who lived in the backwoods of Stannard years ago that could tell stories... more real earthy dirt than anything else

It is interesting how we make fun of Trump voters willingness to ignore Trump's scandals in the face of facts. Yet, when confronted with facts regarding Bernie's history of nepotism and self-dealing, Bernie supporters act in similar fashion.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/impeachment-doesn-t-shake-trump-voters-but-sows-doubt-on-biden

These smears are the equivalent of the Hunter Biden nonsense. I'm sure Republicans will try to make something out of it, but there's nothing there.

Did Joe Biden hire Hunter Biden and and pay him with tax-exempt charitable proceeds or campaign funds?

Now, did Bernie Sanders hire David Driscoll and Levi Sanders for either his campaign or his charitable foundation and pay them with charitable proceeds or campaign funds?

The Hunter Biden allegations are nonsense because there are no facts to support the idea that Joe Biden took any action to benefit Hunter Biden. In contrast, it is safe to assume that Bernie Sanders has some control over who is hired for own campaign and private foundation.

This is not some guilt by association where David Driscoll or Levi Sanders are hired by some third party. Its nepotism, because Bernie Sanders did the hiring.

For example, as I've pointed out before, that foundation was not Bernie's, it was Jane and her son who started and ran it. These right-wing attacks on Bernie, just like the right-wing attacks on Biden, are based on lies and insinuations. Nothing illegal or unethical occurred. I have no idea why these smears are being repeated on a Democratic Forum.

Yes, this probably would be used against Bernie in the general election, just like the Hunter Biden stuff would be used against Biden. That doesn't make it any less nonsense.

For example, as I've pointed out before, that foundation was not Bernie's, it was Jane and her son who started and ran it. These right-wing attacks on Bernie, just like the right-wing attacks on Biden, are based on lies and insinuations. Nothing illegal or unethical occurred. I have no idea why these smears are being repeated on a Democratic Forum.

Yes, this probably would be used against Bernie in the general election, just like the Hunter Biden stuff would be used against Biden. That doesn't make it any less nonsense.

In other words, like I said it’s not Bernie’s foundation in any sense. He didn’t run it. He wasn’t on the board. Nothing.

Also, there wasn’t anything illegal or unethical that happened. At all.

This whole thing, the story is that a think tank which Bernie wasn’t a part of did nothing wrong. Really! It’s hilarious.

used people they knew to do work for them and that the company these people are part of received the standard commission for performing the services they performed?

Yes this is huge!

because I suppose for accounting reasons there have to be receipts.
But what stands out is that the Sanders family and friends do such a great job of enriching themselves by this campaign. Either by creating jobs for family members or using middle men they know for expenditures who then receive millions of commissions for it.

but I do agree with your point about career politicians doing such a clever job of enriching family and friends by manipulating the system.

Mahalo

The interesting thing is that Olde Towne Media, LLC does not show up in Virginia Secretary of State database even though it pulled in this huge amount as you note. How does a company with millions of dollars in revenues disappear without a trace?

https://cis.scc.virginia.gov/

However, if you look up Olde Towne Media, LLC in Florida corporation database, there is a company by that name:

http://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ByName

The Olde Towne Media company is headed by a Thomas Driscoll, III, and a Denise Driscoll, which is just weird given that Bernie's step children are David and Carina Driscoll. It is just amazing that so little is known about a company with so much revenues and expenses.

http://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResults?inquiryType=EntityName&searchNameOrder=OLDETOWNEMEDIA&searchTerm=Olde%20Towne%20Media%2C%20LLC

It would be kind of funny to see Lindsey.Graham saying LOL instead of nothingbudger to try to dismiss evidence of corruption.

'VTDigger is an investigative journalism platform that reports on politics, businesses, events, and public policy of Vermont.[1] VTDigger was founded in September 2009 by its current Executive Director, Anne Galloway, who was nominated for the "Vermonter of the Year Award" by The Burlington Free Press in 2016.[2] In 2010, VTDigger merged with the Vermont Journalism Trust,[3] a non-profit organization that currently publishes the site.[1] Published by a non-profit, a substantial part of its support comes from a governmental unit(s) and/or from the general public, including sponsors, gifts, and organization membership.[3] According to the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), "In the second least-populous state in the country, VTDigger is averaging nearly 300,000 monthly users, has a staff of 19 full-time employees, and an annual budget over $1.5 million" as of May 2018.[3] VTDigger has received substantial public support from government agencies and other sources, including over $1.725 million in 2016, $1.37 million in 2017, and $941,243 in 2018 (which represents 75.850 % of total revenue in 2018). VTDigger made only $21,816 from advertising revenue in 2018. Executive Director, Anne Galloway, reported total compensation of $64,519 from VTDigger in 2018.[4]'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTDigger

In stories about shady dealings.

The interesting thing is that Olde Towne Media, LLC does not show up in Virginia Secretary of State database:

https://cis.scc.virginia.gov/

However, if you look up Olde Towne Media, LLC in Florida's corporation database, there is a company by that name. The Olde Towne Media company is headed by a Thomas Driscoll, III, and a Denise Driscoll.

http://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResults?inquiryType=EntityName&searchNameOrder=OLDETOWNEMEDIA&searchTerm=Olde%20Towne%20Media%2C%20LLC

you know, Manafort's ex partner. the $10,000 a day guy.

I went to Bernie's Wiki for some basic info, I forgot his age and other stuff. This immediately popped out:

'After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he briefly had a variety of jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter.[24] In 1968 he moved to Stannard, Vermont a town small in both area and population (88 residents at the 1970 census) within Vermont's extremely rural "Northeast Kingdom" region, because he had been "captivated by rural life".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders#cite_note-Politico-28


Which I knew was totally wrong. He moved to Vermont in '64. The sources were:

"By the time Sanders graduated, both his parents had died, and his brother had moved to England. (Larry Sanders, who became a social worker and a Green Party councillor, lives in Oxford.) Jane Sanders told me that it had taken her a long time to realize quite how “alone in the world” her future husband had been during his late teens and early twenties. He did a stint on a kibbutz in Israel, worked as an aide at a psychiatric hospital, taught in a Head Start program, and had a carpentry business with a few other guys in New York. It was called Creative Carpentry, and Rader says that it was accurately named: “They advertised in the Village Voice, but didn’t know much about carpentry. They’d go to the hardware store to buy supplies, and ask the clerk how to do the repairs they’d been hired to do.”

Sanders got married for the first time, to a woman named Deborah Shiling, just after college, and they took a road trip from New York to Vermont, where Sanders had never been. The couple ended up buying eighty-five acres of wooded land near Montpelier, for twenty-five hundred dollars. They had preceded the waves of back-to-the-land hippies. Sanders told me, convincingly, “I wasn’t a hippie.” He’d been enchanted by the thought of living in lush, green Vermont ever since he and his brother had collected some travel brochures touting the state’s farms.'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/the-populist-prophet


And:

'In 1964 he graduated with a degree in political science and got married in Baltimore.

That summer, not quite 23, he and his wife, Deborah Sanders, bought for $2,500 some property in Vermont, near Montpelier in the town of Middlesex off Shady Rill Road, according to property records. He wanted to live in the country, he has said, and had some inheritance money from his father, who had died in 1963. They spent parts of the next few summers on the property, living in what had been a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor. The marriage ended only two years after it began, in 1966.

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

By 1968, he was living in Vermont full time. On March 17, 1969, according to records, Sanders bought another property, in out-of-the-way Stannard, with a population of fewer than 200 people, in the rural area of Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom. Four days later, Levi Noah Sanders was born, at Brightlook Hospital in St. Johnsbury, Vermont; according to his birth certificate, his mother was a woman named Susan Campbell Mott.'

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927_full.html


Politico has the date of move right. New Yorker doesn't say. Neither mention Stannard as his original destination. He did move there in '68. How can wiki be so wrong?

Googled Wiki wrong about Sanders and got VT Digger:


Bernie Sanders’ early days in Vermont: His life, loves and circuitous route to politics

'One period of his life, the years from 1964 to 1971, however, has been left unexplained. In media profiles of the senator, Sanders is transported from graduation at the University of Chicago to his idealistic foray into politics with the Liberty Union party.'


'Sanders didn’t let the dream die, though. Shortly after he graduated on June 13, 1964, with a B.A. from the University of Chicago in political science, he moved to Vermont.

News reports have pegged his move to Vermont to much later in the 1960s, and the locations cited are either Burlington, as the New York Times reported recently, or Middlesex, which is tied to the purchase of a piece of land with his then-wife Deborah as Mother Jones reported in May.

Both accounts are incorrect.

As is a story from the National Journal that reports Sanders lived in New York City immediately after graduation.

Though Sanders’ early days in Vermont have been portrayed as that of a revolutionary, his actual life in the late 1960s and early 1970s was like that of any 20-something.

Sanders came to Vermont with Deborah Messing, his college sweetheart, in 1964. Recently married, they bought 85 acres in central Vermont that August for $2,500. It’s been called the sugar shack in the press, and a love shack by locals in the town of Middlesex, but the small structure on Shady Rill Road wasn’t by any means a permanent residence. It had running water and no electricity. Messing and Sanders left Vermont and traveled through Europe, just as the war in Vietnam was escalating. About 18 months later, in 1966, they divorced.'

'Messing says the story that he came to Vermont “with his first wife, had a kid and moved to Stannard,” as cited by Wikipedia, is also incorrect. “I never moved to Stannard,” Messing says.'

https://vtdigger.org/2015/07/09/bernie-sanders-early-days-in-vermont-his-life-loves-and-circuitous-route-to-politics/


New York Times has facts wrong. New Yorker has facts wrong. Politico has facts wrong. Mother Jones has facts wrong. National Journal has facts wrong. Wikipedia has facts wrong still (VT Digger pointed this out in 2015). And something new to me and not reported in any of those, 'Messing and Sanders left Vermont and traveled through Europe...'

Certainly not noted on this ace resume of Bernie's:



Not long on details is it?

How Encyclopedia Britannica covers those 7 years:

'After graduating, he lived on a kibbutz in Israel.

Upon returning to the United States, Sanders moved to Vermont, participating in the communal back-to-the-land movement and working as a union carpenter and freelance journalist. He also became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, which drew him into electoral politics.'

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bernie-Sanders

Not long on details either. Nothing about that traveling through Europe. But at least they mentioned kibbutz. Which just about everyone left out save New Yorker.

Have we ever had a Presidential candidate with such a fucked up timeline. I can tell you every place I've been in my life, at what date and for how long. Same with jobs. What, when, where, and for how long. With addresses, phone numbers, and contacts. Not Bernie. It's all a mystery.