A meme making the rounds after the DNC drafting committee. The highlighted points are all positions currently taken by the Obama administration. Why the surprise at the platform rejection?

I want this to be really short, because I want to focus on the Omar Mateen story again. For those joining us late: I have made no secret for my advocacy of having a President named Bernie Sanders. While there are stories out of California that the actual ongoing counting of absentee and provisional ballots indicates that California may flip to the win column for Bernie, I hold out no particular hopes. As someone who just finished reading THE DEVIL’S CHESSBOARD,  the history of the CIA up to the RFK assassination, I pretty much figure the deep state has all the cool weaponry (both physical and through its ownership of media). Media statements to the contrary, Hillary Clinton does NOT have enough delegates to get past Bernie on a first round (superdelegates are NOT delegates and do not count in the first tally). But I’m not here to belabor this. Nor do I want to talk about H.A ,Goodman’s ongoing tussle with the question of whether Clinton will be indicted over the private servers.

Anyway, there’s been a dust-up over the DNC’s platform drafting committee. These are the people who put those nice broadsides out about what the Democrats stand for, and as a concession for Bernie sheepishly saying he will vote for Clinton in November, the Hillary folks allowed him to seat several representatives on the platform draft committee.

Then–Quelle Surprise!—  none of Bernie’s talking points made it! Bill McKibben, one of Sanders’ representatives, chronicles this here. But guess what planks got blocked!

• A ban on fracking
• Opposition to the Trans-Pacific partnership (TPP)
• carbon-tax proposal
• $15 an hour minimum wage
• opposition to war crimes in Gaza

And here’s the rub. If the DNC goes for these planks, they’re admitting that Obama’s agenda is broken. Obama is handing out oil and gas leases and pushing Fracking as fast as he can–according to new information, the administration recently handed out 1,500 new leases for fracking sites in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s never going to go for a carbon tax. He’s pushing the TPP for all it’s worth. 

Face it, my Bernie-supporting friends. Our fight is not with Hillary–it’s with the Democratic Party and its corporate friendly policies. There is nothing Sanders supporters could do to force HRC to go up against corporations. There’s a deep state issue at work–the present government is hard wired against upstarts like Mister Sanders. I’m extra cynical these days after reading Devil’s Chessboard, but we’re not free to choose our leaders. Besides, as I’ve posted before, I think it’s evil to pin poor President Bernie with the task of telling us in the not-too-distant future that the game is up. Much better to watch the supporters of the status quo to be elected to an office with an expiration date in the next few years. Let me enjoy that bit of schadenfreude here. I’d like to see Trump stutter through a speech about not having oxygen after the ocean has died. Hillary has been part of the leadership of  this country for over 20 years. Was she planning to tell us?

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