Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) will bring his presidential campaign to Duluth on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. PHOTO: Gage Skidmore, Flickr CC
When I started this blog in 2006 it was much more dedicated to the daily tit-for-tat of national politics than it is now. I wrote an absolutely insane number of posts about the 2008 election, for instance.
This year I’ve taken a more relaxed view of the national election. For one thing, I refused to write anything about the 2016 election until it was actually 2016. This is both good for my mental health and lets me save analysis of that race for times when I feel it’s important.
So a good place to start might be the first 2016 visit of a presidential candidate to Northern Minnesota.
On Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will bring his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination to the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center.
You can see details of Sanders visit at his campaign website.
With the Iowa caucuses coming soon on Feb. 1, Sanders is riding a surge in polling that reminds some of President Barack Obama’s rise this same time eight years ago. Interestingly, Sanders is a different underdog facing the same favored opponent, former Sen. and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who remains ahead in national Democratic polling.
This time, however, Clinton is probably more imposing. She’s locked up more super-delegates and continues to perform better than Sanders among voters of color. That will help her in several key states — if it holds.
Obama carried Minnesota handily in 2008 against Clinton, but lost large chunks of Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District to Clinton, especially on the Iron Range. Sanders will be looking to Minnesota’s progressive tradition to help him on Super Tuesday, which could be very important if he manages to win Iowa and New Hampshire.
Clinton campaigned in Hibbing in 2008 for then-candidate Obama. She’s appeared in Minnesota a number of times, but has yet to campaign in Northern Minnesota on her own behalf this cycle. It will be interesting to see if either candidate visits the Iron Range, where international trade is such a big issue right now, as caucuses draw closer. One imagines Sanders message of fighting unfair trade agreements might resonate.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t rule out seeing Republicans in Northern Minnesota as well. It could be easy to imagine Donald Trump taking his populist conservative message to the Iron Range to appeal to voters frustrated with local economic conditions.
At this point it bears mentioning that Trump and Sanders are likely to win Iowa and New Hampshire.
Minnesota’s precinct caucuses will be March 1, part of the “Super Tuesday” collection of primary elections and caucuses. Those will be significant, particularly if we have both major parties trying to rein in insurgent candidacies.
NOTE: Yes, in 2015, Republican candidate Rand Paul visited the University of Minnesota-Duluth, but I am only counting election year visits.
It will be interesting to see if Hillary has been indicted by the time Sanders is supposed to visit Duluth. People should take a serious look at him as he might well be the nominee. Among people unaccustomed to handling classified material the import of some of what was apparently done by the former Secretary of State has yet to sink in. I think that Sanders has some virtues that are rather appealing. I won’t vote for him but thus far I respect him.
So far, none of the documents of concern were classified at the time Clinton placed them on her server. What seems to be going on is a struggle between the State Department and Homeland Security about what should be classified, mostly along the lines of:
Homeland Security: “Your shoe size is classified.”
State Department: “Go away. We’re trying to work here.”
Of course, there is also the unspoken argument that documents on Clinton’s server were actually safer than most documents on government classified servers, as the repeated breeches of the last few years have demonstrated.
That is a lie. You are absolutely clueless about this matter.
You don’t know how classified material is handled. The scale of the material compromised is staggering and the sort of compartmentalized information that was compromised is horrifying.
Additionally the last comment is so mindless and ignorant that you should ask Aaron to wipe it for you. The Chinese penetration of federal security clearance files, including mine, were not DoD servers. They were maintained by the Office of Personnel Management. Their vulnerability, which both Bush and Obama have to answer for, says absolutely nothing about the security of the networks that handle classified traffic like SIPRNET and other more highly classified networks. If you are that ignorant you should really just be quiet.
My recollection is that classified networks were also compromised by the penetrations by Snowden (NSA,) by Chelsea (Bradley) Manning (military,) by the Israelis (CIA,) and by the broad compromise by WikiLeaks. There have been several other smaller penetrations that are public, plus any others done without public information so far. Plus of course the Chinese penetration you mentioned. Unfortunately, in this day and age high security on networks is often just an advertisement that there is something there worth penetrating, and an invitation for both recreational hackers and government sponsored cyberspies to get to work. The battle between security people and hackers in cyberspace continues to seesaw back and forth, much like the battle between offense and defense in military.
So far, no one has reported or detected any penetration of Clinton’s servers, but that is probably more to do with the fact that they were unknown to people who might have been interested, since they undoubtedly were less secure. There was a piece of phishing spam detected, but that was never opened.
So far, Coliin Powell and Condoleezza Rice at the state department have also been shown to have used private servers for exchange of information. There has been, in fact, as you undoubtedly know if you are closely involved in security issues, a longstanding conflict between the State Department and the Homeland Security Department over classification of work product at State. Homeland Security believes that any information about knowledge of the activity of foreign governments and leaders should be secret, while State argues that a large share of their work involves that same information, and that classifying it would make their work unduly awkward and complicated, including restricting access by many of their workers.
All of the information so far that has been shown to have been on Clinton’s server that has subsequently been judged to deserve secret classification fell into that category: information that State had not classified that the investigation of Clinton by Homeland Security determined should have been classified in their opinion. All of that information came from State, not from DoD or from SIPRNET, the NSA, the CIA, or other sources, although the material may have been duplicated there. The Clinton server episode will undoubtedly be the subject of yet another round of argument between State and Homeland Security, and may result in more restrictions than State wants to accept.
If and when there is some revelation that Clinton did mishandle information that was already labeled classified when she got it, that will be a separate issue. Until then, the idea that Clinton will be indicted is just another right wing noise machine fantasy. You may wish Clinton would be indicted, just as Democrats may wish that Karl Rove would be indicted for his own removal of all sorts of material from the White House for his own private server, but it is not likely to happen. There are also people the world over that would like to see George Bush and his advisors indicted for war crimes, but that is not happening either.
It will all just join the angry discussions that has extremists from both side frothing at the mouth while history moves on.
You have no clue.
Can’t argue that you aren’t privy to secret inside information beyond the noise, based on your employment. We all just have to wait for it to come out, but so far there hasn’t been any exciting new or indictable evidence, and Trey Gowdy ended up seeming like a goof when he tried to take on Clinton, although that probably falls under the category of beating up on midgets.
You don’t have to believe a single Republican. All you have to do is believe the IG who is an Obama appointee.
I don’t believe or disbelieve anyone in the investigation, since everything revealed so far has failed to make a big impression. Just have seen that so far all the revelations have failed to show that any of the information on the server was classified at the time it was put on the server — although the investigators have found several things they say that State SHOULD have classified but did not, and that all of the material came from State, not from other material such as DoD, NSA, or CIA sources. There still are more things to come, including the entire investigation of Huma Abedin’s emails.
So if you know of more than has reached the news so far, there may be surprises for Clinton. For now, aside from people like Limbaugh and Coulter, no one is suggesting that anything discovered will amount to much, and Limbaugh and Coulter would execute Clinton for jaywalking.
As far as impact, unfortunately both parties have what can only be called a cluster of fools running for the presidency, with the distinction of who has the worst fools hard to sort out. As I say below, if Clinton is forced out, I am pretty sure that Amy Klobuchar could sweep both the Dem and the GOP field without breaking a sweat. She would certainly be interested, so the only question would be if the Dems are smart enough to run her.
The above is simply false and anyone with an interest can know it.
David, you keep saying that, but what I said is based on following the story for the last year and on Googling the story yesterday. What I said is a summary of what has been said in coverage of the story in multiple national and international sources.
If you have other information, could you please provide a link. By information, I mean real reports in reliable media, not opinion pieces, op eds, editorials, or coverage by right wing propaganda sources like the various Rupert Murdoch media, the Washington Times, or things like National Review, Reason, Breitbart, etc. Neither right wing or left wing propaganda sources are reliable sources of information in something like this, and I always ignore them, including things like MSNBC, Huffington Post, Salon, and so on, as well as the right wing sources.
I am genuinely interested in seeing this, since you seem sincerely to believe a story different from mainstream reports.
I bear the burden of experience and knowledge. But presumably the admission by the State Department itself that there was TS material on her personal server should be hard even for sympathetic Clinton operatives to deny. They won’t release these emails even in redacted form due to their sensitivity. And the charge by the Clinton campaign that a series of Obama appointees are actually Republican secret agents reeks of the desperation she undoubtedly feels.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/22-hillary-clinton-emails-declared-top-secret-218420
This story is actually an illustration of what I have been saying. The same Kirby quoted as a State Department source on your Politico article included this in his statement:
“The State Department said it had “upgraded” the classification of the emails at the request of the nation’s intelligence agencies. Mr. Kirby said that none of the emails had been marked at any level of classification at the time they were sent through Mrs. Clinton’s computer server.”
The article about the downed drone in Pakistan discussed in the article is actually a published news story about the event that was classified as secret by the IG review of Clinton’s email, despite the fact that it was clipped directly from a newspaper story.
In the same set of articles that accompanied this news, Kirby reported that the State department was encountering a problem with their people being forbidden by the classification system from accessing reports they themselves had written but that had been classified above their ratings after they had submitted the material.
You may have seen another set of articles earlier that said that some of the emails sent to Clinton contained material that seemed to have been clipped from classified systems, then sent to her without any secret designation. Although some subsequent discussion suggests that what may have happened was that both the emails and the secret files had actually gotten the material from common third non-classified sources either in the State Department or, as in the one case, from newspapers and other public reports, rather than being clipped from classified material, if indeed it is possible for people to cut and paste material from highly classified reports on classified sites to outside non-classified sites, that would seem to be evidence that the government needs to hire some web designers who know what they are doing.
Anyhow, the story remains the same. All the “classified” material on Clinton’s server is classified because of upgrading the classification of material that was not classified at the time of the initial use but has been deemed classified by the reviewers, and all the material came from other people who had posted it to Clinton, not from her, and was not indicated as classified by them when it was posted — almost entirely because it was not classified at the time.
The use of the private server is a mistake by Clinton, as she admitted, just as it was for Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, and other members of earlier administrations. The noise about top secret material is the offshoot of a disagreement between State and other parties over what should be classified and what not classified, with the State Department arguing that over classification is sometimes laughable, as in the case of the news article and of people being classified out of access to things they themselves had written.
Aaron, the date of the Sanders visit is Tuesday, JANUARY 26, not February. That’s next Tuesday.
Not persoanally a Sanders supporter at this moment, but just trying to be fair.
Shoot, and I knew that but had been writing about the February Iowa caucus and had the month on the brain. It is Jan. 26 and the edit had been made. Thanks.
Just saw 13 Hours this afternoon. Based on Hillary’s willingness to leave dozens of Americans unprotected in this terroristic, deadly siege, killing four brave Americans, she should be disqualified from holding any public office! It’s unimaginable to think she’s running for Commander in Chief…God help us.
Bring in the other endless unethical, immoral, most likely illegal, crap she has engaged in, The Bern should be a shoo-in.
She’s not going to be indicted for anything to do with Benghazi. However her massive violations of federal law regarding the personal server and the massive compromise of highly classified information are an entirely different matter.
I agree David, the Benghazi decisions she made weren’t illegal, but they sure were repulsive. If you’ve ever play a team sport, can you imagine electing her “team captain”? Stevens, Smith, Doherty and Woods certainly couldn’t….not to mention the rest of her Benghazi Team that made it out alive.
No doubt her intentionally self-serving email decisions were illegal, and her Clinton Foundation actions abhorrent, also maybe illegal. All things consider, and we’ve only mentioned a few, she’s a disgraceful human being..
Yes, she is disgraceful but that isn’t really a problem for her candidacy, particularly when contending for the nomination. However I don’t see the Democratic Party nominating someone who is under indictment. I wonder how many ballots Joe Biden could get added to at this late date.
If Clinton were knocked out, I would not bet against Amy Klobuchar for the Dem nomination. She definitely ticks a lot of boxes, definitely has the ambition but was sidelined by the Clinton wave, and could probably gear up fast if the race were to be thrown open.
Yup, Ranger, Hillary will get away with Benghazigate just like she got away with having Vince Foster murdered and a radical Muslim born in Kenya became President.
Hillary’s Benghazi role displayed her complete lack of honor, her Foster role displayed her willingness to screw anybody….two totally different but closely related issues.
Ah, so you do believe Foster was murdered by Hillary’s hit mob?
100’s of millions stand by what I wrote kissa…re-read it, closely.
Alex Jones fan, are you? I have some money bet on the answer.
Hillary’s Benghazi role displayed her complete lack of honor, her Foster role displayed her willingness to screw anybody….two totally different but closely related issues.