Super Tuesday

It was a depressing weekend. The Clinton margin of victory among blacks in South Carolina, even greater than what she racked up in Nevada, is a death knell for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, as Nate Cohn explains in "Hillary Clinton’s Winning Numbers in South Carolina Suggest Sweep in South":

[Hillary] has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The result positions Mrs. Clinton for a sweep of the South in a few days on Super Tuesday and puts the burden on Mr. Sanders to post decisive victories elsewhere. If he does not — and the polls, at least so far, are not encouraging — Mrs. Clinton seems likely to amass a significant and possibly irreversible lead.

For Mrs. Clinton, the path to the presidential nomination is straightforward: fight Mr. Sanders to a draw among the nonblack voters who dominate the party’s contests in many Northern and Western states, and win by huge margins among black voters, who represent about a quarter of Democratic voters nationally. They represent the majority of Democrats in the South, which will play a crucial role on Super Tuesday.

The results in South Carolina — as well as in Nevada, where Mrs. Clinton also won black voters by a wide margin — suggest that she can count on big wins in six Super Tuesday states where black voters represent an above-average share of Democratic voters: Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia. The polls say the same thing.

As a result, the Sanders campaign has effectively conceded the South on Super Tuesday. The campaign is not airing advertisements there, according to NBC News data. It’s instead concentrating resources in five states with far fewer black voters and far fewer delegates: Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts and Vermont. It is a strategy that aims to maximize Mr. Sanders’s chance of winning states, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent Mrs. Clinton from running up huge delegate leads from the South.

The likelihood of a Clinton landslide in the delegate-rich South means that Mr. Sanders can’t compensate with a few narrow, feel-good wins outside the South. The thing to watch on Tuesday night is whether Mr. Sanders can win by big — even double-digit — margins in states like Minnesota or Massachusetts. The margins matter, because delegates are awarded proportionally in the Democratic nomination contest.

Even this might not be enough in a place like Minnesota or Massachusetts, depending on whether one assumes that Mr. Sanders has an advantage in caucus states like Minnesota or a state bordering Vermont like Massachusetts. If Mrs. Clinton has an advantage among Hispanic voters, in addition to black voters, then the burden on Mr. Sanders would grow even more to dominate with white voters in states like Massachusetts or Minnesota.

The polling, at least for now, says Mr. Sanders is not positioned to win by these sorts of margins. He’s in a tight race in Massachusetts. He’s in a tight race in Oklahoma, a state with a below-average black population and a large number of working-class Democrats. There is not much polling in Colorado or Minnesota, but there isn’t much evidence of a blowout there or in neighboring Wisconsin.

I think Cohn's analysis is on the money. Hillary has proven herself Obama's equal in winning a huge percentage of the black vote. And while it is true that Bernie wins a majority of white voters, though apparently not in South Carolina, it is more a split than a landslide. Absent a bombshell like an indictment, Hillary's path to the nomination seems safe.

Hence, the low feeling this weekend. Particularly after reading the massive two-parter by Jo Becker and Scott Shane (The Libya Gamble: "Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall" and "A New Libya, With 'Very Little Time Left' ") about the disastrous Hillary-backed coup of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary's fingerprints are all over the destruction of North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe.

The good news though is she going to have great difficulty winning a general election against Trump. Cohn is too busy lining out the limitations of Bernie's campaign to note the weakness of Hillary's. For starters, Democratic turnout has been less than the GOP so far. Trump broke records for turnout in South Carolina and Nevada. This has to be very troubling for Team Clinton. For the winning formula of the Obama coalition to work, Hillary will need not only the constituency groups -- blacks, Latinos, youth -- but she will need juiced turnout by those constituents. Hillary has the blacks, but so far she does not have young people and there is no evidence that she is winning the Latino vote by a significant margin. Most importantly, Hillary is not inspiring new voters to come to the polls the way Trump is. Read Matt Taibbi's excellent "How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable" and ask yourself, "How does Trump lose any of the big swing states to Hillary?"

One possible answer is found in "Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump" by Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Johnathan Martin. The GOP will campaign against Trump in the general:

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

The article also limns Republican plans to steal the nomination from Trump at the convention.

Maybe the GOP will incinerate itself. We can only hope. One thing is for sure: If Hillary does as well tomorrow as is generally predicted, Bloomberg will not run. The elites will all line up with Hillary, and it will be Hillary vs. the world.

Why Hillary is So Beatable

This morning the pro-Hillary New York Times calls on Clinton to release the transcripts of her speeches to the big banks, "Mrs. Clinton, Show Voters Those Transcripts." This comes a day after video of Black Lives Matter protester Ashley Williams confronting Hillary at a tony Charleston fundraising soiree with a piece of cloth reading "WE HAVE TO BRING THEM TO HEEL" (a quote from Hillary's 1996 "super-predator" speech) went viral.

Look at Adam Johnson's AlterNet post "Black Lives Matter Activist Confronts Clinton About Racially Charged Remarks Because the Corporate Media Won't" for an immediate visceral understanding of why Hillary is the establishment's candidate of choice -- not Rubio, not the "suspended" Jeb Bush, not Ted Cruz.

Hillary is the personification of everything rancid in a political system controlled by the wealthy for the wealthy to the detriment of working people and the planet.

The hashtag #WhichHillary began trending yesterday as people saw the video. Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith points out that Twitter "apparently expunged from the 'trending' list" #WhichHillary.

This is the story of Hillary 2016. We all know that she is a sickening corpse. The problem is that the people in power want her to lead us.

It's not over yet. There is still hope. Young Ashley Williams will inspire many more activists. The transcripts of Hillary's Goldman groveling will hopefully find there way to the public.

The Bloomberg Doomsday Scenario

The goalposts now move to Nevada and South Carolina where Hillary will attempt to remake herself as a champion of the black underclass, as Lambert Strether notes in his "Water Cooler":

“Clinton is set to campaign with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans who died in incidents involving a neighborhood watch representative and law enforcement officers, respectively. And the campaign, sources said, is expected to push a new focus on systematic racism, criminal justice reform, voting rights and gun violence that will mitigate concerns about her lack of an inspirational message” [Politico].

After failing to deliver a clear victory in Iowa or a decent showing in New Hampshire, Team Clinton, and the pundits of the mainstream, are banking on the allegiance of black and brown voters. With Republican voters seemingly ready to embrace Donald Trump whole hog, the ruling elite has a lot riding on Nevada and South Carolina. If she shows continued morbidity in these two states, March 1 Super Tuesday might not be the knockout blow for Sanders that Hillary's campaign is promising.

Yes, a lot is riding on the remaining weeks of February. Meanwhile, overseas Russia and Syria are routing the U.S. backed jihadis and U.S. clients, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are having a tantrum. Enormous pressure is being put on the Obama administration to up the ante with either anti-aircraft missiles or ground troops. As Aleppo returns to government control, NATO warships will now patrol the Aegean to try to prevent more refugees from landing on European shores. In Afghanistan, U.S. ground troops are -- unbelievably -- back in Helmand Province to try to save Poppystan from falling completely to the Taliban.

Things are spinning out of control. In 2016 we should see some sort of dramatic paradigm shift (if we haven't already).

A doomsday scenario we can look for is an election tossed into the House of Representatives, something that hasn't occurred in the United States since the election of 1824 when John Quincy Adams was selected over the Donald Trump of the day, Andrew Jackson. This becomes a possibility if Mike Bloomberg runs for president as an independent. The latest news is that he is "itchin'" to make a go of it.

I don't think Bloomberg will run unless Hillary continues her collapse, which will begin in haste if her Dixie firewall collapses. Hillary now is the champion of a sick and dying global regime. Can her corpse continue its ambulatory miracle of reanimation? So far it has been less miracle and more smoke and mirrors. But money can turn the world upside down. Let's see what happens in Nevada.

In Wake of Emanuel AME Massacre Gray Lady Silent on Ukraine's Love of Dixie Battle Flag

On the Gray Lady's Opinion page today there is an interesting juxtaposition. On the left hand there is the lede unsigned editorial, "The Fantasy Mr. Putin Is Selling," which is a recapitulation of the main USG talking points regarding Russia and Ukraine (Putin's aggression; Western sanctions will cripple Russia); while on the right hand is a Morris Dees and J. Richard Cohen Op-Ed column, "White Supremacists Without Borders," about the global popularity of neo-Nazi, neo-fascist, neo-Confederate ideology that motivated mass murderer Dylann Roof.

What goes unmentioned in both is that the Ukrainian government that the United States stalwartly backs is rife with neo-Nazis, and that following the coup of president Viktor Yanukovych in February of last year the battle flag of the Confederacy was displayed in Kiev's city hall.

If you Google "Ukrainian Confederate Flag" stories pop up about the pro-Russian rebels' use of a standard that bares a resemblance to the Army of Northern Virginia. All the stories appear to trace back to a single report, "Ukrainian Rebels Channel U.S. Confederates," published last year at this time in the pro-Western, English-language, tiny-circulation Moscow Times. This was picked up by Slate which ran a story with images of the Novorrosiyan flag flying in Donetsk and the Dixie battle flag flying in front of the statehouse in South Carolina.

The Moscow Times story is obviously part of a counterintelligence campaign. No one questions that the putschists openly paraded the Confederate flag -- not a flag that bears a resemblance to a Confederate army standard -- in Kiev, and that the Confederate flag, as Dees and Cohen make clear in today's column, is part of the paraphernalia and iconography of white supremacy.

Since it is fruitless to ask that The New York Times balance its demonization of Putin and its Russophobia with a condemnation of the Ukrainian use of Nazi and Confederate symbols, we should take the time to note the "newspaper of record" supports white supremacy abroad at the same time it pleads for tolerance and an end to race hatred at home.