Superdelegate Pushing Convention Effort to Stop Sanders Is a Health Care Lobbyist

DNC PROSTITUTION!

"...William Owen, a former Tennessee lawmaker and Democratic National Committee member, was among the superdelegates quoted in a New York Times article revealing an effort among party insiders to block Sanders’ path to the nomination if he wins a plurality of pledged delegates but not enough to secure a win on a first ballot...."

William Owen, a former Tennessee lawmaker and current DNC member, has also contributed thousands to Republicans.

truthout.org

Superdelegate Pushing Convention Effort to Stop Sanders Is a Health Care Lobbyist

William Owen, a former Tennessee l

A Democratic superdelegate promoting an effort to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., if he fails to clinch a majority of pledged delegates is a health care lobbyist who has contributed thousands to Republicans.

William Owen, a former Tennessee lawmaker and Democratic National Committee member, was among the superdelegates quoted in a New York Times article revealing an effort among party insiders to block Sanders’ path to the nomination if he wins a plurality of pledged delegates but not enough to secure a win on a first ballot.

Owen also owns the lobbying firm Asset & Equity Corporations and donated $8,500 to the Senators Classic Committee, a joint fundraising committee backing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and more than a dozen other Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., last year, according to Federal Election Commission filings first flagged by The Intercept. He has also donated to Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, according to the report.

Owen told The Intercept that he also contributes to Democrats, but the outlet found no record that he donated to any congressional or presidential Democratic candidates this cycle despite backing Democrats in the past.

“I am a committed Democrat, but as a lobbyist, there are times when I need to have access to both sides. And the way to get access quite often is to make campaign contributions,” he told the outlet. “I’m a registered lobbyist, and I represent clients. And they have interest in front of Congress, and I attend the Senator’s Classic, which is a Republican event, each year.”

Owen is a registered lobbyist for the health care technology firm Klox Technologies.

He is also an executive member of the Tennessee Democratic Party and the DNC who endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. Politico reported last fall that Owen pushed Biden’s team to “develop a second-ballot strategy” for the Democratic National Convention. Owen warned that if Sanders or fellow progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, “surges” then “we’re in trouble.”

With Sanders surging across the country after winning the popular vote in each of the Democratic Party’s first three nominating contests, Owen told The Times he hopes former President Barack Obama intervenes to broker a deal, or if he was unwilling, that former first lady Michelle Obama could be nominated as vice president.

“She’s the only person I can think of who can unify the party and help us win,” he said. “This election is about saving the American experiment as a republic. It’s also about saving the world. This is not an ordinary election.”

Numerous other Democrats told The Times they planned to try to block Sanders if he did not win a majority, even though the same article quoted President Obama warning that the Democratic Party “shouldn’t engage in smoke-filled-room politics” because “those kinds of deals would have prevented him from capturing the nomination when he ran against Hillary Clinton.”

Owen previously tried to block the Sanders-backed effort to reduce the role superdelegates play at the convention. “If we don’t have a vote, then what good are we?” he complained to Politico in 2018.

But the DNC conceded to Sanders supporters and barred superdelegates from voting on the first ballot. If no candidate wins a majority of delegates, the convention would go to a second ballot for the first time since 1952, allowing the party’s 771 superdelegates to potentially swing the nomination to their preferred candidate.

The Intercept previously identified a number of superdelegates who work with health care clients that oppose Sanders’ Medicare for All plan and large banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. A growing number of superdelegates have also gone to work for presidential campaigns opposing Sanders.

Election forecaster FiveThirtyEight predicts that Sanders has a 29% chance to win a majority of delegates, but there is a greater chance (52%) that no candidate does. Every candidate except Sanders vowed to let the convention “work its will” at the Nevada debate earlier this month.

Bloomberg has already quietly started making moves to shore up support from superdelegates, as well as supporters of moderates like Biden and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Politico reported last week. Bloomberg has also hired the vice-chairs of the California and Texas Democratic parties, who are both superdelegates, in an effort to “purchase political support,” the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center’s Brendan Fisher told The Intercept.

“This does seem to fit a longstanding pattern of Bloomberg using his billions to help generate support among political elites,” he told the outlet.

Some Democrats worry that Sanders is a risky candidate in spite of a consistent trend of polls showing that he could actually be the most electable candidate. Democrats who emerged from previous intraparty fights at conventions over the last 70 years went on to lose more than 40 states to Republicans each time.

“We shouldn’t be second-guessing voters,” Nebraska Democratic Chairwoman Jane Kleeb told The Times. “If that’s what our party leaders are going to do, you’ll see rebellion not just in the presidential race but in down-ballot races, as well.”

Yasmine Taeb, a DNC member from Virginia, argued that Bloomberg poses a much bigger risk than Sanders despite his self-declared claim to electability.

“Why shouldn’t D.N.C. members — especially the ones of us who were elected by the grass roots — instead be concerned about a former Republican sexist billionaire who is trying to buy the election? I certainly am,” she told The Times. “I’m not concerned, however, with the progressive candidate with the largest grass-roots support across the country to win the nomination, because that’s precisely what is needed to defeat Donald Trump.”

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Coronavirus updates: Trump retweets call to fire Fauci

A Democrat in the Wilderness

Look at that face (Trump's). He really is a mean, stupid man.

Many countries around the world and cities in the U.S. are pointing toward positive signs that social distancing might be finally flattening the curve.

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abcnews.go.com

Coronavirus live updates: Trump retweets call to fire Fauci

Many countries around the world and cities in the U.S. are pointing toward…

Many countries around the world and cities in the

While many countries are pointing toward positive signs that social distancing might be finally flattening the curve, the novel coronavirus death toll continues to be staggering with more than 115,000 dead worldwide.

The U.S. is the global leader in the number of cases and deaths. At least 22,146 people in the U.S. have died as a result of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. More than 557,000 people in the U.S. have tested positive.

Worldwide, more than 1.8 million people have been diagnosed since the virus emerged in China in December. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some governments are hiding the scope of their nations' outbreaks.

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Are my testicles black?

Are my testicles black?

A suspected Covid-19 male patient is lying in bed in the hospital, wearing an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. A young student female nurse appears and gives him a partial sponge bath.
"Nurse,"' he mumbles from behind the mask, "are my testicles black?"
Embarrassed, the young nurse replies, "I don't know, Sir. I'm only here to wash your upper body and feet."
He struggles to ask again, "Nurse, please check for me. Are my testicles black?"
Concerned that he might elevate his blood pressure and heart rate from worrying about his testicles, she overcomes her embarrassment and
pulls back the covers.
She raises his gown, holds his manhood in one hand and his testicles gently in the other.
She looks very closely and says, "There's nothing wrong with them, Sir. They look fine."
The man slowly pulls off his oxygen mask, smiles at her, and says very slowly,
"Thank you very much. That was wonderful. Now listen very,
very, closely:
"Are - my - test - results - back?"

RSN: FOCUS: Paul Krugman | American Democracy May Be Dying

12 April 20

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FOCUS: Paul Krugman | American Democracy May Be Dying

Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "If you aren't terrified both by Covid-19 and by its economic consequences, you haven't been paying attention."

Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.

If you aren’t terrified both by Covid-19 and by its economic consequences, you haven’t been paying attention.

Even though social distancing may be slowing the disease’s spread, tens of thousands more Americans will surely die in the months ahead (and official accounts surely understate the true death toll). And the economic lockdown necessary to achieve social distancing — as I’ve been saying, the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma — has led to almost 17 million new claims for unemployment insurance over the past three weeks, again almost surely an understatement of true job losses.

Yet the scariest news of the past week didn’t involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them.

Why was this so scary? Because it shows that America as we know it may not survive much longer. The pandemic will eventually end; the economy will eventually recover. But democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we’re much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize.

To see how a modern democracy can die, look at events in Europe, especially Hungary, over the past decade.

What happened in Hungary, beginning in 2011, was that Fidesz, the nation’s white nationalist ruling party, took advantage of its position to rig the electoral system, effectively making its rule permanent. Then it further consolidated its control, using political power to reward friendly businesses while punishing critics, and moved to suppress independent news media.

Until recently, it seemed as if Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator, might stop with soft authoritarianism, presiding over a regime that preserved some of the outward forms of democracy, neutralizing and punishing opposition without actually making criticism illegal. But now his government has used the coronavirus as an excuse to abandon even the pretense of constitutional government, giving Orban the power to rule by decree.

If you say that something similar can’t happen here, you’re hopelessly naïve. In fact, it’s already happening here, especially at the state level. Wisconsin, in particular, is well on its way toward becoming Hungary on Lake Michigan, as Republicans seek a permanent lock on power.

The story so far: Back in 2018, Wisconsin’s electorate voted strongly for Democratic control. Voters chose a Democratic governor, and gave 53 percent of their support to Democratic candidates for the State Assembly. But the state is so heavily gerrymandered that despite this popular-vote majority, Democrats got only 36 percent of the Assembly’s seats.

And far from trying to reach some accommodation with the governor-elect, Republicans moved to effectively emasculate him, drastically reducing the powers of his office.

Then came Tuesday’s election. In normal times most attention would have been focused on the Democratic primary — although that became a moot point when Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign. But a seat on the State Supreme Court was also at stake.

Yet Wisconsin, like most of the country, is under a stay-at-home order. So why did Republican legislators, eventually backed by the Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, insist on holding an election as if the situation were normal?

The answer is that the state shutdown had a much more severe impact on voting in Democratic-leaning urban areas, where a great majority of polling places were closed, than in rural or suburban areas. So the state G.O.P. was nakedly exploiting a pandemic to disenfranchise those likely to vote against it.

What we saw in Wisconsin, in short, was a state party doing whatever it takes to cling to power even if a majority of voters want it out — and a partisan bloc on the Supreme Court backing its efforts. Donald Trump, as usual, said the quiet part out loud: If we expand early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Does anyone seriously doubt that something similar could happen, very soon, at a national level?

This November, it’s all too possible that Trump will eke out an Electoral College win thanks to widespread voter suppression. If he does — or even if he wins cleanly — everything we’ve seen suggests that he will use a second term to punish everyone he sees as a domestic enemy, and that his party will back him all the way. That is, America will do a full Hungary.

What if Trump loses? You know what he’ll do: He’ll claim that Joe Biden’s victory was based on voter fraud, that millions of illegal immigrants cast ballots or something like that. Would the Republican Party, and perhaps more important, Fox News, support his refusal to accept reality? What do you think?

So that’s why what just happened in Wisconsin scares me more than either disease or depression. For it shows that one of our two major parties simply doesn’t believe in democracy. Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.

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