MMR, Sept 16, 2016

Bill Clinton made 10 separate appearances over the course of a decade on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Thursday night marked his first sit-down with Stewart’s successor Trevor Noah.

It’s been a rough week for Hillary Clinton, who took three days off from her presidential campaign to recover from pneumonia. Her absence from the trail meant extra time in the spotlight for her husband, who filled in for the candidate in Las Vegas on Wednesday. And he continued to advocate for her forcefully on The Daily Show.

Clinton began by reporting on his wife’s health. He said she “looked great” when she left home in the morning, “looked great” during her stump speech in North Carolina, and she “just called and said she got home and she still feels good.” He added, “Big deal, she had pneumonia. People get it all the time.” Asked if he was “afraid” when he saw her nearly faint this past Sunday, Clinton said, “You’re always concerned, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was because she had been working hard, she was dehydrated, she had been standing up a long time there.”

The former president also addressed some of the criticism of the Clinton Foundation and his Global Initiative, which is meeting this week in New York. Because you can’t undertake the type of large-scale health access initiatives that CGI does without government assistance, Clinton said he would keep that side “at arm’s length” should his wife become president. “I can’t be involved at all, it needs to be an independent entity, and it will be,” he promised.

After a break, the conversation pivoted to the politics of the presidential campaign. Speaking about the sharp divide between left and right in the U.S. today, Clinton said, “We have one remaining bigotry: We don’t want to be around anyone who disagrees with us.” As the crowd laughed tepidly, he added, “They didn’t laugh too loudly because they know I’m telling the truth.”

Noah framed the 2016 election as a battle between “more of the same” from an insider like Hillary Clinton or an “outsider” like Donald Trump, someone who “doesn’t believe in logic or ideas.”

“That’s factually accurate,” Clinton remarked, laughing.

As a former president who came into office as an outsider, Clinton held up experience as paramount. First he explained that he had an “advantage” in the 1992 race by being simultaneously an outsider to Washington but also America’s longest-serving governor.

“Both of these candidates have had a lot of experience,” Clinton said. “They’ve made a lot of decisions, and those decisions have had consequences.” The “big difference” between the two candidates, he said, is not that one is an insider and the other an outsider.

“Most of her strongest supporters are those who’ve worked for her or have done business with him,” Clinton said of his wife. “They’re for her, too.” Most of his supporters “just want something new” and want to “close the door” on anyone who’s not like them, Clinton said. It’s those people, he added, that are being “played” by Trump.

“What I think is important is the proven record of making good decisions that make good things happen for other people,” Clinton said.

Because he knew they make his guest smile, Noah ended the interview with a balloon drop.

www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/16/bill-clinton-on-the-daily-show-donald-trump-s-fans-are-getting-played.html

Trump Shows His Hand, Reveals Plan To Hijack The Debates

Republican nominee Donald Trump has revealed his plan to hijack the debates through an online debate prep survey sent to his fans via email on Thursday.






His email is innocuous enough, filled with the usual grandstanding…..

“In 11 days, I get the honor of fighting for you in the first presidential debate against Crooked Hillary Clinton,” the email begins. “To prepare for the BIGGEST night of our campaign, I’m turning to the very people who have humbled me and gotten me to where I am today… YOU.”
“Take the survey now and let Trump know what issues are important to you!“

He goes on to explain that “this debate isn’t even about me,” rather is “a fight between the American people and the political machine that Crooked Hillary represents.”

However, it isn’t his email that is revealing – it is the survey itself.

The first question is the most revealing, indicating Trump’s intention to ignore the moderators to a certain extent and to hijack the debates, turning it into a forum for subjects and questions for Hillary that he wants raised – not those established by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.

The first question reads in part:

“Which of the following issues do you want Donald Trump to address on the debate stage even if moderators fail to bring them up? (Select as many that apply.)” [emphasis added]

The rest of the 30 question survey includes some interesting insight into the kind of attacks Trump might launch at Hillary during the debates.



Below are but a few samples – you can click here to review the entire survey (or to fill it out and submit it yourself).

Should Trump contrast his tell-it-like-it-is attitude with Hillary’s running list of lies, corruption, and deceit?
Should Trump force Hillary to answer questions about her email scandal that the press still won’t ask?
Should Trump call out Hillary for wanting to put coal miners out of business?
Should Trump call out Hillary’s reluctance to say “radical Islamic terrorism” and her underlying fear of being politically incorrect?


samuel-warde.com/2016/09/trump-shows-hand-reveals-plan-hijack-debates/


Hyperbole about hijacking aside, it was a dumb move to send out the survey

Should Trump say "crooked" in Hillary's presence?
Should Trump go by the moniker given by Charlie Pierce (He, Trump) or by the one given by some small-time blah man on a Little-Marco blog (Trump the Insult Comic Dog)?
Should Trump ask why blah people hate him so much or should he lie about his African American popularity as evidenced by the Uncle Toms/Aunt Thomasinas who represent him on the cable news shows?

Hacked DNC emails


Hi everyone,



Attached is a script for a new video we’d like to use to mop up some more taco bowl engagement, and demonstrate the Trump actually isn’t trying.



Let me know if you have any flags and thank you!

Although the start of the birther movement can not be directly tied to Hillary, it definitely started with her supporters during the 2008 primary.


"The story appears to have started with supporters of Clinton, an important distinction."

www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/23/donald-trump/hillary-clinton-obama-birther-fact-check/

So, we are all in agreement that the birther movement was started during the 2008 primaries and by Hillary supporters.  

Nope, we are not. It started in 2008, yes, but not by Hillary supporters.

Here you go.




And this.

Nice try, though.

Supporters of CLinton, but not clinton or the campaign.

It's a small, but important distinction.

David Duke is a supporter or Trump. So is trump a bigot by association?

Of course not.

He's a bigot all by himself. He doesn't need the association with Duke for that.

But had Trump not made racists remarks, he wouldn't be guilty simply because Duke supports him.

And again, thanks for posting!

That isn't facetious. I'm glad you're posting, because it's a different point of view - and it is coherent; even if we disagree on the subject.

No. By all indication she created a whisper campaign questioning his religion (Christian) but then quickly added she didn't think he was Muslim.

No matter how you try it you can't whitewash birtherism as a rightwing phenomena.


talkingpointsmemo.com/news/where-did-hillary-clinton-started-birtherism-myth-come-from





Again, there were those that stated he was a Muslim, but it was shot down by the campaign itself. The RIGHT made it into questioning his citizenry. The right now only continue to question his religion but also his citizenry. And it took Trump this long to actually state for the record that he is a natural born citizen.

Birtherism is a rightwing thing. 

Questioning Obama's religion started in the lower echelon of the D's.

Because everybody knows that some backwater Democrat making a false accusation is totally the same as a Republican nominee for President doing so. Makes it all the Democrat's fault. Typical wing nut argument.

What a giant cowardly boob.

Trump’s potential SCOTUS appointee thinks America took a wrong turn when women got the vote
But let’s keep talking about Hillary’s pneumonia instead.

Peter Thiel, a libertarian billionaire known for funding a lawsuit seeking to destroy the media company behind the website Gawker, is a leading candidate for the Supreme Court in a Trump administration, according to reporting by the Huffington Post’s Ben Walsh and Ryan Grim.

Thiel, according to a source consulted by Walsh and Grim, told friends that Trump will nominate him to the Court if the GOP nominee is elected president. Another source confirms that members of Trump’s “inner circle” consider Thiel a potential justice. Spokespeople for both Trump and Thiel deny these claims.

Though Thiel’s early career resembles that of a potential future justice — he graduated by Stanford Law School and clerked for a federal appeals court judge — Thiel abandoned the practice of law very early to pursue a career in business. Accordingly, he has very few of the qualifications typically held by a judicial nominee and is unlikely to have the same grasp on legal doctrine as a professional lawyer or judge.

Indeed, in 2012, the conservative Federalist Society asked Thiel to deliver its annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture. It is one of the most prestigious and high-profile platforms offered by the influential legal group — past speakers include former Vice President Dick Cheney, Chief Justice John Roberts, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia. And yet, speaking before a audience of many of the nation’s leading conservative lawyers and judges, Thiel barely discussed legal matters at all, and what he did say betrayed only a passing knowledge of the underlying doctrines.

The bulk of Thiel’s speech outlined his pessimistic belief that economic and technological growth is slowing. He mentioned the law and the Supreme Court only a few times in the speech, and then only briefly. Those brief mentions, however, did suggest that Thiel would make radical changes if he had the power to reinterpret the Constitution.

Thiel blames the alleged slowdown, at least in part, on “mischief that has happened on the legislative, left-wing legal side” which has permitted the rise of “environmentalism” — a statement which suggests that, as a justice, he would be very sympathetic to arguments raised by lawyers active within the Federalist Society, which seek to hobble the federal government’s ability to protect the environment. In an even more drastic departure from widely accepted legal and economic doctrine, Thiel attacked a series of decisions which enabled America to abandon the gold standard, claiming they destroyed money’s “link to something real.”

Thiel’s belief that the gold standard was a good idea is not shared by, well, pretty much anyone who knows anything at all. As Matthew O’Brien explained in the Atlantic,

Economics is often a contentious subject, but economists agree about the gold standard — it is a barbarous relic that belongs in the dustbin of history. As University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler points out, exactly zero economists endorsed the idea in a recent poll. What makes it such an idea non grata? It prevents the central bank from fighting recessions by outsourcing monetary policy decisions to how much gold we have — which, in turn, depends on our trade balance and on how much of the shiny rock we can dig up. When we peg the dollar to gold we have to raise interest rates when gold is scarce, regardless of the state of the economy. This policy inflexibility was the major cause of the Great Depression, as governments were forced to tighten policy at the worst possible moment.

Indeed, as economist Brad DeLong notes, nations began to emerge from the Great Depression at about the same time that they abandoned the gold standard.

So, while Thiel’s views on the law do not appear to be especially well developed, he also appears eager to upend fundamental assumptions that are widely shared by nearly everyone in the fields of law and economics, even though the consensus view is that overturning those assumptions would be catastrophic.

Oh, and there’s one other thing.

In an essay published by the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, Thiel questioned the very idea that the right to govern flows from the will of the governed. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel claimed. He added that he thinks America made a serious wrong turn when it began extending basic human rights to women and poor people.
The moment when it all went wrong, according to Peter Thiel. (CREDIT: AP PHOTO)

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” Thiel claims about the decade that culminated in the single worst economic calamity in American history. “Since 1920,” he adds, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

thinkprogress.org/trumps-potential-scotus-appointee-thinks-america-took-a-wrong-turn-when-women-got-the-vote-a9d772a85a55#.9u8ylfdwf

thinkprogress.org/doj-catches-texas-violating-the-court-order-against-its-voter-suppression-law-d0f750460c23#.jm0nzmhw0

There is only one measurable form of voter fraud and it's done by red states on a state wide scale.

Not that 'wingers give a shit. Anything to win.