California Democrats divided amidst their own dominance — along lines of class, geography and spending policy — can add another fracture line to the mix: the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for their party’s presidential nomination.

“En route to Hillary Clinton’s expected coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee, her party has been caught in an ideological clash pitting the former secretary of state’s loyalists against the factions backing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The feud is blazing not only nationally but in blue California too, where it is one of several schisms among Democrats.”

On the left, some observers reaching for an analogy to Sanders’ surprising strength as a candidate have invoked Upton Sinclair, a hero of Sanders’ who pulled a similar political move in his own rise to prominence. “[T]he closest antecedent is the campaign that socialist author Upton Sinclair waged for governor of California in 1934,” suggested Harold Meyerson, executive editor of The American Prospect, in the Los Angeles Times. “In the depths of the Depression, just one year after Franklin Roosevelt became president, Sinclair switched his party registration from Socialist to Democrat, a change unaccompanied, however, by shifts in his beliefs or ideology.”

Unanticipated consequences

As Sanders has exploited Clintons’ weaknesses as a candidate, putting both Iowa and New Hampshire in play, the Clinton campaign has shifted toward a combative approach that has not only raised eyebrows in its treatment of Sanders, but has also targeted Republicans in a way that could have unanticipated consequences in places like California, whose support Clinton has taken for granted.

Clinton, for instance, has risked an open disagreement with Sen. Dianne Feinstein over Inspector General Charles McCullough, who has been accused by the campaign of collaborating with Senate Republicans to push his view of the potential illegality of Clinton’s handling of confidential information in emails. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told CNN he thought McCullough “put two Republican senators up to sending him a letter so that he would have an excuse to resurface the same allegations he made back in the summer that have been discredited,” according to McClatchy.

But Feinstein has long been a McCullough supporter. “He has long experience conducting investigations both as an inspector general and a FBI agent,” she said in a 2011 floor speech, McClatchy noted. “He is an attorney and is well-familiar with the intelligence community.”

West coast schemes

Meanwhile, confidence in the Sanders camp has run high on the strength of poll numbers in states like California. Although Clinton still maintains a sizable lead over Sanders in the Golden State, the campaign’s deep dive into trends among state Democrats have convinced them that they can put its kind of voters in play after a strong showing in early primaries. Talking to the Washington Post, Tad Devine, chief Sanders strategist, cited a recent Field poll in California that showed Sanders at 35 percent to Clinton’s 46 percent — up from a February showing of just 10 percent — and a swing in Latino support for Sanders from 3.2 percent in May to 35.3 percent this month. “And that all occurred in a state where we have had no paid media,” he added. “I think it bodes well for our potential to win substantial support from Latinos, African Americans and others as they come to know more about Bernie and his plans for their future.”

“Against all odds and expectations, enrollments in health plans qualified under the Affordable Care Act are surging Monday toward — and maybe beyond — the 7-million figure projected by the Congressional Budget Office before Oct. 1, when the open-enrollment period began. The deadline for starting enrollment applications for 2014 plans is midnight Monday.

“The surge is creating a big problem for the ‘train wreck’ narrative of Republican opponents of the ACA, who have been holding out hope for Obamacare’s utter failure. So the excuse-making has begun.”

Here’s what’s really going on, in particular with Covered California, our state’s implementation of Obamacare.

Item 1:

“LA MESA, Calif. – A local couple called 10News concerned after they received an envelope from the state’s Obamacare website, Covered California. Inside was a letter discussing voter registration and a registration card pre-marked with an “x” in the box next to Democratic Party. 

“The couple – who did not want their identity revealed – received the letter and voter registration card from their health insurance provider Covered California, the state-run agency that implements President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.”

Yep, it’s really all about registering more Democrats, who then will vote for more socialist programs.

Well, not all about that.

Item 2:

“SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — On the deadline to sign up for health coverage through Covered California, some hearing-impaired residents were sent to a chat line offering ‘hot ladies’ instead of an insurance navigator.”

That must be what Hiltzik means about there being no “train wreck” over Obamacare.

By John Seiler

Youngsters finally are figuring out that going $100,000 in debt to get a degree in poststructural-prepostmodern-quasistructuralist-semiFoucaulist-political-correctness with no chance of a job isn’t exactly the best way to start out in life.

A new study released today by the Public Policy Institute of California found, in the Contra Costa Times summary:

“From 2007 to 2010, the percentage of graduates attending University of California or California State University campuses fell by 20 percent….

“Fewer than 18 percent of California high school graduates ended up at a Cal State or UC campus in 2010, down from 22 percent in 2007. And 55 percent of the most highly prepared students enroll there, down from 67 percent.

“About one in 10 who reject admissions offers from the state universities choose not to go to college at all….”

College still can be a good deal if you’re pursuing a degree in a technical or scientific subject, such as chemistry or engineering. They still have standards. If you reject Newton’s physics as coming from the “sexist patriarchal oppressors,” the bridge you build will collapse, people will die and you might go to prison for negligence.

But the humanities departments are hopeless. With only a few exceptions, they’re suffused with cultural Marxism.

Murderous Marxism lives

It’s kind of funny, in a mortifying sort of way. Political and economic Marxism died with the Soviet Union 21 years ago after murdering more than 100 million people around world, from Lenin’s and Stalin’s Gulag to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to the killing fields of Cambodia.

Yet Marxism lives in American universities as a cultural excrescence.

So, kids, stay away from it. Start your lives right now. Don’t go to college and get into debt.

Are you intersted in Shakespeare? Then read him, attend local performances of the plays and watch videos of the plays, such as those the BBC produced three decades ago (available on Netflix and in libraries).

If you’re interested in a scientific or technical field, you’ll probably still have to go to college. The way to get through the P.C. college humanities courses mostly undamaged by the academic Stalinism is to take advanced placement tests. If you can’t do that, take courses at your local community college, where the tuition is much cheaper and you’re more likely to get a non-Maoist professor.

Read on your own. Read alternative Web sites like this one. Some of my favorites: LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com. The Mises Institute has hundreds of free books online on libertarianism and free market economics. Use it.

Want to get into business? Then start one. There are copious books an free Web sites on how to do so. Most new businesses fail. Then start again. My suggestion: Don’t go into debt doing so. Business debt can be as bad as college debt.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college. Edison and Ford never went. You don’t need it.

Here’s a good Walter Williams article on how college is a waste for so many.

Another by Marc Slavo on why college is the biggest scam in U.S. history.

And here’s a YouTube of a smart girl saying “farewell to college.” She gives me hope in the rising generation.