They may not get anything from Rhode Island either, as Hillary Clinton is embroiled in an unexpected upstart challenge from Bernie Sanders both here in the Ocean State – which has a rare opportunity to cast meaningful votes in a presidential primary because of Sanders’ surge – and in the remaining 20 some states to vote in the Democratic presidential primary election on April 26.

When Governor Gina Raimondo introduced Clinton, she said, “I was just talking with President Clinton and he said we have to crank it up here in Rhode Island.” Clinton and Sanders have split the only two polls done on their race with a tie breaker expected to come soon.

“I believe America would work a lot better if it worked liked a community college,” said Clinton, speaking from the cafeteria of the Community College of Rhode Island, because they are diverse, affordable and enlightening.

Later in his address, he said he doesn’t think America can afford to make public college free for all, a central plank of the Sanders campaign. Instead, he said student loans should be more affordable and flexible. “A college loan is the only loan that can’t be refinanced in America,” Clinton said.

It wasn’t the only time Clinton took a stab at Sanders’ platform.

Mostly Clinton offered pretty progressive-sounding policy tips. Being anti-immigrant, he said, is “morally wrong and economically dumb.” On the drug overdose epidemic, he said, “You can’t treat it like a crime problem, you have to treat it like a public health problem.”

He said he believes America is on the cusp of a big economic boom, and that his wife is the best candidate to usher in that boom. He even had an idea for how to put Americans back to work while solving another public health problem. “Just imagine how many jobs we could create that could never be exported if we tore out all the lead pipes.”

The headlines say it all:

• Did Bill Clinton violate election rules in Mass.?
• Bill Clinton Appearance Blocks Super Tuesday Voters
• Clintons Show Contempt for Polling Station Laws – and they got away with it!

I was first alerted to this by a fellow RI Bernie Sanders campaign worker, Robert Malin. He shared a video by Angela Garcia (above) which clearly showed that people were irritated, annoyed and put out by Bill Clinton’s poll visit in New Bedford. I contacted Maria Tomassia, chairwoman of the Board of Canvassers of New Bedford, who confirmed that people had to walk longer to get to the polls and that lines were long because people might have wanted to meet Clinton but that there was no impact on voter access. She denied that people had to wait and denied that Bill Clinton was in violation of any election laws.

Afterward New Bedford Bill Clinton continued campaigning for his wife in three additional towns including Boston, Newton and West Roxbury, where he was inside Holy Name Parish School’s gymnasium, a polling location, with Boston Mayor Martin Walsh.

This is election 101, and illegal. In Massachusetts no campaigning is allowed within 150 feet of a polling location. Bill Clinton was caught campaigning within that margin and actually inside a polling place. When you think of all the campaigns that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been in, their decision to circumvent election laws was either ignorant or intentional. I think most people would agree that the Clintons are not ignorant.

Hillary won in Massachusetts by less than 1.5 percent, a very small margin. If Sanders had received .75 percent more the state would have been a virtual tie. Could Bill Clinton’s possibly illegal actions have skewed the vote in Hillary Clinton’s favor?

It would be hard for Bernie Sanders to actually dispute the vote count. There is no way of knowing how many votes he might have lost or how many people were swayed by Bill Clinton’s last minute and frankly desperate antics. But this is not how a campaign should be run. Dirty politics can never be accepted. The Clinton’s are once again showing their true colors.

[Lauren Niedel is the RI State Contact for Bernie 2016. To volunteer please contact her at 401-710-7600 or lniedel@gmail.com]

I have learned about inmates with two social security cards to claim more dependents, and two disability claims. They use a mother’s maiden name to obtain a second social security card, then claim they suffer from ADD, or bipolar disorder and sell their medications.

In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed into law the welfare reform act, ending in concept entitlements. This new law required welfare recipients to find work within two years, and limited receiving assistance to five years. Prior to the passage of the Welfare Reform Act, social security disability recipients were level at 10.92 percent increases for 15 years. After passage of the law those numbers jumped to 54.57 percent, clearly showing a shift from welfare over to social security disability. While disability numbers rose exponentially, the welfare rate dropped 65.41 percent during this same time, based on data listed in the New York Times Almanac of Record Book by John W. Wright.

In “The Real World” by Kerry Ferris and Jill Stein, the authors supplied a figure of $608 billion being spent on social security in 2011. Prior to the passage of welfare reform, social security spending was $331 billion according to the Almanac, supporting my theory of entitlement abuse within the social security disability program.

This ongoing abuse of our disability system makes me sick, because everyone knows the social security administration does not have the manpower to investigate tax fraud, let alone disability fraud. Rhode Island’s current cost of Medicaid is 30 cents of every dollar collected, where prior to welfare reform it was 10 cents to every dollar.

• This post is published as part of the Prison Op/Ed Project, an occasional series authored by CCRI sociology students who are incarcerated at the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institute. Read more here:
  • ‘Prison Op/Ed Project’ teaches civic engagement, writing – Meghan Kallman
  • Does racial injustice still exist? Look at our schools – Aaron Carpenter
  • Rhode Island charges felons absurdly high court costs – Christopher Nemitz
  • Public school students and inmates need more vocational training – Darnell Hie
  • Prison policies put probation and vocational training at odds – Norman Johnson
  • Corporate-modeled prison industrial complex doesn’t serve society – Adrian Rojas
  • Incarceration is the new slavery – James Poston
  • Justice isn’t blind with data-based sentencing – David Brown

Bill Clinton knows how to play the room. So when the 42nd president of the United States took the podium at the Convention Center in Providence yesterday, he opened with: “I love Rhode Island.”

The former leader of the free world also has a fondness for Seth Magaziner, for whom he was here campaigning.

“He represents hope,” Clinton said, invoking both our state motto and his famous 1991 campaign slogan, when it was he coming from nowhere to best a political insider during an economic downturn.

Magaziner was just eight-years-old then, but he was already a Clinton supporter. He wrote a letter to the editor in the Bristol Phoenix extolling the virtues of the 32-year-old Arkansas governor. “I think that’s what put him over the top,” Magaziner joked. His father, Ira Magaziner, is a longtime friend and adviser of Clinton’s, who worked in the White House and now heads the Clinton Global Initiative.

“He’s a total policy wonk, and that’s why I love talking to him,” Seth said when I asked him about the behind-the-scenes Bill Clinton.

Clinton did have a good sense of Magaziner’s policy proposals, speaking at length about his so-called “blueprint” that would create an infrastructure bank, a clean energy fund and investing a greater portion of the pension fund in emerging local businesses.

“You’ve been through a really rough time since this financial crash,’’ Clinton said. ‘‘You deserve as many good jobs as quickly as you can get them, and Seth Magaziner will help you get them.’’ He said Rhode Island’s treasurer’s office has more constitutional authority than many other states, and that Magaziner’s so-called “blueprint” will help improve Rhode Island’s economy.

“He really did read the whole thing,” Magaziner told me afterwards. “Of course I was nervous when I knew he was reading it but I was excited when I heard that he liked it.”

Magaziner said he first mentioned the Clinton last summer that he was considering running for general treasurer. I asked him if Clinton offered any advice.

“He won his campaign based on promoting ideas and his advice to me was to do the same here,” Magaziner said. “Anyone who is running for treasurer right now has to be talking about those core economic issues. He understood, especially given everything Rhode Island is going through, that’s what people would want to hear.”

Kidding aside, the ProJo lays out a pretty honest assessment of the Cicilline/Doherty race with its editorial this morning. They call Cicilline a good mayor who was dishonest at the tail end to climb the political ladder. This is true. I give Cicilline no free pass for lying about the city’s fiscal situation, but don’t think it’s a sin worth throwing him out of office for. He’s a strong progressive voice for Rhode Island in Congress.

Brendan Doherty, according to the ProJo, is still learning politics but seems like a good, honorable guy. This is true too. If this were class president or homecoming king, I might just toss my support behind Doherty. But being that it’s politics, I’ll go with the guy who knows politics.

Not to mention … listen again to what Bill Clinton says about David Cicilline and you’ll see why he’s is the right choice for Rhode Island:

I’m starting to get the feeling that Brendan Doherty doesn’t even want to serve in Congress. If he did, he’d probably audition for the job a just little bit rather than just trying to convince voters to reject incumbent David Cicilline. This campaign has become ridiculously negative, and their debates remind me of when my brother and I would fight as children – the primary difference being me and my bro, even then, seemed to understand public policy better than Doherty…

But if negative campaigning was an Olympic event, the gold medal may well go to my friend Mark Binder. The line between disavowing the hardball politics of Smith Hill and engaging in them is pretty clear; Binder crossed it a long time ago .. he proably doesn’t know who’s responsible for the anonymous ad attack ad running on WPRO, but candidates can and do set a tone for their campaigns.

There are few places I would rather be a fly on the wall than the editorial board meetings at the Providence Journal … for example, how did the typically very conservative ed. board endorse progressive Democrat Elizabeth Warren over moderate Republican Scott Brown?

Obviously us progressives wholeheartedly agree, but the ProJo lays out really good reasons why even moderates who may be more philosophically aligned with Brown should still vote for Warren. By the way, this reasoning applies locally too!

Elizabeth Warren could help prevent a Republican takeover of the Senate, at a time when extremists have inordinate sway in the GOP. Republican control could spell damaging rollbacks of environmental and other regulations, and set back health-care reform. Further, one or more Supreme Court justices could retire soon. Senator Brown named fiery conservative Antonin Scalia as his idea of a model justice, and voted against confirming Elena Kagan. A vote for Ms. Warren would keep the court in more centrist territory. In this race, she is the better choice.

And this is also great from today’s ProJo op/ed page … Cicilline talks up the progressive congressional budget proposal: “This plan would eliminate the deficit in 10 years, end the war in Afghanistan safely and expeditiously restore investments in education and infrastructure, strengthen Social Security and Medicare without cutting benefits, require millionaires, Wall Street and Big Oil to pay their fair share, and enact corporate-tax reforms that seek to make it harder for companies to ship American jobs overseas.

Prototypical DINO Jon Brien had three chances to win back his House seat this campaign season … the first was to win in the primary, which he didn’t. The second was to knock out primary winner Stephen Casey on a technicality, and that didn’t work either. Now, his last chance is to win a write-in campaign. If I were Brien, I wouldn’t invest too much time working on my victory speech…

Rhode Island just got a little greener, thanks to three new wind turbines at the waste water treatment plant in Providence.

NEA-RI President Larry Purtill pens a letter to North Kingstown Patch responding to the school superintendent’s letter in the local weekly paper. Evidently, the superintendent thinks the custodians whose jobs were outsourced should move on – which shows a little bit of ignorance to the dynamics at play … while management might swing a bigger bat, labor bats last.

Trial of the century: US v. Bank of America

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, who was paraphrasing Mitt Romney’s meta-campaign message: We broke the economy and Obama didn’t fix it quick enough so give it back to us.

One has to like not only the name, but also the motivation, of a group backing progressive candidates for State House seats.

According to WPRI’s Ted Nesi: “People for Rhode Island’s Future spent $26,500 this week to support six pro-gay-marriage candidates (David Gorman, Gene Dyszlewski, Lewis Pryeor, Adam Satchell, Laura Pisaturo and Roberto DaSilva) and oppose six others on the ballot (Lou Raptakis, Frank Lombardi, Marc Cote, Michael Pinga, Michael McCaffrey and Dan DaPonte).”

Fight Back RI, a local group working for marriage equality, also endorsed some legislative candidates recently.

Meanwhile, Nesi goes on to report that 50CAN, a national PAC that supports the corporate charter school model for public education, is also spending money supporting local candidates. “50CAN Action Fund said it spent $44,902 on Aug. 30 supporting four candidates in next week’s primary: DaPonte, Jon Brien, Maura Kelly and Mia Ackerman,” Nesi writes. “The group’s Rhode Island chapter endorsed all of them except DaPonte.”

Rhode Island should be concerned that RI-CAN, the major proponent of the big box charter school model in the state, is supporting Brien. He’s one of the most conservative members of the General Assembly who is already a direct conduit for corporate America into our political system through his involvement with ALEC.

And spending money is only one of the ways in which the corporate charter school agenda is trying to influence local politics. Ed Fitzpatrick looks at the race for Senate District 3, which pits former RI-CAN executive director Maryellen Butke against Gayle Goldin, who works for the Women’s Fund of Rhode Island.

Here’s one of the biggest problems with our political process: many pretend that the state is broke but it isn’t. In fact, it turns out Rhode Island enjoys a $115 million surplus in its budget this year.

Yet still, the state is cutting services that help those hardest hit by the recession.

Such contradictions are just one of the many reasons we should discount blowhards like Harriet Loyd of RISC … especially when she uses inflammatory rhetoric like trying to “eradicate” incumbents.

Speaking of nonsense from GoLocal, there is so much that is offensive about this story and the way it is presented, I hardly know where to start. How about with the stock photo of the bloody knife? GoLocal could write the same story about any weekend night on the East Greenwich waterfront, but I think it’s safe to say it wouldn’t.

Verizon is keeping a copy of the texts you send, and if asked they’ll share them with law enforcement.

Bill Clinton’s line of the night at the DNC: “We believe ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own.'”

Elizabeth Warren had a pretty good one too when she explained how corporations are not, in fact, people.

On this day in 1847, Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden after two years of living deliberately and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson.