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BERNIE SANDERS ENTERS 2020 WITH STRONG LEAD IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, THREE-WAY TIE FOR FIRST IN IOWA

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.

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Obamaworld Hates Bernie—and Has No Idea How to Stop Him

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.

One Year in Washington

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.”

‘This Is Alarming’: Iranian-Americans Reportedly Detained, Asked About Political Views at US Border

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.”

Trump and His Team Are Lying Their Way to War With Iran

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.

“We Deserve to Not Only Survive, but to Thrive”

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 Neoliberalism Hijacked Human Rights

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.

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Maduro accused of parliamentary ‘coup’ after replacing Guaidó as president of assembly

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.