US Election: 2016

[mariomike]

Reply #1759
If you don't mind me asking, who are you quoting?

Anyway, enjoy winning arguments on the internet - I'm sure its very rewarding..

For me, I have loftier ambitions so I shall leave you guys to it.

Welcome back! 

 

[FJAG]

Comparing EU Syrian Crime Statistics to (potential) United States refugee crime statistics is apples to oranges, but comparing crime statistics to accidental, firearm related deaths in children is masterful to you.

Your double standards are astounding (ok, not really)

It's not a double standard to compare an idiotic analogy about Skittles made by a moron with an extreme example that shows that in the US you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a Syrian refugee. What it is, is :sarcasm:

Have a good one, keep your perspective and welcome back as well.

:cheers:

 

[Brad Sallows]

So it's "bowl of skittles" vs "basket of deplorables".  The only difference is that one slags a much larger group of people.

(NB. Interesting - I did a Google search to verify whether the word Hillary used was "basket", and despite being a recently-coined and widely-repeated phrase, it didn't make it into the short list of suggestions - at all.)

 

[cupper]

;D


TRUMP WARNS THAT CLINTON WILL RIG DEBATE BY USING FACTS

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-warns-that-clinton-will-rig-debate-by-using-facts

TOLEDO (The Borowitz Report)—At a campaign rally on Friday, Donald Trump warned that Hillary Clinton is scheming to “rig the debate by using facts” in their first televised face-off, on Monday.

“You just watch, folks,” Trump told supporters in Toledo, Ohio. “Crooked Hillary is going to slip in little facts all night long, and that’s how she’s going to try to rig the thing.”

“It’s a disgrace,” he added.

The billionaire drew a sharp contrast between himself and the former Secretary of State by claiming that his debate prep “involved no facts whatsoever.”

“I am taking a pledge not to use facts at the debate,” he said, raising his right hand. “I challenge Crooked Hillary to take that pledge.”

He also warned that unless CNN, which is hosting the debate, promises to forbid the use of facts, he might pull out of Monday’s contest. “I’m only going to debate if I’m treated fairly, and facts don’t treat me fairly,” he said.

At CNN, a spokesperson assured Trump that the network would do everything in its power to keep the debate “as free of facts as possible.”

“We have a well-established practice at CNN,” the spokesperson said. “If the candidates start straying into facts, data, or other verifiable information, we have instructed the moderators to cut them off.”

 

[a_majoor]

From Atlantic Monthly; a look at Trump the man. Rather surprising that they said this much given the heavily left leaning of the Atlantic's editorial position and reporting (but they also publish people like Mark Bowden and Robert Kaplan, so there is some balance)

Strange how this sort of profile isn't on offer from major media outlets (makes you wonder just what sort of "facts" they are reporting), but this is hardly new or even confined to the United States. I have had the opportunity to see both Prime Minister Harper and the current Prime Minister in small settings, and the actual person is 1800 from the media portrayal in each case. In Mr Trudeau's case, since he was speaking at a university for his then $20,000 fee, you would expect something exciting, rather than a telephoned in script full of very tired old cliches about Capitalism, along with no attempt to "work" the room, while Mr Harper was quite warm and spontaneous in person at his event.

As a twofer, I am adding a link I found to a YouTube video, which shows interviews with Trump dating back to the 1980's, and it is remarkable to see how consistent his positions actually are:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335/

Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally
The Republican candidate took his case to a shale-industry gathering, and found a welcoming crowd.
SALENA ZITO  SEP 23, 2016  POLITICS
Subscribe to The Atlantic’s Politics & Policy Daily, a roundup of ideas and events in American politics.
PITTSBURGH—“Running for president is a very important endeavor,” Donald Trump said. “What is more important, right?”

He leaned forward on his chair, separated by a heavy black curtain in a makeshift green room from the crowd waiting to hear him speak at the Shale Insight Conference.

“I am running because, number one, I think I will do a very good job. Number two, it’s really about making American great again.” He paused, as if realizing that repeating his campaign slogan might not seem genuine.

“I mean that; I really do want to make America great again,” he said. “That is what it is all about.”

The 70-year-old Republican nominee took his time walking from the green room toward the stage. He stopped to chat with the waiters, service workers, police officers, and other convention staffers facilitating the event. There were no selfies, no glad-handing for votes, no trailing television cameras. Out of view of the press, Trump warmly greets everyone he sees, asks how they are, and, when he can, asks for their names and what they do.

“I am blown away!” said one worker, an African American man who asked for anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “The man I just saw there talking to people is nothing like what I’ve seen, day in and day out, in the news.”

Just before he takes the stage, I ask whether there’s one question that reporters never ask but that he wishes they would. He laughs. “Honestly, at this stage, I think they’ve asked them all.”

Then he stops in his tracks before pulling back the curtain and answers, so quietly that is almost a whisper: “You know, I consider myself to be a nice person. And I am not sure they ever like to talk about that.”

On stage, Trump began by addressing the unrest in Charlotte. He praised police, condemned “violent protestors,” and called for unity. “The people who will suffer the most as a result of these riots are law-abiding African American residents who live in these communities,” he said.

Turning to the subject at hand, Trump proceeded to tell shale-industry executives from around the country about his “America First energy plan” that, he vowed, would sideline the Obama administration’s climate-change blueprint, ease regulations, and support the construction of energy-based infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines.

The plan, he insisted, would revive the slumping shale-oil and -gas industries, beset by low prices for several years, and “unleash massive wealth for American workers and families.”

Troy Roach of Denver, Colorado, has seen how the reversal of fortunes in the shale and natural gas industries affected his own community. The 46-year-old vice president of health, safety and environment at Antero Resources says he was open-minded about voting and thought about Hillary Clinton, but ultimately decided on Trump.

“With her, there is too much uncertainty on how she will work with the industry,” he said. “I look at my company and the impact it has had, not only with jobs but charitable work in the area. Just last week we bought a truck for the local EMS.”

Clinton also was invited to speak at the conference but declined, organizers said. In March, during a town-hall discussion of the transition to “clean energy,” the Democratic nominee declared: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Later, she declared it a “misstatement.” Two weeks ago, she again ignited controversy, describing half of Trump’s supporters as coming from a “basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

Like the Barack Obama’s description of his opponent’s supporters—“they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion”—eight years ago in San Francisco, Hillary’s remarks appalled many voters in this region, many of whom work in the energy sector or are affected by it.

One of the things Trump says he wants to accomplish as president is to bring the country together—no small task. He says the first black president has struggled with the issue, one at which he should have excelled.

“First of all, the country is divided, and we have no leadership,” he said. “You would think we would have the perfect leader for that but we don’t.”

He hammered at the importance of better opportunities in black communities as a remedy to quell today’s unrest: “We have to have education and jobs in the inner cities or they are going to explode like we have never seen before. You already see signs of that already all over the country.”

The best way, he says, is to provide good education and good jobs in these areas. “Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,” he says. “Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.”

It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.

It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, “Now that’s interesting.”

I asked him whether the birther controversy—his insistence for years that the first black president in the United States release his long-form birth certificate in order to prove that he is an American—would prevent him from winning over black voters.

He dismissed that suggestion, pointing to recent campaign events addressing black communities in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Cleveland: “They are looking for something that is going to make it better. It’s so unsafe … I always say, ‘I’ll fix it—what do you have to lose?’ I am going to fix it.”

Chicago, he said, has had more than 3,000 people shot this year. “Can you believe that?” he asked. “That’s worse than Afghanistan … our cities are in worse shape.”

Democrats who have run many of America’s major cities for the past 100 years haven’t fixed things, he argued, “so that is what I say, what have you got to lose? I can fix it. The Democrats certainly haven’t.”

The crowd received Trump warmly, greeting him with roaring applause when he addressed the importance of lesser regulations, lower taxes for businesses and producing more energy as a central part of his plan to “make America wealthy again."

Outside the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, hundreds of protesters organized by the state Democrats, unions, and progressive groups voiced their displeasure with him mostly over fracking and climate change.

Trump faces a difficult fight over the next 45 days; he says he plans on winning that fight in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where a rich trove of energy voters live and work, many of them are from union families whose blood-lines trace to the long-gone boom days of coal and steel. Opinion-poll averages show him narrowly ahead in Ohio, and down by six in Pennsylvania.

“Trump does have a chance in this area since the electorate is populated with base Republicans, fed-up independents, and working-class Democrats,” explained Jeff Brauer, a political science professor at Keystone College in Northeastern Pennsylvania. “He especially has to camp out in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio, where so many of these types of voter live. But he will also particularly need to convince the moderate Republicans in the Philadelphia suburbs that he and his temperament are an acceptable choice.”

Trump seemed eager to meet that challenge. “I like Pittsburgh, I like the people … you are going to see a lot of me here, I think, between now and Election Day,” he said as he walked toward the stage, smiling and nodding at a convention-center maintenance worker juggling a dolly stacked high with bottled water.

Trump finished his day in Western Pennsylvania at the elegant Duquesne Club in downtown Pittsburgh with a campaign fundraiser; an organizer said the event was expected to raise more than $1.5 million for the Republican nominee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFMRjSE496c

 

[George Wallace]

Joke section or here?

Here, I guess:

 

[a_majoor]

One wonders just how many nails it will take to close the coffin on Hillary Clinton (and the Clinton's in general). This latest revelation is just more proof of how closed the political class really is. I expect Donald Trump to be all over this either in the debaters or in ads and speeches in the home leg of the election race (or both):

http://observer.com/2016/09/the-fbi-investigation-of-emailgate-was-a-sham/

The FBI Investigation of EmailGate Was a Sham
NSA Analyst: We now have incontrovertible proof the Bureau never had any intention of prosecuting Hillary Clinton
By John R. Schindler • 09/25/16 8:30am

From the moment the EmailGate scandal went public more than a year ago, it was obvious that the Federal Bureau of Investigation never had much enthusiasm for prosecuting Hillary Clinton or her friends. Under President Obama, the FBI grew so politicized that it became impossible for the Bureau to do its job – at least where high-ranking Democrats are concerned.

As I observed in early July, when Director James Comey announced that the FBI would not be seeking prosecution of anyone on Team Clinton over EmailGate, the Bureau had turned its back on its own traditions of floating above partisan politics in the pursuit of justice. “Malfeasance by the FBI, its bending to political winds, is a matter that should concern all Americans, regardless of their politics,” I stated, noting that it’s never a healthy turn of events in a democracy when your secret police force gets tarnished by politics.

Just how much Comey and his Bureau punted on EmailGate has become painfully obvious since then. Redacted FBI documents from that investigation, dumped on the Friday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, revealed that Hillary Clinton either willfully lied to the Bureau, repeatedly, about her email habits as secretary of state, or she is far too dumb to be our commander-in-chief.

Worse, the FBI completely ignored the appearance of highly classified signals intelligence in Hillary’s email, including information lifted verbatim from above-Top Secret NSA reports back in 2011. This crime, representing the worst compromise of classified information in EmailGate – that the public knows of, at least – was somehow deemed so uninteresting that nobody at the FBI bothered to ask anybody on Team Clinton about it.

This stunning omission appears highly curious to anybody versed in counterintelligence matters, not least since during Obama’s presidency, the FBI has prosecuted Americans for compromising information far less classified than what Clinton and her staff exposed on Hillary “unclassified” email server of bathroom infamy.

This week, however, we learned that there is actually no mystery at all here. The FBI was never able to get enough traction in its investigation of EmailGate to prosecute anybody since the Bureau had already granted immunity to key players in that scandal.

Granting immunity is a standard practice in investigations, and is sometimes unavoidable. Giving a pass to Bryan Pagliano, Hillary’s IT guru who set up her email and server, made some sense since he understands what happened here, technically speaking, and otherwise is a small fish. The wisdom of giving him a pass now seems debatable, though, since Pagliano has twice refused to testify before Congress about his part in EmailGate, blowing off subpoenas. Just this week the House Oversight Committee recommended that Pagliano be cited for contempt of Congress for his repeated no-shows. That vote was on strictly partisan lines, with not a single Democrat on the committee finding Pagliano’s ignoring of Congressional subpoenas to be worthy of censure.

Now it turns out the FBI granted immunity to much bigger fish in the Clinton political tank. Three more people got a pass from the Bureau in exchange for their cooperation: Hillary lawyer Heather Samuelson, State Department IT boss John Bental, and – by far the most consequential – Cheryl Mills, who has been a Clinton flunky-cum-factotum for decades.

Mills served as the State Department’s Chief of Staff and Counselor throughout Hillary’s tenure as our nation’s top diplomat. Granting her immunity in EmailGate, given her deep involvement in that scandal – including the destruction of tens of thousands of emails so they could not be handed over to the FBI – now seems curious, to say the least, particularly because Mills sat in on Hillary’s chat with the Bureau regarding EmailGate.

This was in fact so highly irregular that Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, pronounced himself “absolutely stunned” by the FBI’s granting of immunity to Cheryl Mills – which he learned of only on Friday. “No wonder they couldn’t prosecute a case,” Rep. Chaffetz observed of Comey’s Bureau: “They were handing out immunity deals like candy.”

Not to mention that Mills has a longstanding and well-deserved reputation in Washington for helping the Clintons dodge investigation after investigation. When Bill and Hillary need a fixer to help them bury the bodies – as they say inside the Beltway – trusty Cheryl Mills has been on call for the last quarter-century.

She played a key role in the Whitewater scandal of the 1990s – and so did James Comey. Fully two decades ago, when Comey was a Senate investigator, he tried to get Mills, then deputy counsel to Bill Clinton’s White House, to hand over relevant documents. Mills went full dog-ate-my-homework, claiming that a burglar had taken the files, leading Comey to unavoidably conclude that she was obstructing his investigation. Mills’ cover-up, the Senate investigators assessed, encompassed “destruction of documents” and “highly improper” behavior.

Such misconduct is a career-ender for normal people in Washington, but not for Cheryl Mills, who over the last several decades has followed the Clintons everywhere they go. Mills has proven her loyalty to Clinton, Inc. time and again, and that loyalty has been rewarded with a pass on prosecution in EmailGate.

To say nothing of the fact that as chief of staff at Foggy Bottom, Mills was in no way functioning as Hillary’s personal lawyer, as Clinton advocates have contended. Even her other title, State Department Counselor, has nothing to do with legal matters, despite the name. That role is traditionally assigned to an esteemed foreign policy guru who is supposed to offer sage counsel to the secretary of state. Mills’ predecessor as Counselor was Eliot Cohen, one of the country’s preeminent scholars of international relations. Leave it to the Clintons to turn that job over to one of their trusted cabal, translating Counselor in mafia fashion as consigliere.

“The whole thing stinks,” explained a retired FBI senior official who professed dismay about the state of his former employer. “This was impossible in my time, unthinkable,” he rued, expressing shock that the Bureau allowed Mills to remain involved in the investigation, including acting as Hillary’s personal lawyer, despite her own immunity.

How exactly Cheryl Mills got immunity, and what its terms were, is the long-awaited “smoking gun” in EmailGate, the clear indication that, despite countless man-hours expended on the year-long investigation, James Comey and his FBI never had any intention of prosecuting Hillary Clinton – or anyone – for her mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

Why Comey decided to give Mills a get-out-of-jail-free card is something that needs proper investigation. This is raw, naked politics in all its ugly and cynical glory. Corruption is the tamest word to describe this sort of dirty backroom deal which makes average Americans despise politics and politicians altogether.

How high in this administration EmailGate went is the key question, and it’s been reopened by the latest tranche of redacted documents that the FBI released – on Friday afternoon, as usual. There are lots of tantalizing tidbits here, including the fact that early in Hillary’s term at Foggy Bottom, State Department officials were raising awkward legal questions about her highly irregular email and server arrangements.

Most intriguing, however, is the revelation that Hillary was communicating with President Obama via personal email, and he was using an alias. The alias he used with Hillary, and apparently others, was withheld by the FBI, and let it be said the fact that the president wanted to disguise his identity in unclassified email is not all that odd.

What is odd, however, is the fact that Obama previously told the media that he only learned of Hillary’s irregular email and server arrangements from “news reports.” How the president failed to notice that he was emailing his top diplomat at her personal, clintonmail.com address, not a state.gov account, particularly when they were discussing official business, is something Congress may want to find out – since certainly the FBI won’t.

Indeed, when she was being interviewed by the Bureau, Hillary’s ever-faithful sidekick Huma Abedin, was asked about President Obama’s emailing to Hillary using an alias. “How is this not classified?” inquired the mystified Abedin.

How indeed?

The fact that the FBI redacted the contents of that email indicates that is was classified, although it was sent to Hillary’s personal email and transited her personal server.

This, like so many aspects of EmailGate, seems destined to remain a mystery, at least for now. The State Department won’t release the full collection of Clinton’s emails until after our November 8 election. Just this week a Federal judge blasted Foggy Bottom for its slow-rolling: “The State Department needs to start cooperating to the fullest extent possible. They are not perceived to be doing that.” Nevertheless, the public won’t get to see all of Hillary’s emails until after Americans decide who the next president will be.

For Hillary Clinton, winning that election may be a legal necessity to protect her from prosecution. Congress, animated by these latest revelations of illegality and corruption, will now pursue her with vigor, while an FBI in the hands of Donald Trump seems likely to show an interest in EmailGate which the Bureau never possessed under President Obama.

Regardless, this story has emerged yet again to tar Hillary Clinton’s reputation at the worst possible time, when her campaign is lagging in the polls. We can be sure that her Republican opponent will mention EmailGate in Monday’s inaugural presidential debate. The Democratic nominee should have coherent answers about her email and server at the ready if she wants to avoid a debacle before the cameras.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.

 

[Journeyman]

One wonders just how many nails it will take to close the coffin on Hillary Clinton (and the Clinton's in general).

Probably the same number as Trump;  they're both abysmal political candidates.

Donald Trump said 52 false things last week
WASHINGTON—The Los Angeles Times put an unprecedented headline in big type at the top of its front page on Sunday: “Scope of Trump’s lies unmatched.” 

Link if anyone needs  more hand-wringing.

 

 

[McG]

Which candidate will give electrolytes to the crops? It's what plants crave!

 

[George Wallace]

Well...The countdown has begun for this evenings "debate".  I wonder what kind of circus it may turn into.  That may be the only thing that draws viewers. 

How times have changed in the last three decades.

 

[FJAG]

Well...The countdown has begun for this evenings "debate".  I wonder what kind of circus it may turn into.  That may be the only thing that draws viewers. 

How times have changed in the last three decades.

It's been four decades so one can understand how you might have forgotten that those eighteen minutes of tape were in fact only a very small part of a much larger series of illegal activities initiated by Nixon. For a reminder see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal and here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_of_Richard_Nixon

Sorry. I shouldn't let facts get in the way of a witty joke.

:cheers:

 

[PuckChaser]

Sorry. I shouldn't let facts get in the way of a witty joke.

You mean like letting the facts get in the way of the FBI letting Clinton off the hook for the emails? If you or I did that, at very least our career would be over, and very likely a lengthy jail sentence.

 

[Remius]

Pretty quite today despite the gong show that was last night's debate.

Well, I think that Trump lost that one.  He did get some good jabs in, particularly when he called her on her stand on trade and the economy.  I also liked how he called her out when she mentioned Obama. 

But he took the bait and acted out too much.  He just about admitted paying no taxes among other missteps. 

2 more debates to go.  I doubt things will change much but I count this as Hillary 1.  Donald 0.  But winning debates doesn't mean winning an election.

One thing though was her creepy smile and grating personality...she seems like a wholly unpleasant person.

 

[mariomike]

One thing though was her creepy smile and grating personality...she seems like a wholly unpleasant person.

From what I have read, Mrs. Clinton does not seem very popular with the Secret Service. Mr. Trump doesn't look like much fun to be around either.

 

[George Wallace]

From what I have read, Mrs. Clinton does not seem very popular with the Secret Service. Mr. Trump doesn't look like much fun to be around either.

Well.....From what I have read: she is a B@#ch towards her agents; and he is under death threats.  In one case the Secret Service are working in a toxic workplace; in the other they are more than actively doing their jobs to protect a candidate.

 

[George Wallace]

With the bias shown by the moderator, one has to wonder how many of the "Public" will be "coached" in asking their questions in the next Debate, which is to be along the "town-hall" style with an open floor?

The Second Presidential Debate Will Try Something New

 

[mariomike]

Well.....From what I have read: she is a B@#ch towards her agents; and he is under death threats.  In one case the Secret Service are working in a toxic workplace; in the other they are more than actively doing their jobs to protect a candidate.

I can't see taking a bullet for either one of them. In the leg maybe. 

This looked like a fun guy to work for,

"The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab.
Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood."

 

[a_majoor]

This should puncture the triumphalist narrative the media is singing about who won the debate:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/244948/

TRUMP WINS MOST IMMEDIATE POLLS: “The newspaper collected screen shots of 19 ‘snap’ polls conducted immediately after the debate, and in 17 of them, most respondents said Trump won the debate, often by a wide margin. It isn’t just Drudge and Breitbart; Trump also got more votes than Clinton in instant polls at Time, Slate, Variety and other liberal outlets. I can’t explain it, other than to say that perhaps it tells us more about how people view Hillary Clinton than about how Donald Trump actually performed.”

Well, certainly one explanation is a repeat of the “Ron Paul Revolution” days of early 2008 – but as with Paul’s quixotic presidential bid, having a large enough group of dedicated zealots to tilt Internet polls does not necessarily translate into sufficient votes at the ballot box where it counts.

It seems safe to say that Trump’s core followers are much more passionate than Hillary’s. We’ll know soon enough if there are a majority of them.

 

[Lumber]

This should puncture the triumphalist narrative the media is singing about who won the debate:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/244948/

Normally I'm a huge proponent of polling. However, this is one case where I have to say to hell with the polls. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence who watched the debate would have seen that el' douche Drumpf's performed poorly compared to Boogeywoman Hillary Clinton. His performance was full of falsehoods and blabbering bafoonery.

Mind you, HRC has been in politics for years and has ample practice with these type of performances. So, for the anti-establishment crowd, HRC's performance could be taken as just another aspect of what is wrong with the establishment (heaven forbid we use facts and clear concrete plans!).

As far as the polls go, I would bet the incongruity between the polls and the debate is the result of:
A. Diehard Drumpf fans more passionately representing themselves;
B. Those same fans responding to the poll not based on their actual assessment of how Drumpf performed, but simply saying Drumpf performed better because; and
C. Sean Hannity.

 

[Scott]

His obfuscation was at near epic levels and he let her off easy on the emails.

She looked far less polished and smooth than he did, decidedly less confident (to me)

I'd hate to have to make the choice between either.

FWIW