The Sanders campaign also laid the blame at the feet of NGP VAN. “Sadly, the vendor who runs the DNC’s voter file program continues to make serious errors,” Michael Briggs, Sanders’s top communications aide, told BuzzFeed News.
“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” said Briggs. “At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
This is the statement from the original article that I find most interesting:

The Sanders campaign also laid the blame at the feet of NGP VAN. “Sadly, the vendor who runs the DNC’s voter file program continues to make serious errors,” Michael Briggs, Sanders’s top communications aide, told BuzzFeed News.
“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” said Briggs. “At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”

So, they had already identified and reported the problem previously (possibly having their own data accessed from the sound of it), but now it's news? They've already done the right thing in firing the staffer responsible, but I do look forward to seeing the results of any investigation into who accessed what over the time period when these firewall problems were happening. It will be interesting to see the real truth of the matter (if we ever see it, as the DNC does have a vested interest in keeping Hillary's campaign strong).

Has there been an official statement from Bernie himself, yet?

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
So, apparently 30% of Republicans and 9% of democrats who responded to a poll said they want to bomb Agrabah

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
So, apparently 30% of Republicans and 9% of democrats who responded to a poll said they want to bomb Agrabah

According to one article I read (may be this one... dunno, haven't read this particular one) the number who'd support bombing Agrabah jumps to 45% when looking at only people who say they'll vote for Trump, or are Trump supporters.

 whembly wrote:

As for Sanders... what did he do wrong? Bernie didn’t steal anything. The concept of property doesn’t exist in his worldview. All things are owned communally by society as a whole and stewardship of all material wealth is exercised by the state on behalf of society. He was just redistributing data which Hillary didn’t actually own. Right?

 Compel wrote:
Just some education, US military and British police are 2 different groups of people.

 d-usa wrote:
In somewhat important political news from a few days ago:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/18/460281572/congress-sends-1-8-trillion-tax-and-spending-bill-to-president-Obama

Seems like this was a pretty interesting deal. Actual dealing and compromising by both parties, neither got everything they wanted, both made concessions, and the parties actually worked together.

 Jihadin wrote:
As for making stuff up. I guess Trump is the only GUILTY one eh.

 Jihadin wrote:
I stated way at the beginning of this goat rope of a rodeo I am voting for Trump because he entertains me.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
I stated way at the beginning of this goat rope of a rodeo I am voting for Trump because he entertains me.

I agree that ordinary people in most countries are sick and tired of career politicians, but I doubt if America wants to be a laughing stock on the world stage - and that's exactly what Trump is doing to your nation.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
I stated way at the beginning of this goat rope of a rodeo I am voting for Trump because he entertains me.

I agree that ordinary people in most countries are sick and tired of career politicians, but I doubt if America wants to be a laughing stock on the world stage - and that's exactly what Trump is doing to your nation.

 Jihadin wrote:
I stated way at the beginning of this goat rope of a rodeo I am voting for Trump because he entertains me.

 Easy E wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
I stated way at the beginning of this goat rope of a rodeo I am voting for Trump because he entertains me.

Forget the Electoral College, let's just move to American Idol: Presidential Edition!

 djones520 wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
I stated way at the beginning of this goat rope of a rodeo I am voting for Trump because he entertains me.

I agree that ordinary people in most countries are sick and tired of career politicians, but I doubt if America wants to be a laughing stock on the world stage - and that's exactly what Trump is doing to your nation.

While I think Trump would be a disaster, as an American, I really don't care about what the rest of the world thinks. Remember, the rest of the world gave Obama a Nobel Peace Prize... Anyways, yeah. I'm not to worried about what Joe Blow from around the world thinks about our leadership.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
I stated way at the beginning of this goat rope of a rodeo I am voting for Trump because he entertains me.

I agree that ordinary people in most countries are sick and tired of career politicians, but I doubt if America wants to be a laughing stock on the world stage - and that's exactly what Trump is doing to your nation.

While I think Trump would be a disaster, as an American, I really don't care about what the rest of the world thinks. Remember, the rest of the world gave Obama a Nobel Peace Prize... Anyways, yeah. I'm not to worried about what Joe Blow from around the world thinks about our leadership.

Ah yeah, I forgot they had that worldwide vote on who would be getting that Nobel Peace Prize.

Wait a sec.....

The principal news about Donald Trump’s candidacy for the U.S. Republican presidential nomination is not the sometimes controversial things that he says, but the increasingly hysterical responses to him from the traditionally respectable political quarters that he discomforts. In this shrill political atmosphere, he is not the chief offender to civil standards of political discourse. Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times last week, and he was reprinted in the National Post on Wednesday, that Trump was reminiscent of Hitler, that there were serious comparisons between Weimar Germany (1919-1933) and the contemporary United States, and that American politics is being Europeanized. By this, Cohen meant succumbing to the charms of France’s Front National, fascism, and, quite explicitly, Nazism. Unfortunately, this theme was taken up in a National Post editorial and letters on Thursday, Dec.17. The editorial represented Donald Trump as “manifestly a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon unfit to govern.” In The Globe and Mail the same day, Trump was lampooned by the urbane John Doyle as a practitioner of Dr. Joseph Goebbels’ Big Lie.

I wrote about the Trump candidacy in my column in the National Review Online (New York) last week and it was widely reposted, including by Donald himself. He is not my preferred candidate but I denounced the Cohen piece, as well as the comparison of Trump with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy by Max Boot, a distinguished guerrilla war and Middle East expert. Now that the Cohen comments have migrated to Canada, I say that that column, and reflections like it, including these local echoes, are ignorant, false, and grossly misleading. There is no comparison to be drawn between any of these individuals, except in contrasts, and the outrages committed by this sort of Trump-accuser are far more egregious than even Donald’s clumsiest sallies.

As Donald Trump tweeted when he posted my National Review piece, we are friends, and I know him to be a generous, honourable and decent man, and a loyal friend (he volunteered to testify on my behalf in my trial in Chicago in 2007, when he certainly had other things to do. He distinguished himself in a difficult time for me far beyond many exalted “friends” and worthies in this country.) He is a very successful developer of highest quality buildings and has been a successful television personality. His attraction to voters is not based on appeals to violence, or incitements to racial or sectarian hate and he does not espouse an illiberal society or American aggression in the world, or any undemocratic alterations of the American political system. Cohen imagines that German hyper-inflation came at the end and not the beginning of the Weimar Republic, and equates the negative consequences of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the German defeat in the First World War, in which all responsibility for that war was pinned on Germany and it lost a lot of territory, all its overseas empire, and took seven million casualties. “Afghanistan and Iraq have been the graveyards of glory,” and (Hitler) “was an outsider given to theatrics and pageantry. He seduced the nation of Beethoven. He took the world down with him.” (Beethoven was a German and Hitler was an Austrian but this is beside the point.) The attempted comparisons are a travesty and an outrage.

Canadians have a little more excuse for their frenzy and the National Post editorial correctly blamed traditional candidates and media for not focusing seriously on the issues Trump has emphasized rather sensationally. The United States has a much more complicated sociology than Canada, including the legacies of slavery, massive illegal immigration, and the responsibilities and mistakes of a great world power for over a century. Foreigners generally like weak U.S. presidents like Obama, other than when they need strong presidents to defend them, like most of those between Franklin Roosevelt and the senior Bush. And foreigners always overreact to the polemical excesses of U.S. presidential candidates. Much the same as the Trump nonsense was widely spoken of Goldwater and Reagan. Goldwater was innocuous and Reagan is now a candidate for Mount Rushmore. In the circumstances, the comments about Trump of Justin Trudeau, Rona Ambrose, and others, while relatively inoffensive, are not really relevant.

Donald Trump has made the points, albeit in a way that invites misunderstanding, that 11 million illegal entrants from Mexico are not the socioeconomic cream of that nationality and that it is impossible to screen out terrorists among a large intake of immigrants from the Middle East. He has said that while many of the illegal Mexican migrants are doubtless good people, they came illegally and include many who have raised the crime rate and the welfare costs of the United States. He has been accused of calling them all rapists and this is a grotesque misstatement of what he said. He said that no Muslims should be admitted to the United States until they can be screened securely. He should have been more careful how he expressed these views, but to use these statements as the basis for likening him to someone who destroyed German democracy, murdered 12 million unoffending people in death camps (half of them Jews), and unleashed war across Europe, North Africa, and the Atlantic, is a monstrous abuse of the right of fair comment.

As for Max Boot, Senator McCarthy accused Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower and General George C. Marshall, of being Communist dupes, and incited pathological fears that the U.S. government was a vast infestation of Soviet agents and traitors, and that communists arose as if infected by a virus, all over America, and had to be exterminated like termites. Where Max Boot imagines Donald Trump fits into any such nightmare escapes my comprehension. The French National Front is a Poujadist petit bourgeois party that is alarmed about Islamic terror in a country that has suffered a lot of it and where 10 per cent of the population is Muslim. The party leader, Marine Le Pen, expelled her own father from membership because he is a Holocaust minimizer.

What Donald actually advocates is the deportation of 351,000 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes and now imprisoned; the end of illegal immigration by building an Israeli-like wall along the Mexican border; an (as yet unspecified) screening process to justify the deportation of some of the illegals and the normalization of the others; and although he advocates the suspension already mentioned of Muslim immigration (not the Christians who are almost half of the refugees), he at least acknowledges that the United States is partly responsible for the political chaos that generated this humanitarian tragedy in the first place. He wants only a small increase in defence spending, reallocated to more effective anti-terrorism; and universal health care through health savings accounts and by smashing the insurance cartel. He is for the gradual legalization of most drugs; is a militant anti-polluter, but correctly (on present evidence) regards climate change and cap-and-trade as hoaxes. He wants to leave education (and same-sex marriage) to the states and to give them the money now wasted in the federal Department of Education. He would ban only late-term abortions, and not when there were overriding circumstances. He would reform the corrupt shambles of campaign financing by abolishing super-PACs and soft money, and lift limits on individual contributions to political candidates. He is a moderate protectionist opposite cheap labour countries, and advocates marginal income tax reductions and the reconstitution of the bloated national debt as a sinking fund to be gradually reduced by spending restraint, implicitly involving an imprecise level of entitlement-reform.

Trump opposes foreign intervention in areas where the U.S. has no natural interest, including Ukraine and Syria, but wants a redefinition of the national security interest of the country, and wants to protect that interest, unlike Obama, but not over-extend it, unlike George W. Bush. This is not a radical program. He is fed up with those mealy-mouthed politicians and commentators who nibble around issues and show more concern for the sensibilities of Islam than the security of America, and who ignored every major issue that has arisen for decades — abortion, illegal immigration, wealth disparity, the corruption of campaign financing, and he is not wrong.

Donald Trump is paying for his own campaign, is not dependent on special interests or a sleazy, opinionated gaggle of Hollywood fund-raising philistines or a jaded electoral machine. He may not be the answer, but he is not a kook or a menace. Nor is he quite the phenomenon he seems; the United States has often had previously unelected people as presidential candidates, usually famous soldiers such as Washington, Jackson, W.H. Harrisons, Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower (and unsuccessful nominees Cass, Scott, Fremont, McClellan, Hancock, and some non-military nominees also — Horace Greeley, Alton Parker, Wendell Willkie, and Herbert Hoover). Prominent military officers and other non-politicians ran a total of 30 times in the 43 presidential elections from 1788 to 1956.

The United States has had 20 years of incompetent government from presidents and Congresses of both parties, which are responsible for an immense and easily avoidable world-wide economic crisis, two absurd and tragic wars, the humiliation of the country with mindless interventionism, self-erasing “red lines,” a cave-in to a nuclear Iran, and a doubling of the national debt of 233 years of American history in eight years. It is little wonder that Americans are thinking of someone not complicit in any of this. America’s previous rise from colonial obscurity to world pre-eminence in three life-times (1783-1991) was without the slightest precedent or parallel in the history of the world. The people are right to be mad as hell. Canada has been more sensibly governed than the United States these last 20 years and is more equable.

Las Vegas — Ted Cruz can see himself on a collision course with Marco Rubio, barreling toward a head-to-head battle with his fellow senator for the Republican nomination — that is, if Rubio can deliver on his end of the deal. In a wide-ranging interview here Thursday, Cruz predicted that the GOP race will boil down to the familiar dynamic of an establishment favorite squaring off against a conservative challenger after they claim victories in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively. “I believe I will be that conservative candidate,” Cruz says. “I don’t know who the moderate candidate will be.” The Texas senator says he has consolidated the conservative “lane” of the race — thanks to the exits of Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal as well as to the fade of Ben Carson — and is confident he will win Iowa and become one of the two finalists. “I don’t believe we have peaked,” he says when asked about surging to the top of several Iowa polls this week, and about the potential danger in taking the lead there seven weeks from the caucuses.

Cruz’s confidence owes to his campaign, an Obama-style grassroots-heavy operation that prioritizes direct voter contact and ground organization. So certain of his operational superiority has the senator become that he dons his strategist cap gleefully and discusses the most granular details of his polling enterprise and outreach program. Moreover, he mocks the approach taken by Rubio’s campaign, which is famously allergic to process stories and defiantly dependent on media buys. At one point Cruz suggests that his rival is “hiding from the grassroots” and running for president “from a TV studio.” And yet Cruz clearly believes Rubio is best positioned to consolidate the other lane of the race. Wearing a mustard-colored flannel shirt and sipping from a paper cup of coffee, Cruz, riding in the middle row of a rented Ford Expedition, repeatedly notes the party leadership’s affection for his colleague from Florida. “The establishment is enthusiastically unifying behind Marco Rubio,” he says. The only thing standing in the way of their matchup, Cruz adds, is Rubio’s performance in New Hampshire. “Marco is perceived by many to be the most formidable candidate in the moderate lane. But he has serious competition in the moderate lane,” Cruz says. “Look, the winner of the moderate lane has to win New Hampshire. And right now there are a number of moderates who are competing vigorously for New Hampshire, and at this point it is not clear to me who will win.”

The truth is, Cruz’s team has come to view several of the so-called moderates whose campaigns depend on New Hampshire — Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich — as critical allies in the fight against Rubio. Cruz is desperate for one of them, or some combination of them, to prevent Rubio from winning the establishment-friendly state and solidifying his status as the center-right favorite early in the primary season. Without a win in New Hampshire, Cruz and his team say, it’s impossible to see Rubio clearing the moderate lane of his rivals as the race moves to South Carolina, Nevada, and the Super Tuesday states. A fragmented center-right vote helps Cruz not only by lowering his vote share necessary to win, they argue, but also by delaying the emergence of an establishment favorite around whom the GOP’s power brokers can rally. But Cruz says he doesn’t fear a binary battle against Rubio or anyone else; to the contrary, the Texas senator says his party’s rightward shift in recent years gives him a built-in advantage against any opponents who align themselves with the establishment.

“Historically, conservatives have outnumbered moderates in the Republican party two to one. That has changed. Barack Obama has radicalized the American people. Today in the Republican party conservatives outnumber moderates three to one,” Cruz says. He continues: “Seventy-seven percent of Republican primary voters identify as conservative, 52 percent as very conservative. If we go head to head, one strong conservative versus one strong moderate, it’s game over, especially given that in past elections the moderate has always had all the money and the conservative has been broke. In this situation, the fact that has the Washington establishment perhaps most terrified is this: Of the 17 Republican candidates who started, the campaign with the most money in the bank is our campaign.”

Cruz scoffs at the suggestion that a one-on-one duel with Rubio would, thanks to their shared roots in the tea-party movement, rob him of the “bold colors” contrast he seeks. With Rubio in recent months ramping up his outreach to the Right, a number of prominent conservatives have said a Cruz–Rubio battle would represent a “win-win” for their movement — a sentiment that poses a grave threat to Cruz’s operational theory and one that he aggressively rejects.

Asked whether he worries that Rubio could steal conservative votes from him, Cruz quickly replies, “Not remotely.” The reason? “Marco and I have made markedly different decisions” since arriving in Washington, Cruz says. “Whether it’s amnesty, which is the clearest distinction, or whether it is defending marriage, or whether it is defending religious liberty, or whether it is standing up to cronyism and corporate welfare, or whether it is supporting American workers against President Obama’s TPP, Marco and I have made very different decisions. In every instance he has made the decision to go with Wall Street and K Street. And in every instance I have made the decision to go with the working men and women of this country.” In reality, however, Cruz and Rubio are nearly indistinguishable on most of these matters. (Both were early supporters of giving the president Trade Promotion Authority; Rubio voted for it, whereas Cruz did an about-face and voted no.) It’s immigration that, as Cruz says, offers “the clearest distinction” — one that was on display at Tuesday night’s debate, with Rubio acknowledging his continued support for an eventual path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and Cruz, in his starkest language to date, saying, “I have never supported legalization, and I do not intend to support legalization.”

The hedging in his phraseology offered an opening to Cruz’s critics — it was Washington speak, they said, coming from someone who rails against it — and his statement of blanket opposition runs counter to statements he made in 2013 supporting a path to legal status. “He clearly left the door open to returning to his previous position, which was to give legal status to illegals that are here,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said of Cruz after Tuesday’s debate. Cruz reiterated to reporters Thursday morning, prior to a rally here, that his amendment and statements pushing legalization in 2013 were cloak-and-dagger politics meant to derail Rubio’s bill. Later, in the car, he emphasizes that his use of “intend” should not be misunderstood. “I said, ‘I’ve never supported legalization and I don’t intend to support legalization,’” Cruz says. He pauses, and shakes his head. “I don’t support it now. I will not support it in the future. I’m happy to say it any way people like; the answer is no.”

He seems to appreciate the risk of Rubio’s “muddying the waters” to minimize the differences in their records. Cruz used noticeably strong language when addressing the issue Thursday morning. He told reporters that Obama and his congressional allies wanted to turn “illegal aliens” into “undocumented Democrats” with the 2013 immigration bill Rubio championed — two phrases that many Republicans fear could be radioactive to Hispanic voters. Cruz’s national spokesman, Rick Tyler, said later he’d never heard the candidate say “undocumented Democrats” before. Cruz, insisting that he had used it often, argued that, rather than repel Hispanics with such talk, he would be the party’s strongest candidate in terms of winning back a demographic that has abandoned the Republican party in the last two national elections.

“In 2012, I was very proud to receive the support of 40 percent of the Hispanic voters in Texas at the same time Mitt Romney was getting clobbered nationally with Hispanic voters, at 27 percent,” Cruz says. “Hispanic voters in America don’t support illegal immigration, despite what many in the media say. It is many Hispanic voters in America who are losing their jobs, who are seeing their wages driven down. . . . And to be clear, when I ran for Senate in Texas, I was unequivocally opposed to amnesty then, and I’m unequivocally opposed to amnesty now.” Cruz promises that if nominated he will win “markedly more of the Hispanic vote in 2016” than Romney did in 2012. He refuses to offer a percentage but acknowledges what many Washington Republicans believe — that 40 percent is the baseline for them to stand a chance in the general election — is accurate. Not surprisingly, however, he disagrees with them on how to get there. “I think the establishment Republicans who are pitching the theory that Republicans must embrace amnesty in order to win Hispanic votes — and in order to have a chance at winning the election — are engaged in fiction writing and fraud on a massive level,” Cruz says. “The data do not support that preposterous theory.”

The conventional wisdom in Republican circles, of course, is that Rubio would be the party’s most electable candidate next November, owing in no small part to his moderate stance and tone on immigration. But Cruz says that nominating Rubio to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016 would ensure a repeat of Romney’s defeat in 2012, when the record of the former Massachusetts governor on health care rendered him unable to draw contrasts with Obama on an issue of visceral importance to the base. “That same Republican-party establishment who thought it was a great idea to nominate a candidate who had designed and implemented a program just like Obamacare now thinks it’s a terrific idea to nominate a candidate who agrees with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on amnesty,” Cruz says. “If we do that — if the Republican nominee shares the very same views on amnesty for 12 million people that Hillary Clinton does — millions of working men and women will stay home, we will lose, and Hillary Clinton becomes the next president.”