On their fitness for the office of Pres. of the U.S. : Hillary Rodham Clinton vs. Donald John Trump

"We did the "young black man, community-organizer with 'slacker-to-Ivy-League' background.' I loved doing that one; my favorite part was how the Blacks flocked to this guy who, in every respect which counts, is as "White" as any wealthy early 20th-century private country-club member ever was! God! how they still admire him!

"Okay, we'll just vary the recipe slightly. A woman--yes. That's easy. We'll have one with a sort of liberal-lefty-ish patina but who's thoroughly a sell-out--of course. After all, it's not our business to fund real opposition."

"But you're not even trying to challenge yourself. Where's the fun in it?"

"What do you suggest?"

"Well, for pity's sake!, do something interesting for once! Of course we can put up a phony liberal woman. Where's the challenge in that? How about one who's widely known and despised and distrusted? Now that has some art and interest in it. I'm bored of this easy repetitive stuff. Let's do a pseudo-Lefty PC woman who's despised as a lying bitch. Otherwise we're just shooting ducks in a barrel."

POLITICO Magazine
Why Some of the Smartest Progressives I Know Will Vote for Trump over Hillary

By YVES SMITH¹June 01, 2016

(excerpt)
••• ••• "True progressives, as opposed to the Vichy Left, recognize that the Clintons only helped these inequities along. They recognize that, both in the 1990s and now, the Clintons do not and have never represented them. They believe the most powerful move they can take to foster change is to withhold their support.

Some of them also have very reasoned arguments for Trump. Hillary is a known evil. Trump is unknown. They'd rather bet on the unknown, since it will also send a big message to Team Dem that they can no longer abuse progressives. I personally know women in the demographic that is viewed as being solidly behind Hillary—older, professional women who live in major cities—who regard Trump as an acceptable cost of getting rid of the Clintons.

••• •••
"What they also object to is that the larger bloc of Sanders voters has been treated with abuse and contempt by the Clinton camp, despite the fact that their positions—such as strengthening Social Security and Medicare, stronger educational funding and higher minimum wages—have for decades polled by solid majorities or, at worst, ample pluralities in the electorate at large.

"By contrast, the Democratic Party in the Clinton and Obama administrations has consistently embraced and implemented policies that strip workers of economic and legal rights to benefit investors and the elite professionals that serve them. Over time, the 'neoliberal' economic order—which sees only good, never bad, in the relentless untrammeling of capital and the deregulation of markets—has created an unacceptable level of economic insecurity and distress for those outside the 1 percent and the elite professionals who serve them.

The result is that the U.S. economy is becoming lethal to the less fortunate, according to the New York Times, which reported this week that U.S. death rates have risen for the first time in a decade. The increase in death rates among less educated whites since 2001 is roughly the size of the AIDS epidemic. One cause, the opioid epidemic, resulted from Purdue Pharma overselling the effectiveness of reformulated OxyContin, then recommending higher dosages when it failed to work properly, which experts deemed a prescription for creating addicts, according to a number of lawsuits. This was permitted by the U.S. government, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Despite President Barack Obama’s Panglossian claim that the economy is doing well, the spike in suicides to levels over those during the financial crisis belies that.

"Yet the Clinton campaign is in such denial about this that it has become vitriolic in its verbal and tactical attacks on Sanders and his supporters—rather than recognizing that the stunning success of his campaign is proof of their abject policy failures. The message is clear: The Clintons believe, as Bill himself put it, that the true progressives have nowhere to go.

"But in fact, they’ve been leaving. The Clinton and Obama administrations presided over the worst losses in congressional and state races in modern history in 1994, 2010 and 2012. And voter preferences were clear. Under Obama, it was the Blue Dog, Third Way Democrats who were turfed out, while candidates with strong stances on economic justice kept their seats. Similarly, as political scientist Tom Ferguson pointed out in a Roosevelt Institute paper, Obama’s loss of a Senate majority when Republican Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was the result of his focus on bailing out banks rather than aiding distressed homeowners (or forcing mortgage services to give modifications to borrowers who still had adequate income, as banks had done historically). The level of votes for Brown was strongly correlated with the amount of foreclosures in those particular districts.

"True progressives know that the Clinton and Obama presidencies have brought inequality to Gilded Era, banana-republic levels. They know that Obama’s policies, which the Clintons embrace, have had all of the post-crisis income gains accrue to the top 1 percent. In addition, corporate profits have risen to nearly double the ratio to GDP that Warren Buffett deemed unsustainably high in the early 2000s. Unlike China, they’ve also ushered in an era of high unemployment and underemployment, as reflected in unheard-of low levels of labor force participation and unemployment among the young in a nominal expansion.

"The Clintons’ dismal record, which Hillary cannot run away from, speaks for itself. And this is what makes many progressives I know unable to support her, even if she wins the nomination. Consider the reasons why they feel this way:

Social Security. Bill Clinton made a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security, but Monica Lewinsky derailed his plans. Sanders has promised to strengthen Social Security. By contrast, Clinton wants to “preserve” it, which includes means-testing. That would put Social Security on a path to being a welfare program, not a universal safety net, making it vulnerable in the long run. Bill Clinton’s ending of welfare is an illustration of the regular pattern, dating back to England’s Poor Law of 1834, of gutting safety nets for the poor.

Climate change. Sanders calls for a full-bore, Marshall-Plan level commitment to reducing carbon output. Hillary talks about climate change but pushed for fracking in Europe while secretary of state. The Clintons remain firmly committed to fracking, which ruins water supplies and releases large amounts of methane.

Minimum wage. Inflation-adjusted minimum wage increases under Clinton were negligible—virtually identical to those under George H.W. Bush. Obama promised a minimum wage increase to $9.50 an hour and failed to act in the first four years of his presidency. Sanders wants to raise minimum wages to $15 an hour, while Clinton stands pat with the administration plan to increase wages to $12 an hour by 2020.

Trade deals. Bill Clinton ushered in NAFTA, which was touted as positive for growth and employment, and is now widely acknowledged to have cost nearly a million jobs. Even one of its chief promoters, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now deems it to have been a failure for American workers. Hillary consistently backed the Trans-Pacific Partnership until Sanders made an issue of it, and she’s recently returned to supporting it. The potential growth and income gains from this agreement and its European sister, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are only marginally positive, while the loss of national sovereignty would be enormous. These agreements would enable foreign investors to challenge laws for labor, environmental and consumer protection, for threatening future profits.

Health care. Sanders wants single-payer, government-provided health care. Around the world, single payer has uncontestably demonstrated that it delivers better results overall at vastly lower cost. Obamacare took single payer off the table, instead rearranging the current costly, clumsy system while guaranteeing profits for health insurers and Big Pharma. Clinton at most has offered patches, but the pressure from Sanders has compelled her to suggest an early buy-in for Medicare.

"That’s before we get to the Clintons’ loyalty to the Robert Rubin and neoliberal fetish of balanced budgets, which most economists say are not necessary. The recent European experience with austerity shows how disastrous that approach is, particularly in the wake of a financial crisis. Hillary’s hawkishness means an even greater commitment to military spending, so voters are assured to get more guns and less butter were she to become president.

"The Sanders supporters I interact with also reject Hillary’s trickle-down feminism as a substitute for economic and social justice. Clinton is correct when she points out that there is a glass-ceiling issue for women. There are fewer female CEOs, billionaires and senators. Women in the elite don’t have it as good as men. But pray tell, what is having more women, or Hispanics or blacks, in top roles going to do for nurses and hospital orderlies, or the minority group members disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs like part-time fast food workers? Class mobility has become close to nonexistent in America. If you are born in one of the lower-income cohorts, you are almost certain to stay there.

"As a woman who broke through an important glass ceiling on Wall Street—Christina Mohr, the first woman to become partner in mergers and acquisitions at Lazard—told a shocked group at Radcliffe seeking better career opportunities for women many years ago: “Nothing will change until women own the means of production.” And that sort of change comes from the bottom up.

"Then there are questions of competence. Hillary has a résumé of glittering titles with disasters or at best thin accomplishments under each. Her vaunted co-presidency with Bill? After her first major project, health care reform, turned into such a debacle that it was impossible to broach the topic for a generation, she retreated into a more traditional first lady role. As New York senator, she accomplished less with a bigger name and from a more powerful state than Sanders did. As secretary of state, she participated and encouraged strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria. She bureaucratically outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention in Libya, which he has called the worst decision of his administration. And her plan to fob her domestic economic duties off on Bill comes off as an admission that she can’t handle being president on her own.

Mind you, these issues are all topics in the current debates. But what is as important, but not as obvious, is the way that most citizens have been stripped of legal and economic protections. As economist Michael Hudson put it, “Most inequality does not reflect differing levels of productivity, but distortions resulting from property rights or other special privileges." The Clinton era brought in weaker anti-trust enforcement, which allowed companies to accumulate more market share and with it, more ability to extract rents. Binding arbitration, which strips employees and consumers of their right to a day in court, has become widespread. Pensions, which used to be sacrosanct (and still are if you are a CEO), are regularly renegotiated. Banks got away with predatory servicing and wrongful foreclosures. Not only was the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement a “get out of liability almost free” card so large that it was tantamount to a second bailout, but banks were not required to fix their faulty servicing platforms, assuring that they’d revert to foreclosure abuses again when delinquencies rise. And let us not forget that senior bankers are a protected class, exempt from prosecution.

Finally, there is the stench of corruption, dating back to Hillary’s impossible—by any legitimate means—trick of parlaying $1,000 into $100,000 in a series of commodities trades in 1978. The Clintons and their backers seriously expect the rubes to believe that large financial firms happily forked over their hefty speaking fees purely out of interest in what they had to say, or that Middle Eastern and Taiwanese moneybags gave big bucks to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was
secretary of state out of their deep belief in the foundation’s lofty goals. Why has Hillary refused to release the transcripts of her Goldman speeches, wiped her server and foot-dragged on releasing allegedly personal emails?

The Sanders voters in Naked Capitalism’s active commentariat also explicitly reject lesser-evilism, the cudgel that has previously kept true lefties somewhat in line. They are willing to gamble, given that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter and celebrity governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura didn’t get much done, that a Trump presidency represents an acceptable cost of inflicting punishment on the Democratic Party for 20 years of selling out ordinary Americans.

The Clintons, like the Bourbons before the French Revolution, have ensconced themselves in such a bubble of operative and media sycophancy that they’ve mistakenly viewed escalating distress and legitimate demands from citizens as mere noise. Sanders voters are taking their cue from Talleyrand, the statesman who navigated the Revolution and the turbulent 50 years that followed with remarkable success: “I have never abandoned a party before it abandoned itself.”

If my readers are representative, Clinton and the Democratic Party are about to have a long-overdue day of reckoning."

¹ : "Yves Smith" is the pen name of Susan Webber, a principal of Aurora Advisors and publisher of the Naked Capitalism economics blog.

© 2016 POLITICO LLC

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/wall-street-2016-donald-trump-hil...

... "voting for Trump (or advocating for the same, in any fashion) remains anathema for me. The thought of Trump having command of the world's largest nuclear arsenal is, as I have stated elsewhere, absolutely terrifying, as is the thought of one of the most profoundly undiplomatic human beings I have ever seen running for public office being placed in charge of US diplomacy. I would expect any reasonably objective and intelligent person to feel the same way."

Clinton camp attacks Trump over 'deranged' health rumors

By ZACH MONTELLARO 08/16/16 09:02 PM EDT

"Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Tuesday pushed back (emphasis added) against rumors circulating on right-wing media sites that her health is failing, issuing a statement slamming Donald Trump for pushing "deranged conspiracy theories."

“ 'While it is dismaying to see the Republican nominee for president push deranged conspiracy theories in a foreign policy speech, it’s no longer surprising,' said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communication director, in the statement."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/clinton-camp-smacks-down-health-rumors-227...

Clinton Foundation won’t accept foreign, corporate donations if Clinton wins"

The decision comes in the midst of mounting criticism of how the Foundation operated during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

By Abby Phillip and Rosalind S. Helderman

CGI, launched in 2005, is an arm of the foundation that hosts gatherings bringing together government leaders, private companies and not-for-profit organizations to discuss ways to (get rich pretending to) solve the world’s problems.

The initiative’s chief event is an annual meeting in New York City, tied to the United Nations General Assembly. The meetings provide networking opportunities for participants and a forum for private companies to make pledges to conduct charitable projects around the world, monitored by the Clinton Foundation."

-----------
If you were born yesterday or have just fallen out of the turnip-truck, a bit of explanatory rephrasing : the above language refers to the new fangled version (2.0) of what also goes by the name of bad old corporate lobbying and shopping for influence with people in and close to power.

In other words, a convention/trade-fair for elite influence-peddling.



" Dear SUCKERS --er, VOTERS! :

"Elect me!--and I promise¹--cross my black, wicked, crooked fucking heart--that maybe I'll be slightly less² of a money-grubbing, influence-peddling slut.³"

Your BFF,

"Hills"

--------

¹ : Gotcha! Fingers crossed! Only valid if I decide not to lie about it now or later. ;^)

² : For only some of the time during my tenure as POTUS, of course. A girl has to make hundreds of millions of dollars. "Diamonds Donors are a girl's best friends™."

³ : Don't elect me--and all bets (and faked promises) are off!

-------

Trump expresses regret over causing ‘personal pain’ with ill-chosen words By Jose A. DelReal, Robert Costa and Jenna Johnson
| 18 August 2016 at 20:22 hrs.

CHARLOTTE — Donald Trump (speaking on condition of anonymity) on Thursday expressed (conditional) regret over (his advisors' advice --which he had followed) causing (potential) “personal pain” through (their) ill-chosen words he has used “in the heat of debate,” an unexpected and uncharacteristic declaration of remorse for a candidate whose public persona is defined by his (wildly successful press headline-jacking) combative and bombastic style.

"Speaking during his first campaign rally since rebooting his (artificial brain used to run his) campaign, the Republican presidential nominee sought to frame himself as a truth-telling candidate who occasionally crosses boundaries in that pursuit. He also sought to contrast himself with his Democratic rival, Crooked Hillary (Clinton), whom he accused of (an incredibly polished and hardly-to-be-believed-professionalism in her) dishonesty and pandering.

“Sometimes in the heat of debate, and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don't choose the right words--(I, personally speaking, do, but you might not) or you say the wrong thing (--not that I ever have). I (suppose some people have got the idea that l) have done that," Trump said, with a slight smile, during a campaign rally here.

“And believe it or not, I regret it. I do regret it (that they got that idea), particularly where it may have caused (a loss to my vote-gaining popularity and, therefore my) personal pain. Too much is at stake for us (--but, really, mainly for me) to be consumed with these issues,” he said. (So I'm suggesting that you forget all that and let by-gones be by-gones. I want the nuclear codes. And power. And prestige--prestige is good. Elect me so that together we can make me president, make America great again and make Crooked Hillary and Bill wear the great big red "L" for Losers!

Officially yours,

The Donald.

So just his Islamaphobia then?

Bye the bye. Since you did not profess your own personal opinion whether Mr Trump is sexist or racist.

>35 proximity1: "You cannot show by any reasonable and evidenced-based argument that Trump is either sexist or racist."

Claiming only insufficient evidence to convict. Let us pretend that this is merely a civil case.

In your opinion is the prepondance of evidence that Mr Trump is not a racist?

Does the balance of probabilities suggest to you that Mr Trump is not a sexist?

His detractors, even within his own party, most assuredly are of the opinion that the evidence in support of claims of sexism, racism, and islamaphobia is overwhelming enough to disqualify him from the office of president.

2. Clinton is also a sicko wad of filthy filth - but of a much better class, obviously, than the micro-dick guy. She at least knows how the game is played and thus will play the game within the normal bounds and rules. TITS - she won't bring a baseball bat and a soccer ball to a basketball game, or wear scuba gear to a chess match, analogously-speaking.

1. trump is a Three-headed Hellhound from Neptune. He is an embarrassment to our entire solar system. Let us not waste time speaking of him again, shall we?

2. Clinton is also a sicko wad of filthy filth - but of a much better class, obviously, than the micro-dick guy.

She at least knows how the game is played and thus will play the game within the normal bounds and rules. TITS - she won't bring a baseball bat and a soccer ball to a basketball game, or wear scuba gear to a chess match, analogously-speaking.

"HRC has magnanimously offered to leave off taking bribes to The Clinton Foundation if elected President (at least while she is President, that is). I think that is quite a concession from a narcissistic sociopathic lying piece of crap. Kudos.

The U.S. voter in the majority will take up her promise and vote her in as President - that is my solemn prediction.

If not, then see #1 above.

The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics
by Martin Jacques | Sunday, 21 August, 2016 | from The Sunday Observer / Guardian Opinion pages

■■■ "The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade, with no end in sight.

--- After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long?¹ Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world. •••
•••

---------

¹: I suggest the answer is news organizations like The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MS-NBC, The BBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's PBS & National Public Radio and the gullible who rely on them as well as people like you.

The thing about Trump is he's got no clue about the economy--no clue about foreign policy--no clue about climate change--we could go on and on

--no clue on anything really. Just a lot of bombast and hot air mixed in with an unhealthy dose of racism and racism is a sickness. The best thing I can say for him after over a year of listening to his shit is he's been consistently against TPP.

He's not a rational choice to vote for simply because he hasn't made himself into one.

Scott Dadich | Culture | Date of Publication: 08.18.16. | Time of Publication: 12:00 am.


( Headline ) : WIRED Endorses Optimism

" WIRED has never been neutral.

"For nearly a quarter of a century, this organization has championed a specific way of thinking about tomorrow. If it’s true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures break through to our present and identify which one we hope for.

"Our founders—Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly—all supported a strain of optimistic libertarianism native to Silicon Valley. The future they endorsed was the one they saw manifested in the early Internet: one where self-organizing networks would replace old hierarchies. To them, the US government was one of those kludgy, inefficient legacy systems that mainly just get in the way.

"Over the past couple of decades, we’ve gotten to watch their future play out: We’ve seen the creative energies of countless previously invisible communities unleashed—and, well, we’ve watched networks become just as good at concentrating wealth and influence in the hands of a few people as the old hierarchies were. We’ve seen geeks become billionaires, autocrats become hackers, and our readers (people curious about how technology is shaping the world) become the American mainstream. Like any sane group of thinkers, we’ve calibrated our judgments along the way. But much of our worldview hasn’t changed. We value freedom: open systems, open markets, free people, free information, free inquiry. We’ve become even more dedicated to scientific rigor, good data, and evidence-driven thinking. And we’ve never lost our optimism.

"I bring all this up because, for all of its opinions and enthu­siasms, WIRED has never made a practice of endorsing candidates for president of the United States. Through five election cycles we’ve written about politics and politicians and held them up against our ideals. But we’ve avoided telling you, our readers, who WIRED viewed as the best choice.

"Today we will. WIRED sees only one person running for president who can do the job: Hillary Clinton.

"Right now we see two possible futures welling up in the present. In one, society’s every decision is dominated by scarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs.

"In the other future, the one WIRED is rooting for, new rounds of innovation allow people to do more with less work—in a way that translates into abundance, broadly enjoyed. Governments and markets and entrepreneurs create the conditions that allow us to take effective collective action against climate change. The flashlight beam of science keeps turning up cool stuff in the corners of the universe. The grand social experiments of the 20th and early 21st centuries—the mass entry of women into the workforce, civil rights, LGBTQ rights—continue and give way to new ones that are just as necessary and unsettling and empowering to people who got left out of previous rounds. And the sustainably manufactured, genetically modified fake meat tastes really good too."

°°° °°°

... "But having met Clinton and talked about all these issues with her, I can tell you that her mastery of issues and detail is unlike that of any politician I’ve met. She comes to every policy conversation steeped in its history and implications, and with opinions from a diverse set of viewpoints. She is a technician, and we like technicians.

°°° °°°

... "Her campaign has been trying to incept us with these ideas for months now, of course: Her vision is bright and forward-looking; Donald Trump’s is dark and atavistic. She’s qualified, she knows the material; Trump is all bluster. We happen to believe that for all the barbs aimed at Hillary Clinton—the whole calculating, tactical, Tracy Flick enchilada—she is the only candidate who can assess the data, consult with the people who need to be heard, and make decisions that she can logically defend. Sure, she’s calculating. She’s tactical. There are worse things you can ask of a person with nuclear codes.

Perhaps you feel like this is a low bar: Support a candidate because she believes in science? Get behind a politician because she approaches policymaking like a professional? Maybe you were hoping to be more inspired. We think the opportunity presented to us is more than inspiring enough. The country can go one of two ways, right now: toward a future where working together in good faith has a chance, or toward nihilism.

Trump’s campaign started out like something from The Onion. Now it has moved into George Orwell–as–interpreted–by–Paul Verhoeven territory. When he isn’t insulting the parents of a dead soldier, or promising to build an impossible wall between the US and Mexico to keep out rapists, or advocating a ban on Muslims, he’s saying that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the founders of ISIS, or that “Second Amendment people” should do something about his opponent, or that he watched a nonexistent video of a plane delivering cash to Iran. And that’s mostly stuff he said in the space of a few weeks.

When Trump beats up on Clinton for her misuse of a private email server as secretary of state—an egregious mistake that the head of the FBI called “extremely careless”—we hear him. But when Trump goes on to ask Russian hackers to continue their apparent assaults on an American election by finding more of Clinton’s emails, even as a wan joke, he takes the side of the arsonists while attacking his opponent for a fire code violation. When he says the press is corrupt and the electoral system is rigged, he’s not acting like someone who wants to lead. He’s acting like someone who demands to be followed.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to judge Trump’s claims as actual statements of belief or intention. We don’t know if President Trump would totally renege on that Paris commitment or actually pursue his policy of Muslim exclusion; but we have to assume he’ll try. We have no way of knowing if he actually believes that vaccines cause autism, as he claimed in a debate, but they don’t. Does he really think that wind power kills “all your birds”? Who knows. But it doesn’t; cats kill all your birds.

Here’s the thing about Donald Trump: In his 14 months as a political candidate, he has demonstrated an utter indifference to the truth and to reality itself. He appears to seek only his own validation from the most revanchist, xenophobic crowds in America. He is trolling, hard.

When we say we’re optimistic, it isn’t just because we can point you to a trove of evidence that we’re all very, very lucky to be alive right now: We live longer, we’re less violent, and there’s less extreme poverty than at any time in human history. And it’s not just because optimism is endemic to Silicon Valley, though that’s also true. It’s because of the way optimism conditions how people act in the world. As Stewart Brand, one of our heroes, once described in these pages, people behave better when they think things are improving: “If you truly think things are getting worse, won’t you grab everything you can, while you can? Reap now, sow nothing. But if you think things are getting better, you invest in the future. Sow now, reap later.” ¹

We’ll keep fighting for the future instead of for the past. And part of that fight is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.

Of course it would be glib for privileged people like us to expect everyone to just buck up about tomorrow. The future isn’t the only thing that’s unevenly distributed in the present: so are wealth, influence, skills, and other deep-seated advantages. So are fears. It’s easy to celebrate the digital revolution when it has enriched the 40 square blocks surrounding your office; less so when you’ve seen your wages stagnate over the past 35 years. It’s natural to welcome social justice when it vests you in American culture and not, I suppose, when it tells you that you’ve been the problem all along. We don’t blame people for worrying about their future. But we think most Americans recognize that it’s important to have leaders who believe things get better from here—who want to build things other than barriers.


Besides, Donald Trump’s supporters aren’t even the people who have been most left behind by globalism and technology. Consider that, institutionally, Trump has no better remaining friend than the National Rifle Association, whose industry leaders have profited enormously from the climate of fear and paranoia surrounding mass shootings. And according to a recent study of Trump supporters by Gallup—the most extensive one yet—the candidate’s rank-and-file fans are in fact wealthier than average and less likely to live in areas affected by immigration and trade. The most charitable explanation is that they are afraid their children will lose ground. ² But let’s be clear: What these Americans stand to lose is nothing compared to the threat their political movement now poses to millions of African-Americans, Muslims, and immigrants, who experience the rise of Trumpism as an immediate menace to their families.

The person who has the least to lose is Trump, who has a long history of walking away relatively unscathed from things he’s destroyed.

So no, WIRED has never been neutral. But now we’re declaring our alignment—one shared by an overwhelming number of tech leaders. The newsroom will continue to do critical, fair journalism about both candidates and the world around us. We’ll keep fighting for the future instead of for the past. And part of that fight is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.

---------------------

Scott Dadich is the editor-in-chief of WIRED.

¹ : This deserves _much _ more attention than it gets here or elsewhere.

² : Note --the embedded link is my addition, not part of the original editorial endorsement.

{ The article Hope is what separates Clinton voters from Trump voters is by Andrew McGill, published by The Atlantic magazine, 19 August, 2016 }

----

"It’s pretty clear who Donald Trump wants to help, because he names them at every rally. Miners. Steelworkers. Guys on the assembly line, whose jobs are either being stolen by the Chinese or strangled to death by Obama’s regulations. If globalization has put your livelihood in jeopardy, Trump wants you on his side. And given his sky-high popularity among white men without a college degree, I’d argue this pitch is gaining traction.

But here’s the weird thing: Folks in hard-hit industrial towns aren’t voting for Trump. When Michigan Republicans went to the polls in March, economists expected to see huge Trump turnout in areas with the most shuttered factories. Instead, they got the opposite: Trump’s support was strongest in towns that had gained manufacturing jobs. He did about 20 percentage points worse in areas where layoffs were most intense. It was completely the opposite of what everyone expected.

Earlier this month, Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell published a working paper expanding the Michigan analysis to the entire country. This time, he used opinion poll results instead of vote totals, making the data more current. Rothwell found the same trend: Trump did worse in towns that lost manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007, and better in areas that gained them. Indeed, Trump is most popular in prosperous areas. Apparently, economic pain doesn’t guarantee votes for the Republican nominee, and economic success is no guard against him.

I’d argue the real dividing line is optimism. Consider this: Two-thirds of Hillary Clinton’s supporters think the next generation will be in better shape than we are today, or least the same, according to Pew Research. The reverse is true for Trump’s camp. Sixty-eight percent of his supporters think the next generation will be worse off. What’s more, the vast majority of Trump voters say life is worse today for people like them than it was 50 years ago. Only two percent —two!— think life is better now and that their children will also see improvement.

"Seems like a reasonable and well-written argument to me (I am particularly fond of the line about Trump's campaign moving into "George Orwell–as–interpreted–by–Paul Verhoeven territory").

But, y'know, I'm just a know-nothing, hypnotized by the mainstream media, who will no doubt continue to infuriate you at least until November 8th, if not beyond."

Donald Trump is on track to lose in November and to refuse to accept the legitimacy of that Election Day result. That’s a problem not just for Hillary Clinton but for both political parties and the country. ...

...Trump began to suggest that the election would be “fixed” last month as Hillary Clinton opened a lead following July’s party conventions. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on,” Trump said at a rally in Altoona. Days earlier in Wilmington, North Carolina, he’d warned that without stronger voter identification laws people would be “voting 15 times for Hillary.” The first image of a Trump campaign ad, released on Friday, is that of a polling place as a narrator alleges “the system” is “rigged”; and his campaign has already begun recruiting volunteers to monitor polling places, specifically in urban precincts where African-American voters, very few of which support Trump, predominate.

Trump’s words are having an effect. Just 38 percent of Trump supporters believe their votes will be counted accurately; and only 49 percent of all registered voters are “very confident” their votes will be tabulated without error, according to a Pew Research survey last week.

The implications — short- and long-term — are serious. Interviews with more than a dozen senior GOP operatives suggest growing panic that Trump’s descent down this alt-right rabbit hole and, beyond that, his efforts to de-legitimize the very institutions that undergird American democracy — the media and the electoral process itself — threaten not just their congressional majorities or the party’s survival but, potentially, the stability of the country’s political system.

“We’ve never had a presidential candidate who has questioned the legitimacy of an electoral outcome nationally,” said Dan Senor, who was a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “This does take us to a whole new world if the actual presidential candidate is questioning the legitimacy of this process, and the damage to our democracy could be substantial.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-concede-succession-227252#ixz...
------

Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.

The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand in hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.
The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.

The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.

Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.

By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.

Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.

I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.

My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”

That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.

Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages." ...

New Democrats
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton

Ideology
Centrism Cultural liberalism Radical centrism Social liberalism Third Way

Variants
Boll weevil Clintonism Conservative Democrat

People
Bruce Babbitt Evan Bayh John Carney Tom Carper Lawton Chiles Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton Gerry Connolly Jim Davis Susan Davis Cal Dooley John Edwards Harold Ford Jr. Al From Dick Gephardt Al Gore Bob Graham Jim Himes John Kerry Ron Kind Mary Landrieu Rick Larsen Joe Lieberman Blanche Lincoln Will Marshall Jim Moran Sam Nunn Barack Obama Jared Polis Chuck Robb Timothy J. Roemer Allyson Schwartz Adam Smith

Organizations
Blue Dog Coalition Coalition for a Democratic Majority Committee on Party Effectiveness Democratic Leadership Council Moderate Dems Working Group New Democrat Coalition New Democrat Network Progressive Policy Institute Senate Centrist Coalition Third Way

Harvard University, B.A., M.D.

Clinton hides, Trump slides, the republic subsides | The Plain Dealer By Kevin OBrien, on August 26, 2016 at 7:15 AM

This may go down in history as the presidential election that made everyone angry.

That, at least, would offer some hope that Americans' taste in presidential candidates might be redeemable.

For now, though, all is bleak. The crook keeps proving more unabashedly crooked and the flake just keeps getting flakier.

Hillary's horror show

There's no new lesson to learn from plumbing the depths of Hillary Clinton's corruption or marveling at the heights of her mendacity. She's as dirty as the day is long, and has been since the day she wriggled out of the Arkansas mud ¹ to become a public figure. This we knew.

All we're getting now are more accurate readings of how low she has gone.

We probably will never know all of the wrong she has done, or all of the details of her criminality — the way the private email server was used during her time at the State Department certainly was illegal ², no matter how circumstances forced FBI Director James Comey to spin it ³.

Now, the news is about the many matches ⁴ between the names in her formerly secret appointment book at State and the names of big donors to the Clinton Foundation⁵.

Don't get your hopes up. As it always does, with a Democrat-friendly news media and a national attention span well short of a gnat's, the Clinton strategy will work.

Deny. Dissemble. Delay. Dismiss.

It's not true. It's technically not true, and besides, you can't prove it. Sure, you can have our records — someday. OK, you got us, but it's such an old story that no one cares anymore. (What difference, at this point, does it make?)⁶

We're a few months away from electing to the highest executive office in the land someone manifestly unfit to hold any position of trust. We are on the verge of putting the entire executive branch of the United States government — the most powerful office the voters can confer — in the hands of someone whose only desire is the acquisition of personal wealth, but who wouldn't mind having an exalted title to make the grifting easier.

To head a massive regulatory state that holds in its hands the power to make or break not only businesses but entire industries, we are about to elect a woman whose entire approach to government can be accurately summed up in two words: Pay me⁷.

Hillary Clinton has been gone from the State Department since Feb. 1, 2013. Long before that day, numerous organizations⁸ were interested in finding out⁹ what she did there and just how tied-in the Clinton Foundation was to her official duties. The answer to that one turns out to be "inextricably."

What if John Kerry's State Department hadn't slow-walked¹⁰ every inquiry?

What if it hadn't finally thrown up its hands and said, in effect, "Alas, 20,000-plus Freedom of Information Act requests! It's just too hard!"? What if it hadn't so vigorously resisted the lawsuits, which now number more than 100?

What if all of the details we're learning now about this "old story" had come to light two years ago, or even one year ago?

Would we still be facing the prospect of putting the office that Barack Obama has re-created in his own image — a playground equipped with a pen and a phone¹¹ to indulge his every unchecked, unbalanced whim¹² — in the hands of a person who is unmistakably corrupt?

We can only hope that when Clinton scoops her profits out of the Oval Office safe four years from January, her other most prominent attribute — horrendous judgment in national¹³ and international¹⁴ affairs — hasn't cost the country too dearly.

References cited in this article :
¹: http://dailysignal.com/2015/03/13/hillarys-career-rose-law-firm-bellwether-moder...
²: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793
³: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james...
⁴: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/emails-reveal-how-foundation-donors-got-...
⁵: https://www.clintonfoundation.org/
⁶: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpQ6X4ojHws
⁷: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/292441-pay-for-play-...
⁸: http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/82df550e1ec646098b434f7d5771f625/many-donors-...
⁹: http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/category/clintons/
¹⁰: https://jonathanturley.org/2016/08/25/the-farce-that-is-foia-the-state-departmen...
¹¹: http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/01/14/obama-on-executive-actions-ive-got-a-p...
¹²: http://moneymorning.com/2016/01/06/president-obama-is-the-most-controversial-exe...
¹³: http://nlpc.org/stories/2015/03/18/heath-care-task-force-showed-secrecy-nothing-...
¹⁴: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/hillarys-huge-libya-disaster-16600

E.g. : I do not recall that conversation, I turned over all of the documents in my possession, I relied on my aides' advice, I was not instructed on this point, etc.²

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR | The New York Times

Save the Republican Party: Vote for Clinton

By JAMES K. GLASSMAN
SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

"Every day, I run into Republican friends who can’t stomach a vote for Donald J. Trump but don’t know what to do. Vote for Hillary Clinton, who has trouble with the truth, wants to raise taxes and opposes free trade with Asia? Vote for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, an outlier who once ran a marijuana business and embraces isolationism? Or not vote at all, maintaining a certain purity but allowing others to decide the next president?

"I faced exactly these choices myself. I have voted for every Republican nominee for president since 1980, but I will not this time. Mr. Trump’s appalling temperament renders him unfit to be president, and his grotesque policy formulations mock the principles of liberty and respect for the individual that have been the foundation of the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln.

"Even before Mr. Trump entered the race, I saw this coming. I worked to open a pathway for an independent — a solid third candidate who would attract the votes of the roughly two-thirds of Americans in the center. A serious contender would force the two major-party candidates to compete for votes in the middle, rather than appealing to the wings. I spent a year and a half on the project, but a month ago threw in the towel.

"The deck is stacked by the parties against anyone but a Republican or Democrat. An independent has to run an expensive gantlet to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot in all the states, suffers a severe disadvantage in fund-raising, and is effectively barred from the fall presidential debates by a commission loaded with party stalwarts.

"Through much trial and error, I learned that this is, whether we like it or not, an election between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, period. And that means that if you want to stop Mr. Trump, you have no choice but to vote for Mrs. Clinton. There’s no sitting this one out. ...

... "I’m voting for Mrs. Clinton because, despite her deficiencies, she will make a better president. But I have another reason. Defeating Mr. Trump soundly will help save the Republican Party. If he wins, a party built on freedom and internationalism will become entrenched as a party of authoritarianism and isolation, which means that within a few years it will atrophy and die."

That Nixon could actually have been the victim of Watergate, and not the
perpetrator, will not sit well with many, especially those with a professional
stake in Nixon’s guilt. Yet three of the most thoroughly reported books on
Watergate from the past three decades have come to the same conclusion:
that Nixon and/or his top aides were indeed set up. Each of these books takes
a completely different approach, focuses on different aspects, and relies on
essentially different sets of facts and sources. These are 1984’s Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA,
by former Harper’s magazine Washington editor Jim Hougan; 1991’s Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin; and 2008’s The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, by
James Rosen.

Dan Rather, meanwhile, whose controversial 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush’s military service record Mr. Baker’s book all but ratifies, was telling a group of people that even if Mr. Baker’s book got a bad review in The Washington Post, it was better than getting nothing.

“It’s a good book and he’s a nice guy,” Mr. Rather said, turning to Mr. Baker’s agent Andrew Stuart. “But it’s a proverbial third rail.”

Asked a moment later how a reporter like Mr. Baker should go about establishing his credibility among people who might dismiss him out of hand as no more reliable than a 9/11 truther, Mr. Rather said it was a difficult thing.

“Journalism is filled with a lot of decent-intending, wanting-to-do-the-right-thing people,” he said. “You just have to keep constantly asking a version of ‘please read the book.’... You know, fear runs rampant in journalism—I do not except myself in that criticism—and with a subject like this, the fear is if you touch it, you’re gonna get burned, and you may get burned to a crisp.”

The numerous episodes of prolonged coughing are another tell. Swallowing disorders are very common in PD. They can lead to aspiration pneumonia, the most common cause of death in PD. But before that they lead to chronic difficulty swallowing saliva. It gets onto the vocal cords, leading to coughing in an attempt to clear them. The high frequency of these episodes strongly suggests a major swallowing disorder.

“One of the most important books of the past ten years.”—Gore Vidal

“A tour de force … Family of Secrets has made me rethink even those events I witnessed with my own eyes.”—Dan Rather

“Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a first historic portrait in full of the Bush dynasty and the era it shaped. From revelation to revelation, insight to insight—from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to the oil and financial intrigues that lie behind today's headlines—this is a sweeping drama of money and power, unseen forces, and the emblematic triumph of a lineage that sowed national tragedy. Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is sure to take its place as one of the most startling and influential works of American history and journalism.”—Roger Morris, former senior staff member, National Security Council, and author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America

“This is the book people will be mining for years to come” – David Margolick, Newsweek and Vanity Fair

“An investigative gem filled with juicy revelations” --Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times

“Russ Baker’s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy…A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn’t know” – Bill Moyers

(WikipediA®)

"According to Baker, the first President Bush became an intelligence agent in his teenage years and was later at the center of a plot to assassinate Kennedy that included his father, Prescott Bush, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, CIA Director Allen Dulles, Cuban and Russian exiles and emigrants, and various Texas oilmen.

He also names Bob Woodward of The Washington Post as an intelligence agent who conspired with John Dean to remove President Richard Nixon from office for opposing the oil depletion allowance."

...

1950 President Harry S. Truman unsuccessfully prods Congress to end the depletion allowance.

1957 Asked about the depletion allowance, President Dwight Eisenhower replies, "I am not prepared to say it is evil because, while we do find, I assume, that a number of rich men take advantage of it unfairly, there must certainly be an incentive in this country if we are going to continue the exploration for gas and oil that is so important to our economy."

1960 Presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debate the depletion allowance. Kennedy says he's willing to review and close the "loophole." Nixon counters, "I favor the present depletion allowance. I favor it not because I want to make a lot of oilmen rich, but because I want to make America rich."

1969 Congress cuts the depletion allowance deduction from 27.5 to 23 percent, over the objections of the president of Gulf Oil, who calls it "a cornerstone, a major part of the foundation on which the industry has built its house. To dismantle it in whole or in part could very well jeopardize that whole structure and, to a serious degree, the economy dependent upon it." President Nixon says the tax break is "in the national interest" because Mideast oil supplies could be cut off "in the event of a world conflict."

1975 Ford almost vetoes but then signs a tax bill that repeals the depletion allowance for large companies. It remains in place for smaller, independent drillers.

Michael Moore: Trump Can Win, a "Human Molotov Cocktail" To Throw At The Political System

| Posted By Ian Schwartz | On Date October 2, 2016 | (RealClearPolitics.com (VIDEO Interview) )

... ...

... MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, I-- which I don't want him to win. Let’s just make that clear. I-- I've been trying to say for months here, I live in Michigan. And, and across the Midwest, across the Rust Belt, I understand why a lot of people are angry. And they see Donald Trump as their human Molotov cocktail that they get to go into the voting booth on November 8th and throw him into a political system that has made their lives miserable.

And, and so I think, at the convention, I was worried, Democrats, the Clinton campaign, were all doing an end zone dance when they were only on the 50 yard line. And, and the celebrating after the debate-- everybody needs to have their game face on here and realize that Trump can win. He can pull this off. And, and everybody has to, has to be full force here. Otherwise, it’s, it has a chance of happening...

CHUCK TODD: Do you think every time a newspaper editorial comes out and denounces Trump, and every time a former cabinet secretary in a Bush administration comes out and denounces Trump, you think that has a-- Do you think that backfires? You think it oddly reinforces Trump's message?

MICHAEL MOORE: I think a lot of people who have seen their livelihood vaporized, who are no longer part of the middle class, who are struggling to survive, pay no attention anymore to what the media or the people in power-- they've lost all credibility, I think, with a lot, with a lot of people. I mean just take what's happened from how we got into the Iraq War.

Where was the media on that before the war? Where was The New York Times, for instance? Putting Judith Miller's stories concocting weapons of mass destruction on the front page of their paper. Where was the media while, while Wall Street was, was creating this crisis that was about to happen?

I mean so people don't trust the media. They don't listen to it, and for good reason, because the, the media has let them down. The, the rich and the powerful have let them down. They used to believe in that. They used to vote for the rich and powerful. And a lot of them aren't going to do that this time. And they, for some strange reason, see Donald Trump as their, as their means to get back at, at, at this system...

I don't think people do trust the Democrats. How else could a socialist win 22 states? I mean in my state of Michigan, Bernie Sanders won. If, if, if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had a difficult time with him, that should have been the red flag to everybody that there is a, a, a mood out there where people are upset at the Democrats and the Republicans.

What has to happen here, though, like with the Brexit vote in England, is that people, where I'm from, have to understand that, while they may not like Hillary that much or she may be a bitter pill to swallow or whatever, you better, you better take your medicine. Because the, the opposite is going to be much, much worse.

BLUE CIVIL WAR |
Despite Donald Trump, Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Won’t Forgive Hillary Clinton
| The Sanders campaign exposed long-simmering discord in the Democratic Party coalition, and the fracture, now exposed and widened, can’t be easily fixed or even papered over. by Michael Tracey
| 10.02.16 6:15 AM ET

...
"During the Obama-Clinton saga, the overriding priority for this group was to remove Republicans from office after eight long, dreadful years of George W. Bush. Obama, buoyed by a surge in youth support, was seen (rightly or wrongly) as a break from Democratic Party orthodoxies — namely staid Clintonism.

"But the progressive left now has different imperatives. It’s not enough to warn about the dangers of evil Republicans gaining power. For them, distressing maladies have persisted and in some cases worsened under an outwardly liberal Democratic president, so something new is needed. Whatever else Hillary might be, “new” she is not.

"Their resistance to falling in line may also have to do with the younger generation’s reliance on social media, which fosters a kind of ingrained skepticism. Whereas passively consuming cable news (an increasingly geriatric activity) encourages adoption of whatever the chorus of anti-Trump pundits are fulminating about on a given day, younger people curate information much more assiduously than their elders — filtering out the superfluous hysterics and nonsense. Indeed, an entire new media ecosystem developed around the Sanders campaign, feeding followers constant updates for months upon months about the perceived corruption of Hillary. So it’s not surprising that people who’ve been immersed in this world might resist demands to suck it up and capitulate to party hacks whom they view not as uneasy allies, but enemies.

"For many of this Sanders cohort, the experience of attending the Democratic convention in July was profoundly souring. “What bothered me most about it was that these were people who spent over a year registering voters for the party, and we were so disrespected,” Tascha van Auken, a Sanders delegate from New York, told me. She founded a volunteer group called Team Bernie NY in the summer of 2015, working tirelessly to sign up new Democrats in advance of the state’s closed primary the following April. Van Auken described a series of slights, affronts, coordinated stifling attempts, and even outright attacks on Sanders delegates at the convention, which in aggregate caused her to wonder whether the Democratic Party itself was fundamentally broken, and ever worth attempting to work within. The feeling hasn’t gone away.

" “I think what was ultimately surprising to me about my experience was not the ridiculous spectacle or even the excessive patriotism,” she said of the convention. “But that Democrats clearly had no interest in welcoming this new progressive component into their party.”

"Van Auken and others identified as a prime culprit for their continuing disaffection the convention “whips” deployed to quell protest activity among the various delegations. Numerous members of the New York Sanders contingent characterized the behavior of these whips — who sported bright yellow visibility jackets — as ranging from moderately officious to aggressively hostile. One particular whip would snap ostentatious smartphone photos of Sanders supporters who were insufficiently compliant.

" “Hillary whips were checking our credentials over and over again and accusing us of not being delegates — they made some delegates cry,” recounted Emmanuel Ackaouy, another New York delegate, who previously regarded himself as a stalwart Democrat but has since felt compelled to reevaluate. “It was really confrontational and uncomfortable,” he said. “It felt borderline fascist.”

"These are the very types of grassroots progressive activists who might have trekked to swing states and organized for the Democratic nominee; instead, they are largely sitting the presidential contest out, focusing on local races, if they remain involved at all.

"Then there’s another aspect to all this, which many are reluctant to acknowledge. Some of the left-wing Sanders faithful — granted, likely a minority, but a recognizable minority nevertheless —believe a Trump presidency would ultimately wreak less destruction than a Clinton one. Alexis Edelstein, a former Sanders delegate from Playa del Rey, California who was active in facilitating much of the organized dissent at the convention — including a “occupation” of the media tent on July 28 — takes this position.

" “I’m hoping that Hillary doesn’t win,” Edelstein, an immigrant from Argentina, told me. “Trump’s an asshole but I feel like he’s full of hot air. HRC’s calculating, she’s conniving. Trump I think is just — he’s got a huge head. He probably bit off more than he can chew.”

"The left-wing case for Trump isn’t necessarily a cogent or well-reasoned one, but it shouldn’t be surprising that some would gravitate to it given the weakness of the current left-wing case for Clinton, who’s made it abundantly clear that she is far more comfortable crafting a message aimed at wayward Republicans and moderate conservatives than one aimed at populist-oriented progressives.

"Another Sanders delegate from California, Michael Fortes, recalled a jarring moment at the convention that bears on this dynamic. At the moment Hillary was formally nominated, he said, a number of delegates could be heard exclaiming, “Hello President Trump!” It was more an expression of defeatism than any celebration of Trump. But the sentiment that we’d be better off if Clinton loses does exist, and there’s no sense ignoring it.

" “To a certain degree, Trump’s overtures to the left are working,” Fortes said.

"Edelstein added that he and fellow Sanders delegates attempted to convince their compatriots of this view, encountering some resistance and some receptivity. Their ultimate hope in wishing for a Clinton defeat is that it will embolden the organized left-wing to seize power in 2020.

" “If Hillary wins in November, I feel she will do whatever she can to squash the progressive movement,” he said. “That movement dies.” "

--------

"outwardly liberal"? Not even "outwardly." Obama and the Clintons are anything but "liberal"--inwardly, outwardly and any other way.

The thing is--this guy can't even empathize without judging people, e.g., weak, fat, lyin', housekeeper, rapist, crooked, little, 10 (or not), loser. I forgive poor choice of words, but this is way of life for The Donald, from a glass house judging virtually everybody else as wanting!

(The Atlantic magazine) For Young Voters, 'Hope and Change' Is Dead by Molly Ball | October 6, 2016

| A group of 20-something voters illustrates young people’s consternation with their political choices this year. |

•••

"Some liberal Millennials have so internalized Sanders' onetime critique of Clinton's character—that she’s just another cog in a corrupt machine—that they are implacably opposed to her. That was the case for one focus-group participant, Amanda, a 27-year-old human-resources worker who's also a single mother enrolled in a holistic-health certificate program. Amanda's description of Clinton: "Bitch, liar, false." She's planning to vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Amanda's attitudes were partly driven by disillusion with Obama, whom she voted for. "I'm just not pumped about what he did while he was in office," she said. "I feel like a lot of stuff crumbled while he's been in there." Her excitement about Obamacare, she said, has given way to dismay at her rising health-insurance premiums and deductibles."

He’ll likely lose - but Trump is the final warning to elites | John Ibbitson | The Globe and Mail | Published October 7, 2016 |

Donald Trump will probably lose the election. But he is a final warning. Unless political elites of both the left and the right become more humble, unless they once again ask themselves how their agendas will play in Peoria, the next rough beast might slouch over the corpse of the republic.

“Will it play in Peoria?” goes back to the days of vaudeville. The city of 115,000 in central Illinois was once considered the ultimate focus group, the embodiment of Middle America, the place to test a joke or a soda or a social policy to learn what white folks without a fancy degree thought of it. Back in the day, you knew better than to defy the settled judgment of this ultimate test market. You went as far as Peoria would let you, and no further.

But we grew impatient. You have to fight Jim Crow, whatever Peoria thinks.

( The Guardian ) Some of Clinton's pledges sound great. Until you remember who's president | Thomas Frank |
The Democrats promise to take on a system rigged against middle America. So why the hell has Barack Obama done almost nothing about that for eight years? |

The puzzle that is currently frustrating the pundit minds of America is this: why is Hillary Clinton not simply clobbering Donald Trump? How is this ranting, seething buffoon still competitive with her? Trump has now stumbled through a series of the kind of blunders that break ordinary political campaigns – the sort of deadly hypocrisies that always kill the demagogue in old movies – and yet this particular demagogue keeps on trucking. Why?

Let us answer that burning pundit question of today by jumping to what will undoubtedly be the next great object of pundit ardor: the legacy of President Barack Obama. Two months from now, when all the TV wise men are playing historian and giving their estimation on where Obama ranks in the pantheon of the greats, they will probably neglect to mention that his legacy helped to determine Hillary’s fortunes in this election cycle. As a beloved figure among Democrats, for example, Obama was instrumental in securing the nomination for her. As a president who has accomplished little since 2011, however, Obama has pretty much undermined Clinton’s ability to sell us on another centrist Democratic presidency. His legacy has diluted her promise.

The reform impulse just keeps short-circuiting every time the Democrats try to switch it on

Let me put this slightly differently. Hillary Clinton has lots of good policy ideas. She promises many fine things. That these things do not attract more voters to her side is (as many have noted) partially due to her wonkish way of presenting them. But it is even more because of the glaring contradiction between the nice things she says she will do and the failure of Obama to advance the ball very far on those same issues.

( The Daily Beast ) HEADS IN SAND | Can Someone Please Make the Candidates Talk About Social Security? | A recent trustees’ report says we have 18 years until it goes broke. We must know what Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump propose to do about it. | Bob Kerrey | 10.07.16 7:00 AM ET |

Few if any candidates for federal office will tell you that as a consequence of current federal law, young Americans are being screwed in two life-changing ways.
First, under current law, every Social Security beneficiary under the age of 48 will have their promised benefits cut by a third. And second, every young person who works is contributing between $10,000 and $20,000 to the health care and retirement of those lucky Americans who are already drawing benefits under federal law.

In some ways the second screwing is worse than the first. Young workers do not have the defined benefit retirement programs commonly enjoyed by their grandparents, and if they do have health care through their jobs, their annual deductibles are probably greater than what their grandparents paid to have children and attend college.

Perhaps the media will notice that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have something very important in common: Both are on Social Security, or at least they are eligible for the old age benefit guaranteed by Social Security.

Clinton is pushing 70. Trump just passed it. Both have substantial amounts of non-employment income to supplement their Social Security benefits. Neither have any personal concern about the Social Security trustees’ report warning that the so-called trust fund for the Old Age and Survivors program will be depleted in 18 years.

(Washington Examiner)
New emails show intersection of Clinton Foundation, State Dept., paid speeches

By SARAH WESTWOOD (@SARAHCWESTWOOD) • 10/6/16 12:23 AM.

"It doesn’t really help matters to claim, as the most ardent Obama defenders do, that the president was powerless before Congress, and that it was therefore impossible for Obama to do anything differently than he did during his eight years. Such fanciful talk may help us to feel better about the current occupant of the Oval, but it also negates his would-be successor’s promises more effectively than any lesser argument you might make against them. It transforms a vote for Hillary from mildly distasteful to almost totally futile.

The immediate problem for Democrats this year is simple, really: it is hard to criticize power when your own leader is the most powerful person in the land.

The larger problem facing them is the terminal irrelevance of their great, overarching campaign theme. Remember the “man from Hope”? “Hope is on the way”? “Keep hope alive”? Well, this year “hope” is most assuredly dead¹. Thanks to Obama’s flagrant hope-dealing in the dark days of 2008 – followed up by his failure to reverse the disintegration of the middle class – this favorite Democratic cliché has finally become just that: an empty phrase. Today as the Democrats go into battle against Trump, they find that their rallying cry has lost its magic. Hillary is discovering how difficult it is to win an election without hope.

"But what's really going on on the so-called liberal media side as I understand it looking from outside is that Hillary Clinton is the worst candidate anybody could ever imagine. She's not doing as well against the guy who seemed unelectable to people who consider themselves the appointed pundit class of the US. Therefore there must be some kind of conspiracy. And it can't be that people don't listen to us as much as we think, and people actively dislike the candidate that we made them pick when they made clear they didn't want her. Therefore, it's the Russians."

“Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here,” John Podesta complained in the March 2015 note, referring to Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, as well as former State Department staffers Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines.

“Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” replied Neera Tanden, a longtime Podesta friend who also has worked for Clinton. Then, answering her own question, Tanden wrote again: “I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it.”

The emails show that while aides struggled to get past the public controversy, they also expressed exasperation at each other and, at times, at Clinton — both for her decision to use the server and for the way she handled questions about it. Several exchanges illustrate fears among some top advisers that Clinton and other aides were demonstrating the very traits that polls suggested made her vulnerable: a penchant for secrecy and a hesitancy to admit fault or error.

“We’ve taken on a lot of water that won’t be easy to pump out of the boat,” Podesta wrote to Tanden in September 2015, at a time when Clinton’s campaign feared that Vice President Biden was about to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Most of that has to do with terrible decisions made pre-campaign, but a lot has to do with her instincts.”

Tanden responded, “Almost no one knows better than me that her instincts can be terrible.”

Tanden and Kendall declined to comment. Neither Reines nor a lawyer for Mills responded to requests for comment.

The Ruling Class

The ruling class decide which ideas are acceptable, which scientific theories to believe, what speech is permitted.

by John Stossel | October 26, 2016

http://reason.com/archives/2016/10/26/the-ruling-class

America is often described as a society without the Old World's aristocracy. Yet we still have people who feel entitled to boss the rest of us around. The "elite" media, the political class, Hollywood and university professors think their opinions are obviously correct, so they must educate us peasants.

OK, so they don't call us "peasants" anymore. Now we are "deplorables"—conservatives or libertarians. Or Trump supporters.

The elite have a lot of influence over how we see things.

I don't like Donald Trump. I used to. I once found him refreshing and honest. Now I think he's a mean bully. I think that partly because he mocked a disabled person. I saw it on TV. He waved his arms around to mimic a New York Times reporter with a disability—but wait!

It turns out that Trump used the same gestures and tone of speech to mock Ted Cruz and a general he didn't like. It's not nice, but it doesn't appear directed at a disability.

I only discovered this when researching the media elite. Even though I'm a media junkie, I hadn't seen the other side of the story. The elite spoon-fed me their version of events.

Another reason I don't like Trump is that he supported the Iraq war—and then lied about that. Media pooh-bahs told me Trump pushed for the war years ago on The Howard Stern Show.

But then I listened to what Trump actually said.

"Are you for invading Iraq?" Stern asked.

Trump replied, "Yeah, I guess ... so." Later, on Neil Cavuto's show, Trump said, "Perhaps (Bush) shouldn't be doing it yet, and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations." I wouldn't call that "support"—the way NBC's debate moderator and many others have.

I was stunned by how thoroughly the media have distorted Trump's position. That's a privilege you get when you're part of the media elite: You get to steer the masses' thinking.

At the second debate, we all know that Trump walked over to Hillary Clinton's podium, as if he was "stalking Ms. Clinton like prey," said The New York Times. CNN said, "Trump looms behind Hillary Clinton at the debate."

Afterward, Clinton went on Ellen DeGeneres' show and said Trump would "literally stalk me around the stage, and I would just feel this presence behind me. I thought, 'Whoa, this is really weird.'"

But it was a lie. Watch the video. Clinton walked over to Trump's podium. Did the mainstream media tell you that? No.

The ruling class has its themes, and it sticks to them. ...

( full text at the link, above.)

Opinion Review & Outlook

The FBI’s Clinton Probe Gets Curiouser
New evidence of a conflict of interest and a double standard.


FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in Washington July 20, 2016. ( Photo: Reuters )

Updated Oct. 24, 2016 7:43 p.m. ET
1543 COMMENTS

Hillary Clinton may win the election in two weeks, but the manner of her victory will bedevil her in the White House. Specifically, evidence keeps turning up suggesting that the FBI probe into her emails was influenced by political favoritism and double standards.

The latest news is the Journal’s report Monday that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend of Hillary and Bill, steered money to the campaign of the wife of a top FBI official. Political organizations under Mr. McAuliffe’s control gave more than $675,000 to the 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Mr. McCabe, director James Comey’s right-hand man, helped oversee the probe into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information on her server.

Some $467,500 of the money came directly from Mr. McAuliffe’s political action committee, Common Good VA, while $207,788 came from the Virginia Democratic Party, which the Governor essentially controls. The funds amounted to more than one-third of all the money Mrs. McCabe raised.

Mrs. McCabe announced her candidacy the same month (March 2015) as the news broke about Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. Mr. McCabe was running the FBI’s Washington field office at the time, and he was promoted to the No. 3 FBI slot not long after the formal FBI investigation began in July 2015.

The FBI said in a statement that none of this is an issue because Mr. McCabe wasn’t promoted to the No. 2 position until February 2016, months after his wife lost her race, and only then did he assume “for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.” ¹

All of this asks voters to believe that Mr. McCabe as the No. 3 official at the FBI had nothing to do with the biggest, most sensitive case at that agency. This strains credulity. Before he became No. 3 at the FBI Mr. McCabe ran the bureau’s Washington, D.C. field office that provided resources to the Clinton probe. Campaign-finance records show that 98% of the McAuliffe donations to Mrs. McCabe came after the FBI launched its Clinton probe.

Director Comey, the self-styled Boy Scout, somehow didn’t think any of this would look suspicious? Add this to the list of special treatment for Mrs. Clinton: no grand jury, grants of immunity to her aides, no interview until the last minute, a special exonerating public declaration, and a pre-Labor Day dump of damaging FBI notes.

-------------------

¹ :

from the F.B.I.'s website : News/ Press releases:

Washington, D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691

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January 29, 2016

Andrew McCabe Named Deputy Director of the FBI

FBI Director James B. Comey has named Andrew McCabe as the Bureau’s new deputy director. Mr. McCabe most recently served as the FBI’s associate deputy director. As deputy director, Mr. McCabe will oversee all FBI domestic and international investigative and intelligence activities and will serve as acting director in the director’s absence.

Mr. McCabe joined the FBI in 1996. He began his career in the New York Field Office, where he focused on organized crime. Throughout his career, Mr. McCabe has held leadership positions in the Counterterrorism Division, the National Security Branch, and the Washington Field Office.

“Andy’s 19 years of experience, combined with his vision, judgment, and ability to communicate make him a perfect fit for this job,” announced Director Comey.

Mr. McCabe will assume this new role on February 1, 2016, when current Deputy Director Mark Giuliano retires from the FBI after 28 years of service.

“Mark’s wide range of operational and leadership experiences have helped us grow as an organization, and his thoughtfulness and ability to connect to people has become a benchmark for our future leaders,” said Director Comey. “I will miss his counsel and his candor very much.”

Daily Caller News Foundation

Leaked Emails: Lawyers Privately Told Clinton Campaign Hillary’s Email Scandal ‘Smacks Of Acting Above The Law’

Jonah Bennett
National Security/Foreign Policy Reporter

1:38 PM 10/13/2016

Attorneys wondered out loud in questions passed along in a 2015 bombshell email to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign why Clinton inexplicably sent secure documents on a private email server and then further deleted documents without consulting anyone, as such a move “smacks of acting above the law.”

The email, leaked by WikiLeaks as part of its release of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s correspondence, dates back to June 21, 2015, and discusses in unusually frank detail the scandalous nature of Clinton’s use of a private email server.

The email contains several questions from other lawyers passed along from Erika Rottenberg, a lawyer with extensive experience in the policy and tech world with ties to the Clinton campaign.

“I know when I talk to my friends who are attorneys we are all struggling with what happened to the emails and aren’t satisfied with answers to date,” read one of the questions sent to Stephanie Hannon, chief technical officer of the Clinton campaign, and senior campaign policy adviser Ann O’Leary. “While we all know of the occasional use of personal email addresses for business, none of my friends circle can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents without providing anyone outside her circle a chance to weigh in. It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”

Scarborough, 'Morning Joe' Panel Rip Clintons: They Keep Crossing The Line And Then Are Shocked At Investigations

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Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date October 27, 2016

... ...

Ron Fournier later joined the panel and argued with Clinton loyalist Steve Rattner on the significance of the WaPo findings and pay-for-play action including the Clinton State Department and Clinton Foundation. MSNBC's Kasie Hunt commented this is just a preview of "what comes next" under a Clinton presidency. She said it makes the American public question if they are "ready to have the Clintons back in the White House."

"This basically confirms everything Ron Fournier has been saying: follow the money," Scarborough said of the story.

"The Washington Post article is absolutely fascinating on 'Bill Clinton Inc.,'" Scarborough said at the top of Thursday's broadcast. "$66 million to him personally and they're bragging! They're bragging at the memo that they can shake down the same corporations that they're taking donation money for, that they can shake them down for $66 million for 'Bill Clinton Inc.'"

"For Bill and Hillary Clinton personally, does that confirm what you and a lot of Clinton skeptics that supported Bernie Sanders were worried about all along?" Scarborough asked guest Eddie Glaude Jr., chairman of African American studies at Princeton.

"Well, it's certainly, um, yes," Glaude Jr. answered to laughter. "It certainly confirms a deep suspicion that there's an ethical deficit that defines how they operate in the political domain, how they operate generally. They have an ethical and moral deficit."

"And they're actually bragging about being able to shake down foundation clients for Bill Clinton money. Doug Band is bragging about it. And it's not like Doug Band dreamed this up on his own, he was doing his boss's bidding," Scarborough said.

"They're bragging about using this foundation to make the Clintons hundreds of millions of dollars. Shouldn't the Attorney General for the state of New York launch an investigation? And at least shut down the foundation like they did with the Trump Foundation? Because there is so much more money involved here," Scarborough wondered.

MSNBC political correspondent Kasie Hunt weighed in on the WaPo story and what it means for Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy.

"The second thing I'll say about it, right now, Hillary Clinton is enjoying an enormous honeymoon period," Hunt told Morning Joe. "She's really riding high. You can see it in her demeanor on the campaign trail. She's extraordinary -- she went to an Adele concert in Miami the other night. A couple weeks out from the election."

"I think what you're seeing in these stories and what your seeing in this conversation going on is a preview of what comes next in the event that she does win this election," Hunt said. "This is the conversation that Republicans in Washington will want to have over and over and over again. I think they're already digging into this material on Capitol Hill. That does pose significant challenges. Part of why we have been talking for so long on whether the American public is ready to have the Clintons back in the White House?"

Scarborough took a swing at the media for taking a break from investigating Trump and looking into the Clintons, joking someone will receive a Pulitzer for digging up the Trump portrait story.

"This is sleazy and everybody knows it's sleazy. You're trading in public service while somebody is Secretary of State," he said.

"Larger amounts of money and the world is used as opposed to Palm Beach and a flag," co-host Mika Brzezinski said, referencing Trump.

"You're shaking down the world for $66 million instead of a Rolex watch or a life-size portrait," Scarborough said, also referencing Trump. "Somebody is going to win a Pulitzer prize for finding a life-sized portrait of Donald Trump that he paid money for with the family foundation. We're talking about $66 million, maybe a $100 million."

"I call that more than ethically challenged," Brzezinski chimed in.

Brzezinski added this is "perplexing" to her father Zbigniew.

"The Clintons and the foundation bearing their name are facing fresh scrutiny over extremely blurred lines between the organization the family's multi-million dollar fortune," MSNBC's Brzezinski said about a new Washington Post expose on the Clinton Foundation. "The revelation stems from the latest release of e-mails by WikiLeaks, allegedly hacked from the personal account of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta."

"A purported 2011 memo from longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton Doug Band lays out extensive fundraising efforts by him and his company Teneo on behalf of the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons personally," Brzezinski reported.

Brzezinski then read from the Washington Post story she cited from.

Later in the show in the 7am hour, when Fournier joined the panel, Scarborough responded to the Clinton complaint of "poor pitiful me" when they are under investigation. Scarborough said the Clintons habitually participate in activity "that crosses the line" and brings cause for an investigation.

"When I read these e-mails that were stolen, these hacked e-mails in the Podesta cache you see people like John Podesta and Neera Tanden basically echoing my columns the last 18 months," Forunier observed. "Because it was those kinds of people, people close to the Clintons who knew what they were doing, was undermining the public's trust in government, which is important to Democrats, and was awfully close if not actually quid-pro-quo and at the very least it undermined her moral authority to take on Republicans."

"And that's exactly how this has played out," Fournier declared. "Her trust numbers have collapsed as predicted by her own people and we now see that Doug Band put in writing in that memo the worst fears of the Clinton folks. Not Ron Fournier, but the Clinton folks who for months now have begged the Clintons to come clean."

Fournier said the State Department-Clinton Foundation relationship was "unethical" and "inappropriate," while Steve Rattner called it "an appearance problem."

"It's not okay, but it's legal," Rattner also said.

"What we see is a moral and ethical deficit, and what does that say about America?" Fournier said about the Clintons' tentacle in politics.

"Here we are, today's October 27th, 2016, and we're just getting this information out today. What are we going to learn tomorrow? What are we going to learn next week? And the Clintons always say, 'Oh, we have been so investigated, there's a vast right-wing conspiracy,' and they keep doing stuff that crosses the line. They keep doing stuff that requires investigations and then they are shocked that they are being investigated and it's poor, poor pitiful me in the words of Linda Ronstadt. Why is everybody always picking on me? That's because they just can't help themselves. And that is why Bernie supporters and other Democrats just have Clinton fatigue and now the whole country signs up for it for another four years," Scarborough described the situation.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/27/scarborough_morning_joe_panel_...

News | Columnists | John Kass

Democrats should ask Hillary Clinton to step aside
Hillary Clinton


Hillary Clinton answers questions about the FBI reopening a probe into her use of a private email server on Oct. 28, 2016. (Jewel Samad / Getty-AFP)

by John Kass

Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday's FBI announcement that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of state?

We'll find out in a little more than a week.

It's obvious the American political system is breaking down. It's been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they're properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect.

FBI director James Comey's announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious.

This can't be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner's wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been "reckless" with national secrets, but said he could not recommend prosecution.

So what should the Democrats do now?

If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process:

They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place.

Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea.

Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta. Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails.

What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

FBI's Comey acted out of 'obligation' to lawmakers, fear of leak to media
FBI's Comey acted out of 'obligation' to lawmakers, fear of leak to media

The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee — should begin demanding it.

But what will Hillary do?

She'll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence.

She'll remind the nation that she's a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been.

Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the "Year of the Woman." Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas.

If you take a step back from tribal politics, you'll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She'd never be hired.

As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn't remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

And there was no prosecution of Hillary.

That isn't merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous.

And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons and one for the peasants.

I've always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes.

The Clintons weren't skilled merchants. They weren't traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars.

All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it.

If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we'll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won't we?

Listen to the Chicago Way podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin. Guests are Tribune cartoonist Scott Stantis and former White House Chief of Staff William Daley: www.chicagotribune.com/kasspodcast.

jskass@chicagotribune.com
Twitter@John_Kass
Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune

There has barely been time for opinion-surveys to reflect the impact on prospective voters of Friday's news of FBI Director James Comey's re-opening of the enquiry into H Clinton's home e-mail server's use for official State Dept business. The polled spread between Clinton and Trump had already been narrowing significantly. That trend should now strengthen.

This comes just as it begins to sink in to public consciousness that the related and still-emerging scandal of the Clinton Foundation's deep involvement in seeking lucrative for-profit business relationships for the direct and primary benefit of Bill Clinton-- a.k.a. "Bill Clinton Inc.,"--is much more serious than it may have seemed at first :

( Douglas Band writing to John Podesta :

"Need get this asap to them although I'm sure cvc Chelsea Clinton won't believe it to be true bc she doesn't want to Even though the facts speak for themselves."

" John, I would appreciate your feedback and any suggestions I'm also starting to worry that if this story gets out, we are screwed. Dk Declan Kelly and I built a business. 65 people work for us who have wives and husbands and kids, they all depend on us. Our business has almost nothing to do with the clintons, the foundation or cgi in any way. The chairman of ubs could care a less about cgi. Our fund clients who we do restructuring and m and a advising the same just as bhp nor tivo do. These are real companies who we provide real advice to through very serious people. Comm head for goldman, dep press secretary to bloomberg, former head of banking, and his team, from morgan stanley for asia and latin am."

"I realize it is difficult to confront and reason with her but this could go to far and then we all will have a real serious set of other problems. I don't deserve this from her and deserve a tad more respect or at least a direct dialogue for me to explain these things. She is acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she's doing because she, as she has said, hasn't found her way and has a lack of focus in her life. I realize she will be off of this soon but if it doesn't come soon enough..."

"Four years later, the story is out, not thanks to Chelsea Clinton as Doug Band was concerned, but due to a hack of John Podesta's email account."

-----------------
(emphasis added, of course.)

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-30/doug-band-john-podesta-if-story-gets-ou...

The Guardian
US elections 2016
Opinion

Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run

by Thomas Frank

WikiLeaks’ dump of messages to and from Clinton’s campaign chief offer an unprecedented view into the workings of the elite, and how it looks after itself

The Hillary Clinton email controversy explained: what we know so far

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives on her campaign plane at Martha’s Vineyard Airport on 20 August, 2016.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives on her campaign plane at Martha’s Vineyard Airport on 20 August 2016. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Monday 31 October 2016 11.00 GMT
Last modified on Tuesday 1 November 2016 16.19 GMT

Comments
783

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real, there is a small possibility they aren’t.

With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.

The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.

Certain industries loom large and virtuous here. Hillary’s ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery).

The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here in force, interacting all the time with the leaders of the party of the people. We watch as Podesta appears to email Sheryl Sandberg. He makes plans to visit Mark Zuckerberg (who, according to one missive, wants to “learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action”). Podesta exchanges emails with an entrepreneur about an ugly race now unfolding for Silicon Valley’s seat in Congress; this man, in turn, appears to forward to Podesta the remarks of yet another Silicon Valley grandee, who complains that one of the Democratic combatants in that fight was criticizing billionaires who give to Democrats. Specifically, the miscreant Dem in question was said to be:

“… spinning (and attacking) donors who have supported Democrats. John Arnold and Marc Leder have both given to Cory Booker, Joe Kennedy, and others. He is also attacking every billionaire that donates to Congressional candidate Ro Khanna, many whom support other Democrats as well.”

Attacking billionaires! In the year 2015! It was, one of the correspondents appears to write, “madness and political malpractice of the party to allow this to continue”.

There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure trove when you search the gilded words “Davos” or “Tahoe”. But it is when you search “Vineyard” on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us. By “vineyard”, of course, they mean Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy vacation resort island off the coast of Massachusetts where presidents Clinton and Obama spent most of their summer vacations. The Vineyard is a place for the very, very rich to unwind, yes, but as we learn from these emails, it is also a place of high idealism; a land of enlightened liberal commitment far beyond anything ordinary citizens can ever achieve.

Consider, for example, the 2015 email from a foundation executive to a retired mortgage banker (who then seems to have forwarded the note on to Podesta, and thus into history) expressing concern that “Hillary’s image is being torn apart in the media and there’s not enough effective push back”. The public eavesdrops as yet another financier invites Podesta to a dinner featuring “food produced exclusively by the island’s farmers and fishermen which will be matched with specially selected wines”. We learn how a Hillary campaign aide recommended that a policy statement appear on a certain day so that “It wont get in the way of any other news we are trying to make – but far enough ahead of Hamptons and Vineyard money events”. We even read the pleadings of a man who wants to be invited to a state dinner at the White House and who offers, as one of several exhibits in his favor, the fact that he “joined the DSCC Majority Trust in Martha’s Vineyard (contributing over $32,400 to Democratic senators) in July 2014”.
How does the US electoral college work?

(Hilariously, in another email chain, the Clinton team appears to scheme to “hit” Bernie Sanders for attending “DSCC retreats on Martha’s Vineyard with lobbyists”.)

Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

While Hillary Clinton still maintains a lead in the polls and a built-in advantage on the electoral map, recent polls suggest that Donald Trump is closing the gap. There are now plausible — however improbable — electoral map routes to victory for him.

I leave it to others to make predictions about how all this will play out, but I feel that I must say again, and until the last minute and with my last breath: America, are you (expletive) kidding?!

I simply cannot wrap my head around how others with level heads and sound minds can even consider Trump for president of this country and leader of the free world. The logic simply escapes me.

I try to view it through the lens of economic anxiety, diminished economic mobility and global pressure. It all seems understandable, but then I’m reminded of Donald Trump, a billionaire whose businesses have on more than one occasion gone bankrupt, who stiffed contractors, who outsources the making of many of his products and who brags about not paying federal income taxes. All of which brings me back to: Are you kidding me?

I try to view it through a purely ideological lens in which people simply tend to vote for the party nominee. It makes sense, but then I’m reminded of Donald Trump, a man who isn’t really an ideologue but a demagogue interested only in self-aggrandizement. And again I return to: You’re kidding, right?

... ...

Is Team Clinton Booting the Election?

By Michael Barone
November 04, 2016

••• ••• "obviously, something has changed. FBI Director James Comey's announcement Oct. 28 that the investigation into Clinton's non-secure emails as secretary of state was resuming undoubtedly contributed to it. And the race may already have been tightening after the announcement of what Trump might call yuuuuuge Obamacare premium increases.

"After all, Clinton is seeking a third Democratic term, though the signature policies of the current Democratic president -- Obamacare, the Iranian nuclear deal -- have always been unpopular.

"The response to the Comey announcement of those on Team Clinton -- which includes many of the mainstream media, as well as the Clinton campaign -- reeked of panic. They clearly didn't see this coming.

"The first response was to attack Comey for addressing his letter only to Republican members of Congress. In fact, it was addressed, in line with typical executive branch practice, to the appropriate committee members of both parties. An unforced error or, as the British would say, an own goal.

"Then came an attack on Comey for violating Justice Department "protocol" -- a word used a dozen times by vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine in one interview.

"But of course, Team Clinton didn't object to Comey's violating protocol July 5 when he announced he wouldn't recommend criminal charges against Clinton for violating email rules and lying repeatedly about it. He said that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring such a case, even though no reasonable judge would quash an indictment under Title 18, Section 793(f) of U.S. Code based on the facts he alleged.

"My theory is that Comey was placed in an impossible position by the June 27 Phoenix tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a meeting that was surely intended to be secret but was revealed apparently because a TV reporter had a good source in the private jet terminal.

"By meeting with the spouse of a candidate under criminal investigation, Lynch revealed herself to be a political hack. Her Justice Department's refusal to summon a grand jury and sweetheart deals with key witnesses strengthen that view.

"So Comey, head of an investigative agency, was obliged to make a decision that would ordinarily be made by a prosecutor. Like a local judge asked to enjoin a party's national convention delegates, he evidently didn't consider it his job to determine who should be a presidential nominee.

"Team Clinton cheered that violation of protocol. The Oct. 28 letter required a "1984"-style flip-flop from those in the Clinton camp. They said, in effect, "We have always been at war with the protocol-violating James Comey."

"The repeated attacks on Comey by Clinton and the mainstream media were out of the 1990s Clinton playbook. Similar attacks worked when Bill Clinton was the incumbent president with high job approval. But Hillary Clinton isn't the incumbent president and has sub-50 percent approval.

"Did Team Clinton think its candidate would win a contest over honesty and integrity with an FBI director it had recently praised? That looks like political malpractice."
••• ••••

Apologies on behalf of Americans for any ugliness you encounter here. Some people quickly resort to shutting down people with whom they disagree. Input from the free people the American President is widely said to lead should always be welcome! Just about every Canadian I encountered this summer--family, friends, strangers--has opinion about election. Even conservatives up there--the ones I encountered, anyway, no fans of PM Trudeau--are appalled by the prospect of Trump...

Big Names Campaigning for Hillary Clinton Underscore Donald Trump’s Isolation (*)

By ALEXANDER BURNS and GARDINER HARRIS
November 4, 2016

Four days before the election, Hillary Clinton held a celebrity-studded concert event in Cleveland. (Doug Mills / New York Times)

••• •••
"Mr. Trump acknowledged the relative bareness of his events at a rally on Friday night: In defiant language, Mr. Trump hailed the size of the crowd packed into an arena in Hershey, Pa.

'By the way, I didn’t have to bring J. Lo or Jay Z — the only way she gets anybody,' he said. 'I am here all by myself. Just me — no guitar, no piano, no nothing.'"

_______________
* And ours. If this photo doesn't also underscore your political 'isolation,' then I guess you and I are on opposite sides of that social gulf.