Screen cap from here:
[URL]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/26/471958688/bird-visits-bernie-sanders-rally-sparks-delight-on-twitter[/URL]

I am pretty positive that it is a female house, aka "English" sparrow. FWIW.
[URL]http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/84/overview/House_Sparrow.aspx[/URL]
Shades of St Francis!
EDIT: It seems to me that the bird was drawn to the water bottle. But it says something about the vibe around Bernie that it would come so close. Maybe it is regularly fed by white-haired people.

I'm coming around to the female house finch theory. I saw a photo from another angle.

I have seen people commenting sarcastically that it takes a bird to get the media to pay attention to Sanders. Policy is [I]sooo[/I] boring, after all.

Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton
 

Don't have a cow. [URL="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-young-people-are-right-about-hillary-clinton-20160325"]This is from Matt Taibbi[/URL]. I would like to remind him that there are a few of us old farts out here who remember all the dirty tricks the Clintons have accomplished in their joint careers.

[QUOTE][Rolling Stone Editor] Jann [Wenner] describes this in the context of saluting the value of "incremental politics" and solutions that "stand a chance of working." The implication is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often don't realize what it takes to get things done.

But I think they do understand. Young people have repudiated the campaign of Hillary Clinton in overwhelming and historic fashion, with Bernie Sanders winning under-30 voters by consistently absurd margins, as high as 80 to 85 percent in many states. He has done less well with young African-American voters, but even there he's [URL="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/sanders-broke-demographic-mold-to-win-michigan.html"]seen some gains[/URL] as time has gone on. And the energy coming from the pre-middle-aged has little to do with an inability to appreciate political reality.
[/QUOTE]

Bernie Sanders as Commander-in-Chief
 

I am glad to see [URL="https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/28/bernie-sanders-as-commander-in-chief/"]this kind of push-back[/URL] against Clinton's much-vaunted "experience."

[QUOTE]Sen. Bernie Sanders’s landslide victories in Washington State, Alaska and Hawaii on Saturday coincided with a long-awaited signal that he may finally be ready to challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the “Commander-in-Chief” question, which has been regarded as one of her key strengths.

In what may be the most striking campaign commercial of the presidential race, the Sanders campaign released [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QEy0mxfFaM&feature=youtu.be"][U]an ad[/U][/URL], entitled “The Cost of War” and featuring Hawaii’s Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who endorsed Sanders not just as her preference for President but as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military.

“Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq War,” Gabbard says. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend our country and take the trillions of dollars that are spent on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home.”

Gabbard also counters another strong point of the Clinton campaign, its contention that Clinton’s plans for incremental change are more realistic than Sanders’s calls for sweeping reforms – or a “political revolution” – to reverse the nation’s steady drift toward a country of lavishly rewarded haves and increasingly desperate have-nots.

“The American people are not looking to settle for inches; they are looking for real change,” Gabbard says. But perhaps her most important statement comes at the end of the 90-second commercial when she says: “My name is Tulsi Gabbard and I support Bernie Sanders to be our next President and Commander-in-Chief.”[/QUOTE]

Links have been piling up on my desktop, time for a purgative data-dump:

o [url=http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36014-media-unimpressed-as-sanders-barely-gets-seventy-percent-of-vote]Media Unimpressed as Sanders Barely Gets Seventy Percent of Vote[/url] | Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

o [url]http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/03/31/were-going-to-war-oliver-stone-opines-on-the-dangerous-extremism-of-neocon-hillary-clinton/[/url] :
[quote]We’re going to war — either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its 1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this, but they don’t because our media is dumbed down in its “Pravda”-like support for our “respectable,” highly aggressive government. We are being led, as C. Wright Mills said in the 1950s, by a government full of “crackpot realists: in the name of realism they’ve constructed a paranoid reality all their own.” Our media has credited Hillary Clinton with wonderful foreign policy experience, unlike Trump, without really noting the results of her power-mongering. She’s comparable to Bill Clinton’s choice of Cold War crackpot Madeleine Albright as one of the worst Secretary of States we’ve had since … Condi Rice? Albright boasted, “If we have to use force it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”[/quote]

o [url=http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/25/donald_trumps_top_foreign_adviser_joseph]Trump’s Blackwater exec foreign policy adviser[/url] | Democracynow.org
[quote]AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, I wanted to ask about Donald Trump. He originally said on MSNBC, when asked about who his foreign policy advisers were, “I’m speaking with myself, number one,” he said, “because I have a very good brain.” But then, with The Washington Post, he talked about his top foreign policy advisers and named Joseph Schmitz as one of them. Talk about who Joseph Schmitz is.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, Joseph Schmitz was the Pentagon inspector general under Donald Rumsfeld, and he didn’t really inspect much of anything. He was a big cheerleader, actually, for many of the most kind of excessive policies of Rumsfeld and the Pentagon in the post-9/11 world. And when Schmitz left the DOD, he became an executive at Blackwater. And Joseph Schmitz is a—you know, is a radical Christian supremacist. He is a member of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta and really is sort of a—you know, has a neo-crusader worldview. And I’m choosing those words carefully. I mean, that’s—he is definitely a radical Christian supremacist.

And he was an enthusiastic fan of Erik Prince and Blackwater, and he goes and he joins that company. And, you know, this is a guy, though, who—when I was researching him for the Blackwater book, he wrote a series of letters to the editor of conservative newspapers—Washington Times and others—in the ’90s. He was a fanatical opponent of abortion. And in one of the letters, he—I actually want to quote this correctly, because Joseph Schmitz threatened to sue me once—and, of course, he couldn’t, because everything I said was true. But he said, “As a former fetus the plight of aborted innocent human life is as real to me as rape is to most women.”[/quote]
So the key question: is Schmitz at all represntative of Trump's FP team, or is he just one of a diversity of voices? trump has mentioned that he deliberately seeks a diversity of voices on such policy matters, while "listening to himself first and foremost", as noted. And a followup: Is Trump's FP team any more rabidly neocon than Hillary's? (Hard to see how 'more' is even possible, but OTOH Hillary has a quite 'live and let live' FP with respect to Israel and Saudi Arabia...)

o [url=http://www.blackagendareport.com/hillary_crusade_against_bigotry_trump]Hillary Wants a Crusade to Defeat Trump’s “Bigotry” – and Leave Her Bankers Alone[/url] | Black Agenda Report
[quote]Tuesday’s primary victories will allow Hillary Clinton to get busy planning her “big tent” general election crusade against racism and incivility, in the person of Donald Trump. It will be a corporate Democrat’s dream campaign, with the prospect of the party garnering majority white support for the first time since 1964. Clinton will allow Bernie Sanders’ delegates to craft much of the language of the party platform, in Philadelphia – a meaningless exercise designed to convince the Sandernistas that there is still hope to transform the Democratic Party “from below.” Clinton – who is permanently primed to lie on any subject, at any time, in the interests of the Lords of Capital – may give forked-tongue service to a Sanders-inspired platform, especially if Trump continues his hype on jobs losses to “China” because of “bad deals.” But, Wall Street will have little to worry about. Clinton’s central project will be to build an historic Democratic super-majority by appealing to all “decent” Americans to reject “bigotry” and embrace “fairness” and “tolerance” – by which she will mean nothing more than that they reject Trump.

Such civil rights-sounding rhetoric will signify to Black voters that their faith in the party, and the Clintons, has been bounteously rewarded; that the campaign is really all about them. They will be reassured of the continuity of Barack Obama’s policies under Hillary – as if that were a good thing, and as if Obama and the Clintons were not political triplets all along, rooted in the same right-wing of the party.[/quote]
I believe the associated Twitter hashtag is #BankersLifestylesMatter .

"These economic fascists aren't the fascists you're looking for..."

Terrifying and discouraging, and all too true.

[QUOTE=kladner;430505]Terrifying and discouraging, and all too true.[/QUOTE]

What, the part about links piling up on my desktop? ;)

Terrifying for the first two. Discouraging for the third.

Cleaning Up Hillary’s Libyan Mess
 

This is dated April 1, but I don't think Parry is Fooling. This article is about Libya, but Regime Change[SUP]®[/SUP] is something of a Clinton trademark. I fear having her continuing to prove how tough she is, with much more power in her hands.

"U.S. officials are pushing a dubious new scheme to “unify” a shattered Libya, but the political risk at home is that[URL="https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/01/cleaning-up-hillarys-libyan-mess/"] voters will finally realize Hillary Clinton’s responsibility for the mess[/URL], writes Robert Parry."

[QUOTE]Hillary Clinton’s signature project as Secretary of State – the “regime change” in Libya – is now sliding from the tragic to the tragicomic as her successors in the Obama administration adopt increasingly desperate strategies for imposing some kind of order on the once-prosperous North African country torn by civil war since Clinton pushed for the overthrow and murder of longtime Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The problem that Clinton did much to create has grown more dangerous since Islamic State terrorists have gained a foothold in Sirte and begun their characteristic beheading of “infidels” as well as their plotting for terror attacks in nearby Europe.
[/QUOTE]

o [url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/hillary-clintons-support-_b_9579544.html]Hillary Clinton’s Support Among Nonwhite Voters Has Collapsed[/url] | Huffington Post

“It is better for a fake right nationalist [Trump] to win in 2016 and lose to a left egalitarian [Sanders or a younger candidate with similar views] in 2020 or 2024 than it is for a neoliberal [Clinton] to win in 2016 and lose to a real right nationalist in 2020 or 2024.”


o [url=www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/paul-ryan-sorry-for-calling-americans-takers-lets-talk-about-the-real-takers.html]Paul Ryan Sorry for Calling Americans "Takers." Let's Talk About the Real Takers.[/url] | naked capitalism
[quote]A question: If the takers aren’t standing in the unemployment line or rushing home from the second job to change diapers, then just where are they? Because an awful lot of America’s resources have gone missing. Like money that should be going to education, job training, healing the sick, retirement funds, infrastructure, and, you know — life.

Ryan didn’t quite get to that part. As he and the rest of the country’s pundits and politicians puzzle over this crazy political season, they might do well to get themselves a copy of Rana Foroohar’s forthcoming book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of American Finance and the Fall of American Business (to be released on May 17). The title was inspired by Ryan’s very own (now-disowned) rhetoric, the favorite shorthand for trickle-down myths that paint the rich as the creators of jobs and innovative products and the rest of the population as lazy good-for-nothings.

That line worked pretty well before the financial crisis. Now, not so much.

Foroohar, TIME assistant managing editor and economic columnist and global economic correspondent at CNN, has a pretty good idea where to find the takers. They are neither single moms in inner city housing projects nor unemployed white men in Appalachia.

They are the denizens of plush Wall Street offices, and they have pretty much absconded with the American Dream. Despite the remarkable ability of financiers to hide behind complexity and dodge the spotlight of the media, the regulators, and the law, Americans are copping onto the breadth and depth of the swindle. They have just about had it — which is why voters have been flocking in droves to the fiery Bernie Sanders, who wants to jail financial crooks and end to Too Big to Fail, and to Wall Street heckler Donald Trump, who describes hedge fund managers as worthless moneymen who ”get away with murder” and gleefully trashes uber-bankers like Jamie Dimon.

Foroohar has traced a seismic shift that has not only left Washington kissing the feet of Wall Street, but has turned previously normal and comprehensible activities, like making stuff and selling it, into insanely complicated financial death races where ordinary Americans are the road kill. This very shift has turned companies like Apple from makers of cool gadgets to a market-rigging megabanks, pharmaceutical companies into cold-blooded financial predators, and the American Dream of dignity, health, and the pursuit of happiness into a fantasy for large swaths of the population.

For Foroohar, “takers” is how you refer to people who do nothing of value for society and whose activities leave students crushed with debt, retirees living in RVs, capable workers struggling to land a third-rate gig, and sick people so many tasty morsels for financial vultures.[/quote]

Why are Mr. Ryan's (now-disavowed, cough, cough, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say-no-more, fingers-crossed-behind-your-back) views pertinent to this thread? Because this:

[url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charles-koch-paul-ryan-nomination_us_57029099e4b083f5c6082b95]Charles Koch Is Privately Committed To Getting Paul Ryan Nominated In Cleveland: Source[/url] | HuffPo

[quote]And Joseph Schmitz is a—you know, is a radical Christian supremacist.[/quote]
I know the post I'm responding to is about a week old, but what on Earth is a Christian supremacist?

Do you guys not realize that claiming to be a Christian doesn't automatically make you one?

If anyone wants to make Christians look bad while technically telling the truth, maybe try referring to Jesus as the slave owner of Christians and the desired dictator by Christians of a new Earth.

Oh, and as far as being an actual Christian is concerned, I've heard Christianity described as one beggar telling another beggar where to find food. Witnessing to someone while simultaneously being conceited isn't really a viable scenario, despite what the so-called Christian might believe.

And, yes, I'm sure someone can find a post that makes me turn out to be a hypocrite. Consistent Christian behavior is something I'm constantly working on.