Thursday Reads: Irrational Hatred and the Exhaustion it Creates
Posted: February 4, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: "hatred, CDS, culture of misogyny, exhaustion, haters, Hillary Clinton, Media bias, prejudice, Sexism 57 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
I’ve been struggling all morning over writing this post. I knew that if Hillary ran for president again we would face unprecedented sexism and misogyny from the media and from many people who claim to be Democrats. But I never imagined it would be this bad. It was bad in 2008, but in 2016 the CDS is magnified beyond belief.
Since I was a child I have had a difficult time understanding why people hate those who are different from themselves. It was around 1956 when I noticed the prejudice that black people have to deal with. I just couldn’t make sense of it. I was 8 years old.
Later I followed the Civil Rights Movement closely and again I was mystified by the hatred of Americans for their fellow Americans. I could empathize and feel rage at the injustice perpetrated against African Americans, but of course I couldn’t really comprehend what it felt like to be the targets of so much ugly, vicious hatred.
As someone who has dreamed her whole life that women might finally achieve equality, and who believes that electing a woman president would go a long way toward making that dream a reality, I am beginning to truly understand how it feels to be hated and reviled by the culture I live in. It is exhausting.
It requires superhuman strength and courage just to get up every day and keep trusting my inner voice no matter what other people say and do, and internally trying to counter the ugly attacks on the first woman to have a real chance to win the Democratic nomination and perhaps to become the first woman President of the United States.
The only thing that gives me the strength to keep believing is the the example set by Hillary Clinton. I don’t know how she does it, but I think she has the courage and the competence to keep fighting for us all the way to the White House.
Last night in the CNN Democratic Town Hall, I saw a woman who is comfortable with herself, who believes in her ability to pull this off, and who has truly found her voice as a candidate. I have never seen a better performance by Hillary Clinton in any debate or forum. She was magnificent.
But don’t expect the media to report that. They’re busy praising Bernie Sanders, the man who answered every question by returning to his boring stump speech far outshone the woman who following him (why does Bernie always get to go first, by the way?) according to the largely white male Washington press corps.
You know what? I don’t care. Hillary is speaking to the voters and I think enough of them will hear what she is saying.
Last night Bernie got mostly softball questions from Anderson Cooper and the audience. Hillary got mostly tough questions, and she rose to the occasion. She never whined or complained. She was humble and she listened carefully to what she was asked.
Bernie on the other hand did his usual nodding and waving–he doesn’t seem to listen to the questions at all. He makes up his mind what the question is while the person asking it is still talking. Hillary doesn’t do that. She actually cares about the person who is talking to her. It’s amazing that so many people can keep right on hating her even after they watch her be so open, so willing to listen, to learn, to get better as a person and a candidate. But that’s what hate is about–hence the cliche “blind hatred.”
Just for today I’m going to leave aside the many media arguments for why Hillary Clinton just isn’t good enough and why she can never be good enough in their minds. There’s another debate tonight, and I need to psych myself up; because I am determined to watch it no matter how exhausting it is to see the irrational hatred my candidate has to face.
#ImWithHer
First, a couple of positive moments from last night:
From a mostly negative article by Eric Bradner at CNN, a wonderful quote from Hillary Clinton after she was asked for the umpteenth time why younger voters like Bernie Sanders so much and why they are rejecting her (although I see so many young women and men on line and on TV who do like her):
“I’m impressed with them, and I’m going to do everything I can to reach out and explain why good ideas on paper are important, but you’ve got to be able to translate that into action,” Clinton said.
“Here’s what I want young people to know: They don’t have to be for me. I’m going to be for them,” she added.
Could Bernie Sanders have been that humble and non-defensive? Not from what I’ve seen so far.
From Maxwell Tani at Business Insider, here’s another sincere and humble moment from Hillary last night.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton delivered a deeply personal answer to a question about how she stays self-confident while being conscious of her ego and staying humble.
Responding to a question from a rabbi at a CNN town-hall event, Clinton seemed to allude to damaging past public scandals, saying she kept a parable from the Bible in mind during tough situations.
“It’s not anything I’ve ever talked about this much publicly. Everybody knows that I’ve lived a very public life for the last 25 years. So I’ve had to be in public dealing with some very difficult issues,” Clinton said.
She continued: “I read that parable and there was a line in it that became just a lifeline for me. It basically is, ‘Practice the discipline of gratitude.’ Be grateful for your limitations, know that you have to reach out to have more people be with you to support you advise you. Listen to your critics, answer the questions, but at the end, be grateful.”
I thought that was straight from the heart. But it will be minimized and then brushed aside by the haters.
In Michael Moore’s Casual Chauvinism, Michael Tomasky writes about the endorsement of Bernie Sanders by the liberal icon. In a letter, Moore lists a series of historical “firsts” in the history of presidential campaigns. The first Catholic, JFK. The first president from the deep South, Carter. The first divorced man, Ronald Reagan, and so on up till the first black president, Obama.
But Moore never mentions women at all. He doesn’t think the first woman president would be important. No. He’s thrilled by the idea of the first socialist president–ignoring the fact that Sanders would also be the first Jewish president if elected. Sanders clearly agrees with him.
Tomasky:
Here’s what’s weird and gobsmacking about this endorsement. In a letter that is almost entirely about historical firsts—it goes on to discuss how “they” used to say we’d never have gay marriage and other changes—Moore doesn’t even take one sentence to acknowledge that Clinton’s elevation to the presidency would represent an important first.
I mean, picture yourself sitting down to write that. You’re a person of the left. You are writing specifically about the first Catholic president, the first black president, the first this, the first that. You want people to believe that if those things could happen, then a “democratic socialist” could win too. Fine, if that’s your view, that’s your view.
But it’s also the case the other candidate winning would make history in a way that is at least as historically important from a politically left point of view—I would say more so, but okay, that’s a subjective judgment—and it’s not even worth a sentence? I wouldn’t expect Moore to back Clinton or even say anything particularly nice about her. But he can’t even acknowledge to female readers that this great progressive sees that having a woman president would be on its own terms a salutary thing?
I obviously have no idea whether Moore contemplated such a sentence and rejected it or it just never occurred to him. Either way, it tells us something. To a lot of men, even men of the left, the woman-president thing just isn’t important.
Please read this magnificent essay by Melissa McEwan at Blue Nation Review: I Am a Hillary Clinton Supporter Who Has Not Always Been One.
I am a Hillary Clinton supporter who has not always been one. She was not my first choice in 2008.
But it was during that campaign I started documenting, as part of my coverage of US politics in a feminist space, the instances of misogyny being used against her by both the right and the left, amassing a “Hillary Sexism Watch” that contained more than 100 entries by the time she withdrew from the primary. And it was hardly a comprehensive record.
I have spent an enormous amount of time with Hillary Clinton, although I have never spoken to her. I have read transcripts of her speeches, her policy proposals, her State Department emails. I have watched countless hours of interviews, debates, addresses, testimony before Congress. I have scrolled though thousands of wire photos, spoken to people who have worked with and for her, read her autobiography, listened to her fans and her critics.
And what I have discovered is a person whom I like very much.
Not a perfect person. Not even a perfect candidate. I am not distressed by people who have legitimate criticisms of Hillary Clinton and some of the policies she has advocated; I share those criticisms.
Is any person or candidate perfect?
What is distressing to me is that I see little evidence of that person in the public narratives about Hillary Clinton. Not everyone has the time nor the desire to deep-dive into documents the way that I have. If I hadn’t had a professional reason to do so, I may not have done it myself.
I may have—and did, before I was obliged otherwise—relied on what I learned about Hillary Clinton from the media.
Which, as it turns out, is deeply corrupted by pervasive misogyny.
The subtle misogyny of double-standards that mean she can’t win (even when she does), and the overt misogyny of turning her into a monster, a gross caricature of a ruthlessly ambitious villain who will stop at nothing in her voracious quest for ever more power.
Please go read the rest. I only wish I could quote the whole thing.
Emily Crockett at Vox: This awful Morning Joe clip shows how not to talk about Hillary Clinton.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday featured a tone-deaf discussion of Hillary Clinton’s tone, which you can watch in full here.
“She shouts,” journalist Bob Woodward said of Clinton. “There is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating, and I think that just jumps off the television screen.”
That kicked off an eight-minute, slow-motion train wreck of a conversation that used Clinton’s alleged problems with volume to support arguments about how voters find her untrustworthy — and even to suggest that Clinton doesn’t know or trust herself as a person.
“I’m sorry to dwell on the tone issue,” Woodward said later, “but there is something here where Hillary Clinton suggests that she’s almost not comfortable with herself, and, you know, self-acceptance is something that you communicate on television.”
Host Joe Scarborough compared Clinton unfavorably to 1980s conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom were apparently self-confident enough to keep the noise down.
“Has nobody told her that the microphone works?” Scarborough said. “Because she always keeps it up here.” The “genius” of Reagan, Scarborough said while dropping into a deep baritone for emphasis, is that Reagan “kept it down low.”
The panel also included Cokie Roberts talking about how people think Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy and dishonest. Gee I wonder where they got that idea, Cokie?
I’m running out of space already. I’ll put some more links in the comment thread. We’ll have a live blog tonight for the MSNBC Democratic Debate.
Iowa Caucus Monday Reads
Posted: February 1, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections | Tags: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iowa Caucuses, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz 51 CommentsLet the Games Begin!!!
Today are the Iowa Caucuses that will likely make or break a lot of the more iffy candidates hanging on to the slim hope that somebody takes them seriously. Iowa first is a long tradition with some interesting twists. Some of the things that I learned so far in the 2016 silly season include the idea of a “kiddie table” debate and that pundits take Uber and that all those Iowa Uber drivers seem to be the source of anecdotal evidence on voting patterns.
This Iowa Caucus is not the Iowa Caucus of my parents. My father was the Ford Dealer in Council Bluffs, Iowa for over 25 years. They voted in the same elementary school where I practiced “duck and cover” during the Cuban Missile Crisis and saw my second grade teacher Miss Irma Long cry as she announced we’d be sent home because our President, Mr. Kennedy, had been shot in Texas. Most of the candidates of the ilk we have today would’ve been a really odd sight on the stump back then.
I can only imagine what my parents and their friends would say if this crazy looking man from Northern Louisiana showed up looking as he does–which is like someone who’s been lost on an island for years ranting crazily from too much sun–to rally for a candidate. But, the same group of Baptists that harassed one of my father’s clerks for doing laundry on Sunday because they saw the steam coming out of the dryer vent is probably uber excited about Ted Cruz and the duckstasy of religious fever. They want to holy roll all gay marriage supporters off the planet, I guess.
While stumping in Iowa for Ted Cruz on Sunday, “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson declared that gay marriage is a sign of growing “depravity” and “perversion” in America.
Robertson, notorious for his racist and anti-gay remarks, said of marriage equality: “It is evil, it’s wicked, it’s sinful and they want us to swallow it.”
“We have to run this bunch out of Washington D.C.,” Robertson said. “We have to rid the earth of them. Get them out of there.”
Cruz followed Robertson on stage, calling the reality TV star “a joyful, cheerful, unapologetic voice of truth.”
Cruz is in hot water for a number of things. First, there are many they are still not convinced he meets the “natural born” qualification stated in the Constitution and Donald Trump mentions it every chance he can. Additionally, Cruz has used a push piece that has come under criticism by the Iowa Attorney General. The Strump is making a lot out of Cruz’s possibly illegal mailer.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump condemned mailers sent by Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) presidential campaign over the weekend, which implied Iowa voters had violated election law.
The mailer, which uses social pressure to urge potential voters to the polls, “grades” Iowa voters on their voting history — a practice not done by the state.
“I think it’s one of the most disgraceful things I have seen in politics,” Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Sunday’s “Hardball.” “When you say violation, and then they’re giving you F’s for your voting records and they’re saying immediately come and vote. I think it’s one of the most horrible things that I have seen in politics.”
You can follow the link to TPM to see an example of the mailer. Meanwhile, every time Trump uses music, another musician tells him to cut it out. This time it’s Adele.
The Republican presidential candidate, whose slogan is “Make America great again”, has recently been playing Adele’s hit Rolling In The Deep as his “warm-up” music.
“Adele has not given permission for her music to be used for any political campaigning,” her spokesman confirmed.
It is not the first time Trump has been criticised for appropriating pop songs.
Lawyers for Aerosmith star Steven Tyler sent Trump’s campaign a cease-and-desist letter last year, after the politician played the band’s hit single Dream On at numerous rallies around the US.
The letter said Trump’s use of the song gave “a false impression” he endorsed Mr Trump’s presidential bid.
Trump responded on Twitter, saying he had the legal right to use the song, but had found “a better one to take its place”.
“Steven Tyler got more publicity on his song request than he’s gotten in 10 years. Good for him!” he added.
Blizzard conditions will be heading tonight to my childhood home in Council Bluffs which basically means there will be no fair weather turnout in a good deal of Eastern Iowa. It also means that youngest daughter will be digging out on Tuesday since she’s out there in the Omaha Boonie Suburbs.
My continued fascination with the parallels between Bernie and the Strump has me thinking on how the both of them seemed to have made the Super Pac and the billionaire donor class appear irrelevant. Trump is self-financing his campaign. Sanders has just passed a record for collecting money from small donors. It’s amazing to watch Jeb Bush struggle for attention while swimming in all that money.
With billionaire Donald Trump sitting firmly atop the Republican field, the willingness of big establishment donors to underwrite his competitors’ war chests has fizzled.
About 17 donors gave $1 million or more to groups backing Republican presidential candidates in the last six months of 2015, 60 percent fewer than the number who gave that much in the first half of the year, according to Federal Election Commission filings. And outside groups that can accept unlimited contributions accounted for about 27 percent of Republican fundraising in the second half, down from 78 percent.
Many donors contributed large sums early to create the perception that their candidate was financially viable to go the distance. Now, with the first-in-the-nation caucuses taking place today in Iowa and several other primaries happening in the coming weeks, much of that money isn’t being replenished as candidates enter a grueling and expensive phase of the campaign.
“Part of this is the Trump effect,” said Tony Corrado, a government professor at Colby College. “Some major establishment Republican donors are undoubtedly waiting to see which candidate will emerge as the best alternative to Trump.”
For some, that’s already begun. Marco Rubio, who has emerged as the leading establishment candidate in recent months, won the backing of two major conservative hedge fund donors — Paul Singer and Ken Griffin — each of whom gave $2.5 million in late 2015 to a super-PAC supporting Rubio, Conservative Solutions PAC.
Rubio’s also winning over some big money that previously backed Bush, who, as a frequent target of Trump’s jibes, has struggled to get traction with voters. After raising a record $103 million in the first half of the year, the super-PAC supporting Bush, Right to Rise USA, pulled in only $15 million over the next six months, the bulk of it from one donor.
Rubio joins Clinton and Sanders as the top fund raisers.
The former secretary of state brought in over $37 million in the final three months of 2015 and started the year with $38 million in the bank. At the same time, the campaign spent $35 million in those three months. She continues to benefit from millions of dollars raised by her super PACs, including Priorities USA, which said Friday it has raised $50 million through this month. Two other groups supporting Clinton, American Bridge and Correct the Record, brought in an additional $6 million total.
And while Sanders has sworn off super PACs and criticizes Clinton’s largesse, a group run by National Nurses United is backing the Vermont senator regardless and has raised $2.3 million, with about half of that remaining, the group reported.
Clinton’s haul also meant a windfall for the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties across the country, who worked with Clinton’s campaign to raise money for the Hillary Victory Fund. In total, Clinton’s campaign raised $18 million for the DNC and state parties.
“We’re heading into the first caucuses and primaries with an organization second to none thanks to the support of hundreds of thousands of people across the country,” said Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager. “We will have the resources necessary to wage a successful campaign in the early states and beyond.”
Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver touted the number of individual contributions — 3.25 million — the campaign has received. “As Secretary Clinton holds high-dollar fundraisers with the nation’s financial elite, our supporters have stepped up in a way that allows Bernie to spend the critical days before the caucuses talking to Iowans about his plans to fix a rigged economy and end a corrupt system of campaign finance,” Weaver said in a statement.
It looks like Hillary and the Strump are the expected winners tonight. Sanders, Cruz and Rubio all appear poised to close with some delegates since Iowa is not a winner take all state.
It would be entirely reasonable to presume that Bernie Sanders has momentum in Iowa. He’s gained on Hillary Clinton in national polls. Hekeeps pulling further ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire. And he’s made substantial gains in Iowa relative to his position late last year. December polls of Iowa showed Sanders behind by an average of 16 percentage points; the race is much closer now.
There’s just one problem: Sanders’s momentum may have stalled right when it counts the most.
The Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll released Saturday, for example, had Clinton leading Sanders by 3 percentage points. That means Iowa is close and winnable for Sanders; polling errors of 5 or even 10 percentage points are not uncommon in the caucuses. But it also means that Sanders hasn’t gained on Clinton. The previous Des Moines Register poll, released earlier in January, showed Clinton up by 2 percentage points instead.
The same story holds for other polling companies that have surveyed Iowa twice in January. A couple of these pollsters — American Research Group and Quinnipiac University — show Sanders leading. But they don’t show him gaining; Sanders also led in the previous edition of the ARG and Quinnipiac surveys.
Clinton and Cruz are relying on a substantive ground game and good commit to caucus plans for GOTV activities. Sanders and Trump are hoping for a large turnout and the ability to overwhelm the caucuses where they do have a base. Cruz appears to be the one Republican with a substantive ground game. Cruz has a natural base with evangelicals that Trump has somewhat eroded. Cruz goes after the right wing religious voters.
It’s little more than 24 hours before the pivotal Iowa caucuses begin, and the presidential campaigns are still going strong. Especially for Ted Cruz, who TIME reporter Alex Altman says digs deep to his religious roots to connect with his conservative voters on the trail.
“Ted, the voice of sanity, in this time of calamity!” a voter exclaims at a campaign stop in a public library in northwest Iowa.
Cruz has been touring several towns in Iowa, and is one of the few candidates who planned to stop in all of the state’s 99 counties.
“This is part of Cruz’s strategy to win it the old fashioned way,” Altman said, “which is to go hand-to-hand in small towns, visit people, and tell them why he wants their vote.”
Iowa is primarily a rural state although there are vast differences between the east and western sections of the state. It is home to several really good universities and to the Amish. There are still plenty of farmers there including the grandfather of my future son-in-law who used to buy his F150s from my dad. Iowa folks are also very fond of their agriculture and ethanol subsidies. It’s going to be interesting to see how they weigh in tonight. I’m seeing lots of pictures and shots from places I recognize that don’t seem to have changed much in my 60 years on the planet. Parts of the state do not have reliable wifi still. There is also a large contingent of immigrants that work the slaughterhouses. It’s a state that looks like Mayberry in many ways. We’ll just have to see.
We will be posting a live blog with the returns later tonight. Caucus doors lock down around 8:30 cst. The weather will be important as will the intensity of the supporters. Who do you think is going to win tonight?
Lazy Saturday Reads: Eghazi!!
Posted: January 30, 2016 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Eghazi!, Hillary Clinton 33 Comments
Happy Saturday!!
Has any other presidential candidate in history had to fight the corporate media in addition to attacks from the other party and her opponents for the nomination to the extent that Hillary has to? I don’t think so. In just two days, Iowans will head to the caucuses. What “bombshells” will the media find to hype against Hillary before Monday night?
Today it’s “Eghazi” once again. Yesterday, the State Department announced that some of Clinton’s emails have been retroactively deemed to be “top secret.” The emails were not sent by Hillary from her private email server. They were sent to her by other people using the State Departments unclassified email server, because the information was not classified at the time.
Unfortunately, someone in the “intelligence community”–presumably GOP partisan(s)–told the State Department they cannot release these emails, so now the Hillary haters can speculate to their hearts’ content. Some of these withheld emails were exchanges between then Secretary of State Clinton and President Barack Obama! But you know, “Benghazi!!” Eghazi!!
I’ll post just one corporate media article about this from eminent Clinton hater and Washington Post columnist Chris Cillizza: Hillary Clinton’s email defense just hit a major bump in the road. Seriously? Oh, and the article is accompanied by an unflattering photo of Hillary frowning.
For months, Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign have stuck to a consistent story line when faced with allegations of classified information on the private server she used exclusively as secretary of state: She was the victim of an overzealous intelligence community bent on categorizing information as top secret or classified when it was, in fact, neither.
That defense hit a major snag on Friday when the State Department announced that it, too, had found “top secret” information on Clinton’s server — 22 emails across seven separate emails chains. The information, the State Department said, was so secret that those emails would never be released to the public.
Suddenly Clinton’s narrative of an overly aggressive intelligence community or a broader squabble between the intelligence world and the State Department didn’t hold water. Or at least held a whole lot less water than it did prior to Friday afternoon.
The Clinton team quickly pivoted. “After a process that has been dominated by bureaucratic infighting that has too often played out in public view, the loudest and leakiest participants in this interagency dispute have now prevailed in blocking any release of these emails,” said campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.
Calling for the release of the allegedly top secret emails is a smart gambit by the Clinton folks since it makes them look as if they have nothing to hide while being protected by the near-certainty that the State Department won’t simply change its mind on the release because the Clinton team asked them to.
Still, the timing of the State Department announcement, coming just three days before the pivotal Iowa caucuses, and the nature of that announcement seem likely to further complicate a situation that has already caused Clinton and her campaign huge amounts of agita since the existence of her private email server was revealed almost one year ago to the day.
You can read more Cillizza lies and distortion at the link.
It’s not likely you’ll see the true story in the corporate media, so here are some calmer responses from people who actually know what they’re talking about. By the way Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon is one of those people. He was previously director of communications for the Department of Justice and dealt with classified material on a daily basis.
Why does the Clinton campaign want the emails released if they are show shocking? Because they’re not.
This from Sen. Dianne Feinstein:
https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/693219721609637889
From Hillary:
So what is really happening? As far as I can tell, there is absolutely nothing new here. It’s all about politics and trying to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming POTUS.
Max Fisher at Vox: The Hillary Clinton top-secret email controversy, explained.
If it’s top secret, then it must be really sensitive, right?
Not necessarily. A large proportion of documents that our government classifies are not actually that sensitive — more on that below. So the key thing now is to try to figure out: Were these emails classified because they contain highly sensitive information that Clinton never should have emailed in the first place, or because they were largely banal but got scooped up in America’s often absurd classify-everything practices? [….]
According to a statement by the State Department, “These documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent.”
In other words, they do not contain information that was “born classified,” but rather fall into the vast gray area of things that do not seem obviously secret at the time but are later deemed that way — not always for good reason.
Go over to Vox to read about “America’s problem with overclassification.”
CLINTON US ETHIOPIA
Big Tent Democrat AKA ArmandoKos at Talk Left: eGhazi: Same BS IC story: different day. Check the links in the post also if you want to know more.
Josh Gerstein and Rachel Bade:
The furor over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account grew more serious for the Democratic presidential front-runner Friday as the State Department designated 22 of the messages from her account “top secret.” [. . .]
“These documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent [and they weren’t sent by Clinton imo – BTD my emhphasis] ,” Kirby said in a statement.
Sound familiar? It should because it is the same story I’ve been writing about since this nonsense started. See in particular State v. IC classification battles:
Now what does this mean? It means the Intelligence Community, represented here by the IC IG, disagrees with the State Department’s determination on the classification of certain information contained in the Clinton e-mails. In their opinion, the information should have been designated classified and should be so designated now. But State does not agree.
Now what were those “classified documents then? I reviewed some that got through. As you can see, the IC is full of crap.What about this batch? I think we can safely say that the bulk of these are news stories discussing drone strikes.
Gerstein writes:
The messages deemed “secret” also vary widely. One from Feb. 25, 2012, appears to discuss U.S. drone operations in Pakistan.”This is hitting the news, with Taliban or HQN [the Haqqani Network] claiming responsibility,” State policy planning chief Jake Sullivan wrote to Clinton. The message originated with the U.S. Ambassador in In Pakistan, Dick Hoagland. Nearly all the text is deleted, but press reports that day described the crash of a drone in North Waziristan.
U.S. drones in Pakistan are operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, but the program is officially covert and therefore classified, even though President Barack Obama has acknowledged it publicly.
In short it is just more crazy crap from IC – news articles are Top Secret!! seems to be the theory.
But leaving aside the overclassification issue, there is just a little problem for those who want to take Clinton down with this nonsense – she didn’t transmit any of the information – just received it. And the issue is not a private server – after all the State’s unsecure email system would not be appropriate for “classified” material either.
As you have heard from me often, if anyone is in trouble, it will be career State officials like the current Ambassador to Bahrain, William Roebuck, Timothy T. Davis and William J Burns.
Addicting Info: Hillary Clinton Did Not Send ‘Top Secret’ Emails On Private Server.
To summarize:
- There are seven emails which the State Department says are now considered classified.
- The emails originated from inside the agency’s unclassified system.
- They were not marked ‘classified’ or ‘top secret’ when they were sent.
- The emails were not sent by Hillary Clinton, but were sent to her, along with a number of other people.
- One of the ‘top secret emails’ is likely a published newspaper article.
In other words, this is not the huge scandal republicans were hoping for. Instead, it’s just another baseless right wing attack on Hillary Clinton that falls apart under even the slightest amount of scrutiny.
Sigh . . . I’m already exhausted from this crap and the weekend is just beginning.
I’ll end with two Politico pieces, one on Bernie Sanders and his campaign’s “foreign policy advisers” and another on Sanders’ claims that he is more electable than Clinton.
Bernie’s foreign policy deficit. ‘I don’t know how I got on Bernie Sanders’ list,’ says one expert cited by his campaign, by Michael Crowley.
Not long after President Barack Obama ordered U.S. airstrikes in Libya in 2011, his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, trekked to Capitol Hill to brief Democratic senators. After a few minutes of discussion about the military operation, Bernie Sanders took the floor.
To talk about the economy.
“Sanders delivered a meandering manifesto about Democratic messaging on the economy,” says a former Senate chief of staff. “It wasn’t that his insights were wrong. It just wasn’t the time or place. Everyone was thinking, ‘Here goes Bernie!’ ”
Current and former Senate aides call the episode typical of Sanders, who on any given day would rather talk about Wall Street profits than about Middle East conflict….
Sanders has yet to give a speech exclusively on foreign policy, and on Friday his campaign backed away from an earlier commitment to deliver one before the Iowa vote. Numerous Democratic foreign policy insiders contacted by POLITICO could not name anyone who regularly advises the Vermont Senator on world affairs — a stark contrast to a Clinton campaign teeming with several hundred foreign policy advisers.
Oddly, the Sanders campaign is claiming to have foreign policy advisers who had no idea they were advising Bernie.
When asked whether Sanders has a full-time campaign staffer who handles foreign policy issues, his campaign did not respond. And several people whom the Sanders campaign has cited as sources of national security advice tell POLITICO they barely know the socialist firebrand.
“Apparently I had a conversation with him last August,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a Brookings Institution Middle East scholar, after checking her calendar upon hearing that her name was on a list of people the Sanders campaign said he had consulted in recent months. “My vague recollection is that it was about [the Islamic State] but I don’t really remember any of the details.” Wittes added that she backs Clinton.
“I don’t know how I got on Bernie Sanders’ list,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who says he spoke to Sanders once or twice about the Iran nuclear deal at Sanders’ request in mid-2015.
What the hell? But of course Bernie voted against going into Iraq in 2002, so he’s the real foreign policy expert, right?
Bernie Sanders might have an electability problem, by Stephen Shepard.
“Not only is Bernie Sanders electable in the general election,” insisted Sanders senior adviser Tad Devine, “he’s a stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton in the general election.”
Indeed, public pollsters who’ve conducted surveys in both Iowa and New Hampshire caution that the Sanders team might be misreading the data the campaign is relying on to make its case that Sanders would broaden the Democratic electorate and make more states competitive by luring young, more independently minded voters.
Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth University Polling Institute in New Jersey, said the independent voters who are backing Sanders in the primary are more liberal in orientation and would be likely to vote for the Democrat in November anyway.
“It’s a big leap of faith to take primary poll data and jump to the general,” added Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which has conducted recent polls for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal. “You do ask the questions, and it tells you something: Hillary has a problem with independents, and Bernie doesn’t. Fast forward to September, October and November. The campaigns will change, and that dynamic will be different.”
Duh. Read the rest at the link.
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a great weekend.
Blue Monday Reads
Posted: January 25, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Chris Hadfield, Democratic Primaries, Hillary Clinton, International Space Station, Space Oddity, Terry Virts 47 Comments
Hello from the depths of Mardi Gras and the despair of the press coverage of the US Presidential Primary.
“Planet earth is Blue and there’s nothing I can do.”
I never really understood the double entrendre enveloping that lyric when I was a a preteen first turning into a Bowie Fan. I grok it now.
That’s a view of New Orleans there on the left today! It was taken from space by US Astronaut Terry W. Virts who posted it to his Twitter page a few days ago. He had a simple message for us: “Good night #NewOrleans. Bonsoir La Nouvelle-Orléans”.
I thought I’d also treat you to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield singing Bowie’s Space Oddity from the International Space Station. He’s got a great voice and some interesting change in lyrics. I’m not sure how he got the guitar up there but watching it float around is a trip. Stick around to watch his collaboration with Barenaked Ladies and some high school kids from 2013. It’s so kewl!!!
I’m not sure why–of all the Bowie songs out there–this song is haunting me. It’s not really bothering me that I feel compelled to sit at the Steinway and grab a guitar for it then arrange away. It’s sort’ve a life time hazard of being a musician with me that melodies grab me and hold tight. So, I’m passing my brain Tweak on to you, lucky you!!
Now for more earthly matters…
I’m really trying to understand wtf is going on with the media and the Democratic primary. Maybe they’re tired of Republican crazy and want to create some lunacy among the Democrats. Maybe, they’ve just got caught up in the mythos of a great outsider still itching to take down the Clintons. It’s just early and getting old already.
Glenn Thrush of Politico has interviewed President Obama and the dissection has begun.
Barack Obama, that prematurely gray elder statesman, is laboring mightily to remain neutral during Hillary Clinton’s battle with Bernie Sanders in Iowa, the state that cemented his political legend and secured his path to the presidency.
But in a candid 40-minute interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast as the first flakes of the blizzard fell outside the Oval Office, he couldn’t hide his obvious affection for Clinton or his implicit feeling that she, not Sanders, best understands the unpalatably pragmatic demands of a presidency he likens to the world’s most challenging walk-and-chew-gum exercise.
“[The] one thing everybody understands is that this job right here, you don’t have the luxury of just focusing on one thing,” a relaxed and reflective Obama told me in his most expansive discussion of the 2016 race to date.
Iowa isn’t just a state on the map for Obama. It’s the birthplace of his hope-and-change phenomenon, “the most satisfying political period in my career,” he says — “what politics should be” — and a bittersweet reminder of how far from the garden he’s gotten after seven bruising years in the White House.
So, from Thrush’s vantage point, Clinton seems the obvious Obama follow-up. There also these overall daunting poll numbers when you look beyond the February openers. What’s with the conversation on a Bernie Bump?
natesilver: FWIW, our FiveThirtyEight national polling average (which we’re not publishing yet — stay tuned) has Clinton up 22 percentage points. Although that was before the Monmouth poll released today, which might tighten things a bit. But somewhere in the high teens or perhaps low 20s nationally is where the race seems to be. By contrast, our averaging method would have had Clinton up by 25 points at the end of December.
So that suggests some tightening, but not as much as the media narrative — which is pretty blatantly cherry-picking which polls it emphasizes — seems to imply.
From there, I’m seeing some other headlines which I don’t quite grok.
From BC News: First Read: Get Ready for a Long Fight for the Democratic Nod. It’s Chuck Todd so be forewarned because as you know the Republicans are rooting for Bernie big time. The weird thing is the fine print doesn’t connect with that clickbait headline. But, FYI there is this which is factual and remember, we’re always around to Live Blogs Debates and Townhalls.
Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley participate at a CNN forum at Drake University in Des Moines, IA beginning at 9:00 pm ET… Clinton holds three earlier events in Iowa, hitting Waukee, Knoxville, and Oskaloosa… Sanders, meanwhile, stumps in Iowa Falls, Ames, and Grinnell… Donald Trump holds a rally in Farmington, NH at 7:00 pm ET… Ted Cruz spends his day in Iowa… So does Marco Rubio… Chris Christie is in New Hampshire… Ben Carson hits the Hawkeye State… And John Kasich is in New Hampshire.
Countdown to Iowa: 7 days
Countdown to New Hampshire: 15 days
I’m really looking forward to hearing this debate because Bernie isn’t standing up well to media scrutiny and I’m denying to hear a response to this: “Sanders: Clinton is running a ‘desperate’ campaign that lacks excitement.”
Asked about his comments last spring that he had no intention of playing the role of spoiler or weakening Clinton’s standing in the general election, Sanders turned the question on its head.
“That’s a two-way question, isn’t it?” he said. “When Hillary Clinton’s hit man is throwing garbage at the media, she is in a sense making it harder for me to win the general election.
“Our campaign is not going to simply sit back and accept all of these attacks,” Sanders added. “We are going to win this thing.”
In another sign of growing confidence, Sanders has stepped up his talk of the general election. “I would very much look forward to a race against Donald Trump,” he said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” In speeches at his rallies, he sprinkles in previews of “a Sanders administration.”
Over the course of The Post interview, Sanders said Clinton was running a “desperate” campaign incapable of generating the kind of excitement his has. He raised questions about her motives and character. He said he expects Clinton and her campaign to “throw the kitchen sink” at him in the coming week in what he described as a craven attempt to avoid an embarrassing loss in Iowa.
Sanders questioned Clinton’s association with David Brock, the head of the pro-Clinton super PAC Correct the Record, whom Sanders called a “hit man.”
Even more bizarre is this comment: “Sanders says the flak he’s getting from Clinton reminds him of what Obama got in 2008.” Is this Sanders way of warming up to black folks?
“We get attacked about five times a day,” Sanders told a crowd of about 700 people here. “But it really reminds me very much of what happened here in Iowa eight years ago. Remember that? Eight years ago, Obama was being attacked for everything. He was unrealistic. His ideas were pie-in-the sky. He did not have the experience that was needed. You know what? People of Iowa saw through those attacks then, and they’re going to see through those attacks again.”
This must be the Clinton speech that gave Bernie the heebie jeebies.
Indianola, Iowa (CNN)Hillary Clinton delivered a blistering assessment of Bernie Sanders’ credentials here on Thursday and implored Iowa voters to scrutinize his policies and readiness for the White House, declaring, “Theory isn’t enough. A President has to deliver in reality.”
It was the most forceful and direct contrast Clinton has drawn with Sanders yet, a speech that underscored the increasing urgency and acrimony of the race. From health care to foreign policy, Clinton repeatedly referenced Sanders by name and questioned whether his ideas could ever become reality.
“I am not interested in ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world,” Clinton said. “I care about making a real difference in your life and that gets to the choice you have to make in this caucus.”
Clinton acknowledged that while she and Sanders “share many of the same goals” they have “different records and different ideas on how to drive progress.”
The former secretary of state used a Teleprompter to deliver her remarks to hundreds of supporters on the campus of Simpson College. The speech, one adviser said, was designed to “shake some sense into Iowans” and escalate the experience argument she has been making against Sanders with limited success.
“Senator Sanders doesn’t talk much about foreign policy, but when he does it raises concerns,” Clinton said. “Sometimes it can sound like he really hasn’t thought it through.”
Clinton’s campaign had multiple cameras here and plan to turn part of the speech into an ad, according to aides.
More bizarrely, we now have hints of a Bloomberg third party candidacy because of some perceived weakness on the part of the Clinton campaign. Doesn’t any one have enough math background these days to get real?
Democratic primary front-runner Hillary Clinton on Sunday vowed to win her party’s nomination for president to “relieve” former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg of any thoughts of running for president.
“The way I read what he said is if I didn’t get the nomination, he might consider it,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Well, I’m going to relieve him of that and get the nomination so he doesn’t have to [run].”
“He’s a good friend of mine, and I’m going to do the best I can to make sure that I get the nomination, and we’ll go from there,” she added.
Bloomberg is reportedly considering a third-party White House bid if the race comes down to Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders and Republican primary front-runner Donald Trump.
Clinton on Sunday also defended lucrative speaking fees that she collected from big banks before her presidential run.
She said the payouts will not influence her policy platform as president.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “You know, first of all, I was a Senator from New York — I took them on when I was a senator.”
Bloomberg has some ‘splaining to do. And I have the heebie jeebies at thinking between a President Bloomberg and President Trump.
A close confidant of Michael Bloomberg told ABC News the former New York City mayor plans to make a decision on whether he will make an independent run for president in the first week of March.
His decision will be based in large part on the state of the Democratic and Republican primaries after the Super Tuesday contests on March 1, the confidant said.
If after Super Tuesday it looks like Bernie Sanders has a good chance of winning theDemocratic primary and the Republicans seems likely to nominate either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, Bloomberg’s odds of running are at least 50-50, according to this long-time Bloomberg friend.
If, on the other hand, Hillary Clinton looks poised to win the Democratic nomination, the odds that Bloomberg will run drop to close to zero, the friend said.
And I’m going back to Tiger Beat on the Ptomac for my closer. I guess I’m with Paul Starr on this one. (“Paul Starr, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect and professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. Among his books is Freedom’s Power: The History and Promise of Liberalism.”)
I have a strange idea about presidential primaries and elections: The purpose is to elect a president.
And I have a strange thought about primary voters: They have a choice between sending the country a message and sending it a president. That is a choice Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire ought especially to be weighing with the first caucuses and primary only days away.
…
But as appealing as Sanders may be, he is not credible as president. Elizabeth Warren would have been a credible candidate, but Sanders isn’t. The campaign he has been waging is a symbolic one. For example, the proposals he has made for free college tuition and free, single-payer health care suggest what might be done if the United States underwent radical change. Those ideas would be excellent grist for a seminar. But they are not the proposals of a candidate who is serious about getting things done as president—or one who is serious about getting elected in the country we actually live in.
If he were elected, Sanders would be 75 years old on assuming office, the oldest person to become president in American history by more than five years. (Ronald Reagan was 69.) Some of his supporters were outraged by David Brock’s recent demand that he release his medical records—did they think no one was going to notice how old Sanders is? The presidency is an enormously taxing job, physically and mentally. His age is a legitimate issue, and if he were the Democratic nominee, even many people sympathetic to his views would have reservations about putting him in office.
Two other obstacles, however, would be so decisive that the question of Sanders’ age might hardly come up. Sanders’ self-identification as a “socialist” is all that many voters would need to know to reject him. A recent Pew poll found negative reactions to the word “socialist” outpacing positive reactions by two to one—59 percent to 29 percent.
In June 2015, Gallup asked people whether they would vote for a “well-qualified person for president” who had various possible characteristics, and “socialist” was a deal-breaker for more Americans than any other attribute, including gay, Muslim or atheist.
“Socialism” is the label Republicans have been trying to pin on Democrats; it is not the flag Democrats want to be waving. Not only would Sanders find it difficult to get elected, Democratic candidates up and down the ticket would disassociate themselves from him.
If that’s what Bernie and his groupies feel is an attack then consider me a warrior princess. I feel the same way.
So, that’s my venture into Spaciness today.
What’s on you reading and blogging list?
Open Thread: President Obama All But Endorses Hillary Clinton
Posted: January 25, 2016 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: 2016 Democratic nomination race, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, open thread 38 Comments
Dakinikat will have a post up later, but I just had to share this amazing interview that President Obama did with Glen Thrush of Politico. As Thrush noted in an article summing up his reactions:
Barack Obama, that prematurely gray elder statesman, is laboring mightily to remain neutral during Hillary Clinton’s battle with Bernie Sanders in Iowa, the state that cemented his political legend and secured his path to the presidency.
But in a candid 40-minute interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast as the first flakes of the blizzard fell outside the Oval Office, he couldn’t hide his obvious affection for Clinton or his implicit feeling that she, not Sanders, best understands the unpalatably pragmatic demands of a presidency he likens to the world’s most challenging walk-and-chew-gum exercise.
“[The] one thing everybody understands is that this job right here, you don’t have the luxury of just focusing on one thing,” a relaxed and reflective Obama told me in his most expansive discussion of the 2016 race to date.
Here are some of my own takeaways from the interview transcript. First, there can be no doubt that Obama wants Hillary to win the nomination and the presidency. He damns Sanders with faint praise.
GLENN THRUSH: I mean, when you watch this, what do you — do you see any elements of what you were able to accomplish in what Sanders is doing?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, there’s no doubt that Bernie has tapped into a running thread in Democratic politics that says: Why are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago? You know, why is it that we should be scared to challenge conventional wisdom and talk bluntly about inequality and, you know, be full-throated in our progressivism? And, you know, that has an appeal and I understand that.
I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives. I don’t want to exaggerate those differences, though, because Hillary is really idealistic and progressive. You’d have to be to be in, you know, the position she’s in now, having fought all the battles she’s fought and, you know, taken so many, you know, slings and arrows from the other side. And Bernie, you know, is somebody who was a senator and served on the Veterans’ Committee and got bills done.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton congratulates President Barack Obama on the House vote to pass health care reform, prior to a meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, March 22, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
On the contrasts the media is drawing between Hillary and Bernie (i.e. he has the enthusiasm, she’s just a boring policy wonk):
I don’t think that’s true. I think that what is — you know, if you look at both of them, I think they’re both passionate about giving everybody a shot. I think they’re both passionate about kids having a great education. I think they want to make sure everybody has health care. I think that they both believe in a tax system that is fair and not tilted towards, you know, the folks at the very top. But, you know, they — I think Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete longshot and just letting loose.
I think Hillary came in with the — both privilege and burden of being perceived as the frontrunner. And, as a consequence, you know, where they stood at the beginning probably helps to explain why the language sometimes is different.
On the media coverage of Hillary and the failure so far of the media to vet Bernie:
GLENN THRUSH: …Do you feel like it’s a little bit unfair to her, to some extent, the way this has been stacked?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah – well, yes. But I think that Hillary is tough and she has been through this before and she could anticipate it. If you are a frontrunner, then you are under more scrutiny and everybody is going to pick you apart….
GLENNTHRUSH: …and Bernie, of course, is an untested 74-year-old kid, right?
PRESIDENTOBAMA: Yeah, yeah.
GLENNTHRUSH: So, to what extent do you think it’s appropriate for that process to be aimed at him right now?
PRESIDENTOBAMA: Well, he hasn’t won anything yet.
GLENNTHRUSH: Right.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that there’s always just a rhythm to this thing. I think that if Bernie won Iowa or won New Hampshire, then you guys are going to do your jobs and, you know, you’re going to dig into his proposals and how much they cost and what does it mean, and, you know, how does his tax policy work and he’s subjected, then, to a rigor that hasn’t happened yet, but that Hillary is very well familiar with.
On the way the Obama campaign reacted to criticism from Hillary Clinton in 2008:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, here’s my view: that whoever the nominee is is going to need the other person’s supporters. And I think it is entirely legitimate to draw sharp contrasts where there are contrasts and it is important, however, to maintain a tone in which people feel as if you’re playing fair. And I think Hillary has done that so far, and I think that the truth is in 2007 and 2008, sometimes my supporters and my staff, I think, got too huffy about what were legitimate questions she was raising. And, you know, there were times where I think the media probably was a little unfair to her and tilted a little my way in the — in calling her out when she was tough and not calling some of our folks out as much when we were tough in ads….
I think — look, I’ve gotten to know Hillary really well, and she is a good, smart, tough person who cares deeply about this country, and she has been in the public eye for a long time and in a culture in which new is always better. And, you know, you’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people don’t, haven’t seen before. That’s a disadvantage to her. Bernie is somebody who —although I don’t know as well because he wasn’t, obviously, in my administration, has the virtue of saying exactly what he believes, and great authenticity, great passion, and is fearless. His attitude is, “I got nothing to lose.”
On Hillary’s strengths as a candidate:
…like any candidate, her strengths can be her weaknesses. Her strengths, which are the fact that she’s extraordinarily experienced – and, you know, wicked smart and knows every policy inside and out – sometimes could make her more cautious and her campaign more prose than poetry, but those are also her strengths. It means that she can govern and she can start here, [on] day one, more experienced than any non-vice president has ever been who aspires to this office. Her strengths, in terms of the ability to debate, the ability to, I think, project genuine concern in smaller groups and to interact with people, where folks realize she’s really warm and funny and engaging— ….
the other thing that I’ll always remember is the sheer strength, determination, endurance, stick-to-it-ness, never-give-up attitude that Hillary had during those primaries. I mean, we had as competitive and lengthy and expensive and tough primary fight as there has been in modern American politics, and she had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels. She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her. She had a tougher job throughout that primary than I did and, you know, she was right there the entire time and, had things gone a little bit different in some states or if the sequence of primaries and caucuses been a little different, she could have easily won.
Finally, on the notion of a woman president:
…my No. 1 priority is having a Democratic president succeed me, and I think there’s no doubt that, given our history, I want more women in politics generally, and I want my daughters to feel that there’s nothing that they can’t do. I don’t think that Democrats are going to vote for Hillary just because she’s a woman any more than they’re going to vote for Bernie just because they agree with him on one particular issue. I think, you know, voters are pretty sophisticated. They’re going to take all these things into account. I am proud of the fact that the Democratic Party represents today the breaking down of all sorts of barriers and a belief that you judge people on what they bring to the table and not what they look like or who they love or their last name.
I’ve quoted a lot, but I still hope you’ll go read the whole interview. I wonder if Obama agreed to do this in order to boost Hillary’s chances? His comments are certainly extraordinary, and they are going to be very disconcerting to the media and to Bernie’s supporters.
What do you think?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments