"10 Things Trump Supporters Are Too Stupid To Realize"

[DEFCON]

Americans have almost come to expect to see a negative media report on some failure, or other of their VA hospital system every few months.

Everyone over there should properly appreciate the VA system for what it is, an inefficient single payer, government run health care system that's a near clone of our own. 

 

   

[deicer]

https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/if-you-see-something-say-something?bffbmain&ref=bffbmain&utm_term=4ldqpgp#4ldqpgp

During Sunday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump spoke about his “Muslim ban,” a proposed policy he referred to as “extreme vetting from certain areas of the world.”

Trump said “people are coming into our country like we have no idea who they are,” and called immigration “the great Trojan horse of all time.”

“I mean, whether we like it or not, and we could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem,” Trump said.

“And we have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on,” he added. “When they see hatred going on, they have to report it.”

ID: 9761839

So, Moustafa Bayoumi, an author and professor at Brooklyn College, did just that:

I'm a Muslim, and I would like to report a crazy man threatening a woman on a stage in Missouri. #debate

9:38 PM - 9 Oct 2016

•  
•  
  83,959 83,959 Retweets
•  
  157,555 157,555 likes

ID: 9761768

With more than 35,000 retweets, it turned out to be the most retweeted tweet of the debate, according to Twitter.

[Boney]

Maybe his comment may cause a discussion about our health care and possibly improve it.

Dare to dream.

[deicer]

On an unrelated related note, to lighten the mood a little, this is why the internet is so fantastic...

 

[deicer]

https://mic.com/articles/156021/samantha-bee-talks-to-trump-supporters-who-think-the-election-is-rigged-only-if-he-loses?utm_source=policymicFB&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=WHFacebook&utm_content=inf_10_285_2&tse_id=INF_01a38d408f2011e6b6db4d0235f40af5#.JbNUPQDim

Some of Donald Trump's supporters entertain a compelling philosophy about the election process. If Trump wins — well, that's a good thing and America is great again — but if he loses to Hillary Clinton, the election format has been rigged in her favor. Considering Trump has a sign-up page for his supporters to be unofficial poll watchers, it's clear he's fanning the paranoia flames — despite what he promised at the first presidential debate.

"In the debate, Trump said he would accept the results of the election and graciously not pursue a coup d'état," Full Frontal host Samantha Bee said on Wednesday's show. "But that promise — like Trump's wedding vows — lasted about four days." 

Trump has since insisted the eagle-eyed poll watchers hone in on Pennsylvania — a swing state — and so Bee sent correspondents Allana Harkin and Amy Hoggart to a Trump rally to speak with his supporter base. They were treated to exchanges like this. 

"So it's rigged if Hillary wins, but not rigged if Trump wins?" Harkin asked a supporter. 

"Exactly," he replied.

"Isn't that like saying just any woman who didn't want to date you was a lesbian?" she said. 

"Exactly." 

[DEFCON]

Sorry Maverick ... I tried but couldn't get anything but the link up.

Deicer ... how soon we forget. A link to documentary proof of tampering is embedded in the attached article too and it's more than informative. I believe the video is a production of Democratically aligned persons.

 Just so you're aware, the inventor of the competing voting machine technology was involved in an unfortunate accident post filming and is now dead. 

http://www.mintpressnews.com/214505-2/214505/

[DEFCON]

New link to HBO documentary.

http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/114412/Hacking_Democracy__Full_Length/

 

 

 

[deicer]

http://secondnexus.com/politics-and-economics/wikileaks-falsified-documents-trump-russia/2/

The Real Wikileaks Smoking Gun Points to Trump, not Clinton

Alan Jude Ryland | October 11, 2016 | 84 Comments

 

An investigative report published in Newsweek reveals that a Russian news organization falsified information and is leaking phony “Hillary Clinton emails” in an attempt to undermine her presidential campaign.

Despite widespread speculation that Wikileaks would deliver an “October surprise”––information that could effectively end Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign––its published documents offered no compelling new revelations about the Democratic nominee. Wikileaks released its documents Friday to relatively little fanfare. During Sunday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump preoccupied himself with the allegedly internal emails from Hillary Clinton’s adviser Sidney Blumenthal which showed him “admitting” that Clinton bore full responsibility for the attack on Benghazi and failed in her duties as Secretary of State.

But while attempting to verify the email’s authenticity, Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald discovered that the email attributed to Blumenthal did not come from Blumenthal at all––because the email was something Eichenwald himself had written.

Here’s what happened. The documents Wikileaks published over the weekend were emails out of the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service, pounced on the documents almost as soon as Wikileaks released them, and claimed to have found an incriminating email from “Blumenthal” that seemed to be, Eichenwald wrote, “the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility” for the attack on Benghazi in 2012. Sputnik even declared the email was likely the “October Surprise” Wikileaks had alluded to earlier in the week.

But the statement Sputnik quoted––”Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate.”––came from a 10,000-word editorial piece Eichenwald wrote for Newsweek about “the obscene politicization of Benghazi” that Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta. The Russians, Eichenwald continued, “carefully selected” and repurposed a paragraph that happened to mention that there were “legitimate” criticisms about Clinton and Benghazi, “all of which had been acknowledged in nine reports about the attack and by the former secretary of state herself.” They then ascribed those words to Blumenthal.

But here’s the rub: According to Eichenwald, only the Russians, through Sputnik, reported the false story (though a reference did appear in a Turkish publication). Yet last night, while speaking at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump told the crowd that he would read out an email from “Sneaky Sidney” Blumenthal.

This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” Then he read the words from Eichenwald’s article. “He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said after he had finished reading. “This just came out a little while ago.”

Trump’s words riled up the crowd ,who called for him to “lock her up.”

Eichenwald was appalled, and today posed a deadly serious question: “So how did Donald Trump,” he wonders, “end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?”

The Trump campaign did not respond to Eichenwald’s request for comment.

“I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe,” Eichenwald wrote. “And that should raise concerns about not only Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters… [But] now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that the Russians are not only orchestrating this act of cyberwar but also really, really dumb.”

It is still unclear precisely why Russian agents would falsify information in an attempt to derail Hillary Clinton’s campaign and aid Donald Trump’s, but the cozy relationship between Trump and the Kremlin can’t help but be highlighted by this. “This is not funny. It is terrifying,” Eichenwald wrote. “The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?”

“For now, though,” he concluded, “Americans should be outraged. This totalitarian regime, engaged in what are arguably war crimes in Syria to protect its government puppet, is working to upend a democracy to the benefit of an American candidate who uttered positive comments just Sunday about the Kremlin’s campaign on behalf of Bashar al-Assad… So no, Mr. Putin, I’m not Sidney Blumenthal. And now that you have been exposed once again, get the hell out of our election. And, Mr. Trump, you have some explaining to do.”

 

[deicer]

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/george-w-bush-white-house-lost-22-million-emails-497373.html

The George W. Bush White House ‘Lost’ 22 Million Emails

For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.

The media paid some attention to the Bush email chicanery but spent considerably less ink and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton’s digital communications in the past 18 months. According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.

In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which mandated that all presidential and vice presidential records created after January 20, 1981, be preserved and that the public, not the president, owned the records. The following year, the Reagan administration installed the White House’s rudimentary first email system.

Despite the PRA, neither the Reagan nor the George H.W. Bush administration maintained email records, even as the number of White House emails began growing exponentially. (The Bush administration would produce around 200 million.) In 1989, a federal lawsuit to force the White House to comply with the PRA was filed by several groups, including the National Security Archive, which at the time was mostly interested in unearthing the secret history of the Cold War. The suit sparked a last-minute court order, issued in the waning hours of the first Bush presidency, that prevented 6,000 White House email backup tapes from being erased.

When Bill Clinton moved into the White House, his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort to uphold a side deal he’d cut with the National Archives and Records Administration to allow him to treat his White House emails as personal. At the time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White House communications director—defended the resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn't want subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails.

 

The Clinton White House eventually settled the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—even invited members of the National Security Archive into the White House to demonstrate how the new system worked. If anyone tried to delete an email, a message would pop up on screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA.

“We were happy with that,” recalls Blanton, who edited a book on the Reagan-Bush email evasion, White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Messages the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy.

Eight years later, in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.

The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.

Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney's office were in the administration's system but he couldn’t get them.

The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, “They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!” His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush's assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”

In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months’ worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.

Eventually, the Bush White House admitted it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then, in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s administration—the White House said it found 22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005, that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache was given to the National Archives, and it and other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009, to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet been made available to the public.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating on a different track but having no more luck. In a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys. The penalties for contempt are fines and possible jail time, but no punishment was ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals court stayed the Senate’s ruling in October 2008, while the White House appealed. Rove’s lawyer claimed Rove did not “intentionally delete” any emails but was only conducting “the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly,” according to the Associated Press.

By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration basically ran out the clock. And neither the Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter.

The committee’s final report on the matter was blunt: “[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened. The reasons given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, and the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort.”

At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency on the White House’s part, but The Washington Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House explanation that the emails could have been lost due to flawed IT systems.

The mystery of what was in the missing Bush emails and why they went missing is still years away from being solved—if ever. The National Archives now has 220 million emails from the Bush White House, and there is a long backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests already. But not all of the emails will be available to the public until 2021, when the presidential security restrictions elapse. Even then, with currently available archiving and sorting methods, researchers still have years of work to figure out whether Cheney deleted days’ worth of emails around the time of the WMD propaganda campaign that led to war, Blanton says.

“To your question of what’s in there—we don't know,” he says. “There was not a commitment at the top for saving it all. Now was that resistance motivated by political reasons? Or was it ‘We gotta save money’?”

Like Leahy, Blanton has doubts that the emails were ever truly “lost,” given that every email exists in two places, with the sender and with the recipient. But unlike watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has been relentless about forcing the State Department to publicly release Hillary Clinton’s emails, Blanton and his fellow researchers have decided not to press their fight for the release of the Bush emails.

Blanton says he has no idea whether the Bush email record will be found intact after 2021, when his group will be allowed to do a systematic search and recovery process in the National Archives. “Did they find all of them? We don't know,” he says. “Our hope is that by that time, the government and the National Archives will have much better technology and tools with which to sift and sort that kind of volume.”

Blanton says he’s not expecting that kind of upgrade, though. “Their entire budget is less than the cost of a single Marine One helicopter,” he says. “It’s an underfunded orphan.”

Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A source involved with the stymied congressional investigation recalled the period as “an intense time,” but the Obama administration didn’t encourage any follow-up, devoting its political capital to dealing with the crashing economy rather than investigating the murky doings that took place under his predecessor. Since then, no major media outlet has devoted significant—or, really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly, the Bush administration was hiding (or losing).

 

[DEFCON]

The Newsweek story is just that, a speculative fiction like so many others tall tales that are concocted by the Democratic machine to obscure the truth however benign it may be in respect of their target, Trump.

I'm not a partisan; if GWB & crew are guilty of a crime, by all means, throw the buggers in jail too.   

[deicer]

This clip says it all, not even his daughter....

 

[Jaydee]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/news/economy/donald-trump-t-boone-pickens-ken-langone-leon-cooperman/index.html?sr=fbCNN101216donald-trump-t-boone-pickens-ken-langone-leon-cooperman1132AMVODtopLink&linkId=29836842

[deicer]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-south-carolina-idUSKCN0UQ2ER20160112

South Carolina lawmaker to Trump: You’re not welcome!

By Harriet McLeod | CHARLESTON, S.C.

CHARLESTON, S.C. A Democratic legislator in South Carolina has a message for Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump: Stay out of my state.

Representative John King filed a resolution on Tuesday saying the Republican front-runner's "abrasive and racist rhetoric" did not belong South Carolina, a state that King said has worked to move beyond a past of racial intolerance.

"South Carolinians have tirelessly worked to overcome a history of hatred and bigotry and there is no place in this state for anyone who espouses hatred and bigotry as a campaign slogan," King's resolution said. "He is not welcome in the state of South Carolina."

King, a funeral home owner and member of South Carolina’s legislative black caucus, represents Rock Hill, which he said posts the motto "No Room For Racism" on all city limit signs.

"Mr. Trump must have missed them on his way into town," King said in a statement.

The resolution seems unlikely to win approval from the Republican-led House of Representatives. Even if it did, it would not have the weight of law and would have little effect on the billionaire candidate's ability to campaign in the state ahead of its Feb. 20 primary.

South Carolina is considered an important voting state with its third-in-the-nation primary election in the race for the party nomination to run for the White House in November.

Trump is scheduled to appear in South Carolina on Thursday for a Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox Business Network.

A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump in December called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States following deadly coordinated attacks in Paris by Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers. Last week, a Muslim woman wearing a hijab was removed from a Trump campaign rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, after standing in silent protest of the candidate.

[DEFCON]

Do society's leftists have any appreciation for cause & consequence?

In the instance at hand, South Carolina's Democratic Representative, Mr. John King, is accusing Trump of being a racist.

Is any kind of vetting undertaken before leaders like King are allowed to take positions publically? It really does appear that King, like most every other politician, take positions that have not been properly considered; logic, reason and common sense don't appear to be pieces of their policy development processes. 

Is the good Representative not aware that he himself belongs to a racially themed, call it 'racist' group known as the 'legislative black caucus'?

And he has the moxy to hurl twisted insults at Trump? ... Give me a break!.

Can you imagine the noise if the white members of Congress were to organize their own racially exclusive legislative caucus?

If our society truly seeks to eliminate racism, by all means it should do so, but it's never going to happen so long as special privilege / advantage is granted on the basis of skin colour etc..

 

 

 

 

[Innuendo]

24 minutes ago, DEFCON said:

Is any kind of vetting undertaken before leaders like King are allowed to take positions publically?

?

[deicer]

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/trumpery

[boestar]

"Showy but worthless"  I believe that definition fits perfectly.

[Don Hudson]

Stating that Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous to America, the Washington Post has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. The following Post editorial discusses the thinking behind their endorsement. 

In my view it reads intelligently, reasonably and is exceptionally well-argued. 

Here is the link to the article, followed by the article in full:

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

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-for-president/2016/10/12/665f9698-8caf-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.b6722811e1ec&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

The Democratic nominee is not the lesser of two evils. She is a choice Americans can be proud of. (Adriana Usero, Julio Negron/The Washington Post)

By Editorial Board October 13 at 6:06 AM

IN THE gloom and ugliness of this political season, one encouraging truth is often overlooked: There is a well-qualified, well-prepared candidate on the ballot. Hillary Clinton has the potential to be an excellent president of the United States, and we endorse her without hesitation.

[The closing argument against Donald Trump]

In a moment, we will explain our confidence. But first, allow us to anticipate a likely question: No, we are not making this endorsement simply because Ms. Clinton’s chief opponent is dreadful.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump. But we would also tell you that was our judgment.

Fortunately, it is not.

We recognize that many Americans distrust and dislike Ms. Clinton. The negative feelings reflect in part the bitter partisanship of the nation’s politics today; in part the dishonest attacks she has been subjected to for decades; and in part her genuine flaws, missteps and weaknesses.

We are not blind to those. Ms. Clinton is inclined to circle the wagons and withhold information, from the closed meetings of her health-care panel in 1993 to the Whitewater affair, from the ostensibly personal emails she destroyed on her own say-so after leaving the State Department to her reluctance to disclose her pneumonia last month. Further, she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, are not the first to cash in on the speech circuit, but they have done so on an unprecedented and unseemly scale. And no one will accuse Ms. Clinton of an excess of charisma: She has neither the eloquence of President Obama nor the folksy charm of former president George W. Bush or, for that matter, her husband.

But maybe, at this moment in history, that last weakness is also a strength. If Ms. Clinton is elected, she will attempt to govern an angrily divided nation, working with legislators who in many cases are determined to thwart her, while her defeated opponent quite possibly will pretend her victory is fraudulent. 

What hope is there for progress in such an environment — for a way out of the gridlock that frustrates so many Americans? The temptation is to summon a “revolution,” as her chief primary opponent imagined, or promise to blow up the system, as Mr. Trump posits. Both temptations are dead ends, as Ms. Clinton understands. If progress is possible, it will be incremental and achieved with input from members of both parties. Eloquence and charm may matter less than policy chops and persistence.

It is fair to read Ms. Clinton’s career as a series of learning experiences that have prepared her well for such an environment. As first lady, she failed when she tried to radically remake the American health-care system. Instead of retreating, she reentered the fray to help enact a more modest but important reform expanding health-care access to poor children.

Her infamous “reset” with Russia offers a similar arc. We have not hesitated to criticize the Obama administration’s foreign policy, including its lukewarm support for Ukraine in the face of a Russian invasion, but criticism of the “reset” is off-base. When Ms. Clinton launched the policy, Dmitry Medvedev, not Vladimir Putin, was president of Russia, and nobody — maybe not even Mr. Putin — knew how things would play out. It was smart to test Mr. Medvedev’s willingness to cooperate, and in fact the United States and Russia made progress under Ms. Clinton’s leadership, including in nuclear-arms control and in facilitating resupply of U.S. troops in Afghanistan across Russian territory. As Mr. Putin reasserted himself and Russia became more hostile, Ms. Clinton was clear-eyed about the need to adjust U.S. policy.

She was similarly clear-eyed after winning election to the Senate in 2000. You might have expected her to hold some grudges, especially toward Republican legislators who had lambasted her husband in the most personal terms during his then-recent impeachment and Senate trial. But colleagues in both parties found her to be businesslike, knowledgeable, intent on accomplishment, willing to work across the aisle and less focused than most on getting credit.

Professionals in the State Department offer similar testimonials about her tenure as secretary during Mr. Obama’s first term: She reached out, listened to diverse points of view and, more than many politicians who come to that job with their own small teams, was open to intelligent advice. She was respected by employees and by counterparts overseas. She set priorities, including ensuring that “women’s rights are human rights” would rise from slogan to policy.

Her 2016 presidential campaign offers one more case study of lessons learned — a model of efficiency and of large egos subordinated to a larger cause — after her far less disciplined 2008 effort.

Ms. Clinton, in other words, is dogged, resilient, purposeful and smart. Unlike Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush when they ascended, she knows Washington; unlike Mr. Obama when he ascended, she has executive experience. She does not let her feelings get in the way of the job at hand. She is well positioned to get something done.

So what would she do? Her ambitions are less lofty than we would like when it comes, for example, to reforming unsustainable entitlement programs, and than many in her party would like, in their demand, for example, for free college tuition. But most of her agenda is commendable, and parts may actually be achievable: immigration reform; increased investment in infrastructure, research and education, paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy; sounder family-leave policies; criminal-justice reform. In an era of slowing growth and growing income inequality, these all make sense, as do her support for curbing climate change and for regulating gun ownership.

Ms. Clinton also understands the importance of U.S. leadership in the world, her campaign-year anti-trade epiphany notwithstanding. Inside the Obama administration, Ms. Clinton was a voice for engagement on behalf of democracy, human rights and stability. At times (the surge in Afghanistan), Mr. Obama listened. At times (Syrian intervention), he did not — and the world is far more dangerous because of that. Ms. Clinton can be faulted, perhaps, for excessive loyalty; though the hyper-investigated Benghazi affair proved to be no scandal at all, Ms. Clinton should have argued more persistently to help stabilize Libya after its dictator fell.

But her foreign-policy inclinations were sounder than her president’s. It is telling that, even as she tacked left to survive the primaries, she did not give ground to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the core value of American engagement in the world. Allies would find her more reliable than the incumbent and far more dependable than her opponent. The world would be more secure as a result.

No election is without risk. The biggest worry about a Clinton presidency, in our view, is in the sphere where she does not seem to have learned the right lessons, namely openness and accountability. Her use of a private email server as secretary was a mistake, not a high crime; but her slow, grudging explanations of it worsened the damage and insulted the voters. Her long periods of self-insulation from press questioning during the campaign do not bode well.

The Clinton Foundation has done a lot of good in the world, but Ms. Clinton was disturbingly cavalier in allowing a close aide to go on its payroll while still at State, and in failing to erect the promised impenetrable wall between the foundation and the government. She would have to do better in the White House.

Even here, however, Mr. Trump makes her look good. She has released years of tax returns. She has voluntarily identified her campaign bundlers. The Clinton Foundation actually is a charitable foundation, not a vehicle for purchasing portraits of herself. She is a paragon of transparency relative to her opponent.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, has shown himself to be bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world.

Rather than dwell on that danger here, we invite you to visit wapo.st/thecaseagainsttrump. There we have assembled a timeline of Mr. Trump’s most alarming statements, accompanied by video and linked to some of the most trenchant commentary from our columnists, guest contributors, editorial writers and cartoonists over the past 16 months. This closing argument is far from exhaustive, but it is horrifying enough. If you have any doubts about Mr. Trump’s unfitness, please take a look.

Meanwhile, Ms. Clinton underlined her fitness for office in what was essentially the first major decision of her potential presidency: her choice of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) as running mate. Rather than calculate how best to assuage or excite this or that part of her base, Ms. Clinton selected a person of sound judgment, with executive and legislative experience and unquestionable capacity to serve as president if necessary.

That presages what Americans might reasonably expect of a Clinton presidency: seriousness of purpose and relentless commitment, even in the face of great obstacles, to achievements in the public interest. We believe that Ms. Clinton will prove a worthy example to girls who celebrate the election of America’s first female president. We believe, too, that anyone who votes for her will be able to look back, four years from now, with pride in that decision.

 

[Don Hudson]

A political historian explains why Trump’s tape could destroy the GOP

http://qz.com/805918/why-donald-trumps-access-hollywood-tape-was-the-last-straw-for-paul-ryan-and-the-gop/ 

Republican politicians looked the other way when Donald Trump suggested that Mexicans were rapists. They ignored him as he made slurs against African Americans, threatened Muslims, mocked the disabled, and insulted prominent female personalities. These attacks were more extreme than the kind that Republican officials generally partake in. But they were of a piece with the narrative that the GOP has used to win voters for generations.

 

The release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of forcing himself on women, however, has proved to be too much for members of the Republican party to bear—precisely because it runs counter to the central GOP narrative. And the fallout looks as if it may destroy the modern Republican project as we know it.

For a generation, the Republican party has been held together by a simple story. For a generation, the Republican party has been held together by a simple story that activists laid out in the 1950s. Coming out of World War II, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Republican Party backed government policies that promoted equality of opportunity—projects such as education, infrastructure, government regulation, and social welfare. These policies were both effective and enormously popular. But wealthy men loathed government regulation and the taxes that an active government required. Calling themselves conservatives, they started a movement to undermine the idea that promoting equality of opportunity was the proper role for the American government.

They had a problem: Most Americans liked the government programs. So to push their agenda, movement conservatives rejected fact-based evidence and instead advanced a very simple narrative: hard-working white American men were under siege by minorities, women, organized workers, and “special interests” who wanted government handouts. Government policies that promoted equal opportunity were the very opposite of fair. They redistributed wealth from hard-working white men to lazy minorities.

 

The party held that good American men just wanted to get back to their traditional role: taking care of their children and their loving, homemaking wives. Central to the portrayal of the conservative American individualist was the idea of his morality. The ideal conservative man worked hard, wanted (and needed) nothing from the government, and loved and protected his wife and children. This paternalistic image offered followers a return to an idealized past, assuring the people who were falling behind in the modern economy that there was a simple cause for their distress. If only the government could be purged from the influence of black people, minorities, lazy workers, and unfeminine women who demanded that the government help them get equal access to schools and jobs, good American men could get back to their traditional role: taking care of their children and their loving, homemaking wives.

 

Richard Nixon welcomed this narrative into the Republican Party when he won voters by embracing the Southern Strategy and rallying the “Silent Majority” of hardworking white men who were trying to support their families while shiftless protesters mobbed in the streets. Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won the White House by continuing to draw upon this idealized image of the conservative male American. He warned voters against the mythical “welfare queen”—a lazy black woman who stole tax dollars to live in luxury—and promised to defend regular, hardworking Americans against such leeches.

 

This image has fired up poor and working-class Republican voters ever since the Reagan era, even as movement conservatives passed legislation that undermined working American’s security by sucking wealth upward. It was this narrative that enabled extremists to capture the GOP in the 1990s, dismissing traditional Republicans as RINOs—Republicans in Name Only. Ever since, the movement conservative narrative has dominated the Republican Party. Anyone calling for the government to promote racial or gender equality is, according this script, a threat to America.

 

When Trump called Mexicans criminals and rapists, he simply took the conservative narrative to its next logical step.  And so when Trump called Mexicans criminals and rapists, he simply took the movement conservative narrative to its next logical step. If minorities and women who demand equality are a threat to the nation, then all good Americans must work to purge them from the country. When he mocked the disabled, attacked Muslims, and called working women pigs and sluts, he was simply stripping the genteel veneer from the same story that movement conservatives had long advanced.

 

But Trump’s tape about forcing himself on women undercuts this narrative. It affronts the men who could back his attacks on people of color, minorities, and organized workers—in part because they justified this stance as necessary in order to safeguard their wives and daughters.

 

The vicious crudeness evident in Trump’s tape strips away such paternalistic excuses and reveals his criminal lust for dominance. It is an attack on the Republican narrative that hit home for men who had otherwise bought the movement conservative line. Many Republican voters could still think of themselves as decent Americans defending traditional values when they supported a man who talked of criminal immigrants or deporting Muslims. But a sexual predator who sees women as his prey is a direct threat to the traditional image of a man whose role is to cherish and protect.

 

Trump wasn’t about respecting and defending the traditional family after all; he was a rich thug who felt entitled to grab whatever he wanted. And so the release of the Access Hollywood tape was the turning point for many Republican men because it undercut their image of what their ideology meant all along. Trump wasn’t about respecting and defending the traditional family after all; he was a rich thug who felt entitled to grab whatever he wanted.

 

This has given an opening for establishment Republicans who recognize that Trump is a loose cannon to toss him overboard as they could not when he was simply taking their own narrative about minorities, working women, and organized workers to the extreme. In fact, House speaker Paul Ryan used this contradiction to try to shore up the movement conservative vision when he tweeted after the tape’s release: “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.”

 

Ryan’s tweet, and Trump’s continued free fall, suggests that the movement conservative narrative may finally be dying. The release of the tape may force regular Republican voters to face the reality that the movement conservatives’ demonization of minorities, organized workers, and women who demanded equality was never really about protecting hardworking American families. It was about creating a ruling class whose members could commit crimes against less powerful Americans with impunity. And so the vulgar boasting of a criminal thug may finally force the GOP to confront the ugly fantasy that has dominated its politics for a generation, and shock American politics back to decency.

 

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

 

[DEFCON]

Bush was awful and Obama's even worse. If the trend continues and the US doesn't go over the edge before he's finally gone, even in that case, Obama's legacy still won't be any more favorable than GW's.

A minor point, but should crooked Hilary prevail, who will the Clinton's blame as ongoing Democratic policy failures continue to mangle the Country and move it ever closer to a state of chaos?

Imho, all the intellectual arguments in the world aren't going to turn Hilary into an honest, trustworthy, or capable leader Don. I'm not advocating for Trump in this case, my comment's only focus is Hilary.

If memory serves, the gaggle of Hilary supporters here on this board today are mostly the same cast of characters that were Obama groupies back in that day. You were all giddy and gushing then, it was as if the Second Coming was unfolding before us. Nevertheless, here we are today; instead of living up to the hype, Obama has proven to be a dud and yet, the Left seeks more of the same ... wow!

Democratic policy disasters are found everywhere, which makes it difficult to pick just one favorite, but let's look at Obamacare. Can any one of you ... Mitch, Deicer ... mount a 'credible' argument justifying the continuance of Obamacare knowing its chief advocate failed to keep any of the promises made, keep your own doctor, cheaper premiums, more options etc., for example? Heck, even Bill Clinton is openly condemning the fiasco while his wife is at the same time claiming she'll fix it ... I'm sure (lol).

[chockalicious]

Arguing politics on a message board (as in real life) is mostly a fruitless exercise but for anyone who think Obama has been bad for the US.

http://pleasecutthecrap.com/obama-accomplishments/

Every economic indicator is better than when he took office.

Clinton's criticism of Obamacare are that he did not think it went far enough to get to single payer.

Ask the millions more who have insurance if Obamacare is bad.

There is no equivalency in the candidates. If you vote for Trump you're a **bleep** idiot.

[UpperDeck]

Oh, well then. No need for any further discussion. Judgment has been rendered with no possibility of appeal.

[Fido]

3 hours ago, DEFCON said:

all the intellectual arguments in the world aren't going to turn Hilary into an honest, trustworthy, or capable leader Don. I'm not advocating for Trump in this case, my comment's only focus is Hilary.

Hear Hear

The best thing that the Americans could do is to postpone the election for a year and come up with some better candidates.  Not even the pack of hounds from either side that were in the primaries were capable.

[J.O.]

1 hour ago, Fido said:

Hear Hear

The best thing that the Americans could do is to postpone the election for a year and come up with some better candidates.  Not even the pack of hounds from either side that were in the primaries were capable.

I appreciate the sentiment and in many ways agree, but I can't honestly say that the next round would be any different. America has many great people who would be capable of leading and doing it extremely well. Who among them would want anything to do with it, after seeing how the last few campaigns have played out.

The "ideal" candidate can't possibly exist in a world of instant media; uninformed opinions that are taken as concrete facts; manufactured memes that morph into truth; statistics that are massaged to make a point or political pundits who are veiled as journalists. Every human being has flaws, but today they're all laid bare at a moment's notice - sometimes legitimately, but many more are done to score points - on all sides. Some who were seen as the great leaders of our history had a side that the public wouldn't like. Some drank, some slept around, some gambled, some went to psychics - all done behind closed doors. There were no prying eyes, power junkies or gold-diggers looking for a quick buck. "News" organizations didn't pay big bucks for dirt on a politician. At the office, they served well and tried their best, warts and all.

In my mind, the business of politics stopped being about leading your country and trying to make it better in the early 80's. It morphed into being about power and control - getting it, keeping it and minimizing that of the other side. Consensus-building was no longer seen as a sign of leadership - it was a demonstration of weakness and giving in. Reagan first exploited that quite effectively against Carter, but he was hardly the last.

Many Americans want a "businessman" like Trump because they think he'll change the critical mass in Washington. Fine, great idea, but why not choose a real businessman. One who's focus has been on building real businesses that fulfill legitimate needs of consumers; that treat their employees with respect and see giving back to their community as a duty, not an option or a way to get a tax break. I'll tell you why not. Because no Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or <fill in the blanks here> would dare subject themselves to the idiocy of the political process. They have far too much self-respect for that.

[Jaydee]

http://qpolitical.com/24-hours-after-last-nights-debate-mike-rowe-makes-a-huge-confession-on-what-he-see-wrong-with-this-election/

"Look at our current candidates. No one appears to like either one of them. Their approval ratings are at record lows. It’s not about who you like more, it’s about who you hate less. Sure, we can blame the media, the system, and the candidates themselves, but let’s be honest – Donald and Hillary are there because we put them there. The electorate has tolerated the intolerable. We’ve treated this entire process like the final episode of American Idol. What did we expect?”