Six on 2020 elections: …And They're Off!; Mike Bloomberg has qualified for Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas; Mike Bloomberg: He's Great!; Michael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism - He never hid his callous indifference to ci
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Thanks John and Gary
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"Hundreds of people were charged with minor crimes so that they could be kept in jail for the duration of the convention. A judge held the city in contempt of court for failing to abide by a state policy that gives people in jail the right to see a judge or be released within 24 hours. And the city lied about how long it took to process the fingerprints of its detainees. In the end, no serious charges were brought against anyone, because the entire point was to keep people off the streets while Bush and his friends enjoyed their parties, and to dissuade others from attempting any further disruption.
Even then, it was clear that the arrests were illegal. They were, as the civil rights attorney Norman Siegel put it at the time, “preventative detention.” The cops knew it, the city’s lawyers knew it even as they denied it, and the mayor knew it. I remember all this because I was there. I probably avoided arrest out of happenstance more than anything else. But most of the people who would go on to elect Michael Bloomberg to another two terms as mayor of New York City have probably forgotten the entire episode, because, like the mayor, they never really cared.
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It took 10 years for the city to settle what the New York Civil Liberties Union described as “the largest protest settlement in history.” Bloomberg had been out of office for a few weeks when the settlement was announced. In his final term, he had used similar tactics against Occupy Wall Street.
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Occupy and the 2004 RNC were special events, which, to Bloomberg and his defenders, justified the bulldozing of civil liberties. But his entire mayoralty was defined less by these mass displays of authoritarian force than by the everyday abuses his police committed against millions of New Yorkers of color as part of his police department’s stop-and-frisk policy. The NYCLU reports that the NYPD made more than five million “stops” during Bloomberg’s 12 years in office. The overwhelming majority of those targeted were black or Latino."
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"Bernie Sanders’s campaign is different. Although Sanders is spending money on television and radio ads—$5 million in February alone—his campaign is built on grassroots energy and a near-monopoly on young voters. His polling with senior citizens is anemic. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Sanders led millennial voters with 43 percent support; the next highest candidate, Joe Biden, was at 16 percent. The same poll found that only 13 percent of Baby Boomers supported Sanders—half the number supporting Biden.
Sanders has framed himself as an outsider, taking on the political establishment as a democratic socialist. But as he has surged in the polls—he now leads Biden with all voters—he is increasingly running up against another establishment: the media, and particularly cable news.
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party was aided by a coup at Fox News. After some early turbulence, Fox quickly got in line and has become something like state TV, an echo chamber for the president’s point of view. Sanders has fewer natural allies in cable TV. In fact, the supposedly liberal network, MSNBC, has become a serious obstacle, pumping out Republican anti-Sanders talking points with increasing frequency.
After last Friday’s Democratic debate, Chris Matthews waxed apoplectic about what electing a socialist could mean for America. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro,” he said. “I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, OK?” Matthews’s colleagues pointed out that Sanders was more of a Danish type of socialist than a Castro type of socialist, but to little avail.
Two days later, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s former campaign guru, went on Morning Joe to rant about how a Sanders nomination would bring about the apocalypse. Literally. “The only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party,” he said. “That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days.” The same day, Chuck Todd, who also hosts NBC’s Meet the Press, read from an article from the right-wing website The Bulwark comparing supporters of Sanders, who is Jewish, to “brownshirts.”
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"Coming out of the first two Democratic primary states, with Bernie Sanders leading in votes and Pete Buttigieg leading in delegates, who is “starting to dominate the national political debate like no one in the past five years other than President Donald Trump”?
According to NBC‘s Jonathan Allen (2/12/20), that’s former New York City mayor, erstwhile Republican, and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has won no national delegates and is currently polling in third place at about 14%. But inconvenient data never stopped anxious members of the media from inflating their preferred candidates’ standing."
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