 For the first time ever, Americans will have the choice of a woman as their president. Hillary Clinton won’t have to worry about fighting off a challenge from Bernie Sanders based on technicalities.
Clinton won enough votes in the last Tuesday of primaries to prevent Sanders from arguing that she was counting on delegates picked by the party, not voters. Even Sanders’ dream of winning in California, the nation’s most populous state, failed. He had hoped that might give him leverage to take to the convention but he lost by more than 400,000 votes. But at the end it was a somewhat boring evening that cable television had been trying to make it seem like it would be decided at the last minute or perhaps not until the Democrat convention in July in Philadelphia. The New York Times reported Sanders had already begun laying off workers. Even his threat to keep his campaign going drew mostly yawns. He was under pressure from President Obama to withdraw and most pundits expected he would comply within days. Clinton, whose husband, Bill, served two terms as president, has been playing down the fact that she would be the first female president. On Tuesday night she let it all out. “Tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible,” she said. “In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848, when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights,” she said in a speech in Brooklyn, N.Y. Many leaders around the world are likely to be happy to see her contesting Republican Donald Trump, who is considered too inexperienced to run the most powerful nation in the world. In her speech, she repeated an earlier comment, that the New York billionaire businessman was unfit to be president. “So we all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you,” she added. She made special mention of her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, who died in 2011. “I really wish my mother could be here tonight. I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become and could meet our beautiful granddaughter, Charlotte,” she said. “And of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee.”
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Hillary Clinton became the first woman to capture the presidential nomination of one of the country’s major political parties on Monday night, according to an Associated Press survey of Democratic superdelegates, securing enough of them to overcome a bruising challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders and turn to a brutal five-month campaign against Donald J. Trump,” the New York Times reported.
New York Times AP reported Monday night that it had surveyed enough delegates to show that she had the 2,383 needed. The AP wasted no time in declaring Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee based on phone calls to delegates in North Dakota on May 26. With Clinton less than 20 delegates less than the number needed it was obvious she would win Tuesday night with six primaries, starting in New Jersey. It remained to be seen whether the rest of the media would buy the AP story, but others confirmed it with their own surveys. Clinton was already firing at Trump. Sanders said he would keep fighting. Presisdent Obama made it clear he was siding with Clinton. Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, said, “We’re going to give Democratic voters the opportunity to weigh in. But certainly somebody who claims a majority of the pledged and superdelegates, you know, has a strong case to make,” Earnest said. The Hill  Monday this report announced "HILLARY CLINTON LIKELY TO EFFECTIVELY WIN NOMINATION IN 24 HOURS" and that prediction was spot on.
The media wasted no time in declaring Donald Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee based on phone calls to delegates in North Dakota on May 26. Monday night polls show a tsunami of delegates will support Hillary Clinton. Will the media give up its only remaining story, pending the general election? Not likely. Some will push that Bernie Sanders can somehow win a brokered convention. He has 3 million fewer votes than Clinton and election tricks will not go down well. He wouldn’t even be in the race without dominating arcane, even byzantine “caucuses.” Those are small meetings where a few thousand delegates who have several hours to spare can meet and choose delegates. It is a truly an Alice in Wonderland event, and first was heard of around the world in the Lewis Carroll story. Estimates differ but Clinton is within a couple of dozen, or even less, of the 2,383 delegates needed to win the Democrat nomination. She has a double-digit lead in New Jersey, in the East Coast time zone, and many pundits predict she will have enough delegates to claim the nomination before polls close four hours later in the nation’s most populous state, California. Many in the media may choose to focus on the likelihood of the first female president. Trump has been self-destructing lately, repeating racist remarks about a judge that even his own party leaders condemned. Clinton, whether she wins or not, will be the first woman nominated by a major party. There is even a chance that Clinton could choose a woman for vice president, Mass. U.S. Sen. Ellen Warren. What will the stylists do? Will they stop calling her “Mrs. Clinton” and settle on “President Clinton.” And what will they call Bill? Will the Republican party try to get on the same page with a majority of Americans? They said they would after the last loss to President Barack Obama. Demographics are going against them. Minority after minority has been courted by Democrats. Whites are being outnumbered, clearly a factor in the growing support among whites for Trump. Alliances of population groups probably would have worked better. Tuesday a BBC News headline reads "Hillary Clinton 'secures Democratic nomination' - AP" but you read that first HERE. The Associated Press reported Monday night that Democrat Hillary Clinton had gathered enough delegates to become the first woman to be the presidential candidate of a major party. AP said it had surveyed enough delegates to show that she had the 2,383 needed. With Clinton less than 20 delegates less than the number needed it was obvious she would win Tuesday night with six primaries, starting in New Jersey. It remained to be seen whether the rest of the media would buy the AP story, but Clinton was already firing at Trump. Estimates differ but Clinton is within a couple dozen, or even less, of the 2,383 delegates needed to win the Democrat nomination. [The convention starts July 25 in Philadelphia and some political pundits expect Pres. Obama to begin campaigning for Hillary Clinton as early as next week] http://www.npr.org/2016/06/05/480848352/clinton-wins-puerto-rico-primary-now-just-shy-of-clinching-nomination http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36466228
Muhammad Ali, who gave up his boxing championship to oppose the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 74. Ali’s death comes at a time when sports have become so corrupted, there is widespread cheating, and doping. He gave it all up because he didn’t want to become part of the U.S. war machine and kill people he didn’t even know. He probably could have joined and been given some behind-the-lines job but he said no and gave up millions. Only Jesse Owens, who embarrassed Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics winning four gold medals, came close to matching what Ali did. But Owens was considered a hero. Ali lost much of that for years because he refused to go into the army and fight in Vietnam. Even then, millions who opposed the war considered him a hero. For three years he was not allowed in the ring. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger,” he said. The war was the most divisive event in American history since the Civil War. Some celebrities felt it was their duty to serve. Others were able to get deferments. As the nation changed its mind on Vietnam, boxing authorities were forced to allow him to box again. Time after time Ali upset men expected to crush him. In 1965, Sonny Liston was considered unbeatable as he drove around my hometown of Denver. Cops often followed and it wasn’t because they admired Liston. He had been in prison for robberies in his native St. Louis, Mo. Official statistics said Liston was 6 foot 5 and 219 pounds. He was called the bear. Ali was more a natural athlete and listed at 6 foot 3 and 190 pounds but in the ring he appeared taller than Liston. Sometimes he stood on his toes. Everyone thought Liston would dispatch Ali in a round or two. Ali said, “You can’t hit what you can’t see” and that he would “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” In fact, more than once it was hard to say exactly when Ali had scored the winning punch. Liston spit out his mouthguard at the beginning of the seventh round and the referee declared Ali the winner. The man sometimes called “the Louisville Slugger,” the same name for a popular baseball bat, died Saturday in after suffering from Parkinson’s for years. His doctors believed all the punches he took shortened his life. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he was named Cassius Clay. He called himself “the greatest.” But his braggadocio was well-received because his face made it seem so genuine. When he was allowed to resume fighting he had lost a bit of his speed and suffered his only two professional losses. In 1975, the year the Vietnam War ended, Ali became a Muslim. The Liston victory was not his only upset. He beat George Forman in “the Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa. He three professional fights, one to Joe Frazier and one to Ken Norton. He beat both of them in rematches, including the “thrilla in Manila” when he sort of bear-hugged Frazier using his “rope-a-dope” style. He retired in 1981 after losing to lightly regarded Trevor Berbick. Ali was directed to boxing by a cop, Joe E. Martin. The officer found the 12-year-old Ali, then Cassius Clay, fuming because his bicycle had been stolen. Martin told him he needed to learn how to box if he was going to “whup” anybody. Ali went on to win numerous amateur titles before winning the light heavyweight gold at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. He was awarded the Presidential Valor award in 2005. Ali is survived by his fourth wife, Yolanda ("Lonnie") Williams. He had nine children.
 Op Ed: Climate change ignored by many in media Mona Lisa’s “mystic smile” has been replaced by a frown as Europe is flooded by record rains. Famous art works are being removed from flooded cities, including Paris. The Mona will stay safe on a higher floor. Across the pond in Texas, five soldiers drowned when their tactical vehicle overturned in flood waters at Fort Hood. Others were missing. Seventeen-hundred Texas prison inmates were evacuated. But most news coverage didn’t even mention climate change, which many scientists believe is responsible for a growing number of wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, snowstorms, more heat waves and other weather events. The Huffington Post reports heat is sapping productivity in India’s population of 1.25 billion. But on Thursday some major news outlets, including the BBC, led some of their news casts with U.S. presidential news. Radio France International reported: The rain and floods are due "to climate, and we have to get used to it, but also to us humans, settling into areas that we shouldn't live," according to climate risk expert Jeroen Aerts. ‘The last six days of torrential rain have caused the Seine and other rivers to burst their banks - this forced the evacuation of thousands of people in riverside towns south of Paris and in the Loire Valley,” RFI said. Russia’s Sputnik news, in an article entitled “The Mainstream Media’s Climate Malpractice,” said: “The simple fact is, these storms are directly connected to global climate change. More specifically, these storms are directly related to the ‘water vapor positive feedback loop’. Right now according to climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, there is about 5% more water vapor in the atmosphere above the oceans than there was in 1968 when Richard Nixon was sworn in, thanks to the fact that the oceans have already warmed one degree. We know that the planet is warming and that it's warming because of human activities: we rip fossil fuels out of the Earth and burn them into the atmosphere, we destroy our soils with industrial farming, and we clear cut carbon-rich rainforests to plant fields of monocrops.” Trenberth is a member of the Climate Analysis Section of the U.S. National Research Center for Atmospheric Research. The Sputnik article also said: If the mainstream media were doing its job responsibly, they wouldn't just tell you the estimated cost of disaster relief, they would tell you that according to Citibank, the estimated cost of climate inaction is around $44 TRILLION globally. But they won't. Because that sort of honest reporting in the public interest would fly in the face of major corporate sponsors and lobbying groups like BP, Exxon, and the American Petroleum Institute.” |
