You may be right. According to Zaid Jilani of Alternet, some of Vox can be full of crap on occasion. I’ve witnessed Vox screw the pooch before, so I tend to agree with Zaid on that point.
Here’s Zaid’s POV:
How the Latest Smear Campaign Against Bernie Sanders Collapsed Before It Started
The Vermont senator’s words were completely twisted. Here’s what he actually said.
I agree with Zaid for the most part, however I still think Sanders needs to get some national airtime soon to better explain himself on immigration. Even to an ardent supporter like me, he appeared too harsh during the last few interviews. We really don’t want the media to frame him as anti-immigration (which is ridiculous if one looks at his overall record), but they’ll do it anyway if he lets them. In my opinion, if not his recent stances, Sanders at least needs to evolve his language on immigration much better than he appears to be doing lately. Then again, this may be one of the few areas where I disagree with Sanders and/or I don’t have enough facts yet on the issue.
I realize I’m coming into this conversation late, but this seems to be pretty far from accurate.
Each candidate/party puts forward their own list of electors. These are people who, whether or not they are legally pledged to vote for the candidate in question (which they are in most states), are hand-chosen representatives loyal to the party or candidate.
When you vote, you are voting for these electors. It doesn’t make any sense to say that “very few members of the College are independent,” as if it’s some static body — it’s voted in every four years.
So, for example, if Sanders ran as an independent, and won a plurality of the vote in California, the entire delegation to the electoral college from California would be required to be those 55 people hand-picked by the Sanders campaign, and they would be bound by state law in California to vote for Sanders.
The electoral college system is definitely unfair to independents, because of the winner-take-all system, but it’s just wrong to say that the electoral college wouldn’t cast their votes for the independent, if that’s how their states had voted.
(There have been a few cases of “faithless electors” casting a vote for someone other than to whom they were pledged, but they’ve all been accidents or symbolic protests when the outcome wasn’t going to change.)
He vocally supported President Obama’s immigration executive order and has called for going even further, such as including the parents of dreamers, putting him to the left of President Obama.
You know, 100,000 people coming out to your rallies is almost certainly better objectively than an Onion article, but I’m still awfully encouraged by that extremely thinly veiled “Bernie Sanders is the only presidential hopeful who is not under the thumb of Corporate America” piece.
I don’t think that what happened at Westlake Park was anything other than what it appeared to be.
I agree (and I’ve said here before) that Seattle definitely has real racism problems. It’s easily ignored because it’s such a white city but that doesn’t make them less real. Westlake Park is often the centre of protests so this shouldn’t have been surprising.
That said, I don’t really know what the point was. What they interrupted was an event about Social Security that Sanders was attending, not his rally, and this just seems counterproductive. Do they want rid of him, or do they want a different candidate? (Who?)
ETA, I like that Sanders lets them have the microphone and say what they want to say, but if they don’t let him respond, what’s the point?
Increasingly some of the BLM is looking like partisan hacks for Hillary Clinton who, indeed, do seemingly want to get rid of Bernie Sanders. They refuse to protest Clinton and it’s looking increasingly odd to many progressives.
For example, this open letter to the Black Lives Matter leaders remains unanswered:
I still support Black Lives Matter, however, many others and myself are increasingly looking at some of the activists (not all of them) sideways as they continue to focus like a laser on Bernie Sanders while giving Hillary Clinton a very obvious pass along with a disregard for Republicans. Some of the recent statements against Sanders are now outright attacks that he certainly doesn’t deserve and it just makes those attacks (solely on Sanders) appear to be a partisan attack to hurt his campaign instead of addressing black lives. This is bad for everyone involved.
