Monday Reads

Good Afternoon!

I’m still a little tired and overwrought from the wedding stuff this weekend so you’ll have to excuse me if this is a little terse. I have to say that I’m getting really excited about casting my ballot and watching a lot of my friends take their pussies and bad hombres to the polls!  We all expect her to win.  The polls really are showing that Hillary Clinton has pulled way ahead  and many states are in play that really shouldn’t be.  Texas is now a toss-up! It’s also early voting starting today!! 

Actually, you can watch Hillary and Elizabeth Warren live this afternoon from New Hampshire!  That’s pretty exciting! Clinton’s concentrating on bringing the House and Senate along with her. They’re helping US Senate Candidate Maggie Hassan who is the current Governor.  What a stage full of impressive women!!!

S0 just like the eight years of the black man who really wasn’t “legitimate” in the eyes of many Republicans, will the white woman be seen as being an illegitimate president?  They can’t question her birthright and won’t since the issue is not her race.  But, what both Sanders and Trump have said is that she is essentially dishonest and has found some kind of miracle way to rig and steal elections.

My fellow Louisianan Charles M Blow really digs right into this and hits all the right points. Blow begins by talking about how Sanders basically framed his loss as a result of a crooked system that Hillary played. Trump has a much more massive conspiracy theory of rigged national elections. Both men would rather believe in imaginary voters, captured superdelegates, and computer bugs than admit they lost to a girl fair and square.

An NBC/SurveyMonkey poll released Friday found that 45 percent of Republicans definitely wouldn’t or were unlikely to accept the result of the election if their candidate lost, compared to 30 percent of Independents and 16 percent of Democrats who felt the same.

At this point, it’s not even clear if Trump would graciously concede if he lost. Indeed, grace may be beyond his grasp.

And while there are signs that Clinton is narrowing the enthusiasm gap with Trump, my sense is that Clinton’s current success is as much a repudiation of Trump’s abhorrence as it is an embrace of Clinton. It feels to me more like exhaustion than exhilaration.

We could be on the verge of something historic. So, why does it feel so much like acquiescence? Why aren’t more people rushing to the polls to vote for this immensely qualified woman rather than rushing to vote against this woefully unqualified man? One of the reasons is that her male opponents have successfully cast the race she may win as rigged.

I think it’s fair to say our electoral processes aren’t perfect. But they’ve never been. Nor has any candidate been perfect. So why must those imperfections be nullifying at the very moment that a woman is on the verge of victory? Clinton is a woman beating men at their own game. Deal with it.

Just this morning, Trump repeated his claims that the polls are phony.

Donald Trump is saying “the truth is that we’re winning” – and claims that “phony polls” are trying to suppress the vote.

Trump spoke Monday at a farmers’ roundtable in Florida. He insisted that his campaign is ahead, even though most polls show him trailing Hillary Clinton.

He told the crowd gathered next to a pumpkin patch in Boynton beach: “I believe we’re winning.”

He then, without evidence, blamed that several “mainstream” media polls for weighing their respondents with Democrats.

He also told reporters that he felt “very good” about his chances in Florida, a state that is essential for his White House hopes.

This followed a CBS4 Florida interview where he railed about rigged elections and how the press has too much freedom of speech.  Trump actually suggested that the First Amendment allowed “too much freedom of speech”.  Welcome to the latest bits of authoritarianism displayed by this ugly, stupid, little man.

If Donald Trump is president, he’d like to make some changes to the First Amendment.

In an interview with WFOR, CBS’ Miami affiliate, Trump was asked if he believes the First Amendment provides “too much protection.”

Trump answered in the affirmative, saying he’d like to change the laws to make it easier to sue media companies. Trump lamented that, under current law, “our press is allowed to say whatever they want.”

He recommended moving to a system like in England where someone who sues a media company has “a good chance of winning.”

If Donald Trump is president, he’d like to make some changes to the First Amendment.

Trump has recently threatened to sue the New York Times and the numerous women who say he has sexually assaulted them.

Trump is right that he would have a better chance of prevailing under English law where an allegedly defamatory statement is presumed to be false. There, it is up to the defendant in a libel suit to prove that their statements are true.

But even if U.S. law were more like England’s, Trump might still have difficulty in prevailing against his accusers or the New York Times.

Many of Trump’s accusers have witnesses who can corroborate their stories. The reporter for People Magazine who says she was assaulted by Trump, for example, has six different people supporting her version of events.

English defamation law was also amended in 2013 to add a “public interest” exemption. This change would potentially allow the New York Times to escape liability in England even if they were unable to definitely prove the truth of their reporting.

He continues to confuse the USA with his personal little dictatorship driven personal corporations which frequently fail.  While we can’t get his taxes released that show the extent of his failures and reliance on his father and the government, we have Wikileaks out there pilfering whatever they can from wherever they can to try to hurt Hillary and promote the Russian Agenda.  The New Yorker has gone over the transcripts of Clinton’s speeches and found one big nothingburger.

So far, the documents have contained a few embarrassing revelations for Clinton—but they’ve been mild ones. Certain e-mails have confirmed that her campaign has been carefully scripted, to the point where numerous aides weigh in on something as mundane as the text of a tweet. The speech extracts, collected in an internal campaign document, showed Clinton courting senior figures from Wall Street, sympathizing with them for the blame they shouldered after the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, and telling them she valued their counsel on policy issues. In one speech, she acknowledged that, given her life style, she was “far removed” from the concerns of middle-class Americans. In another speech, she made a case for the political necessity of adopting different positions in public and private.

But did any of this surprise anybody? The stage-managed nature of Clinton’s campaign has been obvious all along: this is a candidate who went almost nine months without holding a proper press conference. The perception that Clinton had cozied up to bankers in return for large speaking fees was one reason so many Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. The wealth that Clinton and her husband have amassed since he left office in 2000 was hardly a secret. And, from welfare reform to same-sex marriage to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Clinton’s willingness to tack with the wind on policy issues has been a recurring feature of her career.

The real value of the WikiLeaks documents is one the hackers may not have intended. The documents, particularly the speech extracts, portray Clinton as she is: a hard-headed centrist who believes that electoral politics inevitably involve making compromises, dealing with powerful interest groups, and, where necessary, amending unpopular policy positions. Addressing a General Electric Global Leadership Meeting in January, 2014, she said, “I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be.” Answering a question in March, 2014, at an event organized by Xerox, she said that the country needs two “sensible, moderate, pragmatic parties.” These sentiments won’t win over many Sanders supporters. But they might actually reassure moderate Democrats, independents, and even some Trump-loathing Republicans who are thinking about crossing party lines.

For some reason, we’re all supposed to be shocked about this and wax poetic about Bernie or buy the Trumpertantrums.  I’m doing neither.  I’m taking this pussy to the poll.  I’m voting for Hillary Clinton and I’m telling any one who believes conspiracy theories about massive election riggings they should get a life.  Also, they should stop the comparisons to Bush v. Gore because that was heart-stoppingly close. Both the Obama elections and the upcoming Clinton election were and are anything but close.  Get over it boys!  They black man and the girl beat you fair and square!  You’re days starting every activity in life on third base are coming to a close.  Try to get to first base with the rest of us.

As Charles M. Blow says, “DEAL WITH IT”!

What’s on you reading and blogging list today?