Category: Hillary Clinton

Today’s Must Read

No Comments

In The Grauniad,* Thomas Frank makes the obvious point about Hillary Clinton.

Specifically, he notes that Hillary is not a corrupt thrall of the malefactors of wealth, she is a malefactor of wealth herself:

Stunned by the rise of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has been at pains to assure the Democratic rank and file that she too understands their concerns; that just like her rival, she is capable of denouncing wealthy interests, of promising to break up big banks and even of hinting that she might prosecute powerful financiers.

After her landslide defeat in New Hampshire last week, she conceded that “the way too many things were going just wasn’t right”. There was a difference between her and the senator from Vermont, however: she was the candidate who would get things done, who could “actually make the changes that make your lives better”.

………

These are noble sentiments. Unfortunately, what voters are rejecting is not Hillary the Capable; it is the party whose leadership faction she represents as well as the direction in which our modern Democrats have been travelling for decades.

………

Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the president’s few failings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one”.

That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.

Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.

………

In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas – that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization – than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of “intelligent design”. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity. Changing what the Democratic party stands for may ultimately require nothing less than what a certain Vermonter is calling a “political revolution”.

Notwithstanding her prodigious abilities and accomplishment, Hillary Clinton is part of a package with Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was not just a member of the (not thankfully defunct) right wing Democratic Leadership Council, he is one of its founders.

It’s not that they are bought and paid for by people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, it’s that they ARE the people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and unlike, for instance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they are not willing to separate themselves from those people.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

Maybe I am a Cynic, but I Think that Hillary was Forced to Do This

No Comments

You know that if Bernie Sanders were at 10%, Hillary Clinton would not have just pledged never to cut Social Security:

Hillary Clinton promised on Friday that she would not cut Social Security benefits, winning praise from progressive groups that had pressured her to take such a stance — but drawing questions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who challenged her commitment to the issue.

“I won’t cut Social Security,” Clinton wrote in an initialed tweet that included a link to her campaign website’s Social Security page. “As always, I’ll defend it, & I’ll expand it. Enough false innuendos.”

The post was a response to something Sanders had tweeted earlier in the day, when he urged Clinton to “join me in saying loudly and clearly that we will never cut Social Security.”

Let me make this clear, I am NOT suggesting that Clinton is lying.

I am suggesting that she was dragged into this kicking and screaming.

Hillary Retreats to Yet Another Firewall

No Comments

Hillary Clinton is way behind in New Hampshire, and she is running there like a candidate prepared to cede the first-in-the-nation primary.

As polls show Sen. Bernie Sanders continuing to hold a sizable lead here, Clinton strategists are positioning their campaign to weather a loss here, shifting their focus to holding Latino voters in Nevada, which votes Feb. 20, and then win in South Carolina, with its large black population, the following week.

One of Clinton’s most valuable campaign assets with voters in New Hampshire — her husband — is thousands of miles away in Nevada instead of working the coffee shops and union halls where the primary takes place Tuesday. Daughter Chelsea, another key surrogate, is also elsewhere. And even Clinton’s hearty corps of volunteer door-knockers, who were out in force braving the wintry mix that hung over the region Friday, seemed less than sanguine about her New Hampshire prospects.

………

Hillary Clinton is way behind in New Hampshire, and she is running there like a candidate prepared to cede the first-in-the-nation primary.

As polls show Sen. Bernie Sanders continuing to hold a sizable lead here, Clinton strategists are positioning their campaign to weather a loss here, shifting their focus to holding Latino voters in Nevada, which votes Feb. 20, and then win in South Carolina, with its large black population, the following week.

One of Clinton’s most valuable campaign assets with voters in New Hampshire — her husband — is thousands of miles away in Nevada instead of working the coffee shops and union halls where the primary takes place Tuesday. Daughter Chelsea, another key surrogate, is also elsewhere. And even Clinton’s hearty corps of volunteer door-knockers, who were out in force braving the wintry mix that hung over the region Friday, seemed less than sanguine about her New Hampshire prospects.

………

“You know, there’s a lot of states,” said campaign manager Robby Mook. “This is a delegate race. We’re not looking to win every single contest, every single time. We have a strategy and a plan for the long term.”

………

But she’ll also be flying out of the state two days before the election, a rare move for such a prominent candidate behind in the polls here. Clinton will be visiting Flint, Mich., to meet with the mayor about the drinking-water crisis that continues to grip that largely African American city. The visit will likely impress Democratic voters in New Hampshire, but the message of racial justice Clinton is sending through the trip is sure to resonate even more in South Carolina, where African Americans dominate the Democratic primary vote and Clinton remains popular.

I recall a similar firewall.  It was called the Maginot Line.

I still think that the chance that Hillary will win the nomination is a bit better than even, but this is a campaign is serious array

A Thought on the Democratic Debates………

No Comments

I didn’t catch them all, I had to shuttle the Sharon* and Charlie to rehearsal, but I caught a lot of it.

In the foreign policy portion, Clinton spent a lot of time touting her foreign policy bona fides.

Sanders went back to her history, specifically her vote in favor of the Iraq war.

What he did not discuss, and he should have brought up, was her bloodthirsty blunder on Libya, where she was later (in)famously quoted as saying of Qaddafi, “We came, we saw, he died.”

As a result of the overthrow of that government, we now have a country where Libyans are fleeing the country in droves, its educational and healthcare systems demolished, its economy a mess, ongoing genocide against black Africans, and the rise of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever in the country.

Also, the overthrow of Qadaffi led directly to the death of ambassador Christopher Stephens in Benghazi.

And yet she continues to brag about overthrowing Libya.

This is not an indication of foreign policy prowess, this is an indication of thoughtlessness and incompetence.

*Love of my life, light of the  cosmos, she  who must be obeyed, my wife.

Damn You. You Are Forcing Me to Defend Hillary Clinton, and I Do Not Want To.

No Comments

Aver at Sic Semper TyrannisRichard Sale unloads on Hillary Clinton, with a level of venom that really is really off putting:

………

There are few things as ugly as this rampant self-worship. Under its gaze, ordinary life shrivels and diminishes. The vast universe contracts to a mere tawdry bauble kicked to and fro by contending rivals. Hillary has eyes only for those circumstances, facts and incidents that suit and confirm her own biases and which advance her own designs, however morally dubious they may be. Self-worship like hers is not blind in the least– her temperament, her disposition, her power of analysis, enables her to select people whose ideals and ambition and desires are similar to her own. A political leader estimates his or her allies based on their usefulness in furthering the leader’s designs and schemes. Think of the people who occupy high positions in her campaign: her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, or her deputy chiefs, Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, loyalists all, all working to cover up the e-mail scandal, a scandal that clearly threatens Hillary’s viability as a candidate. Staffers like hers bend the rules until they break. One suspects that aanything or anyone that doesn’t serve Clinton’s appetite for public power is cast aside, belittled, scoffed at, undermined or marooned. A political leader like her, sees people as furniture, objects to be moved here, moved there, placed where they will do the leader the most good. A close supporter of a leader has no will or desires or designs of their own. They suspend such things in the hope that their subjugation will be generously rewarded. They accept that their purpose in life is to be used by someone greater, someone who will prove a generous giver of favors, advancement, money and prestige. In other words, their destiny is to be the tool of another’s more powerful and decided will.

This is complete bullsh%$.

I do not support Hillary Clinton, but by the standards of mainstream Presidential Candidates,* she is not especially narcissistic or immoral.

In fact if there is one thing that is remarkable about her political career it is that there have been no tell-all insider books published by people who work closely with her.

Even Bill had a few while president, and if one of Hillary’s acolytes had an axe to grind, they would get a 7 figure book advance from Regenry or other right wing publishers.

If she used people as you asserted, there would already have been such a book published.

Heck, it would have been published in the mid 1990s.

The loyalty of her people under these circumstances is remarkable.

I don;t like Clinton, but she is not a Borgia Pope.

*Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play.

Bullsh%$ Bingo Winner of the Day

No Comments

There is a mildly amusing parody web site that does a compare and contrast of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, things like:

  • Bernie: Star Wars is a great series, and I thought that episode 7 is a nice return to the Franchise’s roots,
  • Hillary: [Makes “Live long and prosper” hand signal]

It’s kind of silly, and not too deep, and pokes fun at Hillary Clinton’s perceived lack of authenticity,* but someone at Salon decided to use the meme to attack all Bernie Sanders supporters as male chauvinists, aka Bernie Bros:

………These jabs at Clinton’s imagined sonic preferences reinforce the tired idea that the tastes of non-cis-male cultural consumers—from teenagers on through boomers and beyond—are something to be mocked and disrespected.………

Don’t even bother trying.

Annie Zaleski has won the bullsh%$ bingo game for this month, and possibly for the entire f%$#ing presidential campaign.

She has her head so far up her ass that she resembles a Klein bottle.

*Not her fault.   Bill Clinton does authenticity so well that if he were sharing a bill with Pope Frank, the Pontiff would look like the Andy Kaufman character Tony Clifton.

Iowa Caucuses

No Comments

And tomorrow is Groundhog day, so expect the same crap from the pundits, day, after day, after day, after day

In terms of the actual numbers, as of 11:50 PM EST, with 98% of Republican caucuses reporting, a Ted Cruz has won the Republican caucuses, with Trump second, and Rubio a fairly close third.

Clearly, Rubio is not the (lame and not particularly intelligent) great white hope of the Republican establishment.

With 94% of Democratic caucuses reporting, it looks like the delegate talley will be pretty close, as Hillary Clintonhas 49.9%  and  has Bernie Sanders 49.6%, with O’Malley at ½%.

The race has not been called, and there are reports that O’Malley has dropped out of the race.

The Democratic caucus results seems to indicate that very little bit has been settled.

I would guess that the results will be the same in the morning, but given that the reporting software is written by Microsoft, I would wait about 48 hours for the final count.*

Ongoing results here.

*I am not suggesting fraud here, I am suggesting incompetence and poor execution, kind of like Windows Vista, Windows 8, Office 2007, and Microsoft Bob.

Hillary Clinton is Scared, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Loses

No Comments

It appears that the DNC is reversing itself, and there will be more debates:

After days of jostling over whether to meet for more debates, and how many, aides to Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders have reached an agreement, of sorts, they said Saturday: The two will meet next week in New Hampshire and will hold three more debates thereafter.

 A Clinton aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss continuing negotiations, confirmed the tentative agreement for four additional debates, which was first reported by BuzzFeed.

 The two campaigns have engaged in a measure of brinkmanship in recent days, with Mr. Sanders’s team one-upping Mrs. Clinton’s by saying it would agree to an additional debate in New Hampshire if her team agreed to more beyond that.

 Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, said the agreement was still being discussed. “I’m optimistic,” he said, but he added, “The details are still being worked out.”

 The Democratic National Committee has yet to weigh in on whether it would sanction the added debates.

 The New Hampshire debate next week was originally scheduled as an unsanctioned one, sponsored by MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper. But a Democratic National Committee official said The Union Leader would not be a sponsor.

 Still, it would mean a highly watched showdown between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders before the Feb. 9 primary in New Hampshire.

 After working in 2015 to restrict the number of debates, Mrs. Clinton’s team has since expressed regret about that as Mr. Sanders surged in the polls, especially because she has generally delivered strong performances in the debates.

I don’t know who wins in this arrangement.

Clinton is clearly more comfortable debating, but the more that people see of Sanders, the more that they like him. (OK, this is a win for O’Malley, because he has nothing to lose in the debates, and everything to gain)

I can tell you who loses, however, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the incompetent and widely loathed head of the DNC, who had been steadfast in resisting debates after scheduling a pittance on weekends up against things like NFL playoff games.

Well, Isn’t That Special

No Comments

In response to a request for transcripts of her extremely well remunerated speeches to Goldman Sach is a dismissive laugh:

After Hillary Clinton spoke at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, I asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She laughed and turned away.

Clinton has recently been on the defensive about the speaking fees she and her husband have collected. Those fees total over $125 million since 2001.

Her rival Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has raised concerns in particular over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies

………

During one of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Clinton reportedly reassured the crowd and told them that banker-bashing was unproductive and foolish, according to a Politico report based on accounts offered by several attendees.

………

When asked by the Des Moines Register on Thursday if she regretted her decision to make money from speaking to various interest groups, Clinton compared herself to President Barack Obama, noting that significant campaign donations from Wall Street did not stop him from passing the Dodd-Frank reform law.

But the Obama administration did in fact go easy on Wall Street by refusing to criminally prosecute the major financial institutions responsible for the 2008 economic crisis. And Dodd-Frank, many critics say, does not go far enough in preventing systemic risk.

Clinton does not want a transcript of that speech released.

It is almost certainly something that she does not want to see the light of day, because it almost certainly a declaration of common cause with the banksters.

I rather do hope that someone recorded a cell phone video of her speech.

Why Hillary Clinton’s Stint as Secretary of State Is Not a Positive

No Comments

Her tenure at State was categorized by mindlessly bellicose rhetoric, and not a whole bunch of major accomplishments.

One of the best examples of this, though it started a few months after Clinton left Foggy Bottom, was the negotiations to open up with Cuba, where the Obama administration had to keep the State Department in the Dark to prevent it from sabotaging negotiations.

It wasn’t Clinton’s direct doings, but it was her people that the Obama administration had to deceive.

The most compelling case on a personal level is how Clinton’s mindlessly bellicose statements  kept US citizens prisoners, detained, and abused in Iran:

I rarely think about being a prisoner in Iran anymore. I’ve been free for more than four years. It’s been a long time since the sounds of hard soles on a cement floor would remind me of my interrogator or I would suddenly need to bolt from a restaurant because I couldn’t take the throngs of people after so much time in a prison cell.

Last Saturday, I was dripping coffee on myself during an early morning drive when I heard that four Americans were being released from Iran as part of a prisoner swap. Suddenly, my eyes welled up. I could feel the knot of excitement and confusion that had turned in my gut when my plane from Tehran hit the tarmac in Muscat, Oman, in September 2011. I pictured the way my and my friend Josh’s families looked small in the distance, their little hands waving, as we taxied toward them. I remembered the force that pulled me—running!—down the stairs of the airplane and how, at the bottom, I laughed and cried at the same time. Everyone else did too.

I was elated for these men and their families.

Later, the joy was tempered by an old, familiar frustration. While scouring the internet for updates on the four Americans, I read that shortly after their release, Hillary Clinton called for new sanctions on Iran for testing two ballistic missiles last year. I was shocked. The prisoners had not yet been let out of the country. Why would she provoke Iran when their freedom was still on the line?

The Omani envoy trying to negotiate our release was repeatedly frustrated by Clinton. “Why can’t your Hillary just keep quiet?” he blurted to me.

I remembered sitting in my cell in 2009—I think I was trying to memorize a family tree from Greek mythology or something equally random—when I heard then-Secretary of State Clinton’s voice from a television in a neighboring cell. I ran to the door and pressed my ear into its little window. She was commanding Iran to release us immediately. My heart sank. I imagined my interrogator bringing me into his padded room, blindfolded, and ranting about how Iran would not be bossed around by America, “The Great Satan.” I came to fear the sound of Clinton’s voice. Whenever I heard her publicly slam Iran about something, I would mentally prepare for at least another couple of months in prison.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Many of our family members grew frustrated with their meetings with her and White House officials. My wife, Sarah, who was released a year before Josh and I were, shared this frustration. Once, during a meeting with us in the prison, Swiss Ambassador Livia Leu, who represented American interests in Iran, broke from her usual reassuring demeanor and said, “They will never respond to your government demanding they release you. They need to talk to the Iranians.”

The title of this article, “When I was a prisoner in Iran, I came to fear the sound of Hillary Clinton’s voice,” pretty much says it all.

Clinton’s mindless dick swinging in foreign policy (Yes, I intend the juxtaposition) is not an indication of foreign policy knowledge, it is an indication of her determined and unwavering foreign policy ignorance.

She gives Dick Cheney a run for his money in the incompetence in the foreign policy arena.

Oh, Snap!

No Comments

Roll Tape!

One of the issues that seems to be giving the Bernie Sanders campaign its legs is the perception that Hillary Clinton is too close to the Banksters on Wall Street.

This 2007 video of Hillary Clinton giving a speech before banksters blaming ordinary people for the mortgage crisis is not going to help her campaign:

When Clinton ran for president during her second term as New York’s U.S. Senator, she gave a tepid speech at the NASDAQ headquarters on December 5, 2007 — before the financial crisis reached a boiling point — about reforming Wall Street’s housing loan practices, largely excusing financial criminals for their behavior.

“Now these economic problems are certainly not all Wall Street’s fault – not by a long shot,” Clinton said early in the speech.

Clinton’s NASDAQ address amounted to essentially asking the financiers assembled to take voluntary action or else she would “consider legislation” to stop banks from kicking families out of their homes. But early on in the speech, Clinton placed equal blame for the subprime mortgage crisis on low-income homeowners alongside Wall Street.

“Homebuyers who paid extra fees to avoid documenting their income should have known they were getting in over their heads,” Clinton said.

One YouTube user found video of the statement and put it side-by-side with her claim at the first Democratic debate in which she said she went to Wall Street before the crisis and told them to “cut it out.”

This sort of crap is like death to her campaing, because it plays into her greatest weakness, a perceived lack of authenticity.

She is firmly in the Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner,  Barack Obama wing of the Democratic Party.

Trying to pretend that she is more of a populist than Bernie Sanders is laughable.

Oh Snap!

No Comments

Hillary Clinton has been going after Bernie Sanders’ single payer healthcare proposals, claiming that single payer would take their healthcare away, and she’s rolled out Chelsea on the campaign trail.

It is ludicrous and dishonest, and it has led to a huge spike in contributions to the Sanders campaign:

Hillary Clinton’s new barrage against Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential primary opponent she has all but ignored through most of her campaign, is having an effect — though probably not the one she intended.

Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip nearly four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.

………

The former secretary of state and her team have stepped up their criticism of Sanders on a variety of fronts in recent days as polls have begun to show him edging even with her in Iowa — and, for the first time, looking competitive in a national poll. But the Clinton strategy may be backfiring in some ways.

………

“As of now, we are at about $1.4 million raised since yesterday when the panic attacks by the Clinton campaign began,” Briggs said. “We’ve gotten 47,000 contributions. We’re projecting 60,000 donations. Even for our people-powered campaign, this is pretty darn impressive.”

………

Even her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, got into the act, bashing Sanders during her first campaign appearance on behalf of her mother this election season.

“Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea Clinton said at a stop in New Hampshire. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era — before we had the Affordable Care Act — that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

Ludicrous, and dishonest, and more significantly, desperate.

Hillary’s strength this cycle was her aura of inevitability, and that appears to be vanishing like the mist

As I recall, inevitability was her perceived strength in 2008 as well.