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"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

-- George Washington

News and Opinion

BERNIE SANDERS declares victory over PETE BUTTIGIEG in Iowa Caucus

The Iowa caucuses debacle

The day-long delay in the reporting of voting results from Monday night’s Iowa Democratic caucuses is an unprecedented event, even by the sordid standards of American capitalist politics. For some 20 hours after an estimated 175,000 people had participated in caucus meetings, the Iowa Democratic Party refused to report a single vote, claiming technical difficulties in the app used to report the precinct caucus totals to party headquarters. When partial vote totals were finally released at 4 p.m. Tuesday, local time in Des Moines, it was for only 62 percent of the nearly 1,800 precinct caucuses. State party chairman Troy Price refused to explain how the 62 percent had been selected, or what distinguished these from the 38 percent not yet reported. He brushed aside repeated questions about when a final count would be ready.

Whatever the specific intentions of the Iowa state party leaders, every action they have taken in the caucus crisis has been to the detriment of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and to the benefit of former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. The former naval intelligence officer has been declared the winner of the caucuses by the media because, in the results tabulated for 62 percent of precincts, he placed first in the obscure category of “state delegate equivalents,” the metric highlighted by the state party. In the same tabulation, Sanders won the most votes, both in the initial count and in the second round after “unviable” candidates—those with less than 15 percent support—had been eliminated. Moreover, much of the unreported vote is from college and factory towns where the Vermont senator posted his best results. It is quite possible that Sanders will also lead in delegate equivalents once a final count is reported.

In previous Iowa caucuses, results were tabulated and made public within two hours of voters arriving at the precinct. The candidates proclaimed the winner in the last four contested Iowa caucuses all went on to win the party’s nomination: Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. But there were no media headlines Monday night and Tuesday morning about Bernie Sanders winning the most votes in Iowa in 2020. Nor were there blaring headlines about the debacle for former Vice President Joe Biden, once the presumed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, who finished a poor fourth in the tally reported Tuesday afternoon. Biden may actually finish as low as fifth in the final count, since Senator Amy Klobuchar trailed him by only a small margin.

It is impossible to say at this point exactly what is behind the delay in reporting from Iowa. However, the claim that all that is involved is a “glitch” in a reporting app—produced by a highly-connected Democratic Party technology company—raises more questions than it answers. The media, which readily swallows incredible tales about Russian “meddling” in American politics, was quick to denounce any questioning of the motives for the delay as a “conspiracy theory.” The whole process is highly suspect and suspicious, ripe for political manipulation. The delay in the Iowa results, moreover, followed by only a couple of days the cancellation of a final poll by the Des Moines Register, after the Buttigieg campaign complained that at least one caller for the telephone survey had omitted their candidate’s name. The highly influential poll was expected to show a sizeable Sanders lead across the state. ...

[Sanders']response to the attempt of the Iowa Democratic Party to rig the caucus result was notably low key. He told reporters that it was “not fair” to suggest that the procedure followed by the state party might be suspect. ... The complacency being promoted by the Sanders campaign is staggering. The fact is that on February 4, no one knew the results of the first contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. One can easily envision a situation where on November 4, only nine months from now, the results of the US presidential election as a whole were unknown, or under challenge, or being openly defied by a president who has repeatedly declared his intention to stay in office well beyond the constitutional two-term limit.

pic.twitter.com/JDS4zUXXJG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2020

DNC Caught Flipping Votes From Bernie To Buttigieg

The Myth Of Incompetence: DNC Scandals Are A Feature, Not A Bug

The Iowa caucus scandal has continued to get more egregious by the hour, with new revelations routinely pouring in about extremely suspicious manipulations taking place which all just so happen to disadvantage the campaign of Bernie Sanders in the first Democratic electoral contest of 2020. By the time you read this article, there will likely have been more. Following the failure of an extremely shady app developed by vocally anti-Sanders establishment insiders which reportedly was literally altering vote count numbers after they were entered, Black Hawk County supervisor Chris Schwartz shared the election results in his county on Facebook so the public could have some idea of what’s going on as the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) slowly trickles out the results of the caucuses.

Uhhhhhhhh the IDP is now reporting vote totals from Black Hawk County that are at odds with what Black Hawk County themselves have reported pic.twitter.com/nbLa6mSuvO

— Bernie Won (@lib_crusher) February 5, 2020

Sanders supporters quickly highlighted the fact that the IDP’s reported numbers for Black Hawk County were wildly different from those reported by Schwartz, with votes taken from Sanders and given to minor fringe candidates Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer. The IDP then announced that it would be making “a minor correction to the last batch of results”, which just so happened to be in Black Hawk County and just so happened to give Sanders back some votes (but still remains different from that reported by Schwartz). It’s probable that this only happened as a result of one Black Hawk County supervisor taking to social media to report the vote tallies for this one particular county. What about all the Iowa locations where this did not happen and local Democratic Party officials didn’t report their numbers on social media? Does anyone actually believe that the one instance where the IDP got caught is the one instance in which such vote tampering occurred?

That would be a very silly belief to hold, in my opinion. It would be like a store clerk discovering that a can of beans is completely rotten, then going ahead and putting the rest of the pallet on the shelf under the assumption that the other cans are fine.

Another of the countless revelations hemorrhaging from this fustercluck is a report from CNN and The New York Post that the DNC, not the IDP, is “running the show” in managing the Iowa caucus scandal. This means that this Democratic presidential primary scandal is being managed by the same committee which orchestrated the last Democratic presidential primary scandal, and that the campaign being victimized by this scandal, that of Bernie Sanders, is the same in both cases. This would be the same DNC whose chairperson, Tom Perez, recently stacked its nominating committee with dozens of odious alt-centrist establishment insiders who are ideologically opposed to Sanders in every meaningful way. ...

As these scandalous revelations continue to emerge I don’t see anyone online expressing surprise that the Democratic establishment is once again stacking the deck against Sanders, but I do see some people expressing surprise that they are being so brazen about it. Which is perfectly understandable; if this party wants to screw over progressive voters, you’d expect that they’d at least try to hide it a little bit so they don’t alienate their progressive base before November.

The flaw in this expectation is its premise that Democratic Party elites care if their party wins in November. They do not. ...

These people do not care if Trump gets re-elected, because they lose nothing if he does. The only people who stand anything to lose are the ordinary citizens who are suffering under a corrupt status quo of soul-crushing neoliberalism and increasing authoritarianism, many of whom currently support Sanders. Democratic Party elites are perfectly happy to keep shrieking about Russia for another four years while making sure that the status quo which rewards their manipulative behavior remains intact, and ensuring that they never wind up like those poor suckers out there who are suffering from poverty and lack of healthcare.

And everything I just said is equally true of the media class who are currently working in conjunction with the DNC’s shenanigans to spin Pete Buttigeig as the clear winner of the party’s first presidential electoral contest. They enjoy all the same perks, and move in many of the same circles, as Democratic Party elites, and it’s all conditioned on their protection of the status quo. ...

I keep seeing the word “incompetence” thrown around. “Gosh these Democratic Party leaders are so incompetent!”, they say. “How can anyone be so bad at their job?” Well, they are not bad at their job. They are very, very good at their job. It’s just that their job isn’t what most people assume it is. Their job is not to win elections and garner public support, their job is to ensure the perpetuation of the status quo which rewards them so handsomely for their malignant behavior. Toward this end they are not incompetent at all. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well. They are extremely competent. Depraved, certainly. Sociopathic, possibly. But not incompetent.

They’re happy to make their nefariousness look like incompetence though, whenever they can get away with it. Any manipulator worth their salt always will be. If they can make their planned, deliberate acts of sabotage look like innocent little oopsies, they’ll gladly do so. But you learn in life that whenever you see someone making a lot of “mistakes” which just so happen to benefit them every time, you’re dealing with manipulation, not incompetence.

Krystal and Saagar: NYT says Iowa 'RIDDLED with errors'

Iraqi officials say Baghdad wants to minimize reliance on US

The Iraqi government has told its military not to seek assistance from the U.S.-led coalition in operations against the Islamic State group, two senior Iraqi military officials said, amid a crisis of mistrust between Washington and Baghdad after an American strike killed a top Iranian general and an Iraqi militia commander.

The step shows that while the Iraqí leadership’s demands for an immediate removal of American forces have cooled, they are serious about rethinking the strategic relationship, and this is directly affecting military cooperation.

Officially, Iraqis have been unclear on the status of joint operations. The Iraqi military announced Jan. 30 that they had resumed after a three-week halt, but that statement was later removed and a military spokesperson rescinded the claim in remarks to state television. It was not followed up with a clarification. ...

On at least two occasions in January, U.S. officials said they expected the pause would be lifted imminently. But in practice, Iraqis are seeking to minimize cooperation with the anti-IS coalition, based on government orders, two Iraqi military officials and one militia official said this week. ...

Outgoing Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has stated publicly that U.S. troops must go, but he has stepped back from unilaterally canceling existing agreements, saying the matter was up to the next prime minister to decide. Prime Minister-designate Mohammed Allawi has not made his policy known toward the troop presence.

Really excellent and worth a full read. Here are some excerpts:

Who Made the Palestinian Authority a ‘Police State?’

Maybe something good will come out of the Trump plan, after all. By pushing the Middle East peace process to its logical conclusion, President Donald Trump has made crystal clear something that was supposed to have been obscured: that no U.S. administration has ever really seen peace as the objective of its “peacemaking.” The current White House is no exception — it has just been far more incompetent at concealing its joint strategy with the Israelis. But that is what happens when a glorified used-car salesman, Donald Trump, and his sidekick son-in-law, the schoolboy-cum-businessman Jared Kushner, try selling us the “deal of the century.” Neither of them, it seems, has the political or diplomatic guile normally associated with those who rise to high office in Washington.

During an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this week, Kushner dismally failed to cloak the fact that his “peace” plan was designed with one goal only: to screw the Palestinians over. The real aim is so transparent that even Zakaria couldn’t stop himself from pointing it out. In CNN’s words, he noted that “no Arab country currently satisfies the requirements Palestinians are being expected to meet in the next four years — including ensuring freedom of press, free and fair elections, respect for human rights for its citizens, and an independent judiciary.” ... In fact, the “Peace to Prosperity” document unveiled last week by the White House is no more than a list of impossible preconditions the Palestinians must meet to be allowed to sit down with the Israelis at the negotiating table. If they don’t do so within four years, and quickly reach a deal, the very last slivers of their historic homeland — the parts not already seized by Israel — can be grabbed too, with U.S. blessing.

Admittedly, all Middle East peace plans in living memory have foisted these kinds of prejudicial conditions on the Palestinians. But this time many of the preconditions are so patently preposterous - contradictory even — that the usually pliable corporate press corps are embarrassed to be seen ignoring the glaring inconsistencies. The CNN exchange was so revealing in part because Kushner was triggered by Zakaria’s observation that the Palestinians had to become a model democracy - a kind of idealized Switzerland, while still under belligerent Israeli occupation — before they could be considered responsible enough for statehood. How was that plausible, Zakaria hinted, when Saudi Arabia, despite its appalling human rights abuses, nonetheless remains a close strategic U.S. ally, and Saudi leaders continue to be intimates of the Trump business empire? No one in Washington is seriously contemplating removing U.S. recognition of Saudi Arabia because it is a head-chopping, women-hating, journalist-killing religious fundamentalist state.

But Zakaria could have made an even more telling point — were he not answerable to CNN executives. There are also hardly any Western states that would pass the democratic, human rights-respecting threshold set by the Trump plan for the Palestinians. Nor, of course, would Israel. Think of Britain’s flouting last year of a ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the Chagos Islanders must be allowed to return home decades after the U.K. expelled them so the U.S. could build a military base on their land. ... Or what about the U.S. evading due process by holding prisoners offshore at Guantanamo? Or its use of torture against Iraqi prisoners, or its reliance on extraordinary rendition, or its extrajudicial assassinations using drones overseas, including against its own citizens?

Or for that matter, its jailing and extortionate fining of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, despite the Obama administration granting her clemency. U.S. officials want to force her to testify against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his role in publishing leaks of U.S. war crimes committed in Iraq, including the shocking “Collateral Murder” video. And while we’re talking about Assange and about Iraq ... Would the records of either the U.S. or U.K. stand up to scrutiny if they were subjected to the same standards now required of the Palestinian leadership?

Netanyahu backtracks on Israeli plan for swift Palestinian land grab

When Donald Trump presented his “vision for peace” last week, it read like a checklist of far-right Israeli aspirations for permanent control over Palestinians and much of the land they live on. In the triumphant delirium of what Benjamin Netanyahu has sold as his diplomatic masterstroke, the prime minister bragged to reporters the same day that the US had greenlighted an immediate beginning of the annexation of occupied territory.

Trump’s man in Jerusalem, the pro-settler US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, made clear that Israel “does not have to wait at all” and could fast-track extending its sovereignty over Jewish settlements as detailed in the plan.

A vote on the issue was set for an Israeli cabinet meeting on Sunday, and Palestinians awaited what is largely seen as the endgame in their decade-long struggle for real independence.

But Sunday came and went, with the cabinet meeting postponed. And on Tuesday evening, Netanyahu, speaking at a campaign rally, made an about-turn, saying he would ask his government to approve the annexation only if he wins a 2 March election. As with much in the Trump administration, it was not clear where the blockage was coming from. ...

Netanyahu’s walk back on his perhaps overly zealous annexation pledge could blow up what was supposed to be his key election strategy. He wanted to spotlight his diplomatic wins, taking the focus off his three damning corruption indictments and political failures after two inconclusive elections.

Worth a full read:

UN rapporteur Nils Melzer exposes British government attempts to obstruct his defence of Assange

At a meeting in London’s St. Pancras New Church on Monday night, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer provided new information about the efforts of the British government and the establishment media to hinder his defence of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. ...

Melzer explained that since releasing his finding in May 2019 that Assange had been subjected to an unprecedented nine-year campaign of persecution by Britain, Sweden and the US, resulting in medically verifiable symptoms of “psychological torture,” his inquiries and recommendations had been ignored. “States refused to investigate or engage in a dialogue about my findings, even to respond to the questions I am mandated by them to ask,” he stated.

The UN official revealed that behind the scenes, British authorities had actively sought to undermine him.

Melzer stated: “They went to see the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights to complain about me. They don’t seem to realise that I am independent, I am appointed directly by the Human Rights Council. But the ambassador in Geneva seems to have told her that he is ‘not happy’ with the way I conduct my mandate. Incidentally, I heard they also told my employer in Glasgow that they were not too happy with how I conducted my mandate.”

That the British government is simultaneously stonewalling Melzer’s inquiries, and apparently conducting a campaign against him, underscores the flagrant illegality of the entire US-led vendetta against Assange.

Melzer is employed at the University of Glasgow as a professor of international law, independently of his role as a UN official. The only reason for the British authorities to contact the university would be to pressure it to act against Melzer over the principled position he has taken in the Assange case. Such conduct recalls the attacks by the British and American governments on UN experts who publicly condemned the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” in the lead-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Trump acquitted: Democrats say battle is not over

It's Over: Trump Acquitted of Impeachment Charges by the Senate

The Senate voted Wednesday afternoon to acquit Trump for asking a foreign country to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, closing a four-month political drama with a stunning display of Trump’s dominance over congressional Republicans. Only one Republican senator broke from Trump: Utah’s Mitt Romney, who hammered Trump’s behavior as “grievously wrong” and said he couldn’t acquit Trump in good conscience. ...

The final tally was 52-48 on the first article of impeachment, and 53-47 on the second. Romney voted to convict on the first article and to acquit on the second. A two-thirds majority was needed to kick Trump out of office. ...

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia ultimately joined his party and voted to impeach Trump on both articles, announcing his decision less than 10 minutes before the vote was counted.

BREAKING — Statement from the White House press secretary on what she calls “the sham impeachment attempt." pic.twitter.com/wGxKkWnIXt

— Michael D. Shear (@shearm) February 5, 2020

Predictable impeachment outcome, Hunter Biden not off the hook

From the Department of Gratuitous Payback:

Breaking: from their press office -

“Good afternoon, Senators Grassley and Johnson today requested Hunter Biden’s official travel records from the U.S. Secret Service as a part of their ongoing probe into potential conflicts of interest.

A full news release is forthcoming”

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) February 5, 2020

Pelosi Applauds Trumps Imperialism/Militarism At SOTU

US homeless student population reaches 1.5m

The number of public school students experiencing homelessness in the US has increased 15% in the past three years, reaching its highest number in more than a decade.

More than 1.5 million students reported experiencing homelessness during the 2017-18 school year, according to a study by the National Center for Homeless Education, with California at the forefront with 263,000 students.

The 2017-18 number was the highest number that the NCHE has reported since it began tracking this data in 2004, George Hancock, the center director, told the Guardian. “We’re seeing it throughout the country,” he said.

The majority of homeless students, whose ages range from pre-kindergarten at age 3 to grade 12 at age 18 or older, reported that they were forced to stay with friends or relatives due to loss of their primary housing or economic hardship. More than 182,000 students reported living in shelters, transitional housing or were awaiting foster care – a 2% decrease from previous years.

However, the number of students living in unsheltered situations, such as on the streets, spiked by 137% to more than 102,000 in the past three years.

'America in a State of Denial About the Level of Poverty in This Country,' Says Ocasio-Cortez

Calling on her fellow lawmakers to pass legislation she put forward last year to better recognize—and move to eradicate—poverty in the United States, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez testified before her own House committee Wednesday about the U.S. government's willful failure to understand how many Americans are living in destitution.

Ocasio-Cortez joined several anti-poverty campaigners in testifying at a hearing regarding the effects of Trump administration policies on child poverty, hunger, homelessness, and healthcare. The first-term New York Democrat argued that the government's formula for calculating poverty—used long before President Donald Trump was in office—makes it impossible to account for the financial devastation millions of Americans face.

"The current level of the poverty line has simply been calculated by the price of minimum dietary requirements times three," Ocasio-Cortez said. "The current poverty line assumes that you have a spouse at home full-time, taking care of your children. The current poverty line assumes that you don't really have any significant healthcare costs. All of this is wrong."

.@AOC: 40 million Americans live in what the government recognizes as poverty. That’s one in ten. pic.twitter.com/d3wrAuzIJW

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) February 5, 2020

The failure to account for how many children are growing up without sufficient food, secure housing, and enough resources to pay for basic needs—and the subsequent failure to provide sufficient welfare services—has left at least 40 million people in poverty, the congresswoman said.

"We cannot go another year with kids not getting food that they need—losing parents because they can't afford healthcare," said Ocasio-Cortez. "This is a moral wrong, and for children to lose their parents because they can't afford insulin or chemotherapy in what we proudly call the richest country in the world, is a moral injustice and a moral outrage."

As Common Dreams reported, the United Nations' top expert on poverty issued a scathing report in 2018, accusing the Trump administration of driving millions of Americans toward the point of "ruination" by cutting government assistance while lavishing the wealthiest people in the country with a $1.5 trillion tax cut.

The Oversight Committee's hearing came eight months after the Trump administration said it may change how inflation is calculated to even further reduce the number of Americans who are considered eligible for federal healthcare and housing assistance.

Bernie Madoff says he is dying of kidney failure and seeks early prison release

Bernard Madoff, the fraudster behind the largest Ponzi scheme in history, said Wednesday that he was dying of kidney failure and is seeking early release from his 150-year prison sentence.

In a court filing Madoff’s lawyer said the 81-year-old uses a wheelchair, often requires oxygen, and suffers from cardiovascular disease, hypertension, insomnia and other chronic and serious medical conditions. He is too old for a transplant and has been moved to the Federal medical center prison in Butner, North Carolina.

Madoff was arrested in December 2008 after authorities exposed a decades-long scheme in which the self-styled investment guru scammed thousands of people out of their life savings.

Prosecutors said Madoff’s firm, Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities, swindled individuals, charities, pension funds and hedge funds out of $64.8bn. At Madoff’s sentencing in 2009, Judge Denny Chin called his crimes “extraordinarily evil”.

Keiser Report: Economic Ghouls and Predators

Justice department opens inquiry into Mississippi prisons after string of deaths

The US Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the Mississippi prison system after a string of inmate deaths in the past few months, officials said Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors are looking into conditions at four state prisons after the deaths of at least 15 inmates since late December. The investigation is examining whether state corrections officials are adequately protecting prisoners from physical harm and will look into whether there are adequate healthcare and suicide prevention services.

The investigation by the justice department’s civil rights division will specifically focus on conditions at the Mississippi state penitentiary at Parchman, the South Mississippi correctional institution, the Central Mississippi correctional facility and the Wilkinson county correctional facility, the justice department said.

The Wilkinson facility holds state prisoners, and the state pays a private company, Management & Training Corporation, to operate it.

The use of such investigations examining the patterns and practices of law enforcement agencies has been curtailed under the Trump administration compared with their use during the Obama administration.

Erasing History: The National Archives is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies

People Keep Getting Killed in El Salvador After They're Deported From the U.S.

At least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 have subsequently been murdered, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday.

Over 200,000 people were deported from the United States and Mexico to El Salvador between 2014 and 2018, according to the report. And although the level of violence due to gang activity has resulted in asylum recognition rates as high as 75 percent in other Central American countries, the U.S. granted asylum to just 18 percent of El Salvadorans who applied for it from 2014 to 2018, the report said.

In addition to the 138 confirmed cases of murder, the report also identified over 70 cases in which deportees were “subjected to sexual violence, torture, and other harm,” or who simply went missing when they returned to the country. Human Rights Watch stressed there was no official tally of those killed or injured, however, and said that the actual casualty toll is “likely greater.”

“U.S. authorities have knowingly put Salvadorans in harm’s way by sending them to face murder and attacks on their safety,” HRW’s Alison Parker, a co-author of the report, said in a statement. “Salvadorans are facing murder, rape, and other violence after deportation in shockingly high numbers, while the U.S. government narrows Salvadorans’ access to asylum and turns a blind eye to the deadly results of its callous policies.”

Chaos Continues in Iowa as Democrats Mistakenly Award Delegates for Bernie Sanders to Deval Patrick

“Put Iowa behind us.”

Translation: we didn’t mean for you to see exactly how we were going to steal democracy from you until it was too late for you to do anything about it. https://t.co/3sZYztxCxo

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 5, 2020

Somebody help me out. What is it called when party elites selectively release results creating a grand media narrative based on incomplete data?

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) February 4, 2020

Krystal Ball: Pete's fake victory erases working class voters

Nontraditional Voters at Iowa Satellite Caucuses Could Tip the Balance to Bernie Sanders

Heading into Iowa, Sen. Bernie Sanders had a mantra he used in his stump speech: If you turn on the TV on caucus night and they say turnout is high, we win. If they tell you that turnout is low, we lose. Simple as that. Except, of course, it’s not that simple. On Monday evening in Iowa, turnout did not match the 2008 record set as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards battled it out. Yet, Sanders still won the most votes so far, both on the first and final ballots, even as the delegate total remains unsettled.

Asked Tuesday about turnout, Sanders told The Intercept that he would have preferred more. Sanders, noted that the numbers were “somewhat higher than in ’16,” when Sanders lost to Clinton by less than 1 percent of state delegates. But, he said, they were “not as high frankly as I would’ve like to have seen.” Whether high turnout translates into success depends heavily on who turns out; a candidate has to increase turnout among the people most likely to vote for them. (Donald Trump, for instance, helped drive higher turnout among Democrats in the 2018 midterms, but that hardly can be counted as a victory for him.) Throughout the 2020 campaign, Sanders has targeted nontraditional voters, students, and working-class people who usually stay home during primaries and caucuses. As the campaign pointed out on Wednesday, turnout among 17-to-29 year olds went up, even from 2008.

The members of the Democratic establishment who could barely contain their excitement as they reported low youth turnout in IA were not only extremely disrespectful to this future of this party, they were wrong.

Kudos to @sunrisemvmt & all the other IA youth organizers! https://t.co/G7UProlQLs

— Briahna Solidarity Gray (@briebriejoy) February 5, 2020

In particular, the campaign focused heavily on bringing people out to the satellite caucuses that were held across the state and in other parts of the world for Iowans who couldn’t make it to the 7 p.m. caucuses. This was the first year the party hosted satellite caucuses, and no other campaign seems to have invested serious resources in turning those voters out. With 41 state delegates available to be swept up, and fewer than 25 delegates currently separating Pete Buttigieg and Sanders, they could end up making the difference when the delegate count is finalized. ...

Jeff Weaver, a senior campaign adviser, said at a Sanders rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday night that he remained optimistic about winning not just the popular vote, but also the delegate count, citing success in the satellite caucuses. “If you look at satellite caucuses — we don’t have final numbers yet — if you look at new Latino voters coming out in Iowa, new Muslim voters coming out in Iowa, caucus sites in union halls, that’s part of this expansion of the electorate. It takes a while, but I’m very proud of the work we did helping underrepresented communities get represented in the caucus,” Weaver said.

Mayor Pete: Flip-Flopper-in-Chief

The loathsome opportunist prepares to capitalize on the dnc/clinton/obama election heist for a little smash and grab action of his own.

Pete Buttigieg looks to build on Iowa success as contest hits New Hampshire

Pete Buttigieg is taking every opportunity he can to proclaim victory in Iowa and leverage that to win in New Hampshire, before the next few state votes in the Democratic primary contest to choose the candidate to take on Donald Trump in November’s election.

The winner of the Iowa caucuses on Monday still had not been called as of Tuesday evening, but with 62% of precincts reporting, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, had pulled slightly ahead of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. In the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, polling showed Sanders with a significant lead over his rivals.

Buttigieg, a relative unknown a year ago, made sure to lace that into his stump speeches and during the question-and-answer portions of his campaign stops throughout the day on Tuesday.

When the former South Bend mayor was asked how he would win over reluctant African American voters – a persistent question for his candidacy – Buttigieg said his campaign “had a lot of work to do” in states such as South Carolina.

“And the process of proving that begins here in New Hampshire as we make our way on to states like Nevada, South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states as well,” Buttigieg said of the forthcoming contests. “And we will earn that support.”

Sanders' senior advisor Chuck Rocha reveals missing precinct data in Iowa

Bernie Sanders’ Iowa state director sent a memo to aides tonight that says they “have a viable path forward to achieve a clean sweep and retake the lead in state delegate equivalents and national pledged delegates.” She also says staff have been working to confirm results. pic.twitter.com/QGk5i7tVuU

— Holly Otterbein (@hollyotterbein) February 6, 2020

Buttigieg Smiles Creepily Instead Of Talking To Reporters About Iowa

Shadow's CEO Is Very Sorry For Screwing Up Iowa, But Still Won't Disclose Its Funders

Shadow Inc. CEO Gerard Niemira broke his silence in an interview with Bloomberg News on Tuesday night, as vote totals were still being released from Monday night’s fiasco in Iowa. “I’m really disappointed that some of our technology created an issue that made the caucus difficult,” Niemira, a veteran of Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, told Bloomberg. “We feel really terrible about that.” ...

Niemira said that out of all of the precincts that had access to the app, just a quarter successfully reported their numbers. Despite that, Niemira still maintained that his app was basically fine. “The app was sound and good,” Niemira told Bloomberg. “All the data that was produced by calculations performed by the app was correct. It did the job it was supposed to do, which is help precinct chairs in the field do the math correctly. The problem was caused by a bug in the code that transmits results data into the state party’s data warehouse.”

Little is known about the company except that it was created after the much-hyped progressive nonprofit ACRONYM purchased Groundbase, according to a tweet from ACRONYM founder Tara McGowan in January 2019. But since the Iowa debacle, ACRONYM appears to have decided that it doesn’t have much to do with Shadow’s day to day operations. In a February 4 tweet, McGowan, who is married to a strategist for the campaign of former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, described Shadow as an “independent company ACRONYM is invested in.”

While Niemira confirmed ACRONYM’s role as an investor, he refused to name other investors or say who sits on the company’s board, according to Bloomberg.

'Trump Is Getting a Little Bit Nervous,' Says Sanders Campaign as GOP Plots Anti-Bernie 'Victims of Socialism' Videos

President Donald Trump's 2020 reelection team is reportedly developing an anti-Bernie Sanders attack strategy that could include videos highlighting so-called "victims of socialism," a plan Sanders' presidential campaign viewed as evidence Trump is worried about facing the Vermont senator in the November general election.

The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that the Trump campaign, Republican National Committee (RNC), and other right-wing allies of the president are "gaming out various attacks and troll tactics to deploy against the Vermont senator in a potential general election face-off."

"One of the major ideas being kicked around," according to The Daily Beast, "is to deploy more 'victims of socialism' and communist regimes to make the case—via video testimonials—against Sanders' vision of governance."

Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, has pointed to Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway—which consistently rank among the happiest in the world—as more just nations that the U.S. should seek to emulate.

The Daily Beast reported that Trump "privately said late last year that he wanted to see an onslaught of TV content and ads that colorfully paired Sanders with hammer-and-sickle iconography." ...

The RNC last October launched VictimsOfSocialism.org, a website that warns "2020 Democrats are obsessed with bringing socialism to America." The site provides an indication of the kinds of anti-Sanders attacks the Trump campaign could use in the future if the senator wins the Democratic nomination. ...

"I think he's a communist," Trump said in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity that aired Sunday. "I mean, you know, look, I think of communism when I think of Bernie." Even as he publicly attacks and ridicules Sanders, the president has reportedly voiced concerns behind the scenes about the senator's working-class appeal in crucial battleground states.

Florida authorities seize 1,400lb of shark fins

Officials seized more than a dozen boxes of shark fins, valued between $700,000 and $1m, at a Miami port in late January. CBP authorities told CBS News the boxes were falsely declared.

Shark fins are commonly used for cooking and traditional medicine around the world.

Customs agents said the shipment violated the Lacey Act, which bans trading illegally obtained wildlife. Many of the shark species confiscated in the search are included in an international trade agreement protecting endangered species of wild flora and fauna.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service officials said the shipment was probably traveling from South America en route to Asia. ... Sara Amundson, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, told CBS the US “plays a key role as an international transit hub for shark fins”. Sharks typically suffocate or bleed to death after having their fins cut off by smugglers who then toss them back in the water.

When it comes to climate hypocrisy, Canada's leaders have reached a new low

Americans elected Donald Trump, who insisted climate change was a hoax – so it’s no surprise that since taking office he’s been all-in for the fossil fuel industry. There’s no sense despairing; the energy is better spent fighting to remove him from office. Canada, on the other hand, elected a government that believes the climate crisis is real and dangerous – and with good reason, since the nation’s Arctic territories give it a front-row seat to the fastest warming on Earth. Yet the country’s leaders seem likely in the next few weeks to approve a vast new tar sands mine which will pour carbon into the atmosphere through the 2060s. They know – yet they can’t bring themselves to act on the knowledge. Now that is cause for despair.

The Teck mine would be the biggest tar sands mine yet: 113 square miles of petroleum mining, located just 16 miles from the border of Wood Buffalo national park. A federal panel approved the mine despite conceding that it would likely be harmful to the environment and to the land culture of Indigenous people. These giant tar sands mines (easily visible on Google Earth) are already among the biggest scars humans have ever carved on the planet’s surface. But Canadian authorities ruled that the mine was nonetheless in the “public interest”.

Here’s how Justin Trudeau, recently re-elected as Canada’s prime minister, put it in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years ago: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” That is to say, Canada, which is 0.5% of the planet’s population, plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget. Ottawa hides all this behind a series of pledges about “net-zero emissions by 2050” and so on, but they are empty promises. In the here-and-now they can’t rein themselves in. There’s oil in the ground and it must come out. ...

There’s obviously something hideous about watching the Trumps and the Putins of the world gleefully shred our future. But it’s disturbing in a different way to watch leaders pretend to care – a kind of gaslighting that can reduce you to numb nihilism. Trudeau, for all his charms, doesn’t get to have it both ways: if you can’t bring yourself to stop a brand-new tar sands mine then you’re not a climate leader.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

How Corporate Media Make Pete Look Like He’s Winning

Bernie Sanders Leads the Popular Vote in Iowa; Wall Street-Friendly Bloomberg Has a Plan

US Halts Drone Program Targeting Kurds for Turkey

US Admiral Says Russian Submarine Presence Means East Coast Not ‘Safe’ for Ships

The Iowa Democratic Party Did the Opposite of What It Should Have Done to Secure Its Disastrous App

Over 60 Green Groups Call on House Dems to Pass Sweeping Worker Rights-Boosting PRO Act

Greenpeace blocks BP HQ with solar panels on new CEO's first day

Stumping for Bernie: Larry Sanders on younger brother

How California Will Be Stolen From Bernie Sanders (Again)

Saagar Enjeti: Biden team tries to cover up HUMILIATING loss, upcoming implosion

John Nichols: How Bernie's rainbow coalition came through in Iowa

Rising: Nate Silver predicts Bernie Super Tuesday dominance

Rising: Did Pete's 'fake' win give him a real bump?

A Little Night Music

Roy Smeck - Little Grass Shack

Roy Smeck - Bugle Call Rag

Roy Smeck - Twelth Street Rag

Roy Smeck - Serenade In The Night

Roy Smeck - Farewell Blues

Roy Smeck - Ukulele Bounce

Roy Smeck - Steel Guitar Rag

Roy Smeck – Bye Bye Blues

Roy Smeck - Limehouse Blues

Roy Smeck's Serenaders - Guitarese

Roy Smeck - Tiger Rag