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From The Guardian:

Vermont senator had trailed in polls by more than 20 points but opposition to free trade and growing African American support won votes in rust-belt state

Bernie Sanders pulled off his biggest win of the Democratic presidential race on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary on a night which also confirmed strong anti-establishment support for Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination.

In an industrial state hit hard by the decline of manufacturing, the Vermont senator’s consistent opposition to free trade deals appears to have been a decisive factor, but he also showed signs of weakening Clinton’s dominance among African American voters.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/08/bernie-sanders-wins-michi...

Whomever you support in the primary, it’s difficult to deny that there is a correlation between turnout and results thus far. Where turnout has been better than 2008, Sanders wins. Where turnout has dropped less than 20%, Sanders usually wins. When turnout has dropped more than 20% Clinton always wins. This table shows the relationship between turnout and results thus far:



There has been a lot of brewhaha about a British court finding that Vladimir Putin may have poisoned a former citizen of Russia for creating propaganda that rankled the Russian state. While there is a lot of talk about how awful Putin is for (allegedly) assassinating people, there seems to be little mention of the fact that President Barack Obama maintains a "Kill List" of intended targets for assassinations. It should also be noted that Obama has assassinated one American citizen (out of the four us citizens he's admitted murdering) on the rationale that he was creating propaganda that rankled the American state. Then, two weeks after murdering the propagandist, Obama murdered a sixteen year old kid for the crime of having the wrong parents. This is not to overlook the thousands of civilians that Mr. Obama and his predecessor have murdered.

So far no court has seen fit to examine Mr. Obama's many war crimes.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, however, makes Putin look like a piker in terms of malevolent dictators.

A federal judge in Michigan has refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of transgender people against Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson.

The six trans people and the ACLU are claiming their constitutional rights are being violated.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds found that the plaintiffs raised a cognizable claim that their constitutional rights to privacy are being violated by a state policy that makes it difficult or impossible to change the gender recorded on their driver's licenses.

Emani Love, Tina Seitz, Codie Stone and three other trans people claim that the under the policy promulgated by the state, the ability to change the gender on a driver's license is denied them.

Erica Maison is the mother of five children in Detroit. One of her daughters is a transgender girl named Corey.

Erica told BuzzFeed News that Corey was always feminine, even from the time she was very young. “She loved to dress in high heels and dresses. In public she wore boy clothes — I just assumed she might be gay.”

When Corey was in the fifth grade she was bullied so badly her mother made the decision to pull her out of public school and begin homeschooling. It wasn’t until Corey was 11 years old that the mother-daughter duo came across a video of transgender YouTuber Jazz Jennings and everything suddenly clicked. “She said, ‘Mom, I’m just like her, I AM a girl.’

Once she was at home and free to be herself, Corey started gaining confidence and began dressing like a girl in public — which wasn’t always easy.

Her hair was still very short, and she still looked like a boy. People would give her dirty looks, and take pictures of her with their cell phone cameras. They would laugh, and point, and stare. I told Corey, ‘Every time someone points their phone at you to take a picture, you turn and smile and strike a pose!’ That really boosted her self-esteem. I wanted to teach her to turn anything negative into something positive.

--Erica Maison