More of This

Unlike some progressives, the Greens come to mind, it appears that Bernie Sanders Democrats are working to take over the California Democratic Party.

This is the sort of stuff that needs to be done, it is a grueling grind, but this is what the flying monkey wing of the Republican Party did after Goldwater's loss in 1964, and it took them nearly 20 years to take over.

Seriously, more of this:

For California’s “Berniecrats,” the fire’s not out yet.

Nearly a year after propelling Sen. Bernie Sanders to a close second finish against Hillary Clinton in California’s presidential primary, some of his most ardent supporters are still organizing – this time within the state Democratic Party itself.

At stake is the party chairmanship held by the departing John Burton, a liberal icon, a longtime lawmaker and former Senate leader who became chair in 2009.

Vying to replace Burton are L.A. County Democratic Party leader Eric Bauman, currently the state party’s vice chair and a major power in California labor politics. Facing him is activist Kimberly Ellis, the director of Emerge California, which seeks to have more women and people of color elected to public office.

Rather than fading into the sunset with their defeated standard-bearer, Sanders’ activists emerged from November both irked and emboldened.

They have joined forces with other some other progressives to support Ellis and take over the party’s leadership, promote a more left-leaning policy agenda and diminish the clout of corporations and business-friendly moderates.

………

They surprised insiders by dominating the obscure process — electing a third of the delegates for the state convention, scheduled for May 19-21 in Sacramento. They believe they have turned the once-sleepy race for a new party chair into a serious contest with Bauman, long viewed as the front-runner.

“We see our biggest opportunity as the party,” Edelstein said. “We want to make a concerted effort. If we can change California, we can change the rest of the country.”

………

[Former Santa Cruz Assemblyman Fred] Keeley said the continued organizing and activism by Sanders backers is rooted in their long-term agenda.

“The organization has continued on because it wasn’t a personality cult or anything close to it,” he said. “These folks by and large are relatively sophisticated players. They do understand that while this may be mind-numbing and uninteresting to most people, this is the thing you need to do to effect change.”

Once the dust settled from November, California’s Berniecrats focused on the weekend party meetings held in January to elect state party delegates from each Assembly district. They partnered with other progressives to build slates of candidates and then used Hustle – a texting application used extensively in the Sanders campaign – to turn supporters out.

(emphasis mine)

This is how you gain effective political power.  It's a lot duller than, for example, running Ralph Nader for president, but this sort of concerted efforts at the local level works  ……… If it can be sustained.

Win or lose, they are going to have to fight this battle for decades.

Spocko Did This a Decade Ago

10 years ago, Spocko, the blogger who runs Spocko's Brain, started to send records to advertisers showing what hate-talk radio jocks were showing immediately before and after these ads.

He asked a simple question: Do you really want your products associated with this?

It now appears that it has dawned on online activists that they can do the same thing with online news.

It's even easier, you just have to email a screen shot with their ad and a headline:

One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

Why would an environmental science program want to be promoted on a site that denies the existence of climate change? Mr. Phillips figured — correctly — that Duke officials did not know where their ads were appearing, so he sent a tweet to Duke about its association with the “sexist racist” site. Eventually, after a flurry of communication with the environment department, he received a satisfying resolution — an assurance that its ads would no longer show up on Breitbart.

………

In mid-November, a Twitter group called Sleeping Giants became the hub of the new movement. The Giants and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys.

“We’re focused on Breitbart News right now because they’re the biggest fish,” a founder of Sleeping Giants told me. (He requested anonymity because some members of the group work in the digital-media industry.) Eventually, Sleeping Giants would like to broaden its campaign to take on a menagerie of bad actors, but that would require a much bigger army of Giants, and “it has only been a month since we started doing this,” he told me when I talked to him in December. Then he added, “This has been the longest month of my life."

Advertisers have been fleeing Rush Limbaugh's show for precisely the same reason ever since he tried to slut shame Sandra Fluke, and it appears from the silence over the numbers, last time around they were trumpeting the numbers, that he took a significant pay cut.

Everyone has a right to free speech, but that doesn't mean that they have a right for you to support their sponsors.

This has Gotta Hurt

The mother of British Prime Minister has signed a petition against her son's cuts of children's services:

Among the 10,000 names on a petition against planned cuts to children’s services by a local council is a name that will cause embarrassment to British Prime Minister David Cameron — his mum.

Mary Cameron, 81, told the Daily Mirror newspaper that she had signed a petition to save children’s centers earmarked for closure by Oxfordshire county council, which is run by her son’s Conservative Party.

“My name is on the petition but I don’t want to discuss this any further,” Mary Cameron, a former magistrate, said.

The petition says: “Our children’s centers are a lifeline to new parents who rely on locally accessible advice and support at a time when it is most needed. Cutting these essential services would leave families vulnerable and isolated and fail an entire generation of children.”

………

Mary Cameron has intervened in her son’s career before. In 2013, she was asked about her son’s support for gay marriage despite opposition from Tory grassroots supporters, and reportedly replied: “I know, but David just won’t be told.”

From his mother?  That's harsh.

This is Some Seriously Sick Sh%$

A left wing Israeli activist, Ezra Nawi, was caught on tape boasting that he turned information about Arabs who were looking to sell land to Jews over to the Palestinian security services, and boasted that these people were tortured and killed:

A prominent Israeli campaigner for Palestinian rights was recorded saying that he helps Palestinian authorities find and kill Palestinians who sell land to Jews.

The recording was aired Thursday by the television program Uvda of Israel’s Channel 2. In it, Ezra Nawi, a Jewish far-left activist from the Ta’ayush group, is heard speaking about four Palestinian real-estate sellers, whom Nawi said mistook him for a Jew interested in buying their property.

“Straight away I give their pictures and phone numbers to the Preventive Security Force,” Nawi is heard saying in reference to the Palestinian Authority’s counterintelligence arm. “The Palestinian Authority catches them and kills them. But before it kills them, they get beat up a lot.”

In the Palestinian Authority, the penal code reserves capital punishment for anyone convicted of selling land to Jews. This law, which Palestinian officials defended as designed to prevent takeovers by settlers, has not been implemented in Palestinian courts, where sellers of land to Jews are usually sentenced to several years in prison. However, in recent years several Palestinian have been murdered for selling land. Their murders have remained unsolved.

He has since been arrested on evidence that he was attempting to lure an Israeli Arab realtor to a village near Hebrone where he would be taken into custody by PA state security forces

Many in Israel’s left have been trying to disassociate themselves from Ezra Nawi, the activist who was secretly taped on a Channel 2 news program Uvda bragging about sending Arab land brokers to certain torture if not death in the hands of the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security service (selling land to Jews is an act of treason under PA law). Those who defended him quickly became the new pariahs of Israel’s mass and social media. Then came a follow-up report Monday night showing Nawi was on the payroll of Breaking the Silence and Rabbis for Human Rights.

………

Meanwhile, right-wing journalist Shai Glick, who filed a police complaint regarding Ezra Nawi’s activities, reported a conversation with an investigating police officer who told him the Arab land broker Nawi was conspiring to hand over to the PA is an Israeli citizen. Nawi and several other activists were attempting to invite this Israeli citizen to the Arab village of Yatta, south of Hebron, where PA police would be waiting to arrest him.

This last revelation probably explains why Nawi hightailed it to Ben Gurion International, to catch a flight to anywhere else, when police caught him and took him in for questioning. It’s starting to sound like conspiracy to commit murder, which Israel frowns on, regardless of one’s political conviction.

Nawi's lawyer is claiming that he was leaving the country to visit friends in Europe,  and that he had checked with law enforcement before booking the flight, and given the sh%$ storm that has blown up around him, I could see he wants to get out.

I understand that Ezra Nawi he feels passionately about Palestinians and their demands for a homeland, but this is a classic case for quoting Freidrich Nietsche, "If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

If you want to lead a consistently ethical life, it's generally a good idea to avoid behavior that might invoke a Nietsche quote.

It's pretty much an indicator that you have lost your way.