It's hard not to love Bernie Sanders. He has proved to be a gifted and eloquent politician. He has articulated the raw and deep anger about the damage the big banks did to the economy and to so many people's lives. He's spoken clearly for those who believe the system is rigged against them; he's made plain how punishing and egregious income inequality has become in this country, and he refuses to let us forget that the villains have gotten away with it.

I've been watching the debates and town halls for the past two months, and Sanders' righteousness knocks me out. My heart is with him. He has brought the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations to the ballot box.

But it is not enough to be a candidate of anger. Anger is not a plan; it is not a reason to wield power; it is not a reason for hope. Anger is too narrow to motivate a majority of voters, and it does not make a case for the ability and experience to govern. I believe that extreme economic inequality, the vast redistribution of wealth to the top one percent — indeed, to the top one percent of the one percent — is the defining issue of our times. Within that issue, almost all issues of social injustice can be seen, none more so than climate change, which can be boiled down to the rights of mankind against the oligarchy that owns oil, coal and vast holdings of dirty energy, and those who profit from their use.

Hillary Clinton has an impressive command of policy, the details, trade-offs and how it gets done. It's easy to blame billionaires for everything, but quite another to know what to do about it. During his 25 years in Congress, Sanders has stuck to uncompromising ideals, but his outsider stance has not attracted supporters among the Democrats. Paul Krugman writes that the Sanders movement has a "contempt for compromise."

Every time Sanders is challenged on how he plans to get his agenda through Congress and past the special interests, he responds that the "political revolution" that sweeps him into office will somehow be the magical instrument of the monumental changes he describes. This is a vague, deeply disingenuous idea that ignores the reality of modern America. With the narrow power base and limited political alliances that Sanders had built in his years as the democratic socialist senator from Vermont, how does he possibly have a chance of fighting such entrenched power?
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The State Department’s internal investigation arm issued a final memorandum today on the email practices of past and current secretaries of state, and it said definitively that past secretaries handled classified material on unclassified email systems.

IC IG made a referral detailing the potential compromise of classified information to security
officials within the Executive Branch. The main purpose of the refe rral was to notify security
officials that classified information may exist on at least one private server and thumb drive
that are not in the government's possession. An important distinction is that the IC IG did not
make a criminal referral- it was a security referral made for counterintelligence purposes. The
IC IG is statutorily required to refer potential compromises of national security information to
the appropriate IC security officials.

Republican operatives are having a strange crush on Bernie Sanders.

During Sunday night’s Democratic debate, the Republican National Committee made the unusual move of sending no fewer than four real-time e-mails to reporters defending the self-described democratic socialist from attacks by Hillary Clinton or echoing his message against her. Based on their content, one could be forgiven for thinking the RNC communiques came from the Sanders campaign.

One RNC e-mail, which was titled “Clinton’s Misleading Health Care Attack,” defended the Vermont senator from what it described as “the Clinton campaign’s inaccurate remarks on Sanders’ single-payer plan,” and quoted news articles that featured rebuttals of her arguments. A second message countered Clinton’s attacks on Sanders over gun control by pointing out her gun-friendly statements in the past. Two other e-mails sought to bolster Sanders’ case that Clinton is too close to Wall Street and the drug industry.

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Meanwhile, American Crossroads, a group co-founded by Karl Rove, is airing an ad in Iowa bolstering a core tenet of Sanders’s case against Clinton: that she has received large sums of campaign contributions from Wall Street, and therefore can't be trusted to crack down on big banks. “Hillary rewarded Wall Street with a $700 billion bailout, then Wall Street made her a multi-millionaire,” a narrator in the ad says. “Does Iowa really want Wall Street in the White House?”

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“In Iowa, American Crossroads is helping Bernie Sanders by depicting Hillary Clinton as a Wall Street insider,” Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, wrote on his blog.
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The paper found the Democrats' policies problematic, arguing they propose no plans that would curb federal spending.

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"Given the distance from economic reality that Clinton and Sanders have catapulted in their exhortations, we cannot endorse either of them in the Illinois primary election," the paper wrote wrote.
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The GOP attack machine is revving up to lay groundwork for defeating Hillary Clinton in a general election, and there's no shortage of super PACs vying for the millions in funding that go along with ensuring her demise. American Crossroads (Rove), Right to Rise (Jeb!), and America Rising are each jockeying for the title of "Clinton slayer"—all of which could add up to a several-hundred-million dollar effort, report Ashley Parker and Amy Chozick.

Not content to simply go after Clinton's recent email "scandal," they are digging up terms like “Whitewater, Travelgate and Filegate.” (Seems a little desperate, no?)

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Clinton has her vulnerabilities—every candidate does—but the idea that she'll ever be as tone-deaf or condescending as Mittens is laughable.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have shown a lot of professionalism towards each other as they compete for the Democratic nomination. In comparison to the shitshow that is the GOP race, Clinton and Sanders look like responsible adults discussing issues imperative to the future of Democrats and liberal policies.

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[font size="3"]
I belong to a number of pro-Bernie Sanders groups on social media, and [font color="red"]the sheer volume of anti-Hillary posts by individuals from conspiracy or conservative websites is staggering[/font]. These people link Breitbart, Infowars, March Against Monsanto, The Daily Caller and other websites to make their claim that Hillary Clinton is the worst person ever – or that President Obama was a gay prostitute in his younger days.[/font]

As I have repeatedly stated before, I am a Bernie Sanders supporter, despite our minor differences on science and genetic technology. I switched from No Party Affiliation to Democrat for the first time in years, simply so that I could vote for Bernie.

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Now I stand with Bernie Sanders, [font size="3"]but I’m imploring fellow supporters to level their criticisms of Hillary Clinton based on well-reasoned arguments involving policy, rather than some blog from a conservative website which was designed to be shared in multiple social media groups by people who don’t check their facts before posting.[/font]

If you do not take pragmatism, reason and fact-checking into consideration before voicing your opinion – the GOP is counting on exactly that for a win in November

[font color="66aaee"]Computer Security Logs Show No Evidence Of Hacking Into Clinton's Email Server[/font]

New York Times: Security Record Of Clinton's Email Server "Showed No Evidence Of Foreign Hacking." Records of computer security logs from Hillary Clinton's private email server "showed no evidence of foreign hacking," according to a March 3 New York Times report. Times reporter Matt Apuzzo noted that Bryan Pagliano, an aide to Clinton who "provided agents the security logs ... told the agents that nothing in his security logs suggested that any intrusion occurred":


[blockquote style="border:1px solid #000000;background: #ddeeff;padding:10px;"]A former aide to Hillary Clinton has turned over to the F.B.I. computer security logs from Mrs. Clinton's private server, records that showed no evidence of foreign hacking, according to people close to a federal investigation into Mrs. Clinton's emails.

The security logs bolster Mrs. Clinton's assertion that her use of a personal email account to conduct State Department business while she was the secretary of state did not put American secrets into the hands of hackers or foreign governments. The former aide, Bryan Pagliano, began cooperating with federal agents last fall, according to interviews with a federal law enforcement official and others close to the case. Mr. Pagliano described how he set up the server in Mrs. Clinton's home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and according to two of the people, he provided agents the security logs. The law enforcement official described the interview as routine. Most of those close to the case spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the continuing investigation.

Mrs. Clinton's work-related emails as secretary of state, which have been made public as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show that she received spam emails intended to try to lure her into clicking a malicious link. Those emails, known as "spear phishing" attempts, were traced to Russia, but it was not clear from the emails alone whether anyone clicked on those links or whether the security was compromised.

Mr. Pagliano told the agents that nothing in his security logs suggested that any intrusion occurred. Security logs keep track of, among other things, who accessed the network and when. They are not definitive, and forensic experts can sometimes spot sophisticated hacking that is not apparent in the logs, but computer security experts view logs as key documents when detecting hackers. (New York Times, 3/3/16)