Hillary Clinton dismissed her Republican opponent’s “stunt” to raise money for veterans in a Tuesday CNN interview, saying it proves “the difference between what Donald Trump says and what Donald Trump does.”

“He's bragged for months about raising $6 million for veterans and donating a million dollars himself,” Clinton told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “But it took a reporter to shame him into actually making his contribution and getting the money to veterans. So look, I'm glad he finally did but I don't know that he should get much credit for that.”

Trump skipped out on a January GOP debate in order to raise money for veterans’ charities but never announced how much the fundraiser took in or where the funds were going until The Washington Post published a story questioning his claims last week. The Associated Press reported that about half of the 41 organizations to which Trump’s campaign donated received checks in the past week, typically dated May 24, the day the Post’s story was published.

With everyone trying to move on to the Big Show in November, the Bernie Sanders campaign is desperate for any gimmick that will earn them attention. And if they get free airtime out of it, so much the better! (And it’s working, look, I’m writing about it!)

So Bernie über-supporter Cenk Uygur was the first to suggest the gimmick to end all gimmicks. ... Jill Stein wanted in! Because if this horror show was going to happen, every fringe candidate needed to be in on it. 
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But alas, Sanders fell into the trap everyone falls into (and I mean everyone) when they assume that Trump means anything he says. Remember, the stuff out of his mouth are just “suggestions.” So when he said “I’ve been saying that should happen,” he actually didn’t mean that he’d been saying that it should happen. He was merely suggesting that he’d been saying that. Because today, Sanders’ hopes and dreams were dashed. 

But given that his entire campaign at this point is “get the superdelegates to undemocratically nullify the will of the Democratic primary electorate, because fuck democracy,” let’s take stock of how many superdelegates were impressed by this stunt:

Zero.

As she has trudged toward the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton has struggled to find a message that could impassion her Democratic voters the way her rival Bernie Sanders has.

But that changed this week in California when she turned her full attention to Donald Trump. With the brash real estate magnate as her full-time foil, Clinton finally seemed to find her voice.
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In speech after speech across the Golden State, Clinton delivered a fiery, point-by-point takedown of the real estate magnate, casting him as a greedy bully who was eager to profit from the financial woes of the middle class Americans who lost homes and jobs in the 2008 economic crash.
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Why on earth would we elect somebody president who actually rooted for the collapse of the market?" she said with indignation in Riverside as the crowd roared their approval and chanted her name. "The fact is Donald Trump thought he could make money off of people's misery."

Bernie Sanders is No Victim of a ‘Rigged’ System

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Bernie Sanders was supposed to be above the usual pettiness of politics. So much for that.

In the past few of weeks, Sanders has gone from someone seemingly capable of walking on water to someone diving headfirst into the political muck. His campaign has engaged in one ego-stroking, victim-baiting, politically calculated act after another – none of which serve the greater good of uniting the Democratic Party long enough to defeat Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump.
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There’s a real danger in Sanders casting himself, his campaign and, by extension, his legion of mostly white supporters as victims.

People who falsely believe they are victims get caught up in their victimhood. They lose track of who the real victims are and often end up fighting for themselves instead. Politics at its finest.
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Anyone who is really a victim of a rigged system – black people who get chewed up and spit out by the criminal justice system, women still fighting for equal pay – wouldn’t dare threaten to stay home in November if Clinton gets the nomination. They wouldn’t dare let Trump take the presidency.

A Brown spokesman said the governor and Clinton discussed foreign and domestic politics, including the presidential campaign. They met in the same room at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento where John F. Kennedy and Brown’s father, then-Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, met ahead of the 1960 election, Brown’s office said.

Clinton’s remarks Monday, without citing polling worrisome to many Democrats, served to counter Sanders’ argument that he is the better candidate to oppose Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. Clinton said his wife has faced opposition from Republicans for years and that her campaign will “get a new shot when the general election starts.”

“Just relax,” Clinton told about 800 supporters at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center in Stockton. “In the end, the American people are fundamentally fair-minded.”

The details surrounding the alleged rape are bizarrely novelistic even by Trumpian standards. According to Ivana, Trump was driven to freakish rage by a failed anti-baldness surgery - a so-called 'scalp reduction'. But the actions are very clear cut. According to her deposition, Trump flew into a rage, attacked her, held her down and began pulling hair out of her head to mimic his pain and then forcibly penetrated her.
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After The Daily Beast resurfaced Ivana's claims that Donald had raped her, she issued another statement saying the story, which was based entirely on her own sworn deposition, was "totally without merit." Yet again, she didn't dispute her words or the incident itself. It is true that lots of accusations get made during acrimonious divorces. But this was a pretty concrete and specific. And the author of the book that first surfaced the deposition said he'd found numerous friends of Ivana's who she had confided the incident to at the time.

While Mr. Sanders says he does not want Mr. Trump to win in November, his advisers and allies say he is willing to do some harm to Mrs. Clinton in the shorter term if it means he can capture a majority of the 475 pledged delegates at stake in California and arrive at the Philadelphia convention with maximum political power.

Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders, said the campaign did not think its attacks would help Mr. Trump in the long run, but added that the senator’s team was “not thinking about” the possibility that they could help derail Mrs. Clinton from becoming the first woman elected president.

“The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14,” Mr. Devine said, referring to the final Democratic primary, in the District of Columbia. “We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states.

Leftists like Sanders regard the Democratic Party as a far bigger problem in the world than the Republican Party. The thinking goes like this: The Republicans, sure, everybody knows they’re evil. That’s obvious. But the Democrats, they’re evil too. They adopt a few attractive positions, say nice things on certain issues as long as saying those nice things doesn’t really threaten the established economic order, so they’re even worse, finally, because they fool people into thinking they’re on their side. I heard this a hundred times from the old guys who used to hector me at the Socialist Scholars Conference in Manhattan 25 years ago when I used to speak there.

That’s what Bernie is. If he’d stayed in Brooklyn, he’d have been a Socialist Scholars Conference hectorer. He had the wisdom to move to a podunk state, and the luck to do so just as it was becoming the place where all the aging hippies were moving and so he became a mayor and then a House member and, finally and exaltedly, a senator.

All that said I give him some credit. He’s much better on the big stage than I thought he’d be. And I certainly don’t have contempt for all his supporters. I am friends with some of his supporters. I love some of his supporters—not that way, but dear friends, extended family, like that. And I think most of his supporters are rational people who’ll accept the reality that he just didn’t get as many votes as the other person and in November will vote for the other person.

But they’re not what’s at issue here. What’s at issue here is the people who won’t accept reality, and in particular the Pied Piper who’s blowing on the flute and waltzing them off the pier. He is becoming a sputtering joke, a man who lost 58-42 and thought—really, truly thought, deep down in his kishkes—that it was stolen from him. And his aides, according to a New York Times piece posted Wednesday night, are ready to "harm" Clinton over the course of the next month, because Sanders also believes these farkakte general-election polls taken before anyone has spent a single dollar attacking him.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has attracted a passionate following because he is selling his followers a fantasy. And not just any fantasy — but one of epic proportions. A group of respected, nonpartisan experts offered the public a sense of the scale on Monday, releasing the most thorough analysis yet on Sanders’s plan and finding that it is profoundly flawed. Before the Democrats agree to adopt his agenda, a price they might pay to get him to end his doomed campaign, they should be clear about what they are signing onto.

The analysts found that Sanders’s program is very progressive, jacking up taxes massively on the rich and providing a range of new benefits to the poor. Though every working person would face higher payroll taxes, the value of these benefits would leave 95 percent of households better off. They granted Sanders that his single-payer health system, in which the government would pay for everyone’s care and demand no co-payments or other cost-sharing, would expand health-care access and cut the growth of health-care costs, and they made “aggressive” assumptions about how much the new system would reduce drug and other prices.

But there is a massive catch. Sanders’s assurance that he has “a plan to pay for every spending program he has introduced to date” is wrong. And not just wrong, but extravagantly so. Even with his large tax increases, Sanders would fall $18 trillion short over just 10 years. Factoring in interest costs, his plan would add $21 trillion to the debt over a decade. That is more than the roughly $19 trillion the Treasury already owes. And the picture would probably get much worse as time went on. Expanding Social Security, for example, would become much more expensive as more people retired.

Sanders’s health-care plan is the big budget-buster. It alone would cost $32 trillion over 10 years — “more than twice the new revenues” that Sanders would raise, Len Burman, the director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said on Monday. When reporters have asked Sanders about the costs of his health-care plan in the past, the senator has typically responded that other countries maintain functioning single-payer systems — as though he has not proposed a specific plan that should be assessed on its own merits. Burman pointed out Monday that other countries do not promise their people as much as Sanders does. Making his system less costly, the analysts found, would require doing very unpopular things. Deeply cutting payments to doctors and hospitals, for example, would induce “supply constraints” — that is, a shortage of providers willing to meet demand for health services, which would make it harder to access care. Think long wait times and other hurdles.