Commentary Culture Investigations

On Saturday former Clinton advisor James Carville took to YouTube and delivered what purported to be a “Presidential History Lesson.” It was a fairly typical Carvillian rant, yet quite revealing about how worried the Democratic establishment is about the damage the DSA insurgency is doing to their party. He begins his diatribe with the 2000 election and insists that every Democrat loss from then on was caused by leftist attacks on the centrist candidates the party nominated. Thus, George W. Bush won in 2000 because Ralph Nader attacked Al Gore from the left. Likewise, Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders attacked her from the left.
As with the alleged theft of the 2000 election by SCOTUS, Carville is peddling a shopworn conspiracy theory unsupported by facts.
From there his history lesson ties Nader and Sanders to the current insurgency that the Democratic Socialists have launched and poses the following question: “Is their solution to beat Republicans, to run against Republicans? No, their solution is to beat Democrats.” He then adds this observation: “These people are so f*cking stupid, I don’t know what to say about them.” It’s difficult to argue with that assessment, of course, but Carville’s memory of presidential election results from 2000 onward diverges from the facts. For example, he repeats the obligatory canard about the Supreme Court gifting the presidency to George W. Bush by “stopping the recount.” In fact, Gore was never ahead during the initial count or the two subsequent recounts.
Nonetheless, Carville insists that Ralph Nader received enough support in Florida to permit the judicial theft of the Sunshine State’s electoral college votes: “Rehnquist, Scalia, et al. steal the presidential election, of which the media establishment says, well, the court has spoken.” Next he describes how Sanders cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election: “Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president … So he runs the whole time against Hillary on the dreaded massive income growth, the dreaded reality that we’re dealing with in foreign policy, the massive knowledge of knowing what the hell goes on in the world. But no, we got to blow the whole goddamn thing up again.” Yet, as John Sides wrote in the Washington Post in 2017:
It’s a perennial question whether supporters of losing primary candidates will vote for their party’s nominee in the general election. So let’s compare the Democratic primary with the Republican primary. In the VOTER Survey, only 3 percent of those supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reported voting for Hillary Clinton, as did 10 percent of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s supporters and 32 percent of Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s supporters. So, Sanders supporters were as likely to vote for Trump as Rubio’s supporters were to vote for Clinton, and less likely than Kasich supporters were to vote for Clinton.
As with the alleged theft of the 2000 election by SCOTUS, Carville is peddling a shopworn conspiracy theory unsupported by facts. But he’s not finished with his history lesson: “Since 1992, I think it’s seven elections, I think the Democrats won the popular vote, five, 92, 96, 2004, 12, 16, 20, 24, no, it’s eight. It was six out of eight.” In 1992 and 1996 his client won 43 and 49 percent of the popular vote respectively. In 2000 and 2004 Bush won 48 and 51 percent. In 2008 and 2012 Obama won 53 and 51 percent. In 2016 Clinton won 48 percent to Trump’s 46 percent. In 2020, Biden won 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent. In 2024 Trump won 50 percent to Harris’s 48 percent. But winning the popular vote isn’t how one becomes President.
As Carville himself says to the socialist insurgents in his party, “Run in a country with an electoral college … Run in that country, because that’s the one you live in. It’s not the one that you fantasize about at night. Run in a country where the most important thing to do in an election is to win the thing.” By that standard, Republicans have won 4 of the 7 presidential elections held beginning in 2000. This is why Carville loathes the Social Democrats: “I am a proud liberal. I am not a leftist. I don’t believe you ought to break the thing up.” Well, if Carville really believes that, he needs to go into TDS rehab, stop lying about recent electoral history and help purge his party of the “useful idiots” who are determined to “fundamentally change” it.
READ MORE from David Catron:
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CNBC sounds like a business channel, but it’s really just another liberal channel. When it thinks about the best “states for business,” they’re matching that with what they call “quality of life.” Some measures – health care, crime – make nonpartisan sense, but CNBC adds grades for “inclusiveness,” “protections” against discrimination, anti-gun “reforms,” and naturally, “reproductive rights.”

They touted their ongoing winner — Vermont, the Bernie Sanders State: 

The best states to live in for 2026: No. 1 has a six-year winning streak

The best states are the most liberal states? Scott Cohn’s report on Minnesota gives you a flavor:

Minnesota offers among the nation’s strongest guarantees of reproductive rights, according to analysis by the Guttmacher Institute. While there are few issues more divisive than abortion, the economics of it are becoming increasingly clear-cut since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision returned the jurisdiction to the states in 2022. A 2025 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found abortion bans “increase net migration outflows” and that ”(t)he effects are more prominent for single-person households than family households, which may reflect larger effects on younger adults.”

So being anti-baby is pro-business. Liberal groups are brought in to testify on behalf of blue states: 

The North Star State also offers strong protections against discrimination, and it earns a near-perfect score from Oxfam America for its worker protections such as the right of workers to organize.

In Maine, the Giffords gun controllers are the experts: 

After a horrific mass shooting spree in 2023 in Lewiston that left 18 people dead, Maine legislators passed a series of reforms that earned the state “most improved” honors in 2024 from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Cohn really stretched on behalf of Democrats in the Virginia section. Republicans have succeeded in reducing crime, but he wants to spread credit to the Democrats who came in and promptly imposed some gun control:

With just 218 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2024, Virginia had one of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation, according to FBI statistics. Ceasefire Virginia, launched in 2022 under Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans — and continuing under their Democratic successors, Abigail Spanberger and Jay Jones — targets gun violence in 13 municipalities in the Commonwealth with increased penalties for possession and use of firearms by convicted felons. An analysis of the program last year by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Public Policy credited it with a 10% decrease in homicides statewide through 2024, including a 24% reduction in homicides in Ceasefire localities. 

Back in 2023, CNBC’s Cohn picked all blue states for his top ten. This time, there were a couple of states Trump won in 2024, Nebraska and North Dakota. 

In 2018, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was quick to write off the death of Rankin County jail inmate William Wade Aycock IV as an accident. But an investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times unearthed new evidence in the case that suggests Aycock was killed. With support from the Fund, the reporting […]
The post Grantee uncovers evidence of murder in a Mississippi jail; story leads state to reopen the case and launch new investigation appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Iran, Israel and the United States are now engaged in war, with the fallout spreading across the region.Strikes have been reported in at least 18 provinces of Iran.

High-definition satellite imagery shows the massive destruction caused by the bombing of the compound of Iran’s supreme leader in the heart of Tehran.US President Donald Trump declared Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in the assault by Israel and the United States.

As a single mother of two, Leanne Farrugia was proud to secure a stable job as a junior prison guard at Metropolitan Remand & Reception Centre at Silverwater, in Sydney’s west, in 2018.That sense of security was shattered one night in May 2022. She was at home sick when her supervisor, then-senior correctional officer Scott Hawken, arrived at her house and drugged her.

BPMB’s 2019 Rejection of a Shareholder Restructuring Offer as Evidence of Targeted Destruction

New satellite imagery shows strikes hit at least seven buildings around an Iranian school where the country’s government said more than 150 mostly young girls were killed last Saturday.Funerals have been held for some of the people, including children, killed when the Shajereh Tayyebeh school was hit in the coastal city of Minab, according to state media.

Investigating the return of the Islamic State terrorist groupThe Bondi Beach terrorist attack signalled the resurgence of the Islamic State terrorist group in Australia.

WASHNGTON, DC; March 5, 2026 – The Fund for Investigative Journalism today announced that eight accomplished journalists have been awarded Alicia Patterson Fellowships to conduct public-service reporting this year. The annual fellowships foster independent, in-depth reporting on topics of public interest. The fellowships were established in 1965 in memory of Alicia Patterson, the founding editor […]
The post Eight Journalists Receive Alicia Patterson Fellowships for In-Depth Reporting in 2026 appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism.