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A Death in Bethlehem |
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Saturday, 13 February 2016 09:26 |
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Ross writes: "Groups of Korean and Indian tourists shuffle across Manger Square, but Nativity tourism is suffering, and, all across town, the stores of Bethlehem are closed to honor the funeral of yet another Palestinian martyr."
Palestinian relatives mourn during the funeral of Muhammad Mubarak, 21, in the Jalazoun refugee camp near the West Bank city of Ramallah. (photo: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)
A Death in Bethlehem
By Andrew Ross, Jacobin
13 February 16
A visit to the West Bank reveals the everyday brutality of the Israeli occupation.
 roups of Korean and Indian tourists shuffle across Manger Square, but Nativity tourism is suffering, and, all across town, the stores of Bethlehem are closed to honor the funeral of yet another Palestinian martyr.
Almost inevitably, the young martyr, Srur Abu Srur, is from the Aida refugee camp, which directly abuts the separation wall and lies on the frontline of daily clashes with Israeli soldiers armed with “shoot to kill” orders. The cement has barely been applied to Abu Srur’s grave before clouds of tear gas begin to drift through the cemetery. Clashes between the camp’s militant youth and the occupation forces continue through the evening.
I am here to help with the making of a film, and Fouad, my translator, is assisting me in interviewing workers crossing the Green Line to work in Israel. Fouad is also the cousin of Abu Srur. Shortly after we finished our work at the Qalandiya checkpoint in Ramallah, he learns of the shooting (Israeli soldiers had been raiding houses in Beit Zahour and Beit Jala all morning). High-tailing it back to Bethlehem, we note the stepped-up military presence all along the road.
Crowds have gathered at Beit Jala hospital to prevent the new martyr’s body from being taken away by soldiers (the Israeli military does not like autopsies), and, shortly after we arrive, they are parading the body around the courtyard. Lamentations and prayers quickly morph into protest and solidarity chants as the body is carried aloft, through the throng, to the mortuary. The next day’s funeral is preceded by a full procession — with flags from across the political spectrum — through Bethlehem’s main streets.
As Fouad put it, his cousin had been “in the right place at the wrong time.” On his way home from classes at Bethlehem University, he ran into the soldiers carrying out the raids. The city is in Area A, the 18 percent portion of the West Bank that is supposed to be under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but that makes little difference.
“We can get shot anytime and anywhere for no reason at all,” observes Fouad, expressing disgust at the PA’s “weakness,” a sentiment that will be echoed by many at the funeral and the three-day wake that follows. Indeed, Palestinians routinely say now that if the current intifada-like situation becomes a full-blown insurgency, then they will have to throw rocks at the PA as well as the Israeli military.
Despite its security coordination agreement with the Israeli authorities, the PA has been unable to protect Area A city residents from nightly (and increasingly, daily) incursions by occupation forces, and the recurrent spectacle of PA officers arresting Palestinians has decimated whatever popular respect it once commanded as a steward of self-reliance. Why is it still alive? Not only because it governs by decree (there have been no elections for years), and is the primary source of stable employment in the West Bank, but also because of the fear of a Palestinian civil war.
Abu Srur’s father was a venerated figure — he had been the first to fire his AK-47 during the second intifada, which began in 2000 — and so the funeral and the wake drew attendees from all over Palestine, including the prime minister himself. Based on the volume of food and beverages consumed, the camp’s Fatah youth chief estimated that as many as forty thousand had come to pay their respects.
These funerals, which are not only public but also highly political occasions, are coming thick and fast — five youth were killed in the Bethlehem-Hebron corridor the same week — and the time and resources that whole families devote to attending these events is a massive drain on their limited means.
Yet each addition to the tally of martyrs tests the community’s tolerance for sumud, the “steadfastness” that is often cited as a core quality of Palestinian endurance under the occupation. When it first aired, during the intifada of 1987, sumud was hailed as the principle of tireless commitment, against all the odds, to Palestinian land and identity.
Over the years, specific practitioners — samidin — have been singled out for their heroic examples, sometimes for even the smallest acts of daily resistance. As the suffering intensifies, and the metallic decree of Israeli bullets take their toll on young lives, this established understanding of “standing fast” or “rootedness” is being questioned.
The most grievous killings are at the hands of settlers, who, in response to the recent spate of stabbings by apparently desperate Palestinian youth, feel quite free to use their weapons with impunity. While settler violence is often condemned by leading Israeli officials, it is the logical extension of the numerous acts of degradation through which the occupation is maintained: from the policy of administrative detention, which has generated a prisoners movement around samidin hunger strikers like Khader Adnan, to the daily, soul-crushing waits at checkpoints for laborers dependent on a precarious Israeli wage.
Whether the violence is driven by race hatred, or by messianic fervor, it is ultimately targeted at the steady seizure of Palestinian land and the completion of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948.
Amir, a young man who also grew up in the Aida camp, described the state of siege in his adopted village, which lies to the south, on the way to Hebron. Surrounded by the settlement cluster of Gush Etzion, the villagers are increasingly thwarted from generating income from their small farms.
Settlers cut down their olive trees or plants, and try to confiscate their farms under a routinely exploited Area C military law that authorizes appropriation of land that has been “under-utilized” for five years. Some villagers accept monetary offers in return for the land, but the bigger bribe comes in the form of waged labor within the settlement, which, for all its indignities, pays out more than the farm.
For most Palestinians, taking work in a settlement — whether in construction, cleaning homes, or setting up for social events — is shameful and stigmatizing. But there are no other choices available to those in Amir’s position: “I force myself to go, I am disgusted at myself, and I want no relationship with any settler, but my family needs to eat.”
Unlike those who put in a long day (sixteen hours door to door is not uncommon) crossing over to construction sites in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it is relatively simple for him to pass through the checkpoint that leads to the settlement.
But getting to it might cost him his life. Settlers and soldiers are usually stationed around the traffic circle he has to cross en route. “You cannot get close to a settler or they will shoot you, and they decide when that is. I do not know if I am coming home when I leave in the morning.” Just the week before, three youths from neighboring Sa’ir were killed at the Gush Etzion junction, and a fourth, allegedly a stabber bent on revenge, was also gunned down and allowed to bleed to death.
Not all the settlers are religious zealots. Their numbers include families who are priced out of Israel’s increasingly unaffordable housing stock, and who jump at the offer to receive heavily subsidized accommodation in these West Bank colonies.
No doubt, the bigotry of their ultra-Zionist neighbors rubs off on some of these economic refugees. But the fact that there are no shared norms of conduct, let alone moral unity, among this employer class magnifies the uncertain plight of Palestinians, who have to second-guess which of the settlers who hires them is also likely to be trigger-happy.
Facing this stark intimidation on a daily basis sends a clear message to Amir. His labor is forced, not freely given; it is accompanied by the threat of physical violence, and it is linked to his giving up on the future of his family farm. Most humiliating of all, he is working to build and maintain an illegal settlement on land stolen from his own people.
The Palestinians who cross the Green Line have also been literally constructing the expansionist Israeli state, brick by brick, for the last three decades. Deprived of employment in the deliberately underdeveloped Palestinian economy, and unable to access an Israeli work permit, the only option for Palestinians like Amir is to lay the foundations, plaster the walls, and tile the roofs of the commuter suburbs and gated hilltop colonies that are supplanting their own olive orchards.
Under these circumstances, despair is not an option — for most Palestinians, this is seen as a self-indulgent response. That is why, in and around Abu Sur’s funeral, the sumud talk was joined by more open calls for direct action and for holding the Palestinian leadership to account.
As Raja Shehaheh puts it, “sumud is watching your home turned into a prison” and choosing “to stay in that prison because it is your home, and because you fear that if you leave, your jailer will not allow you to return. Living like this, you must constantly resist the twin temptations of either acquiescing on the jailer’s plan in numb despair, or becoming crazed by consuming hatred for your jailer and yourself, the prisoner.”
Does the recent upsurge in acts of confrontation, however decentralized, suggest that a new model of resistance to the occupation is in the offing? Internationally, the BDS movement goes from strength to strength, as new victories are recorded almost on a daily basis. The arguments for BDS are effective because they are fueled by clear moral reasoning. But the giddy momentum of BDS is not felt by ordinary Palestinians living in the shadow of the separation wall, waiting in the checkpoint queue, or watching settlers steal the land surrounding their villages.
On the face of it, the stabbings, and other attacks on Israeli soldiers, are nowhere near as articulate, and, officially at least, they are not authorized or condoned by any Palestinian faction. But they are by no means random, they enjoy widespread “popular” support, and their high profile generates the kind of international attention that is not wholly shaped by pro-Israel spin managers.
At the very least, we can say that these clashes and killings are no longer in the realm of “weapons of the weak” (subtle, and barely visible, acts of sabotage that are part of everyday resistance). Significantly, a knife is not a gun, but it is also more than a rock. Active Palestinians may be divided over whether to honor this moment with the label of the Third Intifada, but there is still a general expectation that, as in Yeats’s Bethlehem, something new is about to be born, “its hour come round at last.”
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High School Students of America: Here's How to Sneak Into My R-Rated Movie This Weekend |
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Friday, 12 February 2016 15:04 |
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Moore writes: "Now, you might be asking yourself, 'Why did the American ratings board give my film an 'R' rating?' Well, some people would prefer you not know how teenagers in the rest of the world are treated. Bottom line: They're not treated like babies and inmates. They are treated like full-grown human beings with dignity and rights. Lots of rights."
Michael Moore. (photo: Dog Eat Dog Films)
High School Students of America: Here's How to Sneak Into My R-Rated Movie This Weekend
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Website
12 February 16
 igh School Students of America:
Imagine a place where you don’t have to do any homework, and you don’t have to take those ridiculous standardized tests. Or how ‘bout a place where your public school lunch is a luxurious four-course meal that you have the time to enjoy each day. Imagine a country where all college is free — and it’s impossible to find anyone who has a student loan to pay off. Can you believe there’s actually a place where teenagers can easily get birth control with no parental permission, and that when it comes to getting free health services there’s no issue because, even as a teen, the society respects that only you should have control over your own body. Imagine a world where no hall passes are required to go to the bathroom, where school is not an assembly line (and it doesn’t start at 8 in the friggin’ morning!). And what if, on top of all of this, you could vote at the age of 16 and have a real say in your future.
Well, that place exists. It exists in many countries, all over the world. In fact, in every advanced industrialized country, one or more of the above is already happening every single day. But not here in the U.S.A.
And so I’ve made a movie about all those places, a movie that will take you on a raucous, hilarious ride through the great life that they’re having and we’re not. It’s called WHERE TO INVADE NEXT, and it opens this weekend, February 12th, in theaters across the country.
There’s only one problem: It’s rated “R”.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why did the American ratings board (the MPAA) give my film an ‘R’ rating?” Maybe it has something to do with all the things I’ve just listed above. Some people would prefer you not know how teenagers in the rest of the world are treated. Bottom line: They’re not treated like babies and inmates. They are treated like full-grown human beings with dignity and rights. Lots of rights.
But here in the USA, the MPAA has deemed my film too dangerous for you to see on your own. So I’d like to fix that. I’d like you to see my movie. And I’d like to help you sneak in to do that this weekend.
Now, I’m probably going to have a shitstorm rain down upon me for doing this. I don’t care. Wrong is wrong, and it is wrong to not let you see this movie. The theaters or the movie studios or the censors may not like what I’m about to suggest, but they’re just going to have to deal with it. It is insulting to you as a 15 or 16-yr to be told you can’t handle the truth. What year is this — 1952?
By now, you probably know all the ways to sneak into an “R”-rated movie — buy a ticket to another film then sneak in; go in to the PG film you bought a ticket for then go out to get popcorn and “forget” your ticket so you can then head in to the “R”-rated film; etc.
Here are a few of the other ways (some of which I’m sure you’ve tried):
- Buy your ticket online. That gets you past the first gatekeeper at the ticket window who wants to see your ID.
- Speaking of ID – here’s a good site on how to make fake ID: (CLICK HERE FOR LINK) (use responsibly, not for alcohol or joining the army)
- Have a 17 or 18-yr. old friend buy the tickets for you, or randomly ask an adult in line to do it. Tell them why you want to see this movie. It’s not like standing outside the 7-11 trying to get a stranger to buy beer.
- While standing at the box office window or in front of the ticket taker, try to mimic the way older adults look and sound so as to draw less attention to yourself. Suggestions: be hunched over, look tired, stressed out; have a glaze over your eyes, or a distant stare into a bleak future of abandoned hope. Talk about your 401K or the baby keeping you up at night or something you read in the Wall Street Journal. That should do the trick.
- If you buy a ticket to another film that’s PG-13 in order to sneak in to mine, may I suggest helping out the box office of “Creed”, “Brooklyn” or “Hail Caesar”. They’re good movies, and you should come back and see them anyway.
Any of the above should work. And if you are a parent reading your teen’s email and you’re shocked I’m doing this, let me reassure you that my film contains little profanity, no one is having sex on camera, and the minimal violence that is shown is of police in the U.S. abusing people of color. Thank god this is not your typical PG-13 movie where hundreds get slaughtered, women are exploited and are the victims of rampant misogyny, and abhorrent values of conquering the weak, greed is good and over-the-top narcissism are the messages being conveyed to the young. But when I come along to show them there’s a better world they can make for themselves, I get slapped with an “R”-rating. Go figure. (BTW, I believe, depending on the maturity level of your kids, even 8 and 9-yr olds can understand and enjoy this film.)
So, high school students of America — go check out “Where To Invade Next” (here’s the list of theaters showing it). I promise you it’ll be one of the best movies you’ll see this year. I am so amazed at your generation — how aware you are of the world, how much you’re concerned about your future, how into the election year you are, and mostly how you are not a generation of haters. You don’t hate people because of the color of their skin or if they are in love with someone of their own gender. You don’t want this country going to war. This is a HUGE shift from past generations and already I can see you’re going to make this world a better place.
And remember – after you see my movie, don’t forget to go out and raise your voice, disturb the status quo, and cause a ruckus. We need you.
Yours,
Michael Moore
Director, “Where To Invade Next”
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FOCUS: 19 Great Moments From the Sixth Democratic Debate |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37115"><span class="small">Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Friday, 12 February 2016 11:47 |
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Stuart writes: "If it were an old-timey boxing match, promoters might have called it the Melee in Milwaukee, or maybe the Wis-Confrontation. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders walked into Thursday evening's debate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a primary win a piece to their names, and a lot to lose."
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton participated in a PBS NewsHour-hosted debate in Wisconsin Thursday. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
19 Great Moments From the Sixth Democratic Debate
By Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone
12 February 16
Thursday's debate brought references to "doing" marijuana, and a fight over who is least friendly with Henry Kissinger
 f it were an old-timey boxing match, promoters might have called it the Melee in Milwaukee, or maybe the Wis-Confrontation. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders walked into Thursday evening's debate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a primary win a piece to their names, and a lot to lose. Clinton was clinging to the edge she's managed to hold over Sanders in national polls, while Sanders was anxious to maintain the momentum he gained from a landslide victory in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
The folks watching at home could tell it was going to be a good one when, as Clinton was laying out the plans for her first term, Sanders offered a sharp rebuke. "You're not in the White House yet," he said. But the gloves really didn't come off until the very end, when Clinton compared Sanders to a Republican. "Madame secretary, that is a low blow," Sanders bristled.
The next proving ground for the Democrats will be the Nevada caucuses, on February 20th, followed by the South Carolina primary a week later.
- "Before it was called Obamacare it was called Hillarycare." -Clinton
- "We are not England. We are not France." -Clinton on the United States' employer-based health care system
- "Secretary Clinton, you're not in the White House yet." -Sanders
- "This is the first time there have been a majority of women on stage." -Clinton, referencing the fact that both of the debate moderators were women
- "I think a Sanders victory would be of some historic value as well." -Sanders
- "I'm not asking people to support me because I'm a woman. I'm asking people to support me because I think I'm the most qualified, experienced and ready person to be the president and the commander in chief." -Clinton
- "When it comes to a woman having to make a very personal choice ... in that case, my Republican colleagues love the government, and want the government to make that choice for every woman in America. If that's not hypocrisy, I don't know what is." -Sanders
- "Both the African-American community and the white community do marijuana at roughly the same rate." -Sanders
- Moderator Gwen Ifill: "I want to talk to you about white people."
Sanders: "White people?!"
- "Hopefully after the 2016 election, some of our Republicans will come to their senses and realize we are not going to deport 11 or 12 million people in this country." -Clinton
- "Let's not insult the intelligence of the American people. Why in God's name does Wall Street make huge campaign donations? I guess just for the fun of it! They want to throw money around." -Sanders
- "I don't believe that a vote in 2002 is a plan to defeat ISIS in 2016." -Clinton
- "I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.... I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state." -Sanders, distancing himself from Clinton, who called Kissinger a "friend" in the last Democratic debate
- "If you're going to quote me from 2008, Sen. Sanders, quote what I said." -Clinton, taking issue with Sanders' characterization of her disagreement with President Obama on Iran
- "It's easy to talk to your friends. It's harder to talk to your enemies." -Sanders
- "The kind of criticism we have heard from Sen. Sanders about our president, I expect from Republicans, I do not expect from someone running for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Obama." -Clinton
- "Have you ever disagreed with a president? I suspect you may have." -Sanders
- "One of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate." -Sanders
- "I am not a single-issue candidate, and I do not think we live in a single-issue country." -Clinton
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Expect the GOP Establishment to Start Looking at the Bright Side of Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 12 February 2016 09:43 |
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Rich writes: "Donald Trump's win in New Hampshire - and the primary's reshuffling of the party's Establishment candidates - signals what one political reporter has described as 'the growing chasm between the Republican Party's leaders and its voters.' Is it just a matter of time, as some commentators think, until GOP leaders come around?"
Donald Trump. (photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Expect the GOP Establishment to Start Looking at the Bright Side of Trump
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
12 February 16
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: dissecting the results of the GOP and Democratic primaries in New Hampshire.
 onald Trump's win in New Hampshire — and the primary's reshuffling of the party's Establishment candidates — signals what one political reporter has described as "the growing chasm between the Republican Party’s leaders and its voters." Is it just a matter of time, as some commentators think, until GOP leaders come around?
Even before Trump’s first win, some Republican Establishment figures were starting to come around to him, telling themselves, as Bob Dole put it, that he’d “probably work with Congress” because “he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a deal-maker.” Plus, he had the advantage of not being the universally loathed Ted Cruz. Then came Trump’s second-place finish in Iowa. Suddenly he could be branded a loser — a paper tiger who would only attract fans, not actual voters. Rubio, who came in third in Iowa, was widely seen to be on the verge of surging (again), and GOP leaders (encouraged by the usual assortment of pundits and number-crunching analysts) began telling themselves (again) that Trump was in his death throes, thereby freeing the party at last to unify around the marvelous Marco. And so William Kristol, one of the contributors to the special and spectacularly ineffectual stop-Trump issue of National Review, offered this prediction of the Republican primary results five days before New Hampshire voters went to the polls: Rubio 25 percent, Cruz 22, Trump 19, Kasich 17. If there could be a more graphic illustration of the chasm between these supposed conservative leaders and their own voters, I can’t think of it.
My guess is that these same types — including the opportunistic Kristol, no doubt — will start to shift back into Neville Chamberlain mode and look at the bright side of Trump again. Trump has the nativist, angry base of America’s white-male political party propelling him, and what power does the Establishment have to counter that? Fox News (along with its star, Megyn Kelly) has proved as impotent against Trump as National Review. Super-pacs, whether under the sway of the Koch brothers or Karl Rove, haven’t laid a glove on him. The religious right, typified by Jerry Falwell Jr., is happy to be in bed with a devil who lives large in the gilded manner of a megachurch television preacher. And the old neocon guard has proved all bark and no bite. Paris and San Bernardino were supposed to turn this into a national-security election, but the two most pugnacious avatars of Bush-Cheney 9/11-ism, Chris Christie and the Sheldon Adelson–favored Rubio, have no political gains to show for their hawkishness, and neither, of course, does Jeb!, who proudly listed Paul Wolfowitz among others of the Kristol bent on his foreign-policy team. Trump, by contrast, has been winning votes by advertising his opposition to the Iraq War nearly as much as Bernie Sanders has.
The central problems for the GOP Establishment remain even more basic. Most of the big money on its side is being spent on the circular firing squad that’s crippling its own candidates. Besides, you can’t fight something with nothing. Who is its candidate to take down Trump? Jeb!? The Times-endorsed John Kasich? (Revealingly enough, Fox News cut away from Kasich’s second-place victory speech midway Tuesday night — a defensible call, given that his actual vote total was well below half of Trump’s, even though he seemed to speak twice as long.) None of these guys are speaking the same language as a Republican base that has no problem with a candidate wielding the word pussy and that until recently preferred Ben Carson, a man who literally cannot find his way on to a debate stage, to all of the Establishment alternatives.
No doubt we will soon hear of scenarios by which Rubio can somehow stage a comeback. Not only is he the favorite of disheartened Christie, Jeb!, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker (remember him?) backers, but the media have routinely cast him as the on-the-cusp front-runner for months, with the adjective talented routinely affixed to his name for no apparent reason other than that he is brilliant at using a boyish grin and double talk (or, in his case, quadruple talk) to camouflage hard-right views only marginally different from those of the menacing Cruz. On Saturday, the same day as his fateful debate appearance, both the Times and Wall Street Journal gave major play to news stories charting Rubio’s upward arc.
Well, that was then. Rubio is no more likely to escape the video of his catastrophic Saturday night massacre than Edmund Muskie did his (alleged) tearing up during the 1972 New Hampshire primary, Michael Dukakis did his photo op in a tank, Howard Dean did his scream, or Perry did “Oops!” The only stock that is rising for Rubio is his status as a national laughingstock. It was particularly ill-advised of him to attack Joe Biden at one point in the debate: America knows Joe Biden, and Rubio is no Joe Biden. He’s the new Dan Quayle.
After his victory over Hillary Clinton Tuesday night — in which he poached voters from the demographic groups who supported Clinton in 2008 — Bernie Sanders mentioned that he had "the feeling that the kitchen sink is coming pretty soon" from the Clinton camp. What comes along with the kitchen sink?
The kitchen sink was already being thrown at Sanders before Tuesday’s vote — by the Hillary enforcer David Brock and by Bill Clinton. Their collective ploys have included casting aspersions on Sanders’s health and ethics and purporting that he was a tool of Wall Street because he (like most, if not all, of his peers) received money from the Democratic Party’s own Senate Campaign Committee, which had some financial-sector donors. It’s clear that none of this worked — or will work — and that such tactics will mainly serve to antagonize the young Sanders loyalists whose enthusiasm Clinton will desperately need if she makes it to November. Gloria Steinem’s and Madeleine Albright’s ridicule of Sanders’s supporters was arguably an even bigger disaster.
The inept and panicking Clinton campaign doesn’t need more of the kitchen sink. It needs, among other things, a message that is more inspiring than a liberal version of Jeb!’s ill-fated slogan “Jeb Can Fix It.” Pragmatism is not a cause to rally voters, whatever its merits as a governing strategy. The cliché that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, like many clichés, happens to be true.
It’s also true that Clinton’s concession speech Tuesday night found her at her best — it was lucid, passionate, and feisty — while Sanders’s attenuated victory address, a recycling of his stump speech, had the laundry-list wonkiness one tends to associate with Clinton. Her cause is not hopeless. But her campaign often seems to be. To take just one example: She still can’t answer any question involving her and her husband’s personal fortune. Her lame explanation for taking $675,000 for Goldman Sachs speaking engagements (“That’s what they offered”) shows that nothing has changed since she talked about being “dead broke” during her book tour 20 months ago. She is no sooner going to get away with keeping the texts of those speeches private than Mitt Romney was going to get away with refusing to release his tax returns. But rather than lance the boil, she will likely let it fester for weeks or even months.
Now racial politics are going to enter the fray as Sanders prepares to face African-American voters, theoretically Hillary loyalists, for the first time, in South Carolina and primary states beyond. Might the Clinton campaign misplay the race card as it did in 2008 so that even this natural political advantage is squandered? Based on what we’ve seen thus far, such self-immolation can’t be ruled out.
In an interview this week with the Financial Times, Michael Bloomberg confirmed recent speculation that he's exploring a run for president. Should his increased eagerness to float this idea be taken to mean that he doesn't think Clinton will be the Democratic nominee?
No, he knows no more about who is going to be the Democratic nominee than anyone else. What it does mean is that he has a lot of highly paid experts on his payroll, including pollsters, who are telling him what he wants to hear: America wants you! But third-party candidates don’t win the presidency in America. Bloomberg, whose views on guns and abortion are anathema to conservatives and whose Wall Street advocacy is anathema to liberals, has zero chance of becoming America’s first Jewish president.
A Bloomberg run nonetheless remains a perennial fantasy of a certain strain of centrism in the media-political Establishment — exemplified by some of the more self-righteous “bipartisan” op-ed columnists, by the naïve civic initiatives of Howard Schultz of Starbucks (who sought to ameliorate racial conflict by having baristas scroll “race together” on coffee cups), and by the why-can’t-we-all-get-along pablum peddled by the MSNBC talk show Morning Joe. This crowd will see a path for Bloomberg to the White House as surely as it is already detecting a surge for Kasich, whose relative civility (as measured against the low bar of Trump, Cruz, Fiorina, et al) was spun by some MSNBC talking heads on Tuesday night into a political miracle and whose postelection speech was broadcast in full by that liberal network even after Fox gave him the hook. Let’s remember that Kasich essentially lived in New Hampshire for months and still got barely 16 percent of the vote in a state that could not be more favorable for his brand of antique Republican conservatism. He is no more going to get the GOP nomination than a Bloomberg third-party ticket will carry states west or south of New York.
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he National Retail Federation is fond of pointing out that “retail means jobs.” And it’s true: the retail industry today provides one in ten private-sector jobs in the U.S., a number set to grow in the next decade. 
