**Written by Doug Powers

Another Sunday cavalcade of odds and ends is here. We’ll kick it off with the story of how one of America’s highest profile socialists and his wife are sharing their wealth… with defense lawyers:

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) wife Jane Sanders has booked top notch lawyers to defend her against allegations of bank fraud.

The FBI launched an investigation into loans Sanders applied for when she was president of Burlington College, alleging that she lied to qualify for them.

A January 2016 complaint filed by Donald Trump’s Vermont campaign chair, lawyer Brady Toensing, originally requested the investigation.

The complaint alleged that Mrs. Sanders lied on a 2010 loan application from People’s United Bank for $10 million to expand Burlington’s campus.

Any good socialist critic of capitalism knows that owning multiple homes is worth the allegations of hypocrisy because you never know when you’re going to need a s***load of collateral for a legal retainer.

However, Bernie might want to rethink his rule that the mere existence of an investigation is enough to assume the allegations are true:

Bank Fraud: http://t.co/5VCvlnNAR7 #JPM $JPM

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 6, 2013

Feel the Bern!

*****

The effort to establish health care utopia in California has stalled. At this point only one thing is holding back progressive legislators in the state: Reality:

A high-profile effort to establish a single-payer healthcare system in California sputtered Friday when Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) decided to shelve the proposal.
[…]
“SB 562 was sent to the Assembly woefully incomplete,” Rendon said in a statement. “Even senators who voted for SB 562 noted there are potentially fatal flaws in the bill, including the fact it does not address many serious issues, such as financing, delivery of care, cost controls, or the realities of needed action by the Trump administration and voters to make SB 562 a genuine piece of legislation.”

Under the measure, California would have paid the healthcare costs for all residents, eliminating premiums, copays and deductibles that are common fixtures in the current healthcare system.

Several key details were unresolved in the measure — most significantly how to pay for it. The program, which carried an estimated price tag of $330 billion to $400 billion, would have required new taxes to pay for it, but no sources of tax revenue were specified in the legislation.

The current challenge is finding a way to make nearly a half trillion dollar state expenditure sound “free,” but I’m sure they’ll come up with something.

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Keeping the focus on California for the moment, the state’s attorney general is vehemently opposed to “travel bans” — unless he isn’t:

California’s attorney general blocked state-funded travel to Texas and three other states on Thursday in response to what he considers anti-LGBT rights laws enacted this year.

Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra added Texas, Alabama, South Dakota and Kentucky to the list of places where state employee travel is restricted. Lawmakers passed legislation last year banning non-essential travel to states with laws that discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi and Tennessee are already on the list.

California taxpayers’ money “will not be used to let people travel to states who chose to discriminate,” Becerra said.

But no problem with millions of state taxpayer dollars spent on abortions, naturally.

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Trump saying he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement has provided some high profile alarmists with the opportunity to reinvent themselves as “let’s save the planet together” superheroes:

French President Emmanuel Macron has taken another swipe at Donald Trump over the US president’s policy on climate change – this time backed up by the muscle of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In a video on social media, Mr Macron is joined by the Terminator star as he vows to “make the planet great again”.

The video lecturing/mocking Trump for not taking emissions seriously enough would have made a much better statement if they’d have filmed it aboard Arnold’s private jet:

*****

Hillary Clinton leads by example like no other:

Your operating system vs. the operating system your programmers told you not to worry about. pic.twitter.com/18SyLfAgGp

— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) June 23, 2017

Her basket of deplorables overfloweth.

*****

Oh no, he’s running in 2020, isn’t he?

Mark Zuckerberg is in Iowa. “Iowa is my kind of place.” pic.twitter.com/75IDG3mKrV

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) June 24, 2017

Saved for possible filing under “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids, v2.0.”

Have a good Sunday all!

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe