Bernie is about to address the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in New Hampshire.

A flavor:

We began this campaign seven months ago. We had no organization, no money, very little national name recognition and were at 3 percent in the polls. Today, we have hundreds of thousands of volunteers in every state in the country, including some 5,600 here in New Hampshire. Today, without a super PAC, we have more than 800,000 individual contributors – more than any candidate in the history of our country at this point in a campaign for a first term. And, today, with your help, we are poised to pull off one of the great political upsets in the history of our country. We have come a long way in seven months. The people of this country want real change.

And:

And loudly and clearly, we must tell the Republicans. No. We will not cut Social Security benefits for the elderly and disabled veterans. We will expand those benefits by lifting the cap on taxable income and developing a new formula to determine cost-of-living adjustments.

Because when you hear people saying they “know how to get things done” with Republicans and they have people who want to cut Social Security holding fundraisers for them (which is what “chained CPI” is), then, you can understand that the political revolution will expand benefits for Social Security, while the status quo candidate will buy the “reform entitlement” meme that will lead to cuts in Social Security. Those are the facts, not the political lies.

About foreign policy:

As a member of Congress, I voted against the war in Iraq in 2002. I listened carefully to what President Bush, Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration were saying – and I didn’t believe them. And it gives me no joy to tell you that much of what I feared would happen, in terms of the destabilization of the region, did happen.

Today, we are confronted with a barbaric organization, called ISIS – an organization which must be destroyed – but I hope that we learned some of the very painful lessons of the past. And that is that we cannot and should not attempt to do it alone. We cannot and should not be trapped in perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

We need to put together a broad coalition including the strong participation of the Muslim countries in the region. While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations – with the strong support of their global partners – the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and Iran.

Bernie’s political revolution—in which he also acknowledges past disasters in US foreign policy that included CIA-supported coups of democratically elected governments—is based on wisdom, and the, gee, shocking notion that he did not believe George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who broke the law and should have been impeached. Is there any Democrat who would have believed those three? Of course not. Oh, oooppsss, that would be the status quo candidate.

Bernie further on foreign policy:

What does all of this mean? Well, it means that, in many cases, we must ask more from those in the region. While Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon have accepted their responsibilities for taking in Syrian refugees, other countries in the region have done nothing or very little.

Equally important, and this is a point that must be made – countries in the region like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE – countries of enormous wealth and resources – have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change. King Abdallah is absolutely right when he says that that the Muslim nations must lead the fight against ISIS, and that includes some of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the region, who, up to this point have done far too little.

Saudi Arabia has the third largest defense budget in the world, yet instead of fighting ISIS they have focused more on a campaign to oust Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Kuwait, a country whose ruling family was restored to power by U.S. troops after the first Gulf War, has been a well-known source of financing for ISIS and other violent extremists. It has been reported that Qatar will spend $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup, including the construction of an enormous number of facilities to host that event – $200 billion on hosting a soccer event, yet very little to fight against ISIS. Worse still, it has been widely reported that the government has not been vigilant in stemming the flow of terrorist financing, and that Qatari individuals and organizations funnel money to some of the most extreme terrorist groups, including al Nusra and ISIS.

All of this has got to change. Wealthy and powerful Muslim nations in the region can no longer sit on the sidelines and expect the United States to do their work for them. As we develop a strongly coordinated effort, we need a commitment from these countries that the fight against ISIS takes precedence over the religious and ideological differences that hamper the kind of cooperation that we desperately need.

Full prepared remarks here.

===========================================================================================

ORDER THE ESSENTIAL BERNIE SANDERS AND HIS VISION FOR AMERICA