Wednesday, June 24, 2015
"He's a favorite son," says Martha Allen, a Canaan librarian who heads the Vermont-National Education Association. "And he's just right on all the issues."
The Vermont-NEA, which represents some 12,000 current and retired teachers, became the first union in the country Wednesday to endorse Sanders. Earlier this month, the South Carolina AFL-CIO's executive board passed a resolution supporting his candidacy, but its broader membership has yet to issue a formal endorsement.
While Vermont teachers may not make or break a national election, Allen promises to turn the Vermont-NEA's support into action — particularly in neighboring New Hampshire.
"We'll see what they need, where they need boots on the ground and send [our members] that way," she says.
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Monday, June 22, 2015
"The flag is a relic of our nation’s stained racial history," he said in a statement. "It should come down."
Sanders' comments follow last Wednesday's deadly shooting of nine parishioners at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Photos posted online of the alleged perpetrator, Dylan Roof, show him posing with the Confederate flag and other racially charged imagery. Since 2000, when it was removed from the Statehouse dome, the flag has flown above a nearby monument to Confederate soldiers.
“The tragedy in Charleston, as terrible as it is, has given the people of South Carolina an opportunity to finally turn a page on our past," said Sanders, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. "The flag belongs in a museum.”
Sanders was hardly the first to issue such a call. His campaign issued a statement on the matter Monday afternoon only after word leaked that two prominent South Carolina Republicans — Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a fellow presidential candidate — would do the same later that day.
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Speaking Friday at a Las Vegas conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Sanders argued that, as a son of an immigrant himself, he was as conversant on the subject as Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. From the Los Angeles Times:
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Thursday, June 18, 2015
In the early 1990s, he opposed the Brady Bill, which mandated criminal background checks for gun buyers, but he supported a federal ban on assault weapons.
After a gunman opened fire on a Colorado movie theater in July 2012, killing 12 and injuring 70, Sanders told the Addison County Independent that "decisions about gun control should be made as close to home as possible — at the state level." But after another gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School five months later, he voted for sweeping federal legislation to mandate background checks and ban the sale of assault weapons.
In some respects, Sanders' evolving position on gun laws mirrors that of his Vermont constituents, who used to vociferously oppose gun control but now appear more open to it.
But among the Democratic voters he's courting in his run for president, many of Sanders' past positions seem to be out of the mainstream. In a national poll conducted by Quinnipiac University last July, 80 percent of Democratic voters surveyed said they supported "stricter gun control laws," while only 17 percent opposed them. Ninety-eight percent of Democrats favored the background checks he once opposed.
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Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Two polls out of New Hampshire this week have prompted the pundit class to acknowledge the excitement surrounding Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) quest for the Democratic nomination.
On Sunday, Morning Consult released the results of a phone and web survey showing Sanders trailing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton by just 12 percentage points — 44 percent to 32 percent. On Tuesday, a more reliable landline and cellphone poll of Granite State voters conducted by Suffolk University showed a marginally tighter spread of 41 percent for Clinton to 31 percent for Sanders.
That's a dramatic shift from the last round of New Hampshire polls conducted a month ago, which mostly showed Sanders in the low- to mid-double digits.
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Monday, June 15, 2015
Larry, 80, moved to England in 1968. He earned a master’s degree in social work from Oxford University and a law degree from Harvard. Like his brother, Larry Sanders has experienced both victory and defeat in electoral politics: He served eight years on the Oxford County Council as a Green Party representative and recently received 5 percent of the vote as a Green candidate for the British Parliament.
In May, Seven Days visited Larry to discuss the ways in which Bernie’s working-class roots shaped the presidential hopeful. In that story, Larry described Bernard (as he calls him) as an excellent athlete who had a comfortable upbringing and was particularly affected by participating in the civil rights movement.
Over email, Larry gets into greater detail about growing up in Midwood in the 1940s and ‘50s. Below are excerpts from that exchange.
East 26th Street, like many [streets] in the area, represented a kind of social engineering. The combination of apartment houses on the corners and detached houses on the rest of the street put lower-middle-class and professional families in close proximity. For children, this led to real mixing.
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Thursday, June 11, 2015
“I love the job I have. That's a big factor,” Welch said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. But, Welch said, “The governor stunned all of us with his announcement that he’s not running, so the circumstances have changed.”
Welch, in his fifth term in the U.S. House, declined to characterize how real the possibility is that he will give up his relatively safe seat as Vermont's lone representative. "That's what I have to consider," he said. "For me, the question is where can I best serve."
After Shumlin's announcement Monday, many considered Welch to potentially be a formidable contender.
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Tuesday, June 2, 2015
The USA Freedom Act, he said in a written statement, "will enact the most significant reforms to government surveillance powers" since Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The bill bars the National Security Agency from collecting bulk metadata from telephone companies and requires a court order for the information to be obtained, among other changes.
Passage of the USA Freedom Act restored certain surveillance powers that have been on hold since Sunday, when portions of the Patriot Act expired and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held up consideration of the new legislation.
Opposing the bill Leahy helped write was his fellow Vermont delegate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) were the only liberals to join 30 Republican senators in voting "nay." Sixty-seven Democrats, Republicans and independents voted for the bill.
In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Sanders indicated he was inclined to vote for the bill, which passed the U.S. House last month with Congressman Peter Welch's (D-Vt.) support.
"I may well be voting for it," he told moderator Chuck Todd. "It doesn't go as far as I would like it to go."
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Monday, June 1, 2015
Nearly a week after 5,000 people crowded the Burlington waterfront to watch Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) kick off his presidential campaign, roughly 35 gathered across the street Monday night at Main Street Landing to show their support for former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Lopsided though those numbers may sound, Holly Jones of Shelburne reassured her fellow Clintonites that they were hardly a reflection of Clinton's true support in Vermont.
"There was a lot of talk because he had 5,000 people down there," Jones said. "But I can tell you what: She would get 10,000 people, if not 20 or 30 — and that's the truth!"
Beach Conger of Burlington agreed.
"Cheer for Bernie! Vote for Hillary!" he said.
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