Erdogan Drops a Nuke

Turkey is not a nuclear state, though it does participate in a nuclear-weapon sharing program with the United States as a NATO member. Turkey does have a weapon in its arsenal that is capable of delivering a blow as devastating as a nuke; it is one that Turkish president Erdogan, in the wake of Syrian/Russian airstrikes yesterday that killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Syria's contested Idlib Province, has now deployed:

“We have decided, effectively immediately, not to stop Syrian refugees from reaching Europe by land or sea,” a senior Turkish official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

“All refugees, including Syrians, are now welcome to cross into the European Union,” the official said, adding that police and border guards had been stood down.

Within hours, a column of dozens of migrants was heading on foot towards the European frontier in the early morning light. A man carried a small child in his arms. Others rode in taxis.

Four years ago, Erdogan, after much haggling with German chancellor Angela Merkel, agreed to block the flow of refugees from the Syrian war zone and warehouse them in Turkey. The flows of refugees destabilized Europe, led to Brexit and the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) ultra-nationalist party. Erdogan, whenever he feels like he is not getting what he wants from European leaders, threatens to turn on the refugee spigot; that he has finally done so means that he must be desperate for assistance. What he wants is NATO support for Turkey's offensive operation in Idlib Province, the rump caliphate Erdogan controls along with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), previously known as the Nusra Front, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate.

The problem for Erdogan is that there is no deal-maker among the Europeans who can deliver what he wants. Merkel is a lamb duck with a greatly diminished base of support. Rank'n'file Christian Democrats are moving to embrace AfD. Macron is despised by the French. Boris Johnson has problems of his own. Across the Atlantic, Trump is in the middle of an election year that is taking place during the global coronavirus pandemic. To commit U.S. forces to a war with Russia would be political suicide.

It's not clear that NATO military aid to Turkey would do anything more than expand the refugee crisis during a plague year. The deal-maker Erdogan needs more than anyone is Vladimir Putin.

Erdogan's ask seems to be a return to the original Sochi boundaries minus the agreement's commitment to demilitarization; in other words, a complete absurdity. If Russia and Syria are going to move in a direction that Erdogan wants, a completely new agreement will have to be drawn, which will take time.

But the floodgates have opened. Refugees are crossing borders while the coronavirus continues to spread. We'll know that Erdogan is on his way to getting what he wants if a ceasefire is called in the next 48-72 hours. If not, 2020 is looking downright biblical -- locusts, plague, war.

Democratic Superdelegates Plot Putsch

To understand the horrible rot and verminous infestation of the Democratic Party do yourself a favor. Read "Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders" by Lisa Lerer and Reid Epstein. Party power brokers and stalwarts are convinced that Bernie will fail to win a majority of the pledged delegates during the Democratic presidential primary campaign and it will be up to the superdelegates to block Sanders and nominate an alternative candidate:

This article is based on interviews with the 93 superdelegates, out of 771 total, as well as party strategists and aides to senior Democrats about the thinking of party leaders. A vast majority of those superdelegates — whose ranks include federal elected officials, former presidents and vice presidents and D.N.C. members — predicted that no candidate would clinch the nomination during the primaries, and that there would be a brokered convention fight in July to choose a nominee.

The alternative candidates mentioned in the article signal that the addled behavior of Joe Biden is a shared condition among the superdelegates:

In recent weeks, Democrats have placed a steady stream of calls to Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who opted against running for president nearly a year ago, suggesting that he can emerge as a white knight nominee at a brokered convention — in part on the theory that he may carry his home state in a general election.

[snip]

A number of superdelegates dream of a savior candidate who is not now in the race, perhaps Mr. Brown, or maybe someone who already dropped out the race, like Senator Kamala Harris of California.

Representative Don Beyer of Virginia cast an even wider net, suggesting senators from Virginia and Delaware, along with Ms. Pelosi, as possible nominees.

“At some point you could imagine saying, ‘Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,’” he said, while preparing to introduce the former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend., Ind., at a campaign event near his home on Sunday. “Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.”

Democratic Party leadership is in denial. Nevada should have provided all the evidence needed that Sanders will be the nominee. But the prevailing attitude appears to be that Super Tuesday will distribute its pledged delegates in such a way that no clear winner is revealed. The problem here is this is not what the polling says. FiveThirtyEight, in a conservative model, predicts that Sanders will capture nearly twice the pledged delegates, 587 to 305, on Super Tuesday as his nearest competitor, Joe Biden.

Biden's performance on Super Tuesday is based on FiveThirtyEight's prediction that he is the odds-on favorite (three in four chances) to win South Carolina on Saturday. But there are indications that Biden is slipping in South Carolina. Tom Steyer has real support among African-American voters there. What is unclear is if that support is significant enough to tip the race to Bernie.

I guess what I'm driving at is the Democratic establishment plan to block Bernie at a brokered convention is looking more and more like a Rube Goldberg contraption: Biden has to win in a blowout on Saturday; followed by a "hung jury" on Super Tuesday; followed by another split decision on March 10 (Washington, Michigan); and so on. It could happen, but nothing, other than the hopes and prayers of superdelegates disconnected from a voting public they are supposed to represent, point in that direction.

The more likely outcome is that Bernie puts even more distance between himself and the pack on Super Tuesday, a day that could very well turn into a rout if Biden is upset in South Carolina this Saturday.

Then the superdelegates will have to surrender their fantasy of a brokered convention. At which point, I believe, post-March 10, you'll see Democratic power brokers establishing super PACs to attack their party's nominee; in other words, leaders of the Democratic Party working to elect Trump. As Lerer and Epstein mention:

While there is no widespread public effort underway to undercut Mr. Sanders, arresting his rise has emerged as the dominant topic in many Democratic circles. Some are trying to act well before the convention: Since Mr. Sanders won Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, four donors have approached former Representative Steve Israel of New York to ask if he can suggest someone to run a super PAC aimed at blocking Mr. Sanders. He declined their offer.

South Carolina Debate Postmortem

The audience was stacked against Bernie at last night's debate in Charleston, South Carolina. There were full-throat cheers for billionaire Mike Bloomberg, as well as boos and hisses for deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his erstwhile acolyte, the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

It was not a good night for Sanders. But, that being said, it wasn't a good night for anyone else. After the lively, incendiary debate last week in Las Vegas, the show in Charleston returned to "normalcy"; meaning, it returned to an exhausted, ritualistic, soulless display before a live audience of the well-heeled. I imagine many tuned out halfway through.

Bernie was repeatedly attacked by the other candidates, and he was cross-examined by the CBS moderators, but, with the exception for a brief moment when he beat a retreat from the crossfire bogeymanning of the Sandinistas and Fidelistas by Buttigieg and Biden, Sanders did well enough. This seems to be the assessment found in the pages of the mainstream media this morning.

Tom Steyer, after investing so much in South Carolina, was marginalized. Amy Klobuchar, fed question after question and allowed camera time far beyond the electoral heft of her presidential campaign, is truly horrible. I'm looking forward to the time when she drops out of the race.

Joe Biden is an abomination. There is no other way to say it. He shouts; he spouts gibberish; he claims credit for any and all good legislation written in the last 30 years. Who could vote for this reanimated corpse? No one in her or his or their right mind.

Pete Buttigieg is a vicious, amoral egomaniac; a completely typical personality, but one now more perverse since we're in the end times of peak neoliberalism. If Buttigieg is the best and the brightest our society can vomit up, we're truly in trouble.

Mike Bloomberg came off much better last night than last week. He spoke confidently, and I found it refreshing to hear an opinion on China that wasn't 1950s boilerplate red-baiting. But it is apparent that Bloomberg is not suited for the presidency. He is a billionaire executive best left to handing out instructions from a skyscraper in Manhattan.

Elizabeth Warren's high point was invoking Matthew 25. For a hyper-power careening toward a crackup, I thought it was a timely, down-home reminder.

It is still Bernie Sanders' race to lose. Max Blumenthal is right. The Sanders campaign is going to be in constant retreat until it finds its footing and goes on the attack. Rather than running away when the bots bogeyman Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, the Sanders campaign needs to ask, "Do you even know who Anastasio Somoza is? Fulgencio Batista? These U.S.-backed dictators killed far more of their own people than the leftists leader of Nicaragua and Cuba."  I would also mention that at the time Fidel Castro was consolidating power in Cuba, establishing his populist programs of literacy and public health, the United States was backing a coup in Indonesia and had a key role in the slaughter of 1,000,000 Indonesians. So who loves a bloodthirsty dictator?

South Carolina: Last Stand of Neoliberals

The panic in the ruling class is palpable. Sabato's Crystal Ball is basically predicting Sanders to wrap up the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday (see "The Democratic Nomination: It’s Getting Late Early"): "Democratic rank-and-file voters do not seem worried about Sanders as the nominee. Many Democratic leaders feel differently. They are running out of time to make the voters heed their warnings."

South Carolina is the last stand for the neoliberal Ancien Regime that controls the Democratic Party. AP does a good job compiling the attack ads targeting Bernie, the ones that have proliferated since the commanding Sanders victory in Nevada. Tonight's debate (CBS, 8 PM EST) should provide some insight into how effective these attacks will be in braking Sanders' momentum. My guess is that they'll come up short.

The principal corporate mainstream talking point is that Bernie somehow has not been properly vetted despite being constantly the focus of negative stories in the prestige press the last four years. The "Not Vetted" line acts as a segue for the "Bernie Worships Fidel Castro" attack, which, though still being given prominent placement following the 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, has lost a lot of its force with all the footage on Twitter of Obama praising Cuba.

Biden is predicting to win by "plenty" in South Carolina. He has thus placed a large hurdle in front of his campaign. A relatively close second is all Bernie needs to fuel a Super Tuesday romp and lock down the nomination. Then we'll have to explore the next line of attack for the neoliberal Ancien Regime -- Bloomberg's purchase of the DNC.

Get Ready for "Red Scare 2020"

The spreading coronavirus is adversely impacting global stock prices. The price of a barrel of Brent crude dipped 3.5% to about $56.40. Car sales in China, where Germany earns a hefty profit, fell 92% the first half of February.

The one thing an incumbent does not want in an election year is a recession. It is hard to see how the global economy avoids one now that the coronavirus has spread to the Middle East, Europe and is crossing borders in Southeast Asia.

The oligarchic elite have trundled out their first line of attack on the ascendant people-power campaign of Bernie Sanders. Bernie, we are told by anonymous national security officials, is favored by the Kremlin. Anderson Cooper in last night's 60 Minutes interview confronts Sanders with black-and-white video from four-decades past showing the Vermont politician praising Cuba for its healthcare.

These kind of smears will no doubt constitute the meat and potatoes of the Trump reelection campaign. If they are not calling Bernie a commie, they'll call him a brownshirt. This line of attack might resonate with older voters, voters Bernie is failing to persuade in Democratic primary contests so far, but I don't see it swinging a general election.

What the institutional red-baiting augurs is that the fantasy of a brokered convention where super delegates can award the nomination to a Mike Bloomberg on the second ballot will likely fail to materialize. Centrism is a zombie herd with marginal support. I don't even think party elites believe that Biden or Bloomberg or Buttigieg can somehow emerge from the pack and unite the party to defeat Trump.

I think before the primary is over we will witness the mainstream corporate media discard its "Never Trump" cheerleading for a 2020 red scare.

Bernie's Blowout Nevada Win and the Return of Russiagate

In the wake of Bernie's blowout win in Nevada, the Democratic primary contest is his to lose. Voters are climbing aboard the bandwagon.

The corporate press is not yet ready to concede. A line of argument that has started to appear, incredibly, is that Sanders, a politician of national stature for decades, has not been seriously vetted.

Also, Russiagate, which, remember, was spawned originally to obscure the DNC conspiracy to hobble Bernie's 2016 challenge to Hillary's anointing, has returned. Here, based on the Julian Barnes and Sydney Ember story, "Russia Is Said to Be Interfering to Aid Sanders in Democratic Primaries," is the long and short of it:

But some current and former officials expressed doubt that Russian officials think that Mr. Sanders has a hidden affinity for Moscow. Instead, they said that a Russian campaign to support Mr. Sanders might ultimately be aimed at aiding Mr. Trump. Moscow could potentially consider Mr. Sanders a weaker general election opponent for the president than a more moderate Democratic nominee, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Washington Post first reported the briefing of the Sanders campaign. The campaign sought to pin the blame for the disclosure on the Trump administration, suggesting it was retribution for critical remarks Mr. Sanders had made about Mr. Grenell in 2018.

Russia also worked to support — or at least not harm — Mr. Sanders in 2016. Operatives at a Russian intelligence-backed troll factory were instructed to avoid attacking Mr. Sanders or Mr. Trump, according to the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and an indictment he secured of 13 Russians working on the operation.

Both the indictment and Mr. Mueller’s report quoted internal documents from the Internet Research Agency ordering operatives to attack Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest except for Sanders and Trump — we support them,” the document said.

Russian operatives used the troll factory in 2016 to pose on social media as Americans and sow divisions among already divisive issues like immigration, religion and race. It was one part of the Kremlin’s multipronged attack on the election that also included hackings of Democratic emails, payments to unsuspecting Americans to stage pro-Trump rallies in battleground states and at least one scouting trip to the United States in 2014.

It's a helpful rehash of what lies at the foundation of a huge part of American domestic politics the last four years. Thirteen people couldn't staff a city council campaign in a large U.S. city let alone have any sort of measurable impact on a multibillion dollar presidential campaign.

The whole "Putin Wants Bernie to Win" is a product manufactured by spooks -- no doubt with the intention of doing the oligarchs who run the country a solid -- designed to brake the runaway train that is Bernie 2020. I think voters will pay about as much attention to it as they do the oratory of Adam Schiff.

Shane Goldmacher thinks there is little chance that the corporate Dems will coalesce around a single candidate by Super Tuesday. I think he's correct. But I also think that there will be tremendous pressure placed on candidates after South Carolina to clear the field, particularly Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Additionally, starting now, the negative ads attacking Sanders are going to pop up everywhere.

World War in Idlib

Turkey's president Tayyip Erdogan has promised a large-scale invasion of Syria by the end of the month unless Syria and its allies call off their campaign to retake Idlib Province from Turkey's proxy, the Salafist and Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Erdogan has been seeking assistance from France, Germany and the United States. The big question is if Turkey, once it begins its invasion of Idlib, will invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty requiring the United States and the European powers to declare war on Syria and its allies, Russia and Iran.

Russia controls the air space over Idlib, which it demonstrated yesterday, by rolling back a Turkish effort to regain territory recently liberated by the Syrian Arab Army.

The Western media is attempting to package this latest threat of World War Three as a humanitarian crisis precipitated by the insatiably bloodthirsty duo of Putin and Assad. The corporate reporting has been pure propaganda. All mention of the fact that HTS controls 90% of the "rebel-held" territory in Idlib is air-brushed from the narrative.

There is talk of a four-way summit between Russia, Turkey, France and Germany to take place in Istanbul at the beginning of March. Earlier this month Carlotta Gall reported that the best outcome for Erdogan is going to be some sort of Salafist Gaza Strip on its southwest border with Syria.

Bloomberg Bombs in Las Vegas

The principal takeaway from last night's Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas is that billionaire Mike Bloomberg is a dud, plain and simple. Bloomberg was eviscerated from the get-go by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who rightly called attention to the close connection between Bloomberg and Trump in their predilection for atavistic misogyny. Bernie preceded Warren a few minutes earlier by blasting Bloomberg for overseeing many years of aggressive stop-and-frisk policing in New York City.

In responding, or, better yet, failing to respond, Bloomberg displayed a combination of patrician brittleness and spaced-out obliviousness. This isn't a candidate who will inspire voters.

The morning-after analysis is savage. Can Bloomberg recover and mount an effective Super Tuesday campaign? It's possible -- he'll get a chance to repair his performance with another debate in South Carolina -- but at this point he has lost the prestige press. Absent any real, organic support, it's going to be hard for Bloomberg to buy his way out of the hole that puts him in.

What became clear to me while watching last night's debate is that -- with the exception of the candidacies of Warren and Sanders -- the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are all iterations of the old Obama/Clinton neoliberal status quo. Buttigieg is a gay, white, charismaless version of Barack Obama; Amy Klobuchar is a poor man's Hillary Clinton; Joe Biden was Obama's VP; and Mike Bloomberg is a country-club Republican who has carpetbagged his way into the Democratic Party because he doesn't stand a chance in the new MAGA GOP, and he couldn't win as a third-party contender.

What all these candidates seem not to understand is that the Obama neoliberal status quo was not popular; in fact, it was so unpopular it elected Trump. That's why none of the old Obama status quo candidates have a good shot at beating Trump in a general election.

Elizabeth Warren will get a bounce out of her performance last night, but I think it's too little, too late.

Assuming there's no brake on Bernie's building momentum, the final question that must be answered is to what lengths is the Democratic National Committee willing to go to torpedo the nomination of Bernie Sanders.

Afghanistan: Civil War within a Foreign Occupation

It seems odd to me that there is little reporting yesterday or today about Ashraf Ghani being declared winner of last year's presidential election; his main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, has also announced himself a winner and started to staff a parallel government.

According to The New York Times, (see "Ghani Named Afghan Election Winner. His Opponent Claims Victory, Too." by Mujib Mashal, Najim Rahim and Fatima Faizi),

In a news conference announcing the election result after an audit of about 15 percent of the total vote, the chief of Afghanistan’s election commission, Hawa Alam Nuristani, said that Mr. Ghani had won with the narrowest of margins — 50.64 percent of the vote, just surpassing the 50 percent minimum required for an outright victory with no runoff. Mr. Abdullah received 39.5 percent.

The win puts Mr. Ghani in position for another five-year term as president.

“This is not just an election victory,” Mr. Ghani said, flanked by his running mates, after the result was announced. “This is the victory of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. This is the victory of the people’s wishes.”

Hours later, however, Mr. Abdullah appeared in a televised address surrounded by his own supporters.

“I asked those who believe in democracy, in a healthy future for this country, in citizens’ rights to stand up to fraud and to not accept this fraudulent result,” Mr. Abdullah said. “We are the winners based on clean votes, and we declare our victory. We will form the inclusive government.”

Moon of Alabama thinks (see "Afghan Election Drama Threatens Trump's Deal With The Taliban")
that Abdullah Abdullah is not bullshitting. Though U.S. viceroy Zalmay Khalilzad is attempting to reprise John Kerry's 2014 Mr. Fix-it performance when the U.S. cobbled together an extra-constitutional Ghani-Abdullah shotgun wedding, MoA thinks that Afghanistan may be headed toward partition:

Alarmed over the situation the U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad rushed to Kabul together with the head of Pakistan's military spy service ISI. They and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan went immediately to Abdullah's headquarter.

Threats will be made and many millions of dollars will be offered. But Abdullah will not give in. His voters and followers want to see him fighting. He will most likely demand a run-off election to stall any further process. Ghani will of course oppose that.

[snip]

Abdullah may well think of splitting the north, west and the central Hazara region of Afghanistan from the mainly Pashtun south and east. It would be difficult fight but Afghan's norther neighbors as well as Russia and China may well support him. They see the U.S. incompetence in Afghanistan and the negotiations with the Taliban as a danger to their countries.

Thanks to COVID-19, Trump's beloved DJIA appears to be headed south. Now, Trump's promise to play peacemaker in Afghanistan could be in trouble. Abdullah is critical of the U.S.-Taliban talks.

Hard Ceilings for Bernie and Bloomberg

Today the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll shows Bernie Sanders topping the Democratic field with 31%. Bernie's closest competitor is Michael Bloomberg, 12 points south, with 19%. No surprise, The New York Times leads with Bloomberg's second-place finish (see Reid Epstein's "Michael Bloomberg Surges in Poll and Qualifies for Democratic Debate in Las Vegas").

The poll was conducted Thursday, February 13, through Sunday, February 16. If you were to ask me I'd say the holiday weekend saw last week's Bloomberg surge crest and recede. Liberal columnists like Charles Blow, Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie have teed off on Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk terror campaign as well as his embrace of the right-wing conspiracy theory that black people caused the 2008 financial crisis. On Sunday, The New York Times ran a lengthy expose on how the Bloomberg political octopus operates (see "Bloomberg’s Billions: How the Candidate Built an Empire of Influence" by Alexander Burns and Nicholas Kulish). Endorsing a racist, sexist billionaire might be palatable to a shameless clown like Thomas Friedman (see "Paging Michael Bloomberg"), but apparently it is something that doesn't pass the smell test -- yet -- for the smart set.

Good.

It is interesting that this morning's Nate Silver piece, "Does Sanders Have A Ceiling? Maybe. Can He Win Anyway? Yes.," appears the same time as the results of the Marist poll. Many corporate Democrats who dismiss Bernie do so with the statement that Bernie has a hard ceiling of 30%. Well, the Marist poll, though the sample size is not huge, offers proof that that might not be the case.

Silver has gone from being a Sanders skeptic to being bullish on Bernie. Though the FiveThirtyEight predictive model has reduced Sanders' chance of winning the nomination from 49% to 38%, to the point that Bernie is now basically in a dead heat with a brokered convention, Silver appears to be tacking in the direction of Bernie momentum.

It might be better to talk about hard ceilings for Bloomberg. Remember, he has to win 30% of the Super Tuesday delegates to be in a position to guarantee a brokered convention. It is hard to see how he gets there. Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Biden are likely to remain in the race through Super Tuesday. That clutters the ballot for Bloomberg. Plus, the more people hear about Bloomberg's record and his beliefs -- the guy is against the minimum wage! -- the harder it is going to be for him to break out of the low 20s. He needs more public intellectuals singing his praises and not just corrupt endorsements from pols.

The Rise of Sinn Fein in Neoliberalism's Fifth Decade

Ireland voted last Saturday, and for the first time in a general election Sinn Fein won the most votes, and not by an insignificant margin. As Benjamin Mueller summarizes in "Irish Voters Cast Off Relic of Entrenched 2-Party System":

By the time the votes were counted this week, Sinn Fein held one fewer parliamentary seats than Ireland’s main center-right opposition party, Fianna Fail, which had been expected to romp to victory. And it captured two more seats than the current center-right governing party, Fine Gael, led by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s frontman in negotiations with London over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

Sinn Fein would have won more seats, but the party didn't field enough candidates.

Fianna Fail has ruled out governing in coalition with Sinn Fein because of its historical association with the Irish Republican Army and the Troubles. So now it is up to Fine Gael to see if it wants to eat crow and join Fianna Fail. Both centrist parties had previously ruled out governing together.

What's interesting about the Irish election is the role that housing played. Mueller reports that

“Every other politician, they say they’re going to do this and that,” said Tony Hayes, 64, who lives in central Dublin. “But at the end of the day, they’re feeding you loads of lies. So why not go to somebody you feel like you can trust them? Sinn Fein, you feel like you can trust them.”

There was one issue above all that drove Mr. Hayes’s anger at Ireland’s two old political heavyweights and endeared him, like many voters, to Sinn Fein: housing. The number of homeless people has been rising for years, eclipsing 10,000 in 2019. And average rents have increased by as much as 40 percent in some counties over the past three years.

[snip]

Ailbhe Smyth, 73, a political activist and feminist scholar who played a leading role in the campaign to repeal Ireland’s abortion ban, said that many were feeling the anguish of a crisis that had forced people to wait weeks or years for some medical appointments, despite the government’s lavish spending on health care. She said older people, too, had woken up to the pain that Ireland’s cultural and political norms had inflicted on the younger generations.

While power was passed back and forth between the two center-right parties, parts of Irish identity, such as the expectation that people could grow up to own their own homes, began to vanish. And just as Ms. Smyth said the vote for abortion rights had been driven in part by “a very deep sense of national shame at the way women had been treated historically in this country,” she said that the turnout this weekend reflected the regret of some voters for not vanquishing an outdated political system sooner.

“Older people voting for Sinn Fein are saying, ‘Well, actually, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren, they haven’t got a house,’” Ms. Smyth said. “So there is that feeling of guilt that we’re not leaving them a very good world — and we’ve wrecked the planet, too.”

Facing up to rivals like Mr. Varadkar, who focused during the campaign on Brexit achievements that few voters cared about, Sinn Fein stuck to a few clear, tangible promises. And rather than harping on the government’s failures, as it recently had during unsuccessful campaigns, the party tried to home in on what it would get done. It vowed, for instance, to spend 6.5 billion euros, about $7 billion, building 100,000 homes.

The gestalt of the Irish general election is similar to the one facing voters this year in the United States; call it the zombie neoliberalism gestalt -- a housing/homelessness crisis and a failing healthcare system. After four decades of market fundamentalist orthodoxy the basics -- housing, education and healthcare -- are being priced out of the reach of an ever greater number of citizens. Rather than make an adjustment and correct these failures of the market, the elites who control the political process prefer that the citizens bear the brunt of the failures. Whether that means paying more and working harder to pay more or going into debt or living on the street, the rich don't care, as long as you don't upend their gravy train.

Can Bloomberg Win 30% of Pledged Delegates on Super Tuesday?

Interestingly, The New York Times (see "Centrist Democrats Want to Stop Sanders. They’re Not Sure Who Can. Unless a moderate favorite soon emerges, party leaders may increasingly look to Michael R. Bloomberg as a potential savior.") is lining up with Matt Taibbi. As long as Democratic centrists fail to coalesce around s single standard-bearer Bernie will continue to collect the most delegates in the march to the convention in Milwaukee.

The question is whether 30% of the electorate in the various Democratic primaries is enough to win of majority of the 4,750 delegates. Lambert Strether, joining Nate Silver, sees a brokered convention as a distinct possibility:

Those who want Sanders to win on the first ballot must expect Sanders to start winning outright majorities. He’s not doing that. I doubt very much he will do that in Nevada (hat tip, Harry Reid), or South Carolina. If Sanders wins California, that will be an amazing achievement, but the California Democrat Establishment is as nasty as they come. I don’t believe that the Democrat Party establishment will ever roll over, and allow Sanders to be nominated even if he leads in the delegate count. Too many little Madisons need too many ballet lessons for the Democratic strategists, consultants, lobbyists, media assets, and party elites to simple concede power, even to the future of their party. So, I assume that the Sanders campaign is gaming this out. A point to consider is that the Milwaukee convention is currently an omnishambles (and perhaps, like IA seems to have, been, a chaos ladder?) If we end up with the Milwaukee equivalent of Grant Park in Chicago 1968, that would probably hand the election to Trump (something most Democrat elites, deep down, would be quite happy with), but more important, could destroy the “army” that the Sanders campaign so carefully put together, rendering it incapable of independent operation following the convention after a collapse in discipline and subsequent backbiting and recrimination. For some, that might not be a bad thing.

There's also a possibility that Sanders begins to pull away in the run up to Super Tuesday. Bernie wins both Nevada and South Carolina; then Bloomberg's half-a-billion-dollars in ads turn out to be a bust on March 3. That's a best-case scenario for Sanders, and it can happen.

Bloomberg is furiously buying the endorsements of congressmen like Queens' Gregory Meeks. In the wake of the resurfacing of Bloomberg's racist defense of stop and frisk (which Charles Blow explores today in "The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg"), it is hard to see how purchasing an establishment that the voters despise is a sure-fire path to victory.

On Tuesday night NBC's Chuck Todd waxed on with stars in his eyes about who Jim Clyburn will endorse and better yet who the Kennedys will favor. This is the kind of clueless, cockeyed shit being peddled in the corporate media.

It was apparent to me in the Obama years that the elites in government, finance and the corporate media don't really have a connection to the earth; they float above it on a bubble of money. This makes it hard for them to figure out what's going on in the minds of all of us mud people grubbing away for our daily bread.

You would think Bloomberg could figure this out. We'll see. But right now I'm guessing he won't reach 30% on Super Tuesday.

New Hampshire Postmortem: A Win is a Win

New Hampshire turned out to be a squeaker for Bernie Sanders, not the robust five-plus-point victory I was anticipating. Bernie ended the night edging out "Wall Street Pete" Buttigieg by approximately 2%, or about 3,500 votes, and tying him in pledged delegates with nine.

Not a stellar night. My initial takeaway is that the moderates did very well. If you add the New Hampshire vote totals for Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Biden, you come away with a 52% majority.

But a win is a win. And for the first time during the Democratic primary season, given that Iowa melted down last week, you had a conventional old school victory speech broadcast live a little north of prime time on the East Coast. Bernie gave a great speech; his crowd was electric. I'm sure the rich were clutching at their pearls all across the nation.

So all and all a good night. Then this morning, expecting a foghorn of pro-"Wall Street Pete" spin from the corporate media, I am pleasantly surprised by how balanced -- hence, positive for Bernie -- the reporting is. First, Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher of The New York Times in "5 Takeaways From the New Hampshire Primary":

Mr. Sanders won the most votes in Iowa, even if he narrowly lost the delegate battle. He won the New Hampshire primary. His support among people of color has grown in polls, while his chief competitor for those voters, Mr. Biden, has been fading in the overall contest. He has climbed to the lead in some national polls. And he is raising more money — and has more money — than any of his rivals who are not billionaires.

Meet the new front-runner of the 2020 Democratic primary.

Next, Nate Silver in "Sanders Is The Front-Runner After New Hampshire, And A Contested Convention Has Become More Likely":

I’m going to be relatively brief here as I’m writing this at 2 a.m. in the morning. But let’s take the Sanders conclusion first. The model’s contention that he’s the closest thing to a frontrunner in this race seems inescapable to me. Sanders won the popular vote in each of the first two states (and he may eventually win the state delegate equivalent vote in Iowa). He leads in national polls (having recently overtaken Joe Biden). He’s raised a ton of money. He polls fairly well in Nevada (or at least he did back when people bothered to poll it). And he has a reasonably diverse coalition that should net him at least some delegates in almost every state and congressional district.

As for Silver's prognostication of a brokered convention, let's wait and see how Bloomberg does on Super Tuesday. If Bloomberg can garner 30% of the pledged delegates on March 3, as Silver has speculated previously, well, yes, I suppose a brokered convention is a strong possibility. Bloomberg's defense of stop and frisk is not going to help him on Super Tuesday though.

For the time being, let's revel in the limited media bounce both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg are receiving in the corporate press. If even the mainstream mind managers are reticent to trumpet the moderates' path to victory, we know a rocky road for centrist neoliberals lies ahead.

Biden is, at this point, the walking dead. Blacks, just like everyone else, love a winner. And a winner Joe Biden is not. Will people of color over the next several weeks find something to love in corporate overlords Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar? No.

The rich have blotted out the horizon. It's time to deal them a blow and stop them from hoarding our future. Bernie, however imperfect, is the vehicle for delivering that blow. Let's get moving.

The Death of the Soccer Mom

This election update yesterday from FiveThirtyEight, "Our First Big National Poll Shows Just How Unsettled The Race Is," paints Bernie Sanders the front-runner nationally after Iowa:

[T]oday Quinnipiac University released a national survey conducted entirely after Iowa voted, and it found a new polling front-runner: Sen. Bernie Sanders, who led the field with 25 percent support.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, fell nine points since Quinnipiac last conducted a national survey in late January. This is the first time Sanders has led in a national Quinnipiac survey during the 2020 cycle. As you can see in our national polling average, the gap between Biden and Sanders is shrinking, too — they’re essentially tied at 22 percent.

Pete Buttigieg is a distant fifth in the latest Quinnipiac poll with 10%, five points behind Mike Bloomberg and four points behind Elizabeth Warren.

Unless Buttigieg can upset Bernie or come within four points or less of the Vermont senator, I imagine that he will quickly fade from relevance in the primary.

New Hampshire polls consistently show Bernie as the front-runner. I found Buttigieg's Friday debate performance poor. He got shellacked by the ABC questioner on his record of jailing black people for low-level drug offenses. His response to the criticism of kowtowing to billionaires was an absurdist plea for a rainbow coalition that included the plutocrats and kleptocrats who are destroying the nation and the planet. At this point Buttigieg's appeal is solely as an anti-Bernie, which, needless to say, is not a prescription for success in a splintered primary field.

I'm looking for a Bernie win of five-plus points. That should put former Mayor Pete in the rear-view mirror.

Today the The New York Times publishes a doleful pre-postmortem of the Warren campaign, "Elizabeth Warren Is Running Her Race. The Real One May Be Passing Her By."

I think what we're witnessing is a political paradigm shift in the United States. Trump's election four-years ago announced it, but, because of events like the Women's March and the 2018 Blue Wave, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the death of the ideal voter in the corporate political mainstream, the suburban soccer mom.

Warren's rapid demise means the soccer mom doesn't pack the wallop she once did. The other candidate heavily dependent on the soccer mom is Michael Bloomberg. If California is any indication, the soccer mom has gone missing there too, despite many millions spent to locate her.

Iowa Caucus: "Fraud for 100 Years"

The New York Times comes to the rescue of the Democratic National Committee with "How the Iowa Caucuses Became an Epic Fiasco for Democrats," a story which places the blame on last week's Iowa meltdown squarely on the Iowa Democratic Party and its chairman Troy Price:

Tom Perez, the chairman of the national committee, placed blame directly on the Iowa Democratic Party and Mr. Price.

“Troy Price was doing his best, but it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Perez said in an interview with The Times on Sunday, noting that while the national and state parties work in partnership, the Iowa Democratic Party is ultimately responsible for administering its own nominating contest.

The D.N.C. approved Iowa’s delegate selection plan, but left the state party to determine on its own how to collect and tabulate caucus results, Mr. Perez said, adding that the national party did not test the state’s app or set standards for training or preparation.

Mr. Perez said he was not responsible for what state parties and their leaders do.

“I do not conduct a performance evaluation of every party chair,” he said.

Asked whether the D.N.C. would increase its scrutiny of other caucuses run by state parties, including Nevada’s in less than two weeks, Mr. Perez said he would “implement all of the lessons learned,” but did not specify how.

This contradicts reporting from last week which said that the DNC played a critical role in the IDP's decision to go with the mobile app when it advised the state party not to report results by telephone.

Shadow Inc., the app developer, is portrayed as a well-meaning victim of IDP incompetence, having been been awarded its contract for the Iowa caucuses as late as the fall of 2019. The Times acknowledges that the company is the creation of former Clinton staffers, but it manages to airbrush Tara McGowan and ACRONYM from the narrative. By airbrushing ACRONYM, which has been the focal point for Lee Fang's reporting, as well as Max Blumenthal's, the bigger picture of the guiding influence of wealthy Democratic donors like Reid Hoffman and Seth Klarman is obscured.

Don't get me wrong. The IDP is much to blame too. At this point it seems likely that the true caucus winner will never be known:

In the Times review of the data, at least 10 percent of precincts appeared to have improperly allocated their delegates, based on reported vote totals. In some cases, precincts awarded more delegates than they had to give; in others, they awarded fewer. More than two dozen precincts appeared to give delegates to candidates who did not qualify as viable under the caucus rules.

The big takeaway from last Monday's caucus is contained in a quote from Jeff Weaver of the Sanders campaign:

“You always had to calculate these numbers, all we’re asking is that you report them for the first time,” Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s closest adviser, said he told Mr. Price on the call. “If you haven’t been calculating these numbers all along, it’s been a fraud for 100 years.”

The Sanders people suspected that they won the vote in Iowa in 2016 but there was no way they could prove it because there was no reporting requirement for the raw vote and then the vote totals after realignment, only the allocation of delegates. One of the post-2016 reforms that Bernie people pushed for was more transparency in Iowa, and in this they were successful.

Now come to find out, Iowa, the first vote of the presidential primary, is nothing but a Potemkin village. This is something that has been intuitively obvious and plain to see for my enter life.

I guess one positive outcome of the election year already is that the fraudulence of the Iowa caucuses has been undeniably exposed.

The DNC in Free Fall

You can tell from the reporting in The New York Times that an organized "Block Bernie" effort does indeed exist. Why list total state delegate equivalents (S.D.E.s) and percentage of S.D.E.s as the sole metric of victory? Why? Because that is the only measure by which Pete Buttigieg can be declared the victor. Sanders leads in the popular vote by a significant margin, and the two are tied in the number of delegates each will send to the national convention

As Bernie explained in yesterday's press conference, S.D.E.s are elected participants to a state convention that will vote on rules and officers to govern the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP). They have nothing to do with the Democratic National Convention.

So to frame the election in Iowa as a quest for S.D.E.s, as the "newspaper of record" has done day after day, is bogus.

Besides the Sanders press conference, the big campaign news yesterday was that corrupt DNC chairman Tom Perez announced on Twitter that enough was enough -- the IDP should recanvass the state. Perez walked this back later in the day, saying that only problem precincts should be recanvassed, presumably the satellite caucus sites won overwhelming by Bernie.

There is a debate tonight on ABC. There is little doubt that Buttigieg has received a bounce in New Hampshire. If former Mayor Pete can parlay his fictitious first-place finish in a melted down Iowa to a close second or, improbably, a win in New Hampshire, then the corporate media buzz saw will cut the Democratic Primary field down to a Sanders-Buttigieg contest, pending the arrival of Bloomberg on Super Tuesday.

One potential scenario is that Buttigieg and Bloomberg will join forces. Even assuming that Buttigieg can vacuum up most of the supporters of Biden and Warren -- a big assumption -- he has very little campaign structure outside the first few primary contests. Former Mayor Pete will need to somehow tag-team with Daddy Warbucks Bloomberg if he hopes to remain in the race. FiveThirtyEight has Buttigieg's chances of victory at no more than 1 in 20.

Meanwhile the party is fracturing as expected. As NYT reports,

It’s not just Sanders supporters who are uneasy with Mr. Perez. 

James Carville, who has said the chairman should resign, pointed to another controversy this week that has been overshadowed by the Iowa chaos: the ouster of the top aides who had been planning the party’s nominating convention in Milwaukee. He cited it as another sign of the party’s disarray.

“We can’t count votes, put on a convention or deliver a winning message,” said Mr. Carville, the longtime Clinton strategist.

If James Carville is calling for DNC heads on pikes, you know we're approaching free fall.

Joe Biden for President, R.I.P.

Almost overnight Joe Biden has gone from being the favorite to win the Democratic Party nomination in Nate Silver's political forecast to a candidate with merely a one-in-six chance; Nate Silver considers a brokered convention more likely. Amazingly, the faux-hipster Disney-owned FiveThirtyEight now declares Bernie Sanders the odds-on favorite with a 50-50 shot at winning the primaries. (The New York Times gets into the act, joining Silver in trumpeting the political death of Joe Biden.)

Biden's weakness was obvious from the get-go. But national polls almost unanimously showed, and probably still do, Biden as the front-runner. Maybe he can turn it around with a strong showing in New Hampshire. But at this point anything worse than a close second will likely mean the end of his candidacy.

With 97% of the precincts reported in Iowa, the results show a dead heat between Sanders and Buttigieg. My guess is that Granite State voters aren't going to look kindly on the pipsqueak former mayor repeatedly claiming victory for himself. Caitlin Johnstone argues this morning that the slow release of the Iowa results is a DNC, not state party, initiative to favor Mayor Pete over Bernie. It's hard to conclude otherwise. Since the Monday meltdown Buttigieg has been shown day after day as the front-runner. That's a lot of free media.

After Iowa the Dynamic of the Democratic Primary Remains Unchanged

Thomas Edsall's column this morning, "If Bernie Wins, Where Will He Take the Democratic Party?," is for the most part a compendium of conventional wisdom regarding the likely disastrous outcome for the Democrats in a Sanders vs. Trump general election. David Frum expressed the same sentiment the other day in a debate on Democracy Now! against Jacobin's Bhaskar Sunkara.

The idea is that Bernie is far too left of the electorate; that he would drag down the senate and house. I think that's true in 1992 America but not true today. The other thing to keep in mind, something that both Frum and Edsall refuse to explore, is that every potential Democratic contender for the presidency is going to face significant challenges beating Trump. Why split the party by blocking Bernie's nomination a second time in a row?

The answer from the DNC perspective is that a split party is better than a party controlled by Sanders.

The muddled outcome in Iowa -- Buttigieg and Sanders neck and neck with approximately 30% of the precincts left to count -- doesn't change anything in the primary race. I still think Bernie is the candidate to beat. Biden and Warren are in trouble. Buttigieg will be a flash in the pan. And the DNC is going to bank on Mike Bloomberg to save the day.

The Democratic National Committee Needs a Thorough Purging

Yesterday, contemplating the ham-handed attempts by DNC leadership to rig the Democratic Primary for the second presidential election in a row, I came to the realization that an occupation of party headquarters is going to be necessary before all is said and done.

Blame for last night's Iowa caucus meltdown appears to lie with the Democratic National Committee forcing the state party to report results via a smartphone app. According to The New York Times,

Cybersecurity experts also said that the app had not been properly tested at scale, and that it was hastily put together over the past two months. Iowa Democratic Party officials only decided to use the app to report results after a previous party proposal — which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone — was scrapped, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials.

Sydney Ember and Reid Epstein explain that many if not most of the precinct captains decided not to use the mobile app and those who did had difficulty. When people tried to call in their results to headquarters they couldn't get through.

Max Blumenthal is reporting that

The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.

This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit backed by hedge fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.

The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.

This is banana republic stuff. Yves Smith's post this morning is scathing:

On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment? Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?

It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much better than everyone else.

Buttigieg appears to be the beneficiary of the two recent snafus: 1) the decision not to publish the Des Moines Register poll showing Sanders ahead, and 2) the caucus night reporting meltdown. Fortunately Buttigieg is going nowhere in the polls. He's fading in New Hampshire. He is polling below Tom Steyer in Nevada. He's dust. Kaput. He won't even get a free-media bounce if he is declared winner later in the day because tonight is Trump's state of the union address. Tomorrow is Trump's impeachment acquittal. Already the caucus meltdown is providing Trump a platform to remind voters about Obama's cataclysmic HealthCare.gov roll-out.

But back to my original point. This is what democracy looks like to the DNC. The DNC needs to be cleaned out thoroughly and ruthlessly.

Force-Feeding Democrats Mike Bloomberg

On the day of the first vote for president, Patrick Martin of World Socialist Web Site has an excellent overview (see "Corporate media and Democratic establishment target Sanders") of the mounting panic within the wealthy donor class that controls the Democratic Party:

There was even a report by NBC News that former Secretary of State John Kerry, the defeated Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 against George W. Bush, was overheard Sunday on the phone at a Des Moines hotel discussing entering the presidential race himself because of “the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party—down whole.”

Kerry reportedly expressed regret that he would have to resign from the board of Bank of America and give up lucrative paid speeches, but could expect wealthy donors to provide backing because they “now have the reality of Bernie.”

What really alarms the Democratic Party establishment and the corporate media is not the prospect that Sanders might lead the party to defeat, but that his capture of the nomination, would contribute—despite the Vermont senator’s own efforts—to a radicalization of American working people and youth that Sanders would not be able to contain.

[snip] 

Despite Sanders’ claims, however, the Democratic establishment is in no way reconciled to the prospect of a Sanders nomination. The rule change on eligibility for future debates announced Friday by the DNC drops the requirement that candidates have a minimum number of contributors, an action that would allow billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has only one contributor, himself, to qualify. Sanders’ campaign adviser Jeff Weaver denounced the move, saying, “Now, at this late hour, to change the rules to accommodate a billionaire who wants to buy his way into the party would be unconscionable.”

There was a report in Politico that members of the DNC have begun privately discussing a change in the convention rules to allow so-called super-delegates—elected officials and members of the DNC—to vote on the first ballot of the presidential nomination. Under current rules, they have no vote on the first ballot, which is reserved to delegates chosen in primaries and caucuses, and can vote only if no candidate has an initial majority and the contest goes to a second ballot. Such a change would be transparently aimed at blocking a first-ballot win by Sanders.

If the DNC is willing to change its small-donor rule at the eleventh hour in order to accommodate billionaire media mogul Bloomberg, then there's no question that we can expect more foul play to come. If it is true that the convention super-delegate rule is going to be tossed, then it will basically confirm that 2016 was rigged.

How do the party kingpins expect voters to support such a corrupt organization? Their answer is likely that the voters should do what they are told. And what they are going to be told is that they must vote for billionaire Bloomberg.

Plutocrats would prefer the general election be a contest between two New York City billionaire business moguls than one that would feature a democratic socialist as a contender.

We'll see what happens. But I doubt that the plutocrats will be able to force-feed their preferred scenario to the voting public. There is not enough grassroots support for a Bloomberg force-feed. If Biden were somehow able to muddle through with a narrow victory, the party would be divided, yes, but I believe it could come together in November. Bloomberg? No.

Super Bowl LIV

Interestingly the betting line out of Las Vegas is Chiefs by a point and a half. I think San Francisco is the better team. Benjamin Hoffman predicts a 49ers win in a nail-biter. In a sampling of player interviews on the NFL Network the predominate belief appears to be that Patrick Mahomes is going to find a way to win. That's the way I choose to see it too.

Given that most think this game will come down to how the Kansas City offense plays against the vaunted San Francisco defense, a fruitful way to approach this game might be to say that it will really come down to how the Chiefs defense stacks up against the 49ers offense.

There's really no telling. If the Chiefs can't stop the run I think they're in trouble. Kansas City was able to shut down Derrick Henry. So that bodes well if you are a Chiefs fan. Is Jimmy Garappolo that much better than Ryan Tannehill? I don't think so. Take the Chiefs. Let's hope it is a high-scoring, close game.

With the Super Bowl, the holiday season comes to an end. Some would argue it's Presidents' Day. I think Presidents' Day is like a water stop in the first mile of a marathon, the marathon being the February-to-end-of-May long march to Memorial Day.

The Iowa caucus is tomorrow. In February and March the Democratic Primary will likely be decided; unless the DNC opts for some heavy hocus pocus, finding a way to transfer the allegiance of Biden voters, as well as the supporters of all the also-rans, to Mike Bloomberg. Shane Goldmacher's story from the other day says it all. Biden's campaign is on life support. If he finishes out of the top two in Iowa I think he's in real trouble.

Bloomberg has already spent a surreal $275 million in advertising. How Bloomberg does in the Democratic Primary will be a sobering assessment of the health of U.S. democratic system. Can a billionaire buy a major-party nomination with enormous ad buys as if he were selling Doritos?