US Election: 2016

[cupper]

You mean like her intenet browser history showing she's a closet lesbian dominatrix?  ;D

 

[Brad Sallows]

The espionage - if any occurred - was in the past.

Trump has - tongue-in-cheek - "asked" the Russians to reveal Hillary's non-official emails - the ones containing no secrets or sensitive information, remember - if they have them.  Hardly a matter for hand-wringing.

 

[tomahawk6]

New material from Wikileaks,this time voice mail. ;D

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?file=mp3&count=50#searchresult

 

[mariomike]

A protester caught on fire stomping on a burning flag in Philadelphia.
https://twitter.com/ndiblasio/status/758497532670541824

 

[CougarKing]

Bloomberg weighs in against Trump even as his predecessor Guiliani pledged his support for Trump last week, if I can recall correctly:

Reuters

In clash of billionaires, Bloomberg calls Trump White House race 'a con'
By: Reuters
July 28, 2016 6:09 PM


PHILADELPHIA - New York media mogul Michael Bloomberg assailed fellow billionaire Donald Trump on Wednesday, calling his US presidential race a "con" and ripping into his history of bankruptcies and lawsuits.

"Trump says he wants to run the nation like he's running his business? God help us," Bloomberg told the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to roaring applause. "I'm a New Yorker and I know a con when I see one."

Formerly a Republican and now an independent, Bloomberg was for the most part greeted warmly by the audience in the Wells Fargo Center arena where he threw his support behind the Democrats' presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

I thought I was a political junkie, but my wife has been glued to CNN.

Today, while going in and out of the apartment I saw two examples of the "moral equivalency express" derailed.

1. The commentators were foaming at the mouth because Trump's remarks about Russia "were threatening national security". I wonder which nominee's actual actions threatened national security, or caused the deaths of Americans?

2. Van Jones was introduced and commented as a "Former Presidential advisor". Any guesses as to why he is "former"? The media certainly didn't enlighten us.

And this is simply two examples from waling through the living room at random times. I can only imagine what the rest of the day must have been like.

 

[cupper]

People need to do more research before spouting off.


Republicans said Kaine’s pin was the Honduran Flag. It was actually a symbol of his son’s military service.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/07/28/republicans-said-kaines-pin-was-the-honduran-flag-it-was-actually-a-symbol-of-his-sons-military-service/

In a since-deleted tweet, the North Carolina Republican Party called out Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine for wearing the flag of Honduras on his lapel during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday.

Except it wasn’t the flag of the small Latin American country where Kaine had spent a year doing missionary work, but instead the pin was a mini Service Flag, or blue star flag, denoting his son’s current service in the United States Marine Corps.

According to the Blue Star Mothers of America website, the flag can be displayed “by families who have members serving in the Armed Forces during any period of war or hostilities the United States may be engaged in for the duration of such hostilities.”

The red-trimmed, white flag comes in a number of variations. Depending on how many service members a family might have in the military, the flag can contain multiple stars. If the family has lost someone in combat, the flag will contain a gold star in lieu of a blue one.

North Carolina has one of the largest concentrations of military bases and personnel in the United States and is home to Kaine’s son’s unit: 2nd Battalion 8th Marines out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., according to military documents. Known as “America’s Battalion,” 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines is a decorated infantry battalion that has deployed multiple times in support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First Lt. Nathaniel Kaine recently deployed with the Marine Corp’s Black Sea Rotational Force, a detachment of Marines based primarily out of Romania that trains with its European counterparts throughout Europe as a part of recent U.S. reassurance measures in region.

 

[Journeyman]

People need to do more research before spouting off.

That should be a mantra in several venues, not merely political.    :nod:

 

[cupper]

Still not entirerly sure about this being a good thing or not.

Intelligence Director: Clinton and Trump Will Receive Classified Briefings

http://time.com/4429507/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-james-clapper-intelligence-briefings/

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, reaffirmed Thursday that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would be offered classified national security briefings in the coming weeks, despite protests from partisans about the briefing of both nominees.

It’s tradition dating back to former President Harry Truman. The presidential and vice presidential nominees of both parties are presented with the option to be briefed by top intelligence officials about broad threats facing the nation. Clapper, as the highest-ranking intelligence official, oversees the process.

“There’s a long tradition that the intelligence community at the appropriate time—and now is the appropriate time since both candidates have been officially anointed—that both camps will be reached out to and offered briefings,” Clapper said. “We’ve got a team all prepared,” he added.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Clapper noted that there is no security clearance required for the briefings. “The fact that they’re a candidate qualifies,” he said, adding it would be inappropriate if it were otherwise. “And I’ll tell you really it’s not up to the administration and certainly not up to me personally to decide on the suitability of a presidential candidate.”

It’s up to voters to provide the ultimate clearance, he argued. “And they will make that decision to pick someone who will be cleared for everything.”

Concern over the briefings came to a head this week from Democrats concerned by Trump’s call Wednesday for Russia to hack Clinton’s private email. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid encouraged the intelligence community to give Trump fake information to prevent leaks.

“I would suggest to the intelligence agencies, if you’re forced to brief this guy, don’t tell him anything, just fake it, because this man is dangerous,” Reid said in an interview with the Huffington Post.

The concern has been mutual. In early July, after FBI Director James Comey reported that the FBI found classified information on Clinton’s private email server, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2012, called on Clapper to bar Clinton’s access to classified information.

“I think the DNI, Clapper, should deny Hillary Clinton access to classified information during this campaign given how she so recklessly handled classified information,” Ryan told reporters.

But Clapper rejected both complaints Thursday, adding that “there isn’t” any hesitation in the intelligence community about briefing the candidates.

“Neither I, as the DNI, nor anyone else in the administration … make that determination,” Clapper said. “That’s the determination made by the electorate. So we will brief both candidates if they want it.”

An Intelligence Official familiar with the matter said the briefings will be provided “on an even-handed, non-partisan basis,” with invitations to work out the logistics coming after the conclusion of both conventions.

“Candidates are advised of the classified nature of the material, and operational and policy matters are not addressed,” the official said. These are not daily briefings. Candidates typically receive one or two strategic-level briefings that provide broad threat overviews.”

 

[cupper]

More on how bad things got at the DNC under Wasserman Shultz.

DNC insiders detail months of escalating dysfunction
As Wasserman Schultz faltered, the White House and Clinton campaign fretted but failed to act.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-debbie-wasserman-schultz-226352

PHILADELPHIA — Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn’t supposed to ask Joe Biden to come to her daughter’s bat mitzvah.

Democratic National Committee staff had sent the chair to the vice president armed with four specific requests for getting him involved in raising money for the party.

She decided to scrap them for two of her own.

First, she asked Biden to do a fundraiser for her own reelection to her House seat in Florida in the primary challenge she’s facing next month. He agreed.

The second was to get down to Boca Raton for the bat mitzvah.

Biden’s staff balked. They offered to tape a video message from him instead, hoping that would satisfy her.
Wasserman Schultz eagerly said yes. They played it for everyone who came.

The meeting with Biden was symptomatic of the way the DNC was veering off the rails just as the presidential election was heating up. More than a dozen people inside the party apparatus, speaking in the wake of Wasserman Schultz’s resignation on Sunday, describe an internal culture in which few felt they could challenge an increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions.

Last week’s WikiLeaks dump, releasing thousands of emails showing DNC officials sparring with Bernie Sanders supporters and with one another, was what finally got Hillary Clinton’s top aides to force her out Sunday on the eve of the convention.

Now, all DNC senior staffers seem to believe they’re on the verge of being fired — and that’s before the next WikiLeaks release, which many fear is coming within days, and which DNC lawyers are bracing for. Several staff members have already been asked to prepare statements about their departures.

Staff members were briefed in a Tuesday afternoon meeting in Washington that their personal data was part of the hack, as were Social Security numbers and other information for donors, according to people who attended. Don’t search WikiLeaks, they were told — malware is embedded throughout the site, and they’re looking for more data.

This was all done to influence the 2016 election, they were told.

Wasserman Schultz battled to the end. But the dysfunction within the DNC had been mounting for months, according to interviews with over a dozen people in and around the organization. Wasserman Schultz’s detractors extend from party officials to the White House to the Clinton campaign — even though she was widely viewed as favoring Clinton. And many of them say they worry that the email drama has obscured the full picture of went wrong on Wasserman Schultz’s watch, which they worry won’t be fixed unless there’s a more complete airing.

“This [WikiLeaks release] didn’t peel back all the layers of the onion of incompetence,” said one person inside the DNC. “But it broke the fever.”

Neither the White House nor Clinton’s campaign made the moves to oust her earlier for fear of an untimely blowup. Her support of the Iran deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership helped keep the West Wing from going too hard at her. But senior aides to Clinton and President Barack Obama had long ago run out of patience with what they saw as her attempts to constantly insert herself and clumsily try to ingratiate herself at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.

“It was an inch-by-inch battle for everything, and Debbie didn’t make it easy — not because she was trying to stay neutral, but because she was trying to maintain control,” said one person familiar with DNC operations.
Wasserman Schultz refused, without direct explanation at the time, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s request to have three members of Congress testify at the first party platform committee meeting in early June, leading Pelosi to clear her schedule that day and show up herself to speak about House Democratic priorities.
When Obama agreed to do a DNC fundraiser in Miami in June — and in the end, went out of his way in his public remarks to talk about why Wasserman Schultz needed to be reelected — she for weeks hassled White House political director David Simas to get 10 of the 60 seats (which went for $10,000 each) at the event for her congressional reelection campaign’s biggest donors. She ended up filling the seats, according to people involved with planning the event, with family and friends.

A DNC spokesperson did not dispute the Biden and Obama encounters. As for blocking Pelosi’s request, the spokesperson said it was because the session “was set up to hear from grass-roots voices as well as stakeholders around specific issues. When Leader Pelosi raised the question of testifying on the Innovation Agenda, Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz welcomed her testimony, and she testified at the hearing.”
A decision about how much money to transfer to state parties that was supposed to be made in consultation with DNC officers was made unilaterally by Wasserman Schultz, and without warning, angering top brass.
The other DNC officers, directly aware of many of the problems and told by staff about others, were constantly talking to one another about what was going wrong and how to get around a chair who was adamant that she would stay through the end of her term in January.

“In the last eight weeks, there was a growing sense that it just wasn’t going to work, and it was only a matter of time,” one officer said.

Frustration within the DNC, the White House and the Clinton campaign was exacerbated by Wasserman Schultz’s efforts to raise her own profile by appearing more often on national television.
Luis Miranda, the communications director whom Wasserman Schultz hired last September, pitched her hard in their interview on how he would get her on TV more often. He got the job over two candidates who were recommended by the Clinton campaign.

“The biggest problem with the communications department right now is that we don’t put Debbie out there enough,” Miranda said at his first staff meeting after coming on board in September, according to people in the room.

Requests for comment from Wasserman Schultz and Miranda were directed to a DNC spokesperson.
“The DNC got suggestions for the communications director job from many sources, and filled the position with a highly qualified communications professional who had DNC experience, Obama ’08 and White House communications office experience, and experience with communications in the private sector,” said a DNC spokesperson. “Managing the press profile of the DNC chair is part of the job, as anyone who has ever worked at the DNC, under any chairperson, will tell you.”

But Wasserman Schultz’s increased television activity increased her problems. After the raucous Nevada state convention in May, she went on the attack against Sanders and his supporters, and an enraged Sanders responded by calling for her resignation.

Just at the point when Democratic leaders were hoping to shift toward more party unity, she’d inflamed the situation and put herself in the middle of it.

“The people who were willing to look the other way stopped looking the other way,” said another person familiar with DNC operations.

She sometimes failed to show up at headquarters to make donor calls, or stay for long when she did. Key staffers couldn’t find her after her personal staff had stopped sending her schedule to all but two top staffers, which the DNC spokesperson said was due to security concerns as the email hack was being investigated.
More and more, the DNC staff, the White House and the Clinton campaign simply wrote her off.
“There was nothing we could do with her, so we just stopped pretending,” another DNC staffer said. “She became so ineffective for the building that we just stopped using her.”

Meanwhile, Wasserman Schultz accentuated an existing divide with Amy Dacey, who as committee CEO was supposed to have control over all operations. She was often left out of the loop of decisions by the chair’s staff, sometimes leading to contradictory plans.

“One hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing,” lamented one state party chair.

After Clinton won the nomination in June, her campaign moved quickly to try to take control of the DNC. But when Brandon Davis, former political director of the Service Employees International Union, was brought in to the DNC by Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook to be the campaign’s eyes and ears in the party office, Wasserman Schultz made comments both in introducing him to the full staff and in private conversations encouraging people to see him as working for her.

Wasserman Schultz couldn’t stop Davis’ hiring. But when the campaign tried to bring in a senior communications aide who’d be supervisor to Miranda, she dug in against the move, infuriating the Clinton campaign anew, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Wasserman Schultz, meanwhile, has remained in Philadelphia, attending events day and night with her police escort, and having her assistant reach out aggressively to donors, urging them to see her in her suite at the Wells Fargo Center, her base while in town.

She hasn’t seen DNC staffers since she stopped by their meeting of shaken staff Sunday night, within hours of Obama calling her to accept her resignation.

“And all those scumbags who are giving you shit on social media,” she concluded, according to several attendees, “f--- them, they don’t know the first thing. They don’t know you.”

 

[cupper]

From the Canada Party FB page:

Hey everybody start saying Hillary's a secret Hindu born in Amsterdam, see how long it takes Trump to confirm it. #DemsInPhilly

Hearing a lot of this "greatest country in the world" crap at #DemsInPhilly. Umm, we're standing right here!

 

[Kirkhill]

Still not entirerly sure about this being a good thing or not.

Intelligence Director: Clinton and Trump Will Receive Classified Briefings

http://time.com/4429507/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-james-clapper-intelligence-briefings/

Anybody giving odds?  Who will leak first?  Clinton by email or Trump on stage?

 

[a_majoor]

The real reason the GOP establishment hates Trump is that he has cut off their access to great rivers of cash. From the comments thread of a website:

https://voxday.blogspot.ca/2016/07/that-was-fast.html

I'm hoping that this both the birth of the American party and the death of the Republican party as VD alluded to yesterday. The poobahs aren't celebrating Trump because they're not personally benefiting from his success they would they would if a GOPe candidate were somehow swelling their ranks. So to hell with them and their party.

Other than a few diehards like Jonah Goldberg, who can't stand trump for ideological reasons, the very real reason why the establishment doesn't like Trump, and didn't like Trump, is because he is totally outside of the permanent party infrastructure.

In campaigns, there are a few things you alway have to have: pollsters, data people, mailing list people, ad buyers, consultants, handlers, etc.

Trump shunned every single one of those groups. Jeb bush raised and spent $150 million in a few months of active campaigning. Every single dollar went through the cleaners first - first from bundlers and fund raisers, who all got a taste. Then through consultants who help file the paperwork, who keep the records, who organize the funds, and then cut checks. To HR companies who staff up temporary staff, to leasing company who will lease desks, chairs, phones, computers and cellphones and real-estate. Transportation companies for air travel, bus travel, rental cars, and gas and maintenance. Then to advertising companies who write and produce advertisements. Then to ad-buyers who locate and purchase ad-inventory. Then to media consultants who track the impact of the ads, and make recommendations back to the buyers and the candidate. Then to media strategists who talk their way into candidate review meetings and editorial sessions and all that. And then to hotels for renting out entire floors of hotels for weeks at a time in NH and IA. To consultants who will tell you how to dress like a local and how to order your hot dog at the county fair.

Trump took all that, and flushed it down the toilet. This political class makes their money, every two years, taking 20, 30, 40% off the top. It's where the money goes. Everyone gets a taste, the circle always gets bigger, the operation more profitable.

In 2008, Pres. Obama spent $422.22 million on ad-buys. His buyers - David Plouffe and David Axelrod among them - typically skim 5-8%, and sometimes more, off that. That's over $30 million in profits before anything else. He spent $60 million on travel. $51 million in salaries. Mitt Romney spent smaller but still huge numbers the same exact way. Between the two "teams", well over $2B in total campaign spending, all raised from wealthy donors and millions of small donors milked again and again for funds. (See: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/index.php).

With 3 months to go, Mr. Trump has raised spent only $60M, and $49M of that is his own money.

He has literally cost the GOP establishment a billion dollars. If he wins, the Democrats will have to adjust, as especially big ticket donors will realize that the money is wasted.

BTW the "That as fast" in the title refers to Bernie Sanders dropping his Democrat affiliation of convenience and reverting to being an "Independent"  in the Congress.

I have heard that at least 5% of the Bernie Bros may vote for Trump as an act of defiance against the Democrats. It is unknown how many will cross over to the Green Party or Libertarians, Trumps greatest advantage may simply be that millions of Bernie Bros will sit out the election or write in Senator Sanders as their candidate on election day.

Personally, it would be the most epic trolling of the Dems if Donald Trump had a televised Presidential debate against Garry Johnson and Jill Stein, exposing millions of Americans to two alternatives to the current party system.

 

[a_majoor]

More surprises from the Bernie Bro's: wearing glow in the dark T shirts saying "Enough is Enough" during the acceptance speech. This really is turning into the most interesting election campaign ever, watching both party establishments trying to reign in rebellions.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Who will leak first?  Clinton by email or Trump on stage?

Yes.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Anybody giving odds?  Who will leak first?  Clinton by email or Trump on stage?

"Depends".... I think Hilary is of an age....   maybe that'll control leaks.

 

[cupper]

"Depends".... I think Hilary is of an age....   maybe that'll control leaks.

That Depends. Does she have Poise?  ;D

 

[cupper]

This really is turning into the most interesting election campaign ever, watching both party establishments trying to reign in rebellions.

And to think, it's only just begun.  :facepalm:

This is going to be the most negative election cycle in recent history. And since I live within the DC market it will be ground zero. And because Virginia is a swing state, and the DC 'burbs particularly key to that swing, TV will be all but unpalatable.  :

When the F will Hockey start again, so I can start yelling at the TV and blame Sidney Crosby for all the world's woes again.  [

 

[cupper]

Anybody giving odds?  Who will leak first?  Clinton by email or Trump on stage?

My money is on the Russians leaking to Wikileaks, then Trump calling for Russians to search for the missing briefing notes, and the Dems claiming that Melania Trump plagerized the Russians leaked info.

 

[mariomike]

July 29, 2016

Q. Who protects DNC in PHL from VBIEDs?
A: Police? B: FBI? C: Secret Service?
A: D: The DOT

'Just Another Day at the Office' for the Human Bomb Shields Outside the DNC
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/just-another-day-at-the-office-for-the-human-bomb-shields-outside-the-dnc-8920535?

Edit to add:

Why Obama’s half-brother says he’ll be voting for Donald Trump
http://nypost.com/2016/07/24/why-obamas-half-brother-says-hell-be-voting-for-donald-trump/