Senator Bernie Sanders opened 2020 with a strong start against the Democratic presidential primary field in New Hampshire and Iowa. He is currently leading the race in New Hampshire by two points while also coming first in a three-way tie with former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg in Iowa, according to a new survey.
In the latest CBS poll, released Sunday, Sanders broke out as the front-runner in New Hampshire with 27 percent of primary voters supporting him across the state. Biden came in second with 25 percent, while Senator Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’ strongest progressive opponent, trailed behind in third with 18 percent. Buttigieg followed in fourth with 13 percent.
Liberal voters have been gravitating away from Warren for Sanders since November, when she was leading the field with 31 percent. In the past month, Warren has seen a roughly 13-point decrease in support in New Hampshire.
Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg tied for first place in Iowa, with each candidate garnering 23 percent support. Meanwhile, Warren trailed behind in fourth place with 16 percent, and Senator Amy Klobuchar came in fifth with 7 percent.
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager, told Newsweek on Sunday afternoon that the candidate’s latest surge is likely the result of their consistent approach throughout the race. “Our steady and consistent approach has been producing the surge in volunteers, attendees at events, and financial resources that we had hoped for. Still a ton of work to do, however, to end up where we want to be,” he said.
While some candidates have experienced fluctuations in support over the past six months, Sanders’ steadily growing base has indicated their strength in backing the progressive senator. According to the CBS poll, 47 percent of those who voted for Sanders in New Hampshire said they won’t change their backing of the candidate, and 65 percent of his backers have indicated they are “enthusiastic” about their support for him. Only 15 percent of Biden supporters have described their decision as definite.
Results in Iowa show a similar level of support for Sanders. Although he is tied for first, the senator lead the primary field on two fronts: 43 percent in the state say they’re sure about their decision to support him, and 67 percent are enthusiastic.
Former President Barack Obama’s top lieutenants are eager to poke every conceivable hole in Bernie Sanders’ resurgent bid for the Democratic nomination. But ask about a coordinated effort to stop his ascending campaign and you’ll get crickets.
Less than a month before voting begins, Obama has declined to offer a preferred pick to take on President Trump in 2020, only occasionally waxing philosophical about the perils of moving too far left and reminding voters to be “rooted in reality” when exploring nominee options. But as Sanders gained new flashes of traction in recent weeks, the former president’s lack of official guidance to halt his momentum, and the scattering of his inner circle to rival campaigns, have hampered any meaningful NeverBernie movement.
Indeed, the most striking aspect of Obamaworld’s response to Sanders on the rise—flush with cash, an uptick in the polls, and unusually frequent hat tips about the merits of his character from his rivals—is the lack of a cohesive one.
Seasoned Obama operatives who spoke to The Daily Beast concede that Sanders is likely to be a major player through the end of the primary, with several agreeing there’s little to no consolidation around one anointed candidate to blunt his momentum. In fact, while pointing to his massive cash hauls and loyal base of supporters, the thinking among Democrats close to the former president is that they are hoping the Vermont Independent flames out on his own.
“Money is important but doesn’t always translate to votes,” Neera Tanden, who served as policy director for the Obama-Biden presidential campaign, told The Daily Beast.
Sanders recently posted his biggest fundraising haul to date, having raised an eye-popping $34.5 million, far surpassing his closest rivals, with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg coming up approximately $10 million short of that sum at $24.7 million. Shooting down criticism that he hasn’t expanded his base from 2016, his campaign points to a newly released number, boasting that 300,000 new donors gave to his campaign last quarter, a sign of increased grassroots strength and enthusiasm from previous showings. And in a departure from his competitors, including Biden, his campaign has regularly pledged not to do big-dollar fundraisers in the general election.
Also, there’s Neera again. I’m surprised she had any time to comment for this article considering how much time I saw her on twitter over the weekend responding to her bad tweets. 😉
he corridors of Capitol Hill are a marbled monotony, with Oxford heels clacking around corners indistinguishable from one another, white walls, oaken doors, and a steady rhythm of rectangular congressional nameplates.
Except for one. At the very end of a hallway in Cannon Office Building is an explosion of affirmation cribbed onto thousands of Post-it notes, a neon-green-and-pastel-pink flower bursting outward. Go there at the right time, Hill aides say, and you can see groups of people, usually women, often young, weeping at the sight of it.
“I love you from Maine! Keep on with your fierce, informed queen of a self!,” wrote Mikala from Bangor on a pink Post-it. “AOC! Seeing you is seeing me! I live in Michigan, but you are my representative. Adelante!,” says one on white signed (with a heart) from Kristen on August 1. “Dear AOC. Continue to scare old white men,” adds another.
They go on and on and on, these paeans to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 30-year-old freshman member of Congress from Queens and the Bronx, who, in the year since she was sworn in as the youngest woman elected to the House of Representatives in the body’s 230-year history, has emerged as perhaps the most significant political figure in the Democratic Party in the age of Trump. She was recently ranked the fourth-most-tweeted-about politician in the world, beating out every Democrat running for president. It’s not that there is already a children’s book about her, The ABCs of AOC. It’s that there is already a comic-book series about her, a young-adult biography of her, a wall calendar of her, a book of her quotes, a collection of essays about her, and even, this holiday season, a Christmas sweater with her face on it.
Ocasio-Cortez’s staff didn’t know what to do with the Post-its when they first started appearing after she was inaugurated in January 2019. It seemed possible they broke a House rule — and if not an official violation, it was a practice that, at the least, would mark her as different from the rest of the incoming class. Staff took the first batch and framed them in her office, but the notes kept coming. If anyone writes something negative or nasty, one of the myriad devotees who make the pilgrimage takes the errant note down before it can spoil the mood.
“It’s weird,” Ocasio-Cortez said when we spoke inside the Capitol Building one afternoon in mid-December as impeachment hearings consumed Washington. “Because I know I am also one of the most hated people in America.”
Reports that dozens of Iranian-Americans were detained at the U.S.-Canada border on Saturday and questioned about their “political views and allegiances” were met with alarm by lawmakers and rights groups, particularly given the soaring military tensions between Iran and the U.S. brought on by the Trump administration.
On Sunday, the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it is “assisting more than 60 Iranians and Iranian-Americans of all ages who were detained at length and questioned at the Peace Arch Border Crossing in Blaine, Wash.”
Those detained, according to CAIR, were returning from an Iranian pop concert that took place Saturday in Vancouver, Canada.
CAIR, citing an anonymous source from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), alleged that “the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a national order to CBP to ‘report’ and detain anyone with Iranian heritage entering the country who is deemed potentially suspicious or ‘adversarial,’ regardless of citizenship status.”
President Trump ordering the killing of Qassem Soleimani is troubling on several fronts. The assassination has been treated as an act of war in Iran, uniting disparate political factions after a brutal crackdown on protesters in November. Now, U.S. forces are on a state of high alert across the region, with many anticipating potential Iranian counter reprisals that risk further deepening the escalation spiral from which there could be no escape.
But there’s another troubling aspect to this decision — Congress was left in the dark, and the administration appears to be lying about the intelligence they used to justify the strike.
The official administration line — that this disrupted an imminent attack, saving lives — was somewhat dubious from the start. Soleimani was a commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, and thus gave orders to associates to carry out various operations. Killing him would be unlikely to stop an imminent attack, as many observers have pointed out. As former intelligence analyst Jon Bateman said, killing Soleimani “would be neither necessary nor sufficient to disrupt the operational progression of an imminent plot. What it might do instead is shock Iran’s decision calculus.”
If anything, killing a senior Iranian military commander could guarantee the action it is purported to have forestalled.Moreover, while Congressional leaders were kept out of the loop about the strike, Trump had reportedly been boasting about it for days to guests at Mar-a-Lago. As reported by The Daily Beast, Trump told several different guests at Mar-a-Lago in the days leading up to the strike that he was “working on a ‘big’ response to the Iranian regime that they would be hearing or reading about very ‘soon,’” with Trump claiming that he’d been in touch with his national security team “gaming out options for an aggressive action that could quickly materialize.”
If true, it would beggar belief that there was a specific and imminent threat emerging from Iran that could be eliminated with Soleimani’s death. Instead, this was a calculated provocation and reckless ratcheting up of tension that Trump couldn’t wait to crow about.
Subsequent reporting confirms that the strike was contemplated for days, calling into question the administration’s narrative and its legality.
I think that’s one of the reasons that establishment Republicans like Michael Bloomberg, wait, is he still a Republican?, anyway, that they had so much difficulty admitting that the hit was an assassination, because Israel has been assassinating people for years.
Remember these?
Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated
The United States has no right to bomb countries, to overthrow governments, or to assassinate other states’ officials, though it has been doing so for so long that these practices have come to be widely accepted as natural.
or Jackie Fielder, who just announced her bid for a seat in the California State Senate, cutting to the root of the problems facing her state and country requires following the money: “Just look up specific companies and see the campaigns they’re financing. Then see which bills those elected officials either push through or water down through the legislative sessions in any given year.”
Fielder is a young, twenty-five-year-old queer woman of color who is part of a wave of progressive and radical political activists who are running insurgent campaigns.
She is running against an incumbent, Scott Wiener, with impeccable liberal credentials in a city whose elected leadership prides itself on being impeccably liberal. The problem is that, at best, this political machine has made only incremental improvements or enacted stop-gap measures; at worse, it has continued an ongoing capitalist feeding frenzy that has destroyed much of what made the San Francisco Bay Area a place of cultural vibrancy and political possibility.
Fielder is running to represent District 11, which covers the northern San Francisco peninsula, the consolidated city-county of San Francisco, and northern San Mateo County. In the 2016 primary, Wiener lost to progressive civil rights attorney and San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who was thirty-eight at the time, but he won the general election by 2 percent of the vote.
But much has changed since 2016 and Donald Trump’s election. Today, we’re seeing a groundswell of support for candidates who are addressing the disparities that have so riven American society. That energy was seen in the remarkable success of radical Chesa Boudin’s campaign for SF district attorney. It is no coincidence that Fielder’s campaign has attracted activists from Boudin’s.
David Palumbo-Liu sat down with Fielder to learn why she is running and what she hopes to bring to the state legislature.
When the architects of neoliberalism cobbled together their new economic order at Mont Pelerin, they included a moral vision with it. Co-opting the once revolutionary concepts of universal human rights, neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it fundamentally to the free market, and turning it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects all over the world.
Venezuela’s opposition has accused president Nicolás Maduro of masterminding an illegal parliamentary “coup” after an apparent bid to decapitate the challenge from his presidential rival Juan Guaidó by replacing him as head of the country’s opposition-controlled parliament.
Guaidó shot to international prominence last January after he was elected president of Venezuela’s national assembly and used that position to declare himself the country’s legitimate interim leader.
On Sunday Guaidó had hoped to extend his leadership of the anti-Maduro movement by being re-elected as the assembly’s president for another year.
But there were scenes of chaos and confusion as security forces and riot troops blocked opposition lawmakers and journalists from entering the parliament building in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.
Dramatic video footage showed Guaidó attempting to climb over a fence into the assembly’s grounds but being repelled by members of Maduro’s Bolivarian National Guard.
After a lengthy stand-off, Luis Parra – nominally an opposition politician who many suspect has been co-opted by Maduro – declared himself the assembly’s new president with support from pro-Maduro members, while many Guaidó backers remained outside.
The move sparked outrage among Guaidó supporters in and outside Venezuela. At an improvised session in the headquarters of a local newspaper, pro-Guaidó lawmakers re-elected him as national assembly president, meaning that it – like Venezuela – now had two rival leaders.
I’ve read reports that Guaido’s attempts to climb the fence was no more than performance art and that he didn’t really believe he would be re-elected as assembly president. Who knows.
Guaido’s ouster means he is no longer the highest-level elected official in the land after president Nicolas Maduro. That title now goes to Parra, a man Washington is unlikely to consider Venezuela’s “interim president.” Washington will either have to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s leader, recognize Parra or painstakingly stick with Guaido who has failed to convince the rank and file of the Venezuelan military to jump the PSUV ship.
Even some of Guaido’s supporters think that Guaido missed his moment. But, of course, that won’t keep the U.S. from targeting that oil.
More evidence that Guaido was not blocked from entering the National Assembly. He used the fact that 5 other deputies were facing criminal prosecution and barred entry as an excuse for not attending a vote he knew he would lose – all in order to disqualify it. https://t.co/7uwakfbfKo
If you recognize DailyKos, it is actually a positive thumbs-up for a particular comment posted on there. As LD points out, it means ‘ Tipped and Recommended.’ You see it on a lot of blogs now.
.@AOC speaks her mind on the progressive caucus — "they let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive" — and Joe Biden — "In any other country, [he] and I would not be in the same party…"https://t.co/1BFov7WKKVpic.twitter.com/sV35sm6kwy
I do find a little bit of cheer from these efforts of centrists to call themselves progressives in that I’m old enough to remember how I used feel like I had to stick up for yourself just calling myself liberal (during the 80’s for ex). And now politicians are fighting to be called progressive.
But, OTOH, those fake progressives need to be called out. They’ve already stolen the word liberal from us.
Torabs
Ocasio-Cortez has had the most effective rebuttal to the inane “purity test” criticism of the left. Part of me recoils from the celebrity cult surrounding her, but she keeps coming with the substance to show that she deserves the spotlight she’s earned. Keep up the great work!
Amid signs that both Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders have found their footing in Iowa after months of being overshadowed here, they are now aggressively seizing on the escalating tensions with Iran to press their starkly divergent cases for the presidency as they compete for an overlapping slice of the electorate.
Both men seemed newly energized on the campaign trail, treating the Iran confrontation as a clarifying political moment, as well as a tailor-made opportunity to showcase their long records on international affairs. And yet no two candidates better illustrate the sharp divisions in the party about what American leadership abroad should look like.
Mr. Biden, the former vice president, has focused on highlighting his decades-long résumé in foreign policy and his relationships overseas, casting himself as the candidate best prepared to assume the commander-in-chief title “on Day 1.”
In contrast, Mr. Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, is emphasizing his long-held aversion to war while steadfastly promoting a domestic political agenda for America’s working class. “Joe Biden has prided himself on foreign policy experience for the last several decades,” said Sean Bagniewski, the Democratic chairman in Polk County. “I’ve heard Iowans say they think this election may focus more on foreign policy than many of us expected and that he’s now their guy.”
He added, “On the flip side, Bernie was one of the few Democrats to vote against the war in Iraq. I’ve heard folks say that reinforces their decision to support someone who they think had been right all along.”
Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders both appear to be “doing fairly well” in Dubuque, a heavily Catholic, blue-collar city along the Mississippi River where they campaigned this past week, said Steven Drahozal, the Democratic chairman of Dubuque County.
“This is the type of community, I think, that actually, interestingly, plays well to both of them,” Mr. Drahozal said. Mr. Biden, a Catholic, has longstanding relationships in the city, but Mr. Drahozal added that Dubuque also had a “very vocal, very active, very progressive community that is very supportive of Senator Sanders.”
Mr. Sanders views his consistent diplomacy-over-conflict stance — dating to his opposition to the Vietnam War and his anti-interventionist foreign policy as mayor of Burlington, Vt. — as an advantage with working-class Americans who are frustrated with the country’s involvement in costly and distant wars.
“I know that it is rarely the children of the billionaire class who face the agony of reckless foreign policy — it is the children of working families,” he said on Friday, reading from prepared remarks at an event in Anamosa.
Aides to Mr. Sanders view him as well positioned against Mr. Biden — who in many ways embodies the centrist Washington establishment Mr. Sanders dislikes — and they have urged him for months to go after the former vice president more directly. With foreign affairs, Mr. Sanders’s campaign sees an opportunity not just to call attention to the senator’s consistent resistance to war but also to draw an easy-to-grasp contrast between the two candidates.
Even before the airstrike in Iraq last week, Mr. Sanders’s aides had been eager to highlight his foreign policy views. But though he speaks on the trail about his opposition to America’s support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, foreign policy has so far taken a back seat in his campaign to domestic policy proposals like “Medicare for all” and tuition-free public college.
The rising tension with Iran, however, has afforded Mr. Sanders a fresh opportunity to highlight his diplomacy-centered vision for foreign policy — and in particular his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a stance that underscores his contrast with Mr. Biden, who voted to authorize that war.
At an event in Dubuque on Saturday, Mr. Sanders called on Congress to “take immediate steps to restrain President Trump from plunging our nation into yet another endless war.”
His foreign policy views have struck a chord with voters in Iowa like Peggy Ross, 67, a bookseller from Decorah. “I think he has the right idea,” she said after seeing Mr. Sanders speak. “No one likes war.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden, whose entire presidential campaign centers on the restorationist idea that his decades of Washington experience are the best guarantee to undo the Trump administration’s mistakes, has been increasingly nudged closer to the fire by opponents pointing to his past support for the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation, a quagmire from which many of the current crises in the region emerged. As a former two-term vice president and a major figure in U.S. foreign policy during his decades in the Senate, Biden is particularly vulnerable to attacks on geopolitical orthodoxy as an example of what not to do.
“Age does not necessarily correlate with wisdom on foreign policy,” one foreign policy adviser to a top-tier campaign told The Daily Beast. “Over the course of years, and in some cases decades, there is a track record that is extensive—and in some cases it is consistent—in pointing to flaws of judgement, and perhaps even a worldview that is not necessarily well-suited to what is required of a commander in chief.”
Leading the charge, unsurprisingly, is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who for years has trumpeted his 2002 vote against authorizing the use of military force in Iraq as a member of the House of Representatives as evidence that decades of foreign policy experience can’t supplant good judgment. Even in the days before the strike that killed Soleimani when foreign policy was still very much on the back burner for most presidential hopefuls, Sanders had described Biden’s support for the war as “a lot of baggage.”
“I was right about Vietnam. I was right about Iraq. I will do everything in my power to prevent a war with Iran,” Sanders tweeted on Friday morning, alongside a video underscored by a trap beat in which he describes that war and the vote that authorized it as “the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of the United States.”
“People want to criticize me for that? Go for it, that’s okay,” Sanders said. “I don’t apologize to anybody.”
The Trump campaign also pushed out an old interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served under President Barack Obama, in which he stood by saying that he thought Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Biden’s response, as in other campaign moments when his buttons were pressed, has been defensive to the point of inelegance, refusing to respond to Sanders’ comments about his “baggage” except to say that Sanders himself has more than his fair share.
On Friday, Biden’s response to a reporter’s inquiry about his role in the 2011 operation that led to the death of Osama bin Laden prompted further questions about whether his foreign policy experience is a help or a hindrance. In an exchange with Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy, Biden said that he would be willing to use an airstrike to kill a terrorist leader, using the bin Laden operation as an example. When Doocy followed up by noting that Biden has previously said that he discouraged President Obama from authorizing the operation, Biden brusquely responded, “No, I didn’t. I didn’t.”
The exchange—which was almost instantly repackaged by the Trump campaign into an email titled “Joe Biden just lied about opposing the raid to kill Osama bin Laden”—sparked a flurry of fact-checking articles noting that by all accounts, including Biden’s own in 2012, he had not backed the operation in a group meeting at the time. In 2015, Biden said that he did not offer a firm opinion in that group meeting, saying that “it would have been a mistake” to do so, but that he had privately encouraged President Obama to “trust your gut.”
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden dishonestly suggested on Saturday that he had opposed the war in Iraq “from the very moment” it began in 2003 — even though Biden’s campaign said in September that he “misspoke” when he made a similar claim.
Biden was responding Saturday to a voter in Des Moines, Iowa, who told him, “I’m with you 90% of the way” but questioned his judgment in part because “you were for the second Gulf War, which was a mess.” Biden said that “from the very moment” President George W. Bush launched his “shock and awe” military campaign, and “right after” that occurred, “I opposed what he was doing, and spoke to him.”
It’s false that Biden opposed the war from the moment Bush started it in March 2003. Biden repeatedly spoke in favor of the war both before and after it began.
Biden’s language on Saturday — saying he opposed “what he was doing” at the moment the war commenced — was more vague than his language in September, when he flatly said he had opposed “the war” at that moment. But the new version was highly misleading even under the most generous interpretation.
On both occasions — and on another occasion earlier this week — Biden created the impression that he had been against the war at a key moment when he was actually a vocal supporter.
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BERNIE SANDERS ENTERS 2020 WITH STRONG LEAD IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, THREE-WAY TIE FOR FIRST IN IOWA
…
Obamaworld Hates Bernie—and Has No Idea How to Stop Him
I wonder what BO’s actual thoughts are about the Jim Crow aspect of US history? He is such a YUPPIE joke!
Very disappointing overall for sure.
Also, there’s Neera again. I’m surprised she had any time to comment for this article considering how much time I saw her on twitter over the weekend responding to her bad tweets. 😉
Y.E.S.!!!!!!
One Year in Washington
‘This Is Alarming’: Iranian-Americans Reportedly Detained, Asked About Political Views at US Border
I will say it again: I hope this Iranian mess is the cosmik hand that helps push the Bernster over the POTUS finish line. 🙂
Trump and His Team Are Lying Their Way to War With Iran
War With Iran
I think that’s one of the reasons that establishment Republicans like Michael Bloomberg, wait, is he still a Republican?, anyway, that they had so much difficulty admitting that the hit was an assassination, because Israel has been assassinating people for years.
Remember these?
We won’t even begin to go into how many they’ve done in Gaza.
Stop the War. Stop US Empire.
Yeah, but there are a. lot. of Americans like the Birdies, etc. on this Nest who are sick to death of this FRightwing crap!
“We Deserve to Not Only Survive, but to Thrive”
https://youtu.be/vzv3DRUPrr4
Great Q&A. Fielder seems to be hitting all the right notes this early in her campaign. I need to at least donate and show my support.
When Neoliberalism Hijacked Human Rights
..
Maduro accused of parliamentary ‘coup’ after replacing Guaidó as president of assembly
I’ve read reports that Guaido’s attempts to climb the fence was no more than performance art and that he didn’t really believe he would be re-elected as assembly president. Who knows.
Even some of Guaido’s supporters think that Guaido missed his moment. But, of course, that won’t keep the U.S. from targeting that oil.
FWIW
Thanks for clarifying Mags. In this messy situation, we have to be very careful about believing what we read.
As a poll skeptic, I sure hope there’s some truth in that report. T and R, LD!!
I know I should know this, but I don’t. I’ve been trying to figure out for months now what T and R means. I’m sure I’ll feel foolish when I find out.
Tipped and recommended, some jargon leftover from the other place we used to exist at
If you recognize DailyKos, it is actually a positive thumbs-up for a particular comment posted on there. As LD points out, it means ‘ Tipped and Recommended.’ You see it on a lot of blogs now.
I do find a little bit of cheer from these efforts of centrists to call themselves progressives in that I’m old enough to remember how I used feel like I had to stick up for yourself just calling myself liberal (during the 80’s for ex). And now politicians are fighting to be called progressive.
But, OTOH, those fake progressives need to be called out. They’ve already stolen the word liberal from us.
Ocasio-Cortez has had the most effective rebuttal to the inane “purity test” criticism of the left. Part of me recoils from the celebrity cult surrounding her, but she keeps coming with the substance to show that she deserves the spotlight she’s earned. Keep up the great work!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/us/politics/joe-biden-bernie-sanders-iran.html
Biden lies about his role in promoting the Iraq war and whether he supported the bin Laden raid.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/joe-biden-suddenly-on-the-defensive-after-qassem-soleimani-killing?ref=wrap
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/06/politics/fact-check-biden-iraq-war-repeat-iowa/index.html