I think it should be pointed out that since Tuesday (well, since Monday, actually) there have been a lot of misleading headlines out there giving the impression that Sanders has thrown in the towel and is endorsing Hillary.
He's done nothing of the sort. He and Hillary have said that they'll "work together" to defeat Trump, but neither has conceded to the other. When Reporters tried to ask Bernie questions after his meeting with Obama, Harry Reid waved them away and wouldn't entertain any speculation that Bernie had quit. Later, speaking on his own, Reid told reporters something to the effect of "I don't imagine Bernie would refuse" to help Clinton beat Trump, but nowhere had Bernie made anything like a concession speech.
To the contrary, he's fighting her in the D.C. primary next.
An article was published on a website called JUSTICEGAZETTE.ORG making the case that Bernie Sanders actually won California by a landslide, and election fraud named Hillary as the winner. Many have been skeptical. Who's ever heard of this website? CNN doesn't say anything about fraud in California. None of the big networks do. Instead, they all have pictures of a smiling Bernie next to headlines suggesting he's supporting Hillary now.
OF COURSE this story is going to come from some amateurish little fish wrapper publication! Hillary and the big media outlets are all on the same payroll! That's been deafeningly clear all through this election. I don't know why anyone should now start acting surprised by the fact. There was practically a media blackout on Bernie while he was getting more donors than Hillary. Then they were giving him a token mention followed up with, "Of course, he can never really win," just before he won state after state. For the first time ever, they included superdelegates in the running tally of who was winning, because even in states that Sanders WON (like Washington), most superdelegates refused to support him.
So some little rag written by someone who could stand to take a journalism course or two wrote that journalists who support Bernie are getting shoved to the side while Hillary supporters are given the choice spots. Is this really all that incredible a statement? It correlates perfectly with what we're observing.
Cut through the brand marketing and look at the substance. Forget the "a popular actress said" or the speculations and look at what facts were reported: There are parts of California where you'd be hard pressed to even find a Hillary supporter other than at a Hillary rally, places where TENS OF THOUSANDS of people rallied for Bernie while a few hundred showed up to support Hillary...and yet Hillary won those districts. How?
No, really...how? It's like if you heard tomorrow that San Francisco had elected a Bible-banging homophobe for mayor, or Texas had elected a communist governor, or Baltimore or Oakland had elected a white supremacist, or Las Vegas elected someone who wants to shut down all the casinos and chase out the tourists despite visibly massive, overwhelming support for that person's rival.
More Californians favored Bernie than Hillary. They supported him 2:1 over Hillary in the run-up to the election. This much is documented, regardless of how chintzy you think JUSTICEGAZETTE.ORG might be. And then they show a video--a video that Hillary's party has been showing for years--of a computer programmer who works for a company that writes vote-flipping programs testifying under oath about how easy it is to produce a 51-49 win for any candidate, and why he believed that it appeared that had happened in Ohio in 2004.
That's what's called circumstantial evidence. Contrary to what every detective show and court drama ever produced would have you believe, "circumstantial" doesn't mean "invalid." Circumstantial evidence is evidence. It's not usually as rock solid as some other sorts of evidence, but sometimes, it's the most solid that's possible. For example, let's say you're home babysitting your little nephew, Roger. Roger loves cookies, he loves to climb, and he knows he's not supposed to have any cookies until after dinner. You're watching TV shortly before getting up to make dinner, and you hear a crash from the kitchen. You run in an find Roger sitting on a stack of books on the counter. There's a chair pulled up to the counter, books stacked on the chair. The cabinet where the cookie jar is kept is open, and the cookie jar is smashed to pieces on the floor. You don't have to be a genius to see that Roger climbed up to get the cookies and caused the jar to fall. Do you have video of this happening? Eyewitnesses? Roger's fingerprints or DNA samples from the cookie jar or the cabinet handle? Any evidence that the crime wasn't actually perpetrated by Roger's imaginary friend Herbie, as he claimed (right after he claimed that nothing happened and before he changed his story to say that the Ninja Turtles did it)? You and Roger are the only ones in the house. There are no pets, no vermin, no open windows or strong breezes. You, however, are not an investigative journalist for a billion-dollar broadcast news channel. Now, do you doubt your conclusion that Roger knocked down the cookie jar? Is there any doubt at all? "All you have" is circumstantial evidence.
It's that same kind of situational evidence that's making it obvious that this election was stolen. If we want to be sure the results were wrong, there'd have to be a hand-counted recount of paper ballots. If we want to be 100% certain that the error was intentional, we'll have to have a programmer look at the source code of the program used to count the votes. But common sense and a simple understanding of math tell you that if, going into the polls, some number of people say they're voting for Hillary and TWICE AS MANY say they're voting for Bernie, and then the election results say Hillary wins...somethin' ain't right.
But as the infomercials say, "Wait! There's more!" Even without hacking the vote count, there's the matter of so many Bernie supporters--easily identified by software used during pre-election canvassing--and ONLY them, being given provisional ballots that were never counted.
This is the 2000 Florida all over again, but without any hanging chads. Just count all the damned ballots. How hard is that to understand? People who were registered voted. Count their votes.
That's not being done, and people are laughing that the mere idea that all the votes should be counted is just some lunatic blogger crying sour grapes.
I'm done with it. If Bernie doesn't get the nomination, I'm voting for Trump. He'll try (and fail) to do such horrible things that the military will remove him, or the UN will step in, or we'll otherwise have some sort of Constitutional crisis requiring a new Constitutional convention. Then we can finally break up this monstrous empire into a more sane collection of appropriately sized nations. The South can finally have their apartheid Baptist theocracy where everyone's required to carry three machine guns, and the Northeast can have their bans on large sodas while staging elementary school performances of the Torch Song Trilogy. We can finally stop lumping together the Great Lakes and prairie states as "the Midwest" (like Cleveland and Detroit have anything at all in common with Kansas and Iowa) and let California do its own thing.
