Capture...

Fundraising and polls show that many Democrats think the best answer to an angry old white guy with crazy hair, New York accent and flair for demagoguery is, well, another angry old white guy with crazy hair, New York accent and flair for demagoguery. 

His campaign announced a haul of $18.2 million in the first quarter from 525,000 individual contributors. The early favorite Warren (Mass.), has floundered in both money and popularity.

And undeclared front-runner Biden now looks vulnerable to accusations he inappropriately touched women, kicked off by a prominent Sanders 2016 backer who served on the board of the Sanders political group.

Sanders himself remains untouchable, in a Trumpian way. Claims of mistreatment by male staffers from women who worked on his 2016 campaign. His resistance to releasing his tax returns. The idea that Democrats need a unifying figure to lure disaffected Trump voters in key states.

Sanders isn’t Trump  but their styles are similar: shouting, unsmiling, anti-establishment and anti-media, absolutely convinced of their own correctness, attacking boogeymen (the “1 percent” and CEOs in Sanders’s case, vs immigrants), offering impractical promises with vague details, lacking nuance and nostalgic for the past.

Yeccch...

A look at the Democratic line of candidates for the 2020, and you can see how disappointing the group is. Everyone is going extreme into Free stuff but who is going to pay for it?

Make no mistake about it, these folks know that their plans and suggestions, is just sound bytes. They may talk about it but don't believe it.

If you desire to be moderate, go some place else. We are Democrats.

Shortfall...

Oil held gains after rising to the highest in more than four months in London as ongoing tensions in Libya added to concerns over supply.

Brent futures added as much as 0.7 percent, approaching $71 a barrel. Libya’s internationally-recognized government vowed to counterattack against forces loyal to strongman Khalifa Haftar which are trying to enter the capital Tripoli. 

Crude prices have continued to climb after their strongest quarter in almost a decade as OPEC and its allies curb output while economic and political crises squeeze supplies from member nations Venezuela and Iran. An escalation of the conflict in Libya, which pumped 1.1 million barrels of crude a day last month, risks creating a supply shortfall.

You broke it you bought it. What we did in Libya created more chaos and destruction than we imagined.

Harmful...

Beware...

History repeat itself. The Media will be creating its own favor or someone they think can be sympathetic to their business. And again, we will see the fall.

Furious...

Fast and Furious was a Justice Department program that allowed assault weapons  including .50-caliber rifles powerful enough to take down a helicopter to be sold to Mexican drug cartels allegedly as a way to track them. 

But internal documents later revealed the real goal was to gin up a crisis requiring a crackdown on guns in America. Fast and Furious was merely a pretext for imposing stricter gun laws.

The scheme backfired when Justice agents lost track of the nearly 2,000 guns sold through the program and they started turning up at murder scenes on both sides of the border including one that claimed the life of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

While then-Attorney General Eric Holder was focused on politics, people were dying. At least 20 other deaths or violent crimes have been linked to Fast and Furious-trafficked guns.

Just a thought.

Free...

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang has a big goal for a relatively unknown business person: to reach the White House. And he's aiming to get there by selling America on the idea that all citizens, ages 18-64, should get a check for $1,000 every month, no strings attached, from the U.S. government.

Yang, 43, who was born in upstate New York in 1975, will be running as a Democrat.

"People who think the antidote to Donald Trump is a boring generic Democrat missed the point. He is a sign of massive institutional failure. On both sides," Yang said on Reddit on April 2.

The government has "plenty of resources, they're just not being distributed to enough people right now," he says.

* While Bernie's free education entice people to improve and seek higher education, this Yang expands the welfare system.

This is the worst plan ever uttered in an election season. 

Recycle...

Recycling is the globe’s bizarro commodity, created by the richest people on Earth and sold to the developing world. Like all commodities, its price reflects a staggering string of interconnected happenings. 

Your 2011-era empty Coke bottle wasn’t just worth a lot because of high oil prices it was worth a lot because of Pakistan devastating monsoons in the summer of 2010 that sent cotton, in April 2011, to its highest nominal price since records began in 1870. 

Jeans were going to be more expensive, Levi’s announced. And so, it turned out, was recycled PET plastic, because for Chinese manufacturers of articles like teddy bears and blue jeans, polyester fibers made from old plastic bottles were a cost-effective replacement for cotton. Cotton was up; plastic was up; recycled PET prices went up. 

After China stopped buying, a supply glut sent prices for recycled materials down, and fast. Recyclers found themselves dumping paper in landfills outside Seattle and incinerating plastic in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  Northeastern recyclers were sending just 54 percent of the bottles they collected to processors for reuse. The rest were basically landfilled.

Rigged...

A persistent group of Sanders supporters still won't let go of the slights real and perceived from the last campaign. The frustration is notable now that Sanders is a 2020 front-runner, raking in $18.2 million in the first quarter, downplaying concerns about DNC bias and highlighting his success in bringing the party around on liberal policies it once resisted.

The acrimony stems from a fiercely fought campaign and a sense among Sanders loyalists that party leaders privately favored Clinton. DNC leaders at the time scheduled fewer debates than Republicans and sometimes slated them for nights with low television viewership. 

Often opaque delegate allocation rules also contributed to a belief among some Sanders supporters that the primary was essentially rigged.

According to data from the Pew Research Center, the tension took a toll. About 81% of people who consistently supported Sanders during the primary season and were confirmed to have voted in the general election said they ultimately voted for Clinton, while 11% said they supported Stein or Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, and 3% supported Trump.

Tan...

A former NAACP leader in Washington state who was exposed in 2015 as a white woman pretending to be black has reached an agreement to avoid trial on charges of welfare fraud.

Rachel Dolezal, who changed her name to Nkechi Diallo two years ago, was charged with two felonies last May.

Investigators alleged she failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in income from her memoir, "In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World," and other sources, so she could collect $8,847 in food and child care assistance from the state.

The Spokesman-Review reported that Diallo entered into an agreement with prosecutors March 25 in Spokane County Superior Court to repay the money and complete 120 hours of community service to avoid a trial.

Any similarities here with ...?