The Democrat Party 2017

Amazing. A great piece by Truthdig covering Hillary's great loss.

I knew a lot of this, but the piece by piece mistakes and failures of the Clinton campaign followed by scalding evidence from Hillary's mouth (or mouthpieces via their own emails) is definitive.

I'm also newly pissed at Robert Rubin.

Take a look at this excerpt:

CLINTON AND GLASS-STEAGALL

The Glass-Steagall Act was passed in 1933, in the depths of the Depression, to separate commercial from investment banking, thus curbing speculation with ordinary Americans’ savings. It was repealed by Congress in 1999 after a push from President Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Ending the act made the pending October 1998 merger of Citicorp with Travelers Group possible, creating the first super bank, Citigroup. And who became chairman of the new banking conglomerate when he left government? None other than Rubin himself.
-----------------------------------------
http://m.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/hillary_clintons_goldman_sach_speeches_economic_elitism_20170703
-----------------------------------------

Those speeches were profitable, but eventually costly.

I always felt that this remark was misinterpreted — as clumsy as it was, it was ripe for misinterpretation. But I don't think she was actually calling half of Trump's supporters "deplorables". I think she was trying to say that if you look at some of the positions being pushed, the ideas themselves represented a collection — "basket" — of deplorable opinions and policies such as white supremacy, anti-immigrant prejudice, and rolling back women's rights.

Straight from her mouth:


CLINTON: I know there are only 60 days left to make our case—and don’t get complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

From the article.

Yes. I'm sticking with my interpretation though. "Deplorables" referred to the ideas.

I don't think there's any big secret as to why Clinton lost. It wasn't because of Russia. It wasn't because of ties to Wall Street. It wasn't because of Sanders. She simply was unliked by many, many people. That thing about familiarity breeding contempt. Apparatchiks in the DNC simply couldn't believe this and refused to see it. I know a woman who worked with Clinton and absolutely loved her and described her as competent, knowledgeable, and funny — obviously this never came across. And again, the establishment couldn't recognize that this wasn't generally seen by the electorate.

Hillary's remarks, quoted above, made it very clear she was referring to people. not ideas, and that she characterized them as homophobic, Islamophobic, etc.

All adjectives which could be applied to ideas or people and why she added afterward that "there are people like that".

Not worth an argument, georgeob1, but an example of how important it is to choose words carefully.

You are simply unwilling to face the obvious truth. It is true, as you wrote, that the adjectives in question could be applied to people or ideas --- that is merely a grammatical tautology. However, is beyond doubt that Hillary, in her remarks quoted above, was referring to the "deplorable" people who support Trump, and not the ideas she alleged they hold.

Fine. Suit yourself. I'm not "unwilling to face" anything — I could make the same comment about your position. Why turn it into an argument? I simply understood the meaning and intention of the words differently. "Basket of deplorables" is not the sort of phrase you hear everyday, especially applied to people. I'm not defending her, I'm talking about political rhetoric, how it can be tricky to get words right, and how effectively they can be turned against you.

Doesn't do much for hightor's credibility--to listen to her explain and add context to her meaning and he decides to ignore it.

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

From PDiddie
http://brainsandeggs.blogspot.com/

Russians may be coming again ... but we've larger voting problems
Before we go to war with North Korea, before the unhinged Right starts killing CNN reporters, before acetamenophin destroys what's left of our empathy ...



When last we tuned in to RT while clicking on Sputnik News, we learned that our antagonists Boris and Natasha Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear (see here and here for the Wiki background) had been hard at work scaring the pants off moose and squirrel everybody from Jameses Comey and Clapper to your friendly neighborhood Dem precinct captain about what, precisely, they had been up to in the summer of 2016. That is to say, beyond humiliating Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, John Podesta, Huma Abedin, and the rest of the DNC hacks that got hacked.

We learned that they hacked into 39 states' voter databases -- or tried to, and succeeded in getting into perhaps just one, Illinois. Alex Ward at Vox has it, with a link over to the original at Bloomberg, and previously and briefly referenced by yours truly in the second half of this aggrepost.

While this is indeed alarming, I still find voter suppression via photo ID and partisan gerrymandering to be greater threats to our republic. Paper ballots with verifiable paper trails -- something like the Scantron-style electronic voting machines Denton County has just adopted -- would resolve the Russian problem, but nothing short of a blue tsunami will fix the other two, and unless they can find something to run on besides "Trump is evil/Russia/Impeach", 2018 isn't going to be the cycle the Donkeys are looking for.



(*Ed note: let me pause here and acknowledge my friend Brad Friedman's lasting concerns about anything machine count-related. Experts appear to disagree on the hackability, or at least the ease thereof, of scanned ballot counters.)

For the benefit of my conspiratorially-minded Democratic friends, let me point out -- as I have repeatedly in the past -- that the key to cracking the Russian conspiracy lies not in tracing election hacking attempts but in Trump's still-concealed tax returns. Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Felix Sater, and the rest of that ilk are the threads special counsel Mueller should be -- and hopefully is -- pulling on. And if Trump, or Jeff Sessions, or Devin Nunes, or any Republican in the administration or the Congress is found to be obstructing that investigation, then the walls will come tumbling down.



Focusing on the wrong Russiagate is starting to show up in polling as a loser for Democrats. It's a winner for the corporate media and ratings, however, especially MSNBC. Before Mika B's facelift became an atrocious but ultimately distracting Tweet -- even Tucker Carlson thinks so, by Jeebus -- Trump usually didn't give half of one solid **** about the other liberal media news channel; he's mobilized his base to destroy CNN, and now even Julian Assange is piling on.

I would like to also point out that the Democratic Party has bigger fish to fry than continuing to demonize Jill Stein, but I'm convinced that unhealthy obsession has become part of their DNA.

So with all that, plus 1) Kris Kobach, 2) a Texas Legislature poised to over-reach once more with a photo ID law that will require a couple of years for the courts to once again nullify, and 3) gerrymandered congressional and statehouse districts thanks to Tom DeLay almost fifteen years ago, as Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker reminded us in his comprehensive and compelling piece "America's Future is Texas"... why are you more worried about what Russian hackers may or may not be doing in the next election cycle? Your vote barely counts for anything as it is.

On a more positive note, here's an easily attainable goal for those of us in Harris County: #FireStanStanart and replace him with Diane Trautman, and then push the mostly Republican county commissioners to approve and purchase paper ballots for 2020. Because if Democrats can actually win some elections -- particularly this one -- in 2018, those GOPers will be forced to do so, due to the caterwauling from their base about Ill Eagles voting.

See how easy this is? Just requires a little focus on the proper thing.

It doesn't do anything for my "credibility", one way or the other. You can criticize my interpretation or disparage my reading comprehension but we both agree on the source of the quote — HRC. I believe the statement is ambiguous — and weird enough to suggest that it might be better understood as a poor choice of words. Mr. Trump does this all the time but no one cares that much because expectations for him are rather low. It's one of the things about the current political scene which I find particularly nonconstructive — select an offhand remark, take it out of context, and turn it into an attack line. Sort of like Obama saying that if you like your health insurance you can keep it.

My impression of both Obama's "you can keep it" remark and Hillary's characterization of Trumps supporters as deplorable was that neither was offhand at all.

Obama repeated his statement numerous times in multiple venues over several months, indicating clearly that his was a careful, planned assertion about his rather contentious proposals, about which nothing at the time was specifically known. The subsequent statements of his advisors, including the esteemed MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber revealed that they at least were well aware of the contradictions they were planning to impose on an ignorant public that didn't know any better.

The context of Hillary's extended commentary on the character of Trump's supporters among the electorate was equally clear, and the election revealed what they thought about her.

I stand corrected over the Obama remark then — I'd only heard it once. So I'll use Gerald Ford's contention that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” — he didn't mean what he said but we never heard the end of it.

The democrat party at this juncture represents gangsterism, racism, pedophilia, and a perverted Malthusianism which seeks to reduce human populations to medieval levels for the glory of "Gaia(TM)".

Oralloy is right, the party needs to be outlawed and banned.

Malthusianism... Bork Obunga telling Africans why Gaia demands that they not have cars, houses, or air conditioning (but he can)....

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention the question of the new demoshit Russophobia...

Donald Trump is trying to establish decent relations with Russia and China and the demopoops are joined at the hip with the deep-staters and neotards trying to shoot all of that down for the benefit of Rothschilds and Soros. And anybody who has a problem with any of that is a racist.....

No argument from me about such misstatements. They are common. generally thoughtless and of little significance. There was some of that in Hillary's statement as well. However her knowing exploitation of group identities and ethics (as opposed to individual ethics) to advance her political position ("war on women") as well as her long-term proclivity to castigate broad classes 0of people for opposing her or Bill ('vast right wing conspiracy") makes it pretty obvious ( to me at least) that she was again castigating her opponents in the same broad, sweeping way.

I thought our problem in the last election was failing to get white voters in those swing states who went for Trump. However, it turns out it was "millennial voters of color" who either voted third party or stayed home. Not in huge numbers, but if you read the piece you can see the decline since 2008.

Progressives: Dems at risk of perennial election defeat (The Hill)

So, perhaps we don't have compromise to the right center like I thought which makes me happy. I was wondering where the compromise was going to come from.

Looks like Kamala is in the Hamptons for her Clinton anointing. The establishment hasn't figured out that a Clinton anointing is the kiss of death.

Better go left, pseudo-Democrats.

https://www.google.com/amp/pagesix.com/2017/07/15/kamala-harris-meets-with-democratic-elite-in-hamptons/amp/

A little Democrat/Hillary news.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/342462-poll-clinton-more-unpopular-than-trump

I don't think a Clinton annointment is the direction the Dems want to go with their 2020 Hail Mary.

She's more unpopular than Trump.