Bernie Sanders Suspends Staffer For Being As Tough On Israel As He Is

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Democratic Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) debate on April 14, 2016 in Brooklyn ahead of the New York primary to be held April 19.

Sanders’ Democratic debate comments on Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian conflict echo those that got Simone Zimmerman suspended.
Huffingtonpost 04/15/2016 01:44 am ET | Updated 10 hours ago

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued during Thursday’s Democratic debate that the Palestinian people should be treated with dignity and that the United States shouldn’t always kowtow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hours earlier, Sanders’ campaign suspended its new Jewish outreach director for advocating the exact same positions.

The ninth debate between Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton featured a heated discussion about whether Israel’s invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014 was a disproportionate response to rocket attacks fired into its territory by Hamas, as Sanders has said it was.

It was a seminal campaign moment, made more salient because it happened in New York, a state where Jews comprise a larger share of the Democratic primary electorate than elsewhere.

Clinton argued that Israel had a right to defend itself from terror attacks and blamed the Palestinians for failed peace negotiations. Sanders said something relatively sacrilegious for an American politician — that Netanyahu “is not right all of the time.”

“As somebody who is 100-percent pro-Israel ... in the long run, if we are ever going to bring peace to that region, which has seen so much hatred, and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity,” Sanders explained. “I believe the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people. That does not make me anti-Israel. That paves the way, I think, to an approach that works in the Middle East.”

This is what Simone Zimmerman, Sanders’ now-suspended Jewish outreach director, said she believes. And it’s a good distillation of what J Street, the progressive advocacy group fighting for a two-state solution and against inertia in the American Jewish community, believes. (Zimmerman was president of J Street’s campus arm, J Street U, while in college.)

As The New York Times reported Thursday evening, Sanders’ campaign suspended Zimmerman just two days after it hired her, after the conservative Washington Free Beacon published a past Facebook post of hers in which she wrote, “F—- you Bibi,” using Netanyahu’s nickname, and described the Israeli leader as “arrogant, deceptive, cynical” and “manipulative.” She criticized Netanyahu for trying to “derail” the Iranian nuclear negotiations and for leading the charge into Gaza, where roughly 1,500 Palestinian civilians were killed during the 2014 invasion. 

(President Barack Obama also seems to agree with Zimmerman: He has complained about having to deal with Netanyahu, and a member of his administration reportedly called the prime minister “chickenshit.” In turn, Netanyahu’s spokesman has called Obama anti-Semitic and Secretary of State John Kerry “childish.” Obama and Netanyahu’s personal relationship, setting aside their countries’ working relationship, is the worst ever between an American president and an Israeli prime minister.)

Zimmerman’s suspension suggests a couple of things, including that Sanders’ campaign does not vet staff members and that it feared alienating New York’s Jewish voters if it didn’t respond to the calls for her firing. 

“The smear campaign being waged against Simone Zimmerman is a reflection of how out-of-touch the American Jewish establishment is with the Jewish community,” said Yonah Lieberman, who co-founded IfNotNow with Zimmerman and others. The group is dedicated to ending the American Jewish community’s support for the occupation of the Palestinian territories. 

“This is not the first sign of this disconnect — it just the most blatant example of the American Jewish establishment trying to intimidate and silence young people acting on the very Jewish values we were taught by our community,” Lieberman continued. “The Jewish establishment won’t stand for anyone criticizing Israel — no matter the truth or reason. When young Jews call for freedom and dignity for the Palestinians, the establishment can only respond with intimidation and fear.”

SAMUEL CORUM/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES
If Not Now protesters gathered outside of the Verizon Center where Donald Trump and other Republican Presidential candidates spoke during the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee convention in Washington, USA on March 21, 2016.

Those who would otherwise have been thrilled with Sanders’ debate rhetoric about being more “even-handed” in approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were instead furious with him for suspending Zimmerman.

Max Berger, another IfNotNow co-founder, started an #IStandWithSimone hashtag campaign on Twitter, which picked up more tweets as Sanders spoke during the debate. 

Sanders’ comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the debate would have made waves at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference last month in Washington. He gave his stellar AIPAC speech at a high school in Utah, speaking at length about how settlements are counterproductive to peace. Clinton, in contrast, mentioned Israeli settlement construction just once in her AIPAC remarks and said the sorts of things that AIPAC supporters love to hear.

Sanders criticized Clinton for “barely mentioning” the Palestinians.

“I heard virtually no discussion at all about the needs of the Palestinian people,” he said. “Almost none in that speech. ... Of course Israel has a right to defend itself, but long term, there will never be peace in that region, unless the United States plays an even-handed role, trying to bring people together, and recognizing the serious problems that exist among the Palestinian people.”

Clinton responded: “Describing the problem is a lot easier than trying to solve it.”

“I was the person who held the last three meetings between the president of the Palestinian Authority and the Prime Minister of Israel … and I was absolutely focused on what was fair and right for the Palestinians, I was absolutely focused on what we needed to do to make sure the Palestinian people had the right to self government ... and get an agreement that will be both fair to the Israelis and the Palestinians without ever undermining Israel’s security,” she added. 

Clinton capped her defense by arguing, “Nobody is saying that any individual leader is always right.”

Said Sanders: “There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”

That’s the sort of tough talk that might get Sanders fired from his own campaign.

Science and Morality

Season 7, Episode 7

Credit: the-lightwriter/iStock.

Explore the intersection of science and morality when host Neil deGrasse Tyson answers fan questions with the help of guest Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic Magazine and author of The Moral Arc. Co-host Eugene Mirman has picked some of your deepest, most thought provoking questions to throw at Neil and Michael, like, “With evidence proving we’re all equally the same, why do racism and bigotry remain strong in certain groups?” Find out about the brain mechanism known as ‘one-trial learning,’ why we’re evolutionarily prone to pigeonholing, and why racism is actually the nefarious hijacking of an evolutionary force, tribalism. Can the scientific method be applied to political systems, society, and human behavior? Compare scientific discoveries that have shaped our morality, and contrast both the concepts of mutually assured destruction with supernatural beliefs that court death and the fears of terrorism with gun violence. What are the ethics and morality of cloning and bioengineering? Would clones have rights? Next, Neil, Michael and Eugene ponder whether aliens would be good or evil, and how we look at that question through the lens of human history filtered by imperialism and colonialism. You’ll learn about phrenology, the eugenics movement and repeated anti-immigration movements. It’s not all bad news, though: you’ll also hear about the Flynn Effect: data indicating that the general population is getting smarter and more scientifically literate, and why that might be.

Co-HostEugene Mirman, Comedian

GuestMichael Shermer, Ph.D., Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine; Author, The Moral Arc

Music
“Help Our Souls” – NIHILS
“A Dream” – Common
“Pride (In the Name of Love)” – U2
“RED HANDS” – Walk off the Earth
“Psycho” – Muse

Click here to go to StarTalk Radio

PRINCE RUSHED TO HOSPITAL After Emergency Landing

Prince was rushed to a hospital early Friday morning after his jet made an emergency landing in Illinois ... TMZ has learned. 
According to our sources, Prince's private plane made an unscheduled landing at Quad City International Airport in Moline just after 1 AM. The singer was immediately transported by ambulance to a nearby hospital.
One source tells TMZ Prince is still in the hospital and "not doing well," however another source close to the 57-year-old singer tells us he's been released and is doing okay. The nature of the medical emergency is unclear.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer had performed Thursday night in Atlanta ... and he was in the air for only a short time before things went south.

Following the incident, he tweeted, "I am #transformed."

Click Here for TMZ article about Prince falling ill

Live Recap: Prince's Piano & A Microphone Tour, Atlanta's Fox Theatre, 4/14/16
By Bonnie Stiernberg  |  April 15, 2016  |  12:31pm


When Prince’s Atlanta date on his Piano & A Microphone Tour—which, just like it sounds, features the singer playing solo at a purple baby grand, the first such tour of his lengthy career—was postponed last week due to a bout with the flu, the rescheduled shows were announced surprisingly quickly. The Purple One hit the stage at the Fox Theatre just a week after he was initially supposed to, and from the look of it, he’d made a full recovery.

Would we really expect any less, though? We all know Prince isn’t fully human—the man hasn’t visibly aged in 30 years, so why should we be surprised that seven days after being ill, he’s reaching mind-blowing high notes on “A Case of U” that artists half his age would struggle to hit? His 7 p.m. set was a short one—just 80 minutes—but that seemed to have more to do with the fact that the venue needed to turn over in time for his 10 p.m. set later that evening than with any sort of lingering flu symptoms. Prince made every second count, and perhaps most importantly, the crowd was grateful for any time at all. He still managed to cram two encores into those 80 minutes, and every time he reappeared onstage, the noise was deafening.

The encores weren’t the only times the singer left the stage—he got up periodically throughout the set, at one point leaving briefly to regroup before returning and explaining that “Sometimes I forget how emotional these songs are.” But every time those fingers hit the keys, there’d be a rapturous moment of recognition from the crowd. The opportunity to hear these songs stripped down on the piano is a rare one, and that wasn’t lost on the fans, some of whom shelled out as much as $1000 a seat to be there.

Prince fed off that energy, too, encouraging hand-claps and sing-alongs on Controversy and bringing the house lights up for “Kiss” to witness the entire theater attempting their best falsettos. His cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” was moving, resulting in a hushed awe—one of the few quiet moments of the set. Purple Rain fans didn’t get to hear the famous title track—a fact some reminded him when he finished his last encore by joking “I don’t have any more hits left!”—but they were treated to stellar versions of favorites from that record like “I Would Die 4 U,” “Baby I’m a Star” and “The Beautiful Ones.”

And, ultimately, Prince can do and play whatever he wants. He’s Prince, and he’s here blessing us with his presence. Especially for a show that almost wasn’t, every song feels like a gift.

Setlist:
1. Little Red Corvette / Dirty Mind
2. Linus & Lucy (Vince Guaraldi cover)
3. The Beautiful Ones
4. Nothing Compares 2 U
5. Joy in Repetition 
6. Muse 2 the Pharaoh
7. U Got the Look
8. Pop Life
9. Elephants & Flowers
10. I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man
11. A Case of You (Joni Mitchell cover)

Encore 1:
12. I Feel For You
13. Controversy
14. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
15. I Would Die 4 U
16. Baby I’m a Star
Encore 2:
17. Heroes (David Bowie cover)
18. Diamonds and Pearls
19. Adore
20. The Beautiful Ones
21. How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore
22. Do Me, Baby
23. I Wanna Be Your Lover
24. Kiss

Clinton-Sanders and the Facts: Fact-checking the Clinton-Sanders spat over Big Oil contributions

Responding to a question from an activist from Greenpeace USA, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton appeared to get mad, jabbing a finger at the questioner and saying she was "sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me." (350 Action)

“I have money from people who work for fossil-fuel companies. I am so sick — I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me.”

— Hillary Clinton, to a Greenpeace activist, March 31, 2016

“The fact of the matter is Secretary Clinton has taken significant money from the fossil fuel industry. She raises her money with a super PAC. She gets a lot of money from Wall Street, from the drug companies and fossil fuel industry.”

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), interview on ABC’s “Good Morning, America,” April 1

“Fifty-seven lobbyists from the industry have personally given to her campaign and 11 of those lobbyists have bundled more than $1 million to help put her in the White House. If you include money given to super PACs backing Clinton, the fossil fuel industry has given more than $4.5 million in support of Clinton’s bid.”

— Bernie Sanders campaign, in a news release, April 1

Who’s right in the Democratic spat over oil-industry contributions? A lot depends on what is counted –and how it is counted. Clinton made a strong accusation that the Sanders campaign is “lying” about the issue. Let’s see whether the Sanders campaign’s math hold up.

The Facts

This all started when a Greenpeace activist approached Clinton on a rope line to ask her to “reject fossil-fuel money in the future” in her campaign. As a matter of law, campaigns are prohibited from taking money directly from corporations, though the Clinton campaign has not received money from oil-industry PACs either.

As Clinton noted in her angry response, she does get money from people who work at oil companies. (These calculations involve people who contribute at least $200 and provide an occupation or employer.) According to the Center for Responsive Politics, as of March 21, the Clinton campaign has received nearly $308,000 from individuals in the oil and gas industry. The Sanders campaign has received nearly $54,000.

In you include contributions from outside groups supporting a candidate, Clinton’s total increases slightly to $333,000, compared to Sanders’ $54,000. Compared to Republicans, Democrats have received just a pittance from the fossil-fuel industry: 2.3 percent of oil and gas contributions in this election cycle. That should be no surprise, given that both Clinton and Sanders have been critical of the oil and gas industry — and have targeted it for higher taxes or reduced loopholes.

As our colleague Philip Bump noted, about 0.15 percent of Clinton’s campaign and outside PAC money is from the “oil and gas industry,” compared to 0.04 percent of Sanders’s contributions. So it’s pretty hard to describe that as “significant,” as Sanders did in his interview.

But Sanders campaign has its own math, which is borrowed from a Greenpeace analysis. As noted in the campaign statement, the Sanders campaign is counting money raised by lobbyists with ties to fossil-fuel companies. Greenpeace tracked nearly $1.5 million in bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying for the fossil-fuel industry. (Lobbyists who directly work for such companies would have been counted in the direct contributions of $308,000.)

Then another $3.25 million in donations were directed by such lobbyists to Priorities USA, a Super PAC backing Clinton, Greenpeace claimed. We should note that under the law Clinton cannot coordinate with the Super PAC so she has no control over these donations. (Apparently, this figure reflects funds provided by just two individuals with somewhat tenuous links to fossil fuels.)

So that adds up to more than $4.5 million. That’s certainly a bigger number than $333,000, but it’s still only 2 percent of the total contributions received by Clinton and outside groups backing her. Indeed, the Center for Responsive Politics does not list oil and gas as one of top 20 industries contributing to Clinton’s campaign.

There’s a further problem with this calculation. Greenpeace counts all of the money raised or contributed by lobbyists as “oil/gas industry” funds, but these lobbyists have many other clients besides the oil industry. Ben Klein, one of the lobbyists highlighted in the Greenpeace report, also lobbies for American Airlines, Cigna, and Hearst, according to the lobbying disclosure database, so in theory his contributions to the Clinton campaign could also be labeled as funds for airline, insurance or media industry.

“When a lobbyist represents a number of different kinds of clients, it’s a little disingenuous to say that the money was bundled by ‘lobbyists for the oil and gas industry’ without a big caveat,” said Viveca Novak, editorial and communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics.

CRP is generally considered the gold standard for tracking campaign contributions, but the Sanders campaign rejects its method of counting. “When it comes to looking at how much a campaign has received from the fossil fuel industry, we believe that Greenpeace is the gold standard,” said senior adviser Warren Gunnels.

“Sen. Sanders made a pledge with Greenpeace to return any fossil fuel money from their PACs, their executives, and their lobbyists if it is brought to our attention,” Gunnels added. “It’s one thing to receive a small donation from an office clerk at a fossil fuel company.  It’s quite another to have fossil fuel lobbyists who are fighting for legislation to advance their interests bundle money for her campaign.”

Generally, the Sanders campaign has suggested, without quite saying it, that Clinton’s votes and actions as a lawmaker and secretary of state have been influenced by campaign contributions. But Gunnels provided a list of examples that he said showed the “undue influence fossil fuel money has on the political process.”

Citing Big Oil campaign contributions made to Clinton when she was a senator, Gunnels pointed to votes she cast to expand offshore drilling and to thwart proposed restrictions on such drilling — and also actions Clinton took as secretary to approve a tar sands pipeline and help energy companies expand offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

There’s no evidence any of these actions were tied to campaign contributions. The link between such contributions and the State Department actions is especially weak because that reflects Obama administration policy, not just Clinton. (Indeed, pipeline approval authority had been delegated to a deputy secretary of state.)

Important context is also missing. The offshore-drilling vote cited by Sanders also banned oil and gas leasing within 125 miles off the cost of Florida. Moreover, Clinton voted against the 2005 energy bill, the energy industry’s top priority at the time.

Still, in the 2008 campaign Clinton did not hesitate to claim that Obama had made deals or cast votes in response to campaign contributions, despite also a lack of evidence.

The Pinocchio Test

The Sanders campaign is exaggerating the contributions that Clinton has received from the oil and gas industry. In the context of her overall campaign, the contributions are hardly significant. It’s especially misleading to count all of the funds raised by lobbyists with multiple clients as money “given” by the fossil-fuel industry.


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Bernie Takes Wisconsin, Changes Nothing

So it’s a nice night for Bernie. A little nicer than expected, in fact. What does it mean, to win Wisconsin, and where does it leave things?
Here’s what it means. Wisconsin is a significant state, no doubt of that. Winning there is a sign of potential regional, and therefore national, strength. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that it is not a swing state. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, she’ll likely beat Ted Cruz there by seven or so points, and Donald Trump by more, maybe a good bit more. Barack Obama won there in 2008 and 2012 by 14 and seven points, respectively. It’s gone Democratic every time since 1988. It is to be sure one of those handful of blue states that Sanders could arguably win by more than Clinton could, but a win is a win, and it’s the 10 electoral votes that matter. In other words, what I’m saying is, to give the Sanders campaign credit, winning Wisconsin counts for more than winning the Alaska caucuses. But it doesn’t count in the same way that Ohio and Florida count.
I go into this because there’s been this quasi-taxonomic parsing lately of the value of each win, spurred, it must be said, mostly by Sanders – who used his victory speech Tuesday to claim “momentum” – and his supporters. He tried to dismiss Clinton’s Super Tuesday wins as happening in irrelevant “conservative” Southern states. It is true that most of them happened in states that are going Republican in November, with the glaring and important exception of Florida. On the other hand, those states are not “conservative” when it comes to Democratic voters, and Sanders knows it. It was a cheap shot, made the worse by Tim Robbins’s execrable dismissal of South Carolina as Guam, a dismissal he and other Sanders supporters would surely call racist if the situation were reversed.
Sure, Clinton’s wins in Alabama, Oklahoma, and some other states are what you might call valueless. But Sanders has valueless wins, too—the aforementioned Alaska, and Nebraska, and Idaho, and Wyoming, and so on. I propose we just call that fight a draw. Meanwhile, of the six genuinely purple states that have voted so far, Clinton has won five of them (Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada), while Sanders has won one (Colorado). And when it comes to Super Tuesday, in point of fact, not all of Clinton’s non-Florida wins were without value. Georgia at least is gettable, in a Clinton-Trump scenario; Nate Silver tells us so. And in fact, if Trump really collapses, South Carolina will be close. Obama lost it by 11 last time, which isn’t that much for an ex-Confederate state. And one poll  says even Utah could fall.
And yes, there’s the question of the delegate math. Sanders didn’t win Wisconsin by quite enough to catch up very much on that score, or on the overall vote total, the famous “will of the voters.” Clinton was 2.5 million votes ahead coming into Wisconsin, and Sanders made only a small dent in that Tuesday night.
So now, we look to New York. This race is somewhat eerily following the rhythm of the 1992 contest between Hillary’s husband and Jerry Brown, the left-insurgent candidate of that year. Then, Bill Clinton basically locked the delegate math down on March 17. Here, Hillary did the same on March 15.
Then, Brown won the contest before New York—that year it was Connecticut—and set up a major New York showdown. And now Sanders has done the same (no, Wyoming's caucus Saturday doesn't really impact the narrative here).
In 1992, just as today, there were two weeks between that vote and the New York vote. Bill Clinton was on the ropes for the first week. Then, in the second week, the state’s Democratic power structure collected itself, and Bill slaughtered Jerry by 15 points. Hillary is not going to beat Bernie by that. She might not beat him at all. And if she doesn’t, then this is going to get brutal.
Here’s what to watch for. Sanders knows that New York is his last shot. If he doesn’t win it, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Maryland and California will probably fall like dominoes for Clinton. So the question is, how negative will he go? That oil-and-gas lobbyists attack on Clinton was pretty sleazy, and false.
But it wasn’t a GOP talking point. Will he start going there in a big way—the emails, her trustworthiness, all that?
For Clinton, the danger is she tries to turn the New York primary into a referendum on Israel. There is a long tradition of this. Clinton’s people should read up on how Al Gore tried to do this to Mike Dukakis in 1988—and how he came to grief. And the sentiment of Democratic voters on Israel, even and maybe especially Jewish voters, has moved well to the left since 1988. If Clinton tries to make New York an “Israel vote”—which is to say, basically a Likud vote—she will show a tone-deafness to her party’s current state of play, and it’ll hurt her.
So it’s like 1992—but it’s also totally not like 1992. The times—the Great Recession, and the anger that arose in reaction to it—has have changed the playbook. Clinton remains the presumptive nominee by every mathematical measure, but she should want to be the nominee by more than math. The next two weeks will tell us whether she’s up to it.

Michael Tomasky - The Daily Beast - Tuesday, April 5, 2016