The personal story of Bernie Sanders

New polls suggest that Bernie Sanders has caught up with Hillary Clinton just before the Nevada caucuses to be held on Saturday.

Overall, 48% of likely caucus attendees say they support Clinton, 47% Sanders. Both candidates carry their demographic strong points from prior states into Nevada, with Clinton holding an edge among women, while Sanders tops the former secretary of state among voters under age 55.

One exception emerges though: Although the pool of potential caucusgoers in Nevada is more racially diverse than those who participated in Iowa or New Hampshire, the racial divide among likely caucusgoers isn’t nearly as stark as among voters in South Carolina, with both white and non-white voters about evenly divided between the two candidates.

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Comparing Sanders and Trump

It has become common in the mainstream media, terrified by the thought of anti-establishment politicians crashing their cozy parties, to describe Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as two sides of the same coin, both being extremists who are beyond the pale of normal politics. Justin Raimondo of the website Antiwar.com, a site whose philosophy can be roughly described as anti-war, pro-free market Republicanism with a dollop of libertarianism (sometimes given the label of paleoconservatism) takes a more nuanced look at the similarities and differences between the two.
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A careful anti-union strategy wrecked by Scalia’s death

Justice Antonin Scalia’s death has thrown a spanner into a carefully planned union-busting legal strategy. Opponents of unions have long sought to overturn a 1977 Supreme Court precedent known as Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that allowed unions to collect fees from non-union members to cover the costs incurred in contract negotiations and enforcement that benefited even the non-union members. Opponents of unions had argued that unions can use those fees to promote political views and thus they were being forced into speech that they do not agree with.
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You knew it had to come: Dark theories regarding Scalia’s death

I got an email today from a friend overseas cryptically pointing out “Scalia was declared dead over the phone by a Coroner named Guevara … Scalia has never been to the remote hunting lodge before. No security detail, no autopsy.” That reminded me that in the US, nothing significant happens without a proliferation of alternative theories. And sure enough, theories have started flying around about dark doings.
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Another Republican debate fiasco

I spent a delightful Saturday afternoon and evening visiting with my daughter, son-in-law, and his relatives, meandering along the California coast, stopping to go to the beach at various points and wandering in a grove of magnificent giant redwood trees before ending the night with a dinner. The ocean was rough, and I saw something I had never seen before, which was that as the waves hit the beach, they produced a large amount of foam that stayed around, like a bubble bath.
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The post-Scalia debate

In practical terms, the death of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia will not affect the outcomes of cases, except for those that were going to be decided 5-4, with him in the majority. Now those cases will result in a 4-4 tie which means that the lower court opinion will stand. The opinions in those cases already heard but not decided and that justice Scalia was assigned to write the opinion will now have to be re-assigned.
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