Hillary Clinton – Page 2 – RAnt(hony)-ings

Who brought up Hillary? That Was Last Year.

McCain delivers a thumbs down defeat to McConnell and Trump

Baltimore Post Examiner McCain’s Thumbs down.

They will take this embarrassment out on America. These are the people who can’t let abortion go. These are the people who can’t let their goddamned religion go. These are the people who can’t let Benghazi go. These are the people who remember every slight and every offense and they cannot let their overwhelming desire for revenge go. It’s nearly two hundred years, they still can’t let the Civil War go. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO CAN’T LET EITHER BARACK OBAMA OR HILLARY CLINTON GO — hell, 20 years later and they are STILL determined to get even with BILL Clinton. They will learn NOTHING from this, in fact they’ll become even more secretive, intolerant, scheming, and revengeful.
Stonekettle Station

Every single argument I have with Trump supporters (even with relatives) ends up with the question, “but what about Hillary?”

I keep wanting to ask in response, who brought up Hillary? I didn’t bring her up. I wasn’t even thinking of her. I couldn’t care less about her now than I did ten years ago (Go look. Harsh? Yes, I know) I only voted for her because she was who the Democrats picked, the presumed Democratic nominee that was so certain to win that I resigned myself to voting for her two years ago when I wrote Hillary for President? I resigned myself to voting for her because I knew the Republicans would pick a lunatic. Wonder of wonders, one of my predictions came true and they did pick a lunatic from a group of ten lunatics (and Kasich) and now that lunatic is president.

They’ll make the destruction of their efforts to repeal Obamacare about Hillary too. They’ll make it about Hillary and Barack Obama at the same time if they can. It was Hillarycare that started them all down this long, deep slope into madness. I can easily see how this is all linked to Hillary Clinton somewhere in their minds.

Saying I only voted for her because she was the nominee is selling my support for her a bit short. After she won the nomination. After Donald Trump co-opted the Republican convention and Republican party and made it his own personal propaganda vehicle. After all of that, I decided I did really like Hillary Clinton after all. I mean, at least she wasn’t a lunatic. Wasn’t a fraud. Wasn’t engaged in demonstrably criminal activities that have simply never been prosecuted. I mean, the haters (now Stormtrumpers) tried to prosecute her (#Benghazi) but there simply wasn’t anything that they could get a conviction on. This is more than could be said for Donald Trump, as we are now discovering. So yeah. Knowing real estate developers the way I do, and seeing the cluster fuck that a Trump presidency was going to be, I wholeheartedly embraced Hillary Clinton in 2016. But that was 2016.

Republicans are so caught up in the past, with all these grievances that they just can’t abide, they can’t begin to think about what comes next. Which is how we find ourselves here in this mess today, them still talking about what happened in 1998, and the rest of us outraged about what is going on around us right here and now.

Donald Trump’s race baiting. His misogyny. His probable coordination with Russia during the election. His continued money laundering for the Russian mob. His uncontested control of 2/3’s of the federal government, with the last third one simple SCOTUS nomination away.

How about we, the sane 3/4’s of the United States, start talking about what comes next for a change? Let’s start now so we know where we’re going in 2018. Screw the Republicans. They’ll still be nominating lunatics twenty years from now. #SignedByTrump

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Her explanation for the Gap is simple enough. “There’s a lot of behavioral science that if you attack someone endlessly — even if none of what you say is true — the very fact of attacking that person raises doubts and creates a negative perspective,” she says. “As someone Exhibit A on that — since it has been a long time that I’ve been in that position — I get that.”
Understanding Hillary – Ezra Klein – July 11, 2016

09/12/2017 – What Hillary Clinton really thinks – The Ezra Klein Show (youtube)

Consider, for a moment, two people. One, as a young woman at the beginning of a promising legal career, went door to door searching for ways to guarantee an education to the countless disabled and disadvantaged children who had fallen through the cracks. The other, as a young millionaire, exacted revenge on his recently deceased brother’s family by cutting off the medical insurance desperately needed by his nephew’s newborn son, who at eighteen months of age was suffering from violent seizures brought on by a rare neurological disorder.
Huffingtonpost – Larry Womack – Stop Pretending

Postscript

As for the embarrassment of having their eight year long quest to repeal Obamacare ended by one of their own, on the brink of death, voting against party leadership as a final fuck you? They should learn to live with it. Live with it, because that will be the legacy that the Moral Majority and Reagan Republicans will be saddled with. The United States and the world has turned a corner now, and there is no going back to the time when the United States was a shining city on a hill, if that time ever existed in the first place. We might move forward into respectability once more, but that road is a long and hard one, and won’t be the direction that Trumpists will go if they ever return to power.

facebook.com/RBReich

Robert Reich was more on topic for the subject in the featured image, all the way back in March of that year. I replied with Look, they are stealing our Medicare! and linking the Indivisible podcast on the subject of the AHCA. They are taking healthcare from the poor and charging more to the middle and giving all of that to the wealthy! How is this even vaguely fair? None of it was fair, and in the end it mattered not at all because John McCain threw himself on that grenade.

I was triggered by Jim’s hearkening back to the question of Hillary Clinton and the fact that Republicans haven’t been able to let their hatred of her go for thirty years now, and so consequently sold us all down the river to an known con artist rather than admit that their Qanon delusions were untrue. I can admit that now, looking at this article from the perspective of four years in the future. I was triggered and went off on the tangent of rebutting the general whataboutism rather than breathing a sigh of relief at the crisis averted by McCain’s noble sacrifice that day. It’s hard to be thankful to a loose cannon like McCain turned out to be, but there is no denying that Americans all owe him a debt of gratitude.

We took back the House of Representatives in 2018. We took back the Presidency in 2020, and took back the Senate after a highly unlikely runoff result for Georgia in January 2021. We own two-thirds of the government now, with Republicans having stuffed unqualified judges onto federal benches at a breakneck pace throughout Trump’s presidency. We’ll be a lifetime weeding them back out of the courts, but at least here and now we have the power to do something good. I hope we don’t waste the chance this time.

The Resistance: Tea Party Left?

Resisting Trump is necessary. But getting behind an agenda that takes back our economy and our democracy from the privileged and powerful is essential.
Robert Reich

The Tea Party started out the same way; controlled by independents, focused on reform. Look at them now, a hollowed out shell of bombastic rhetoric from those elected to office and little action on behalf of the now-abandoned grassroots. Support from Hillary should be welcome, but support is not leadership on the issues. She especially needs to understand this distinction because we don’t want a repeat of 2016.

Medicare for all is a baseline measure, like a litmus test. Get behind it or go somewhere else. I would go further. Parties need to be de-emphasized as power brokers. This means an end to party primaries and an end to party controlled district drawing. It possibly means an end to the house as it has been known since the 435 rule was introduced. We want an electoral college that reflects popular will. That means more, smaller districts. We have to keep beating on this message until it sinks in.

More equal representation. More connection between representatives and their districts. An end to money primaries. An end to money as speech, or legislation that makes everyone a party to the current funding of elections through vouchers for contributions to elections.

Higher taxes on the wealthy. Universal Income. Medicare for all. I’m done playing around with half measures as proposals. If the conservatives can lead with “let the poor die for lack of care” then we should lead with make the wealthy care for the poor until they are no longer wealthy. We can then meet somewhere in the middle.

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If It Bleeds, It Leads. Same as It Ever Was

For the last year and a half the media have fawned all over His Electoral Highness, The Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) They can’t stop talking about him. They can’t be kept from giving him airtime to talk about himself. Aside from the OHM himself, his biggest fans are the media who think that what this lame duck of a leader says means anything at all. Because of the media’s fawning, I have been forced to spend the last two years ignoring everything the OHM can be heard saying with their generous gift of free airtime. I ignore everything he says because listening to him is what he wants us to do. I ignore him because attempting to make sense of what he says makes me feel ill. I ignore him because listening to him demonstrably makes you dumber; the media being a prime example of people made stupid by the sound of the OHM’s voice.

The media’s free gift of airtime helped give him the momentum to take the electoral college if not the popular vote; and now they ask, why is America so divided? If anyone should know the answer to this question it should be the media, but I wouldn’t look to them to give you a truthful answer. Division is what they want. It sells. Conflict and violence always lead the news. The division they are trying to illustrate here is largely a matter of perception. The division is almost entirely of the media’s making, their policy of going with taglines that hype the separation, the division, the conflict,

CBS Sunday Morning – A polarized America – Mar 26, 2017

There’s nothing new about simmering hostility between a President and the press. As Richard Nixon once stated, “The President should treat the press just as fairly as the press treats him.”
In March of 1974, the Nixon presidency was lurching toward destruction by Watergate, and there was an ongoing tension between the President and the CBS White House correspondent:
President Nixon: “Are you running for something?”
Dan Rather: “No, sir, Mr. President, are you?”
Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was then, and remains now, a student of our political system and our media:
“We would watch network news shows and we would sit there and we would have basically a common set of facts that would emerge from them,” he said. “As we’ve moved to the new media world, the more you’ve got this cacophony of voices, the more you cut through it by, basically, shock value. And that’s why people now are driven not by their own attachment to their own parties; they’re driven by a hatred for those on the other side.”
CBS News, The great divide: Politics in the Age of Trump

Much like Nixon ushered in the end of the Republican party that elected him, the OHM signals the ultimate end of Reaganism and Reaganomics. There will be no possibility of doubt remaining as to the bankruptcy of Reagan’s policies by the time the OHM is drummed out of office; policies which have held sway since Reagan was president. The question the media should be asking is, will the Democrats find themselves and their new direction, or will they waste their resurgence as they did with the Carter years? Let me unpack these observations for you.

The eight years of Clinton were not liberal years. The most damning thing to be said about Clinton is that he was and is Republican lite, conservative-ish. He ended welfare in the US because the conservatives demanded that he do it. Because it was something that Reagan promised and compromising with Reagan Democrats was how Bill Clinton got into office. Over and over again he proved that he wasn’t liberal in any real sense of the word. He was a conservative from the old Southern wing of Democratic conservatives who just happened to have married well. Without Hillary’s influence I am convinced he would have been even harder on the poor, even more militaristic than he was. Weirdly, I doubt that would have kept Republicans from manufacturing a scandal in their attempts to remove him.

Barack Obama was pretty close to liberal but still enacted conservative policies because conservative policies were the only ones that the conservatives in the congress he was saddled with would vaguely go for. Obamacare was and is Romneycare. That is why Romney had such a hard time dissing the ACA, because it was his idea offered by a Democratic president and he knew it. Obama was the deporter-in-Chief because, again, that is what conservatives wanted him to do. He was tough on immigration because he hoped it would win points with the other side of the aisle. Only in his last two years did he realize that Republicans would never work with him and so he spent those years ruling by executive order. The Republicans didn’t refuse to work for him because he was black if we are to take them at their word. they didn’t refuse because he was liberal because his policies prove otherwise. They refused to work with him because he was a Democrat.

The sin that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are all guilty of is the sin of being members of the Democratic party. If they had been Republicans they would have been deemed typical centrists willing to make deals in order to get the government’s work done. It is deal making that the new conservatives hate. They are convinced that there is a true conservative ideology and all they have to do is adhere to it. Never mind that no two conservatives can agree on what conservatism is aside from prosperity gospel Jesus, a completely different kind of Jesus than that socialist hippy Jesus of the seventies. That is religion masquerading as ideology which is all conservatism has left to appeal to, the shadow of religion that Reagan rode to power on.

None of this has anything to do with real ideology beyond the ghost of Reagan that even Reaganite priests can’t quote because Reagan was more liberal than the country is now. The ghost of Reagan and his trickle-down Reaganomics is why the tax rates on the wealthiest people in the US remain low. Anyone making more than a million dollars a year should be taxed at the confiscatory rate of 99% just as the progressive tax rates did during the post-war era. During the times when the middle class grew and the poor were not quite so desperate. Back when Jesus was a socialist hippy. They should be taxed at this extreme rate because they don’t spend more when they have more, so it benefits society not one bit to allow them to keep their incredible wealth.

The subject of monetary policy is too lengthy to get into here, but in the end upper income tax rates were lowered because the increased wealth was supposed to generate more benefits for the rest of us, and the reality we live in has demonstrably proven that the opposite is true. Ergo, some form of income cap has to be reinstituted. Either a scale requiring all boats be raised when the wealthy get paid more, or confiscatory taxes on pay greater than the scale would dictate.

So here we are at the tail-end of the Reagan era, just waiting for the Reagan Democrats to bleep their last heartbeat on the heart monitor they are strapped to before we can get on with progress. It has to be those people because they are the only ones left watching TV, getting their news from TV and from radio. Those are the people who went out and voted for Trump, his core base of stormtrumpers. Those are the people who in their political ignorance voted Republican not realizing that Republicans and conservatives ran everything in the country aside from the presidency already. Politically ignorant people who don’t understand that the president’s job isn’t to fix the country, that is the job of the congress. A job the congress is supposed to achieve through legislation and funding and programs to keep the myriad systems this country depends on, running.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, conservatives have swallowed the anarchist notion that government doesn’t work. Republicans have echoed this falsehood because their base believes it, never questioning why they want to elect people to do jobs that they believe don’t need to be done. So it falls to the Democrats to make proposals for government that will work. It falls to them to prove that the poor can get a fair shake in this new America, that the wealthy don’t always get their way. Falls to the Democrats to propose the kinds of changes that populists on both sides of the aisle wanted and would get behind, because the Republicans and conservatives are too scared of socialism to even go someplace where government just might work. If the Democrats can do this, it will be the end of the Republicans for at least a generation.

What I don’t understand is how the media can’t see this happening? Why do they see fractiousness and faction rather than seeing what is really going on? The politically informed vs. the politically ignorant that gave us the current administration? Why can’t they see that they are the OHM’s biggest fans? Perhaps they can’t see it because they too are caught in a previous age. The age of the gatekeeper and the top-down administrator. The feudal society of corporate America, what is fast becoming a corporate globalism. The history of dictators and their five year plans that never worked out. They are soon to be as irrelevant as the Reagan Democrats who will be cashing their last Social Security checks soon. Checking out as movers and shakers and are left behind as the world starts dancing to a different beat.

The media and Reagan Democrats will be as baffled by the next election as they were by the last one, because they think the narrative is one they set, and not one that we the people decide.

Several facebook status posts lead to this post. Here was one.

Petty OHM Henchmen

Did anybody else note this the other day?

Facebook video, Youtube video, PBS NewsHour December 2, 2016

The NPR politics podcast (live) covered a bit more of this debacle.

NPR Politics Podcast Weekly Roundup: Live In Cambridge December 2, 2016

Can anyone be more juvenile than the entire Trump team? Can anyone be more clueless than their candidate is about the office he is about to be elected to? This is the essence of the problem we are now facing. The inmates are truly in charge of the asylum, and there is no knowing where this will go next if he is allowed to take office.

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Explaining the Inexplicable?

Episode #49 of Waking Up, The Lesser Evil is perhaps the best post-election failure dissection conducted pre-election that you will ever find. Listening to them discuss the compromised nature of Hillary Clinton; how they (the Clintons) claimed to be defenders of equal rights while doing so many things that make that a lie:

spotify – samharris.org

What I draw from the episode is this: Clearly there are more people interested in making sure other people suffer more than they do. That there are far more people who think gays do not deserve equality, that poor people need to be poorer, that immigrants are parasites, that American success comes at the cost of a subjugated world, all the things that Donald Trump was verbally in support of during the campaign. Clearly there are far more of those people than the thinking men in this and other podcasts thought.

All of this makes the Clintons look like the smart ones after all. Clearly Hillary was pulled too far to the left to win her base (Southern moderate conservatives) forcing her to make appeals on the left that were never going to win anyway. They were never going to win, because those people would not support her and thought they were stronger than they were. Thought they were strong enough to defeat the stormtrumpers.

Had that other candidate appeared (and it wasn’t Bernie Sanders) been allowed to appear by opening up Democratic politics after 2008, who knows where we would be now. Would we still be waking from Birther-in-Chief nightmares? That we will never know. Maybe the US will survive two years so we can see a new Democratic party emerge. One that isn’t lead by such compromised people.

Postscript

Looking back one year later, I have to modify my voiced perceptions. I thought then she had gone too far left. I’m thinking today that she actually went exactly where she should have been on the political spectrum, but failed to communicate her positions to the right people to gain enough support in the right places.

This is more a function of the corruption of the US election system than it is anything that can be blamed on Hillary. The corruption of money in politics, party interference including gerrymandering and voter suppression, and even the electoral college itself. Sullivan, being a conservative, thinks Clinton lost touch with her base and went too far in the wrong direction. The key demographic that she needed, white women, were never going to vote for her in enough numbers to make up the difference needed without the suppressed votes in states like Wisconsin. GOP corruption of the system combined with targeted conservative funding and foreign interference put us on this path to destruction much more than anything Hillary ever did aside from having been seen destroying the reputations of Bill Clinton’s sexual victims.

Carry On, Whether You Feel Calm or Not

This talk from Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times is exactly what we need to stay focused on, those of us capable of rational thought today. Carry on Post-Brexit, whether calm or not easily applies to the US today and for the next few months after the disastrous returns from the 2016 general election. In the spirit of carrying-on I decided to go through Robert Reich’s points published on his wall this morning point by point, just to get a feel for what I think we have in store for us. We’ll see if my post-election predictions are as off as my predictions of the election of our first female president were.

Waking up this morning in an altered universe, trying to avoid despair, as I’m sure many of you are.
What to do, now? Let me offer a few suggestions.
The first temptation will be recrimination – against the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and all the other establishment figures who prevented Bernie from getting the nomination. That’s understandable, but recrimination won’t get us where we need to be.
Bernie would have lost. Every other Democratic candidate presented would have lost (maybe not Julian Castro, but he didn’t want to compete with Hillary for the job either) because this is the same kind of malcontents who upset the Brexit vote. They want things broken, and their change agent will be expected to break things. They voted for him with the expectation of breaking things, that is why he is the President-elect, not for anything he promised to do, but the damage he is expected to cause. With cynics like that at the helm, be prepared for ugliness to occur.
As a practical matter, our first priority must be to defend civil rights and civil liberties. Trump has unleashed the furies, and the furies will now feel unbridled. Be conscious and beware. We must protect those who need protecting. Trump isn’t yet president. We still have a court system, at the least.

This is probably one of the few points that is actually doable, because we don’t have to rely on our opponents to get it done. We just have to fund the ACLU and other defense organizations with enough funds to pull this off. The one thing that the break-everything’s who won the 2016 elections cannot control is the actions of the sane half of the United States. If we keep our heads and stay focused on the important goals. Goals like that one.

Our second priority must be to hold on to as much of the progress already made as possible. Use political jujitsu to turn the Republican’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act into something closer to Medicare for All, which it should have been all along – based on the most popular program in the federal government. Hold on to the progress on the environment we’ve already achieved, and fight off attempts to link a carbon tax to a huge corporate tax cut. Use this populist moment to raise taxes on corporations and the rich rather than cut them.

There is a steep slope ahead for anything we do on this front (see the previous note about breaking things) the ACA is gone. It ain’t coming back. Anyone who had insurance? You will lose your insurance. The subservient congress he has been handed will tacitly do whatever he asks, and his plans are to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, disabled and non-citizen workers. Look to see a reversal of the private prisons decision and an expansion of prisoner work programs. Militias will probably start rounding up what they term “Illegals” which we will have to counter with the ACLU and other rights programs. Budget cuts for everything that isn’t the military are likely. The military will be expanded over the objections of the generals, who will probably be replaced.

Worse, Obama (whom I love) will hand the Birther-in-Chief a blueprint for how to screw all of this up in his attempts to hand off the baton in this relay race he thinks he is running, unless he suddenly gains an understanding that not all of us want the same things.

Which is why the taxes on the wealthy will be lowered, as will the corporate tax rates (which is a far more complex issue than I can outline here. Suffice it to say lower corporate tax rates are not necessarily a bad thing) the memory of Ronaldus Maximus will be served, even if the actual policies of Ronald Reagan are not.

A carbon tax has no chance now. The Birther-in-Chief thinks climate change is a hoax. So repeat this mantra till it sinks in Americans are dumber than most of us thought, the dumber than dirt kinda dumb. They voted for the conspiracy fantasist who will be sworn in next January, they are definitely not smarter than he is.

Those of us blessed to live in progressive states must use this opportunity to move the agenda forward at the state level — to show what can be done on the minimum wage, paid family leave, single-payer health insurance, tuition-free public college, and election reforms.

I see a mass exodus to the blue areas of the map in the near future, as if that isn’t already happening. This will further exacerbate the problems in the red areas, areas which already do not have enough population to do the jobs they need doing, to maintain the industries they are demanding come back to the U.S. This is only going to make the in-fighting between the cities and the rural areas (blue and red, respectively) uglier, not better. How that will shape up is anyone’s guess. It might be possible to use the tax base of the cities to address problems of the rural areas that feed it, but that will take some pretty creative thinking on the parts of city managers across the country. City managers who are already underfunded and understaffed. Not holding my breath on that one.

Our fifth priority should be to organize with an eye to the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election. I know many of you are exhausted, and the mere thought of more politics almost sickens you. But we have no choice.

I’m trying to remain hopeful that there will be a recognizable US in 2018 at this point. I really don’t see how we get there. If we do, we better be sure that we are positioned to take back congress and the senate. That means the 2018’s start next week. Find your local precinct office, invite your neighbors, take over the party machine. Do it now so that we don’t have to think about it in two years, we’ll just be doing what we planned all along.

Finally, we must take over the Democratic Party, or begin a third party, in order to bridge the gap between the white working class and people of color – thereby creating a coalition that can not only win elections, but take on the moneyed interests and reverse the inequalities that have driven us to this point.

Third parties are a really bad joke. The delusion that another party will fix the problems of the party system which excludes them from the system they want to fix, is the same kind of insanity that has gotten us here (doing things the same way expecting different results) The system does not allow for them. If we are inordinately successful, a speed of change not seen in the history of the world, we might be able to see the system modified to allow for minority party voices. That means ending gerrymandering, reforming campaign finance and altering the voting system itself with some form of ranked voting. All of this will likely require amending the Constitution to be successful, and there are several active groups out there attempting this now. Go join one of them. Until they are successful, taking over the local party machines (both Democrat and Republican) is the only method we have for fixing this system which has delivered us here.

There’s much more to talk about. But I wanted to start somewhere, and to give you a sense of possibility. Please do not fall into cynicism. That’s a self-fulfilling prophesy
What do you think?

I love Robert Reich’s posts for that last sentence. Sometimes it is maddening, but the professor in him makes him ask his students, his audience, to engage the problem directly.

Cynicism is what put the Birther-in-Chief where he is supposed to be in January. Cynicism drove his candidacy and cynics elected him to break the system. If we want to do better than the people who elected this real estate developer to the highest office in the land, cynicism is the first thing we have to evict from our minds.

The least productive congress, the least popular congress in history returning to office at 96% rate. That is the definition of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I’ve noticed this behavior in Texas for decades now, and I am at a loss to explain it outside of just calling it insanity. For twenty years and longer Texas has doubled down on electing the most conservative candidate they can find; and when that idiot turns out to be, well, an idiot, they elect the next idiot who claims to be even more conservative. So it has gone again and again and again and they never seem to figure out that if you want to see different results, you have to change the parameters, the criteria, whatever it is you think you want from your government, from the people you elect to government.

Until then, until we do that, we will be that crazy dude in the alleyway that keeps walking into the wall over and over again. The guy who smells like alcohol and urine, looks like he slept in his clothes for a month, and wants to bum $20 bucks off of you to buy gas for his car. The world isn’t going to follow us while we blunder into walls repeatedly like a crazy person. They will stop buying our debt, create their own default market currency and move on without us. I don’t even want to think about what happens then.

Don’t be Texas, America. Learn from our bad example.

Email and Crime: Take 1

Let’s all talk about a real crime conducted by email for a change.

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.

For those of you who think this is a smokescreen, that what I am (and others are) suggesting is that Hillary Clinton be let off on a technicality, let me set you straight.

Hillary Clinton surrendered her emails that weren’t her private correspondence. I know that the idea that politicians don’t have something to hide (especially female politicians. Female politicians who seem overly fond of privacy) just strikes the average cynic as implausible, but there it is. She complied with the request from legitimate authority and has suffered no end of pain over it. People are convinced there is a crime there somewhere. There just has to be, after eight inquests and millions of dollars spent. Surely there is something?

No. No there isn’t. I know this breaks your heart but if you want to satisfy your intense interest in other peoples private correspondence, why don’t you go look through George W. Bush’s email records? Why? Because you can’t. Because they destroyed that information rather than turn it over when it was requested by legitimate authority.

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? ”

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.
Newsweek

That, just FYI, is a crime.

Editor’s Note

The Orange Hate-Monkey‘s son-in-law was reported to be using a private email server to conduct official White House business in today’s New York Times,

As a candidate, Mr. Trump aggressively attacked Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, for her use of private email while she was secretary of state. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies outside the White House are urging him to press for a prosecution of Mrs. Clinton, even though an F.B.I. investigation into her handling of classified information has been closed. At Mr. Trump’s rallies, his supporters still break into cheers of “lock her up!”

So we can add this hypocrisy to the list of Administration officials past and now present, who have also not been indicted for using a private email server to conduct government business. Will the Republicans now be chanting Lock Him Up? Don’t hold your breath.

There Is An Evil Party, But It Isn’t the Democrats.

I was a die-hard libertarian when Gore lost to Bush II. We told ourselves from our high ideological horses that the one was no worse than the other.

I don’t know what Gore would have done in the short time before 9/11 and I don’t know what he would have done after it, but I’m reasonably certain we wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq, because that was an invention of the Bush II administration as payback for what Saddam did to Bush I; or alternatively, as establishing the beachhead that the Republicans had always planned on executing with Iraq at some point. Were planning to inflict on Iran in the years following. Fortunately those plans were foiled by the complete lack of substance in conservative and libertarian economic ideals, and the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007.

In any case, I’d give almost anything, as an American who voted the wrong way in 2000 (fortunately not in Florida) to be able to go back and change my vote in that election. Give Gore the chance he should have had instead of dismissing him with the throw-away line “They’re both the same”. How hollow those words seem now.

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‘I might be old, but I’m not stupid. And I suspect that a lot of other members of my generation feel the same way. We remember when we were impatient. And we remember the mistakes that our impatience created.

“Old people don’t tell young people what to do and what not to do because we want to control your lives — we just want to warn you not to make the same mistakes we did.

“But you will. Or you won’t. Because it’s your choice. Always.”
David Gerrold

Facebook Hillary Haters

As I was trolling Facebook the other day, I stumbled across a discussion on a friend’s wall where one of his friends suggested that Hillary was worse than Trump and she was voting Green because of it. I nearly lost my mind. But I chilled it down a notch and then sent the poor fool a few links. I started with this article titled A Gentle Talk With My Friends. I’ll include a few excerpts here, starting with one for the right side of the aisle:

To My Moderate Conservative Friends:
This is a tough time for you. For years, I’ve said “The Republican party is saturated with racist jerks who’d like to raze the Constitution to the ground,” and you said, “No, no, that’s not who we are, we believe in firm laws and equality.”
Then you wake up to discover that your official candidate’s a guy who literally doesn’t know how many articles the Constitution has, and David Duke is so thrilled by Trump’s candidacy he’s come out of the woodwork. You’re not a racist – I wouldn’t be friends with you if you were – but you’re realizing that Trump is representing an ignorant, anti-science, pro-white wing of the party that you tried very hard to convince me didn’t exist.
Worse, those people you claimed didn’t exist (or were just background noise) are, in fact, dominant.
The Ferrett

Here’s a second excerpt for the left side:

To My Liberal Friends Saying “There’s No Difference” Between Hillary and Trump:
There’s no delicate way to say this, but do me a favor:
Look down at your hands.
Yeah, every one of you who said that and looked down at your hands will have noticed that you’re white.
It’s pretty easy to claim there’s no difference when you’re not the one he’s targeting. I get that you’re mad, and it’s a legitimate anger; Hillary’s a prickly candidate.
But do you think the Supreme Court Justices that Trump will nominate – and he will nominate them – will make no difference in your lifestyle ten years down the line? (Go look up Antonin Scalia’s record, then ponder Trump’s statements of Our Beloved Scalia, then ponder what the court would rule with four of him on the team.)
Do you think that your LGBTQ friends will be treated the same in a Hillary-as-President world versus a Trump-as-President world?
The Ferrett

…and if that doesn’t convince you, read this:

See, that’s the problem with Presidential protest voting. You think you’re sending a message, but the guy who wins the Presidency hears “I won, I get to do what I think is best.” The guy who loses maybe hears a message, but that guy lost. And after two years of President-in-office, all those Presidential protest votes evaporate in people’s memories to become, well, another Democrat or a Republican won.
The Ferrett – Why Your Presidential Protest Vote is a Wretched Idea

…or maybe you could read something from my own blog. Something like this:

US Politics Fix – Starting the Process

There have always been third parties. There are several third parties right now (parties 4, 5 & 6?) The system is rigged to only allow two parties to have any real power. The system has been rigged since the Republicans rose to national prominence with the dissolution of the Whigs in 1854 over the question of slavery. This is the point that seems to be glossed over time and time again when it comes to the subject of the two party system we are currently trapped in. It isn’t that I don’t care about third party politics. The system itself isn’t setup to recognize minority parties in any real way. It has been codified and calcified over the course of 200 years to the point where, in certain states, it is all but illegal to be a member of any party aside from the Democrats and Republicans. Third parties, minority parties, minority factions cannot alter the system because it is insulated from their efforts by layers of interference.

And still the question appears “how can anyone vote Democratic or Republican?” The answer is demonstrable; we vote for them because one of the two of them will win. One of the two of them will win because in the vast majority of races throughout history the political system in the US has been controlled by one of two dominant parties in the US. These protest votes for alternative presidential candidates, this entire obsession with the top office? It is completely unwarranted because the president is not (and should not be given) the powers of a dictator.

I have other friends who can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. I say “so what?” all the offices down-ballot, ALL OF THEM, should not suffer because you don’t like the candidate at the top of the list. Voting is the last act in a series of acts in which you should have at least brought something that you agree with to the table.

If that didn’t happen, maybe you should change parties. Just remember that the current system only acknowledges two and can’t be changed except from inside those two parties. The sooner we accept this fact, the sooner we can get to work fixing the system.

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Postscript

You don’t like the person at the top of the ticket? Join Indivisible and change the party that picks the person at the top of the ticket through organizing with like-minded citizens. It is the only way to make real change.

Trumpismo won and we were spared a third Clinton presidency. I don’t know too many people who can look back over the last four years and say with a straight face “Hillary would have been worse.” There are those who will say that, but most of them are dismissible as lunatics and propagandists.

The members of Indivisible created an agenda and a movement and they defeated Trumpismo at the polls, the way that power in a democracy is supposed to be wielded. They/We can do it again and again and again. Join us and help make this country what it always should have been.

Political Cynicism is Destroying America

It’s all in which sources you believe and just how much cynicism is whispering in your ear.

It isn’t enough to just reject or fight cynicism. Cynicism has to be held underwater until it’s little feet stop kicking, and then buried out in the garden with the rest of the dead pets. You might even want to have the corpse of cynicism blessed by a priest or perhaps burned and scattered. I’m not sure. Not sure just what to trust these days or if anyone or anything deserves trust. But I do know one thing. Cynicism is the enemy in your own mind. It warps your thoughts, plagues your hopes and pisses on your successes.

So you can look at Hillary and just see the negative, the negative created by those who hate her and have hated her since the 90’s. Or you could try looking at her through a different lens. Your choice. But personally I’ve spent enough time hating authority for no good reason beyond it’s being authority. Picking my battles better in the future.