After a month of speculation, President Obama has made his nomination to
the U.S. Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia.
That person is Judge Merrick Garland, who comes from the corporate
defense law firm of Arnold & Porter. With this pick, Obama has
secured his legacy as a corporate appeaser. Ring of Fire’s Farron
Cousins discusses this.
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Marco Rubio snuck in a quiet announcement that he was suspending his
campaign, but he was careful to bury it in a pile of old speeches, much
of which he stole from candidate Barack Obama.
Things about being the son of immigrants, and more. He also blamed
the conservative movement and the establishment Republicans for this
years' season of discontent, before saying he wasn't going to be
President in 2016, or maybe ever.
This is what Chris Matthews sounds like after he's been huffing way too much
of that Tip and the Gipper, bipartisan, magical fairy dust during MSNBC's Super
Tuesday election coverage.
Apparently Matthews think the potential Democratic nominee for president of
the United States needs to pick an anti-choice, anti-labor, trickle-down, gives
tax cuts to the rich on the backs of the working class, former Lehman Brothers
executive as a running mate in order to get elected.
I’m sorry Hillary, but I just can’t do this anymore.
If
the 2016 presidential campaign were a football game, the Democrats
would be heading into it as two-touchdown favorites. Facing a Republican
Party that seems to have collectively lost its mind, America’s
purportedly liberal party only needs to put forth a minimally competent
candidate to win an election in which that candidate will face either
a reality TV star who combines ranting racist rhetoric with a
bottomless ignorance of every policy question under the sun, or an
extreme right-wing religious fanatic.
With the presidential
election all but being handed to them, the Democratic Party’s powers
that be have almost unanimously decided that Hillary Clinton is liberal
America’s best hope to keep the nation from being taken over by
right-wing maniacs. (In terms of endorsements, FiveThirtyEight.com’s formula
currently has Clinton ahead of Bernie Sanders by a total of 478 to six.
Even the much-reviled Donald Trump has more support among Republican
power brokers than Sanders has from Democratic pooh-bahs).
The
problem with this decision is that it’s becoming clear that Hillary
Clinton is a really bad candidate. I say that not as a Bernie Sanders
supporter: my attitude toward the Democratic primary has been that just
about the only relevant consideration is the question of whether Clinton
or Sanders would be more likely to win the general election, given how
catastrophic a GOP win would be.
Until recently, I was assuming
that Clinton would be a stronger challenger to either Trump or Cruz, so I
was hoping she would win out against Sanders. But I’ve changed my mind
about that.
Clinton keeps making serious mistakes – and these
mistakes follow a pattern that reveal why she’s making it increasingly
difficult for even mildly progressive voters to support her.
Clinton’s
latest blunder was her bizarre claim that Nancy and Ronald Reagan
played an important role in getting Americans to talk about AIDS in the
1980's: “It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was
for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980's,” Clinton told
MSNBC. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular,
Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody
would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”
This is not merely false, but the precise inverse
of the truth. Ronald Reagan managed to avoid ever mentioning the AIDS
epidemic for the first several years of his presidency. The famous
activist slogan “Silence = Death” was coined in response to the Reagan
administration’s studied refusal to even acknowledge the
epidemic. Indeed, the Reagans “started a national conversation” about
AIDS in the same sense that Donald Trump has started a national
conversation about the extent to which racism characterizes much of the
Republican Party’s base.
Clinton’s surreal historical revisionism – which
she walked back after a firestorm of criticism – is typical of the
eagerness with which she embraces even the most dubious figures, as long
as they are members of what my colleague Scott Lemieux calls America’s
“overcompensated and under performing elites.”
A few weeks ago she repeated the racist myth
that “radical” Northerners imposed corrupt governments on the defeated
South after the Civil War, and thus paved the way for Jim Crow and the
Ku Klux Klan. This week she engaged in some good old-fashioned red-baiting,
criticizing Sanders for opposing America’s sordid history of dirty wars
in Latin America, which she mis-characterized as his support for
Communist dictatorships.
All of this is both wrong as a
matter of principle, and stupid politics to boot. How many votes does
she think she’s going to get from (increasingly imaginary) “moderate
Republicans” as a consequence of this 1990's-style triangulation? Not
nearly as many as she’ll lose among disgusted liberals, who remember
that the Contras were terrorists, that Kissinger is a war criminal of
the first order, that Reconstruction didn’t cause the virulent racism
that undermined it, and that the Reagans’ silence regarding AIDS
contributed to countless unnecessary deaths.
I will, of course,
vote for Clinton if she’s the nominee – she is after all vastly
preferable to either Trump or Cruz – but by now this is starting to feel
like pointing out that a sprained ankle is preferable to a heart
attack.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
With this year's Game Developer's Conference barely started,
Microsoft has already rolled out a major announcement that has the
potential to significantly change the console gaming landscape. By allowing for cross-network play on Xbox Live,
Microsoft has signaled it's willing to open the doors to one of
gaming's most frustrating walled gardens and help restore the
platform-agnostic promise of the early Internet.
The question is, why now? Microsoft has been running Xbox Live since
2002, and it's been nearly a decade since the similar PlayStation
Network launched on Sony's PlayStation 3 (not to mention PC-based
networks like Steam). Why hasn't Microsoft made public overtures to
connect these disparate networks before now?
Part of it might be technical, on all sides. After all, it's easier
to develop a new, private gaming network with tens of millions of users
if you are in total control of all the hardware that will be connecting
together. The Xbox 360 and PS3's vastly different system architectures
may have made true online agnosticism difficult on console developers in
the last generation as well.
But a large part of it was surely business-related, at least for
Microsoft. The lock-in effects of closed gaming networks means console
gamers have long had to effectively coordinate their system purchases to
line up with those of their online gaming friends.
Ten years ago, when the Xbox 360 was launching, this was a key
advantage for Microsoft's new system. Back then, Microsoft had years of
experience running Xbox Live (compared to Sony's standing start with the
PlayStation Network), a one-year head start in reaching market with the
Xbox 360, and online-centric exclusives like Halo and Gears of War in the pipe to drive multiplayer-focused gamers to its console ecosystem.
The momentum driven by that Xbox Live lock-in among console gaming's
online early adopters was no doubt a large part of why the Xbox 360 was
able to find relative market success—especially in the West—following
Sony's market-dominating PlayStation 2 (though it surely wasn't the only reason).
Today, the console market looks quite different from Microsoft's point of view. Worldwide, the PS4 is now in close to twice as many homes as the Xbox One. Even in the usually Microsoft-friendly American market, Microsoft only rarely beats Sony in raw monthly console sales numbers these days.
That means, all things being equal, this console generation is much
more likely to see a critical mass of your friends playing on Sony's
PlayStation Network rather than on Microsoft's Xbox Live. If both online
ecosystems are closed off from each other, more new console buyers are
going to follow those friends to Sony's console if they want to play
online. But in the world of cross-platform play Microsoft is proposing,
the Xbox One might suddenly get a second look—especially since the
system will give you access to a new Halo in addition to letting you play Call of Duty and Madden with all your PS4-owning friends.
Microsoft has said it doesn't care overly much
about the size of its user base relative to Sony's. Still, the same
network effects that drove the Xbox 360's sales could now be a headwind
against the Xbox One gaining more momentum among prospective
buyers—especially among the online gamers that tend to be console
gaming's biggest spenders. That means today's announcement from
Microsoft can be seen both as an olive branch of consumer-friendly
cross-platform cooperation and as a white flag of surrender in the
battle to drive the console market.
And it's a flag that Sony doesn't have to accept. By offering "an
open invitation for other networks [read: Sony] to participate as well,"
though, Microsoft is very publicly pressuring Sony to follow the same
course. Otherwise, Sony will likely take a significant PR hit for trying
to hold on to its own relative walled-garden advantage at the expense
of player convenience. (Developers will also have to play along, but the
notion of having a single, unified base of players across two major
consoles will probably win out over any technical growing pains in
connecting the two similar consoles).
Sony hasn't given much indication how it will respond to Microsoft's
very open invitation/dare, but it would be in everyone's best interests
if they could bury the hatchet. Business concerns aside, there's no
longer much reason to force developers and players to a limited base of
competitors with the exact same hardware if they don't want to.
Hopefully, Sony won't let its current market dominance prevent a chance
to finally unify a hopelessly divided online gaming landscape.
There’s been a lot of fear mongering about the cost of Bernie Sanders’s
health care plan. Time to set the record straight. Cenk Uygur, host of
the The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the
comment section below.
"Single-payer national health insurance,
also known as “Medicare for all,” is a system in which a single public
or quasi-public agency organizes health care financing, but the delivery
of care remains largely in private hands. Under a single-payer system,
all residents of the U.S. would be covered for all medically necessary
services, including doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental
health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug and
medical supply costs.
The program would be funded by the savings
obtained from replacing today’s inefficient, profit-oriented, multiple
insurance payers with a single streamlined, nonprofit, public payer, and
by modest new taxes based on ability to pay. Premiums would disappear;
95 percent of all households would save money. Patients would no longer
face financial barriers to care such as co-pays and deductibles, and
would regain free choice of doctor and hospital. Doctors would regain
autonomy over patient care.”
Happy Pi Day, where we
celebrate the world’s most famous number. The exact value of Ï€=3.14159…
has fascinated people since ancient times, and mathematicians have
computed trillions of digits. But why do we care? Would it actually matter if somebody got the 11,137,423,895,285th digit wrong?
Probably not. The world would keep on turning (with a circumference
of 2Ï€r). What matters about Ï€ isn’t so much the actual value as the idea, and the fact that Ï€ seems to crop up in lots of unexpected places.
Let’s start with the expected places. If a circle has radius r, then
the circumference is 2Ï€r. So if a circle has radius of one foot, and you
walk around the circle in one-foot steps, then it will take you 2Ï€ =
6.28319… steps to go all the way around. Six steps isn’t nearly enough,
and after seven you will have overshot. And since the value of π is
irrational, no multiple of the circumference will be an even number of
steps. No matter how many times you take a one-foot step, you’ll never
come back exactly to your starting point. Calculating the area of a circle with wedges. Jim.belk
From the circumference of a circle we get the area. Cut a pizza into
an even number of slices, alternately colored yellow and blue. Lay all
the blue slices pointing up, and all the yellow slices pointing down.
Since each color accounts for half the circumference of the circle, the
result is approximately a strip of height r and width πr, or area πr2. The more slices we have, the better the approximation is, so the exact area must be exactly πr2.
Pi in other places
You don’t just get Ï€ in circular motion. You get Ï€ in any
oscillation. When a mass bobs on a spring, or a pendulum swings back
and forth, the position behaves just like one coordinate of a particle
going around a circle.
Simple harmonic motion is another view of circular motion.
If your maximum displacement is one meter and your maximum speed is
one meter/second, it’s just like going around a circle of radius one
meter at one meter/second, and your period of oscillation will be
exactly 2Ï€ seconds. The area of the space under the normal-distribution curve is the square root of pi. Autopilot, CC BY-SA
Pi also crops up in probability. The function
f(x)=e-x², where e=2.71828… is Euler’s number, describes the
most common probability distribution seen in the real world, governing
everything from SAT scores to locations of darts thrown at a target.
The
area under this curve is exactly the square root of π.
Another place we see π is in the calendar. A normal 365-day year is
just over 10,000,000Ï€ seconds. Does that have something to do with the
Earth going around the sun in a nearly circular orbit?
Actually, no.
It’s just coincidence, thanks to our arbitrarily dividing each day into
24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds.
What’s not coincidence is how the length of the day varies
with the seasons. If you plot the hours of daylight as a function of the
date, starting at next week’s equinox, you get the same sine curve that
describes the position of a pendulum or one coordinate of circular
motion.
Advanced appearances of π
More examples of π come up in calculus, especially in
infinite series like
1 – (1⁄3) + (1⁄5) – (1⁄7) + (1⁄9) + ⋯ = Ï€/4
and
12 + (1⁄2)2 + (1⁄3)2 + (1⁄4)2 + (1⁄5)2 + ⋯ = Ï€2/6
(The first comes from the Taylor series of the arctangent of 1, and the second from the Fourier series of a sawtooth function.)
Also from calculus comes Euler’s mysterious equation
eiπ + 1 = 0
relating the five most important numbers in mathematics: 0, 1, i, π, and e, where i is the (imaginary!) square root of -1. A graph of the exponential function y=e^x. Peter John Acklam, CC BY-SA
At first this looks like nonsense. How can you possibly take a number
like e to an imaginary power?! Stay with me. The rate of change of the
exponential function f(x)=ex is equal to the value of the
function itself. To the left of the figure, where the function is small,
it’s barely changing. To the right, where the function is big, it’s
changing rapidly. Likewise, the rate of change of any function of the
form f(x)=eax is proportional to eax. The relationship between an angle, its sine, cosine and a circle. 345Kai, CC BY-SA
We can then define f(x)= eix to be a complex
function whose rate of change is i times the function itself, and whose
value at 0 is 1. This turns out to be a combination of the trigonometric
functions that describe circular motion, namely cos(x) + i sin(x). Since going a distance π
takes you halfway around the unit circle, cos(π)=-1 and sin(π)=0, so eiπ=-1.
Finally, some people prefer to work with Ï„=2Ï€=6.28… instead of Ï€.
Since going a distance 2Ï€ takes you all the way around the circle, they
would write that eiτ = +1. If you find that confusing, take a few months to think about it. Then you can celebrate June 28 by baking two pies.
Rachel
Maddow explains the political science behind the classic strongman
political tactic of ginning up political violence in order for a
politician to present that violence as a problem that needs to be
solved.
For the first time since 1932, an American
Presidential campaign presents an opportunity for the public to overthrow the
aristocracy.
The historical significance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential contest isn’t yet
generally recognized.
Consider the evidence regarding this historical
significance, in the links that will be provided here, and from which the
argument here is constructed:
For the first time ever, a Republican campaign ad against Hillary Clinton is
entirely truthful about her and focuses on the most important issue facing
voters:
For the first time since 1932, an American Presidential campaign presents
an opportunity for the public to overthrow the aristocracy.
And, for the first time in U.S. history, a realistic possibility exists
that the voters’ choice between the two Parties’ Presidential nominees might
turn out to be between two enemies of the aristocracy:
Bernie Sanders versus
Donald Trump.
However, if it turns out instead to be between Trump v. Clinton, then what
will be the aristocratic backing of each?
On Clinton’s side will be Wall Street — and this includes the ‘shadow banks’ (the
non-“bank” sellers of what Bill Clinton and the Republicans caused to become
unregulated credit derivatives), from which Hillary Clinton is also
receiving donations, and from which the Clinton Foundation is supported and overseen — along with other Clinton funders).
Clearly, this is the first Presidential contest since 1932 in which the
interests of the aristocracy versus the interests of the public will be
presented to the voters, for them to decide which of the two sides they’re
actually on.
And, if the election turns out to be between Trump versus Sanders, then
this will be the first U.S. Presidential election ever in which both of the
major-Party nominees will have committed themselves to policies (Trump clearly
on foreign affairs, Sanders clearly on domestic affairs) that the aristocracy
vigorously oppose, and that present a severe threat to the aristocrats' continued rule of the country.
Phyllis Schlafly, ancient conservative demon spawn, has announced that she will be attending a Trump rally on Friday afternoon where she will throw her dried husk of bitter hatred behind Donald Trump for president.
That Schlafly is to endorse Trump is no real surprise, as the living fossil has a long history of being as hateful of a conservative as there ever was.
Highlights of Schlafly’s contributions to America include her Nixon-is-too-Liberal revolt in the 1960’s, her strong opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, her belief that women should first and foremost be housewives, and her opposition to just about any progressive step forward during her lifetime.
Recent comments from Schlafly regarding Trump’s promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants gave early indication that she was supportive of the hateful candidate, but her support of Trump is the only logical conclusion for such a bitter and regressive woman.
Out of seemingly nowhere, the Pangu hacking team has released an
update to its jailbreak tool for devices running iOS 9.1. The tool,
which is available for both Mac and Windows, allows users to jailbreak
the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. More interestingly, the same team is
promising to release a jailbreak for the 4th generation Apple TV next
week.
Unfortunately, few people will be able to take advantage of this
jailbreak that haven’t already. Why?
Apple stopped signing iOS 9.1 back
in late December, which means that anyone not currently running iOS 9.1
can no longer downgrade or upgrade to that particular version of iOS.
Since many of those who are not jailbroken have since upgraded to newer
versions of iOS, and those that are jailbroken are still running earlier
version of iOS, it limits the scope of potential users.
Pangu acknowledges that the kernel bug used for the 9.1 release was
patched by Apple in iOS 9.2. In other words, it had nothing to lose by
releasing the 1.3 update, and it gave the few users who might still be
running iOS 9.1 an opportunity to enjoy a jailbreak.
On its site, Pangu gave special thanks to Jung Hoon Lee, nicknamed
Lokihardt, a South Korean security expert who’s well-known in hacking
circles. Lee previously won a large bounty in the 2015 Pwn2Own hacking
competition. Pwn2Own is where contestants are challenged to exploit
mobile devices and software using new vulnerabilities.
You can download the Pangu 1.3 tool for iOS 9.1
from Pangu’s official website. The tool only works for iOS 9.1 on
64-bit iOS devices. Earlier iOS 9 versions can be jailbroken on 32-bit
devices using the same tool.
Apple TV 4 jailbreak in the works
Having an iOS 9.1 jailbreak is nice, but the news of an Apple TV 4
jailbreak is much more interesting. On its official Twitter account,
Pangu noted that it will release an Apple TV 4 jailbreak for 9.o.x next
week.
The jailbreak will only include SSH access, so there won’t likely be
any user-friendly GUI based features at the outset. Yet, this is still
very good news, and will open the floodgates for new Apple TV
modifications and enhancements. Remember, the third-generation Apple TV
was never jailbroken, so there’s a lot of pent up demand for a new Apple
TV jailbreak.
Please be aware that jailbreaking come with inherent risks. By
jailbreaking, you’re using a tool created by a team outside of Apple
that exploits security flaws.
That said, I personally choose to accept that risk and I still
jailbreak, although not as often on my daily driver. What about you? For
more details on the current state of jailbreaking, be sure to read our latest State of Jailbreak post.
Casual seafood chain Joe's
Crab Shack is on the receiving end of some extremely bad publicity this
week, and it's well-deserved: A couple who visited a Minneapolis-area
location recently were shocked and disgusted to find a photo of a
lynching displayed on one of the restaurant's tables, reports CBS Minnesota.
Tyrone Williams and Chauntyll Allen sat down at a Joe's in Roseville,
Minn. when they discovered the decorative tabletop had a picture
embedded in it "that depicted two black men being lynched by a white
mob, with the caption next to one of the victims that read, 'All I said
was that I didn’t like the gumbo.'"
According to CBS, the couple did
some brief research while still at the restaurant and found that the
photo depicted a real-life lynching that occurred back in 1896. They
spoke to the restaurant's manager, who apologized but also said that it
was likely other restaurants had similar tables.
In
a press release issued yesterday by the Minneapolis arm of the NAACP,
chapter president Nekima Levy-Pounds said, "This disturbing incident
that occurred at Joe's Crab Shack, demonstrates that racism is still
alive and well in this country. It is sickening to know that someone
would make a mockery of black men being savagely lynched and then use
that imagery for decorative purposes in a restaurant. We demand
accountability of Joe's Crab Shack for allowing racist material to
appear in its restaurants. This is completely unacceptable."
The
group is asking for a public apology from the Joe's Crab Shack
corporate office, and also asking for the "immediate removal of any and
all lynching or otherwise racially-offensive imagery from its
restaurants," as well as "a donation to a local community-based
organization that serves African American youths and teenagers."
Clearly someone on the Joe's design team needs to be fired for this one.
One of the New York City buildings bearing Donald Trump’s name. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)
Keith Olbermann is a news and sports commentator and reporter.
Okay, Donnie, you win.
I’m moving out.
Not
moving out of the country — not yet anyway. I’m merely moving out of
one of New York’s many buildings slathered in equal portions with
gratuitous gold and the name “Trump.” Nine largely happy years with an
excellent staff and an excellent reputation (until recently, anyway) —
but I’m out of here.
I’m getting out because of the degree to
which the very name “Trump” has degraded the public discourse and the
nation itself. I can’t hear, or see, or say that name any longer without
spitting.
Frankly, I’m running out of Trump spit.
And,
yes, I’m fully aware that I’m blaming a guy with the historically
unique fashion combination of a cheap baseball cap and Oompa Loompa
makeup for coarsening politics even though, out of the two of us, I’m
the one who has promulgated a “Worst Persons in the World” list for most
of the past decade. That’s how vulgar this has all become. It’s worse
even than Worst Persons.
This
is the campaign of a PG-rated cartoon character running for president,
interrupting a string of insults the rest of us abandoned in the seventh
grade only long enough to resume a concurrent string of half-crazed
boasts: We’re gonna start winning again! We’re gonna build an
eleventy-billion-foot-high wall! We’re not gonna pay a lot for this
muffler!
All this coarseness is largely masking the truth that
the Trump campaign is entirely about coarseness. Take away the
unmappable comb-over and the unstoppable mouth and the Freudian-rich
debates about genitalia, and there is no Trump campaign. Donald Trump’s
few forays into actual issues suggest he is startlingly unaware of how
the presidency or even ordinary governance works.
Of course that doesn’t preclude his election. A December study
carried out with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst showed that
Trump’s strongest support comes from Republicans with “authoritarian
inclinations.” They don’t want policy, nuance or speeches. They want a
folding metal chair smashed over the bad guy’s head, like in the kind of
televised wrestling show in which Trump used to appear.
And
it isn’t as though the American electorate hasn’t always had a soft
spot for exactly the worst possible person for the presidency. Two
months before the 1864 vote, some Republicans were so thoroughly convinced
that Abraham Lincoln would lose in a landslide that they proposed to
hold a second Republican convention and nominate somebody to run in his
place. The Democrat they feared, George B. McClellan, was not only
probably the worst general in the history of the country, but also his campaign platform
was predicated on stopping the Civil War, giving the South whatever it
wanted, running the greatest president in history out of town and
repudiating the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after the North’s
victory at Atlanta turned the tide of the war and thus the election,
McClellan — anti-Union, anti-Lincoln, anti-victory and pro-slavery —
still got 45 percent of the all-Northern vote.
There
could still be enough idiots to elect Trump this November. Hell, I was
stupid enough to move into one of his buildings. But here in those
buildings, even as I pack, is the silver lining hidden amid the golden
Donald trumpery.
One day Trump appeared in person and, with what
I only later realized was the same kind of sincere concern and respect
that Eddie Haskell used to pay “Beaver” Cleaver’s mother, asked me how I
liked the place and to let him know personally if anything ever went
wrong. About 15 months ago, when the elevators failed and many of the
heating-unit motors died and the water shut off, I wrote him. He sent an
adjutant over to bluster mightily about the urgency of improvements and
who was to blame for the elevators and how there would be consequences,
and within weeks Trump’s minions were obediently and diligently
installing — a new revolving door at the back of the lobby.
That
three-week project stretched past three months, smothered the lobby in
stench and grime, required the repeated removal and reinstallation of a
couple of railings, and for a time created a window frosting problem
even when it wasn’t cold out.
So at least there’s this comfort. If there is a President Trump and he decides to build this ludicrous wall to prevent the immigration from Mexico that isn’t happening, and he uses that same contractor, it’ll take them about a thousand years to finish it.
Fifteen of the 16 negative stories on the Bernie Sanders campaign that the Washington Post ran over a 16-hour period.
In what has to be some kind of record, the Washington Post
ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours, between roughly
10:20 PM EST Sunday, March 6, to 3:54 PM EST Monday, March 7—a window
that includes the crucial Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, and the
next morning’s spin:
All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by
advancing the narrative that he’s a clueless white man incapable of
winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article
about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise—despite
the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman.
While the headlines don’t necessarily reflect all the nuances of the text, as I’ve noted before, only 40 percent of the public reads past the headlines, so how a story is labeled is just as important, if not more so, than the substance of the story itself.
The Washington Post was sold in 2013 to libertarian Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is worth approximately $49.8 billion.
Despite being ideologically opposed to the Democratic Party (at least
in principle), Bezos has enjoyed friendly ties with both the Obama
administration and the CIA. As Michael Oman-Reagan notes, Amazon was awarded a $16.5 million contract with the State Department the last year Clinton ran it. Amazon also has over $600 million
in contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization
Sanders said he wanted to abolish in 1974, and still says he “had a lot of problems with.” FAIR has previously criticized the Washington Post for failing to disclose, when reporting on tech giant Uber, that Bezos also owns more than $1 billion in Uber stock.
The Washington Post’s editorial stance has been staunchlyanti-Sanders, though the paper contends that its editorial board is entirely independent of both Bezos and the paper’s news reporting.
With come-from-behind victory, Bernie Sanders has won the Michigan primary. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)
A potentially 'huuuuge' victory.
Though expectations were met as Hillary Clinton claimed a win by
large margin in the Mississippi primary, the big story of Tuesday's two
Democratic primaries is that Bernie Sanders has achieved an "upset of almost unheard of proportions" by claiming victory in the bellwether state of Michigan.
"The corporate media counted us out. The
pollsters said we were way behind. The Clinton super PACs spent millions
against us across the country. We were hit with a dishonest attack in
the debate.
But we won, again… and if we continue to stand together, we
can win this nomination." —Sen. Bernie Sanders Just after 11:30 PM ET, NBC News
declared it was "projecting" the win for Sanders as returns showed him
leading Clinton by more than 26,000 votes with more than 94% of
precincts reporting. Michigan has 147 delegates, which will be divided
proportionally between the two candidates.
"I want to thank the people of Michigan," Sanders declared in a brief
television interview just after 11 PM. "Tonight, I think the people of
Michigan stood up to the pundits. They stood up to the Establishment.
They stood up to the pollsters. And they said they want an economy that
works for all of us, and not just the people on top."
In a campaign email shortly after, Sanders declared the victory in Michigan as significant:
The results are in and we were just declared the winner
in a very important state for our campaign: Michigan. That’s a major,
game-changing victory for our campaign.
The corporate media
counted us out. The pollsters said we were way behind. The Clinton super
PACs spent millions against us across the country. We were hit with a
dishonest attack in the debate. But we won, again… and if we continue to
stand together, we can win this nomination.
Appearing on MSNBC as it was becoming clear that Sanders was
on the verge of victory, Nina Turner, former State Senator of Ohio and a
campaign surrogate, said the win proves Bernie has a winning agenda
that Democratic voters are responding to and ready to support. "It
really does show that his honesty and his consistency is really taken
hold in the state of Michigan," Turner said.
"He was about twenty percent down last week and in July about fifty
points, so he is really closing the lead," she continued. "And the more
people hear his message—his righteous indignation for the working class
and poor in this nation—and the way that he fought over bad trade deals
that took away manufacturing jobs both in Michigan and in Ohio, people
are really starting to hear his message."
Asked about the implications of the Michigan win and moving forward,
Turner said the campaign's eyes are now on other midwestern states such
as her own, but also larger states like California and New York later in
the primary calendar. "The more that people see he has been
consistent—that he doesn't change his message based on polling, that he
doesn't change his message depending on what audience he's talking to—he
has been a champion of the everyday people and it is starting to
resonate."
Ahead of the official call, Sanders delivered a brief statement to television cameras just before 11:00 PM ET.
"We believe our strongest areas are yet to happen," said Sanders
during "We're going to do very, very well on the West Coast and other
parts of this country. What the American people are saying is that they
are tired of a corrupt campaign finance system and super PAC's funded by
Wall Street and the billionaire class. They are tired of a rigged
economy in which people in Michigan, people in Illinois, people in Ohio
are working longer hours for lower wages; are worried to death about the
future of their kids, and yet all new income and wealth is going to the
top one percent. And the people of America are tired of a broken
criminal justice system in which we have more people in jail--largely
African American, Latino, and Native American--than any other major
country on Earth.
"When we started this campaign," Sanders continued, "we were sixty or
seventy points down in the polls. And yet what we have seen—in poll
after poll; state after state—what we have done is create the kind of
momentum that we need to win. So once again, this has been a fantastic
night. In Michigan we are so grateful for all the support we have gotten
and we look forward to going to Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and the other
upcoming states that we will be competing in next week."
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