the same thing about building a permanent grassroots movement but then he turned his back on the grassroots on day one and took up the banner of the establishment 1%. We know Bernie won’t do this. In 40 years in politics, he has never turned his back on the people. Bernie and his grassroots movement are for real. Bernie is a legitimate anti-establishment candidate. The fact that he's a senator doesn't change that. He's anti-establishment because of the positions he takes, but more importantly, because he's refusing to take dirty money or corporate money. He will be the first president in my lifetime to belong to the people and the people only.

How many other presidential candidates in our times have ever explicitly rejected Big Money or corporate money? None, zip, zero – that's how many. It's unprecedented, never happened before. People laughed, people mocked, they said it was foolhardy and would doom his candidacy. But what really happened?

He has kept neck and neck with the Goldman Sachs candidate raising nearly as much as her from the American people as she has from Wall Street and the 1%. Bernie Sanders has now had more individual donations than any other candidate for president ever at this point in the race. His money is from us, the 99%. He is in no one's pocket. He will be modern history's first and only candidate to be beholden only to the American people. They keep saying it can't be done and he keeps doing it.

Big money already has a stranglehold on the process of government. It outright owns most of the members of Congress, and its lobbyists write much of our important legislation. With Citizens United, buying elections is now more or less legal. Big money even owns most of the media companies that employ those pundits who are all telling us now to worry about how "realistic" Sanders isn't.

Matt Taibbi in RollingStone

Think about that. A president with awesome progressive credibility and unassailable integrity. An honest person who is beholden not to the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street or the Military Industrial Complex, but to the American people. It would be, at least in my lifetime, unprecedented. That's why I said we'd have to be fools not to seize this opportunity for real change. Chances like this just don't come along often – almost never. And we've run out of time for more of the same old crap. We cannot afford not to change, and the only credible change candidate we have, by a very wide margin, is Bernie Sanders.

People are afraid to try something new, big and bold. They've been conditioned to be afraid of the risk, afraid to challenge the owners of the corporate state. There are no safe bets here, it's a risky universe. We need to be fearless and do the right thing now that we have a snowball's chance.

Sometimes we don't know what's possible until we try. Can a peaceful democratic uprising turn things around? I don't know that for a fact. It just seems to me that we have to try. I'm not willing to accept the status quo, and none of us should be. It's killing the planet. I can't just watch as we continue to circle the drain. Now that we have a sliver of a chance of fighting for a more hopeful future, why in the name of all that is or isn't holy wouldn't we? It's not the time to give up. Making an honest man president seems to me a damned good idea whatever the limitations of that might turn out to be. We at least know he won't lie to us or turn his back on us. We know he's on our side.

Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks upon his "grumpy demeanor." But Bernie is grumpy because he's thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who've had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time.

Matt Taibbi in RollingStone

We'll certainly never control the armaments trade and their outrageous war profiteering, and thus all these evil wars, as long as our leaders on on their payroll. I would love to see a president NOT owned by the militarists or the corporatists or the billionaires. What ever its limitations might prove to be, it would have to be a major improvement over rule by corporations and the hideously rich who don't mind bombing the world and laying waste her resources in an insane drive to further enrich themselves. So Bernie actually gives me hope, the first I've had in a while — hope that we might finally start what will no doubt be an arduous and massive effort to turn it all around.

The establishment meme is that Bernie can't possibly win. How many thought he'd make it this far? The establishment, if you haven’t noticed, is out of its ever-loving mind and wrong in every conceivable way about every conceivable thing.

Don’t be fooled by conventional metrics or the deception and propaganda of the corporate media. No one really knows what’s going on out there - least of all pollsters. Oh, they’re measuring stuff but not the right stuff and not all the stuff. I believe the youth vote and the never before voted, for example, are being underestimated and largely ignored and that the Internet, also being ignored, is a bigger factor than most anyone realizes. Much of this is unprecedented and therefore off the radar. Don’t be misled by polls and the usual bullshit. Bernie has a damn good chance. A lot of people just still don’t realize it.

Damn the establishment, the corporate media, the naysayers and the republicans - full speed ahead!

We need a President Bernie Sanders in the worst possible way.

We have some very serious and immediate problems that are so intimidating that many refuse to even acknowledge that they exist or that it's as bad as all that. Are we on the verge of ecological disaster? We sure as hell are. People want to minimize it because they don't have the courage to face it. It really is that bad. Scientists are in despair. We need to face up to reality, roll up our sleeves and get to work, or it's curtains for people, all people. Extinction is not something to scoff at. If we keep going in the direction we're headed, were going to hit a wall. It’s going to be hard enough to tackle these issues with a President Sanders, with a president of honest intent, no strings attached and clarity of vision. I hate to think what it would be like without all of those things.

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