When the exact same problems crop up in separate campaigns, with different staff, at what point do the principals say, “Hey, maybe it’s US?”— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) February 8, 2016
Harsh, but Mr. Axelrod has a point, and in just 140 characters.
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.
The distinguished Gentlewoman from Massachusetts just cut Lloyd Blankfein a new asshole over his whining about Bernie Sanders criticizing him:
Elizabeth Warren entered the intensifying battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, defending Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from a new attack by the head of Goldman Sachs — a Wall Street behemoth whose executives have delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton, her presidential campaign and her family’s foundation.
In an interview with International Business Times hours before Wednesday night’s Democratic town hall in New Hampshire, the Massachusetts senator — whose endorsement is coveted by both Democratic candidates — slammed Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein for asserting earlier in the day that Sanders’ criticism of Wall Street had created a dangerous environment in America.
“He thinks it’s fine to prosecute small business owners, it’s fine to go hard after individuals who have no real resources, but don’t criticize companies like Goldman Sachs and their very, very important CEO — that’s what he’s really saying,” Warren told IBT.
In January, Sanders pointed to billionaire Blankfein as a prime example of the corporate greed he says is harming the United States. Sanders also released a television ad in which he slammed Goldman Sachs by name, and he has criticized Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state, for accepting $675,000 of speaking fees and $930,000 of campaign contributions from the firm and its executives during her career. Goldman Sachs has donated at least $250,000 to her family’s foundation — which in 2014 held a donor meeting at the company’s Manhattan headquarters.
Blankfein responded to Sanders’ criticism on Wednesday in an appearance on CNBC, saying the intensity of the criticism created an environment that “has the potential to be a dangerous moment — not just for Wall Street, not just for the people who are particularly targeted, but for anybody who is a little bit out of line.”
Warren, a Democrat, disputed that notion in harsh terms, telling IBT that such statements show why American voters should focus on Wall Street’s power during the 2016 election.
“When Blankfein says that criticizing those who break the rules is dangerous to the economy, then he’s just repeating another variation of ‘too big to fail,’ ‘too big to jail,’ ‘too big even to prosecute,’” she said. “That tells you here we are, seven years after the crisis and these guys still don’t get it. Seven years. That crisis cost an estimated $14 trillion, it cost jobs, it cost homes, it cost retirement funds. And Lloyd Blankfein stands up and says ‘Don’t even criticize me, I ran a company that was right at the heart of some of the biggest financial frauds in history and made money off it, but don’t you dare criticize me.’ That’s his position? That’s why we need voters to get really engaged.”
This isn’t an endorsement as such, but it is a pretty clear indication that she has his back.
There is a mildly amusing parody web site that does a compare and contrast of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, things like:
It’s kind of silly, and not too deep, and pokes fun at Hillary Clinton’s perceived lack of authenticity,* but someone at Salon decided to use the meme to attack all Bernie Sanders supporters as male chauvinists, aka Bernie Bros:
………These jabs at Clinton’s imagined sonic preferences reinforce the tired idea that the tastes of non-cis-male cultural consumers—from teenagers on through boomers and beyond—are something to be mocked and disrespected.………
Don’t even bother trying.
Annie Zaleski has won the bullsh%$ 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.
On CNN, Van Jones, by way of a compliment, called Bernie Sanders a, “79,000-Year-Old Muppet-Looking Socialist.”
The YouTube is prize:
When you take a look at at previous “insurgent” challengers, they tended to get a lot of support from more affluent Democrats.
Sanders’s strength with voters making less than $50,000 a year — and his relative lack of appeal among voters making above $100,000 — sets him apart from Democratic primary challengers in years past like Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama. All these “progressive” underdogs attracted their strongest support from wealthier voters, while struggling, in relative terms, to win lower-income support. (Nate Cohn notices the same trend in today’s New York Times.)
Also this:
Bernie Sanders’s coalition once looked very familiar: He had strong support among well-educated and affluent liberal white voters of the sort who backed Barack Obama, Bill Bradley and Jerry Brown. He struggled among less affluent voters.
But his coalition has evolved over the last few months. He now fares much better among less affluent whites than Mr. Obama did eight years ago, suggesting he’s attracting a group that traditionally supports more moderate establishment candidates, someone like Hillary Clinton. If confirmed in the voting, it would vindicate his hope of building a progressive coalition based more on class than the coalitions put together by liberal predecessors.
I’m not surprised that the Democratic establishment hates Sanders.
There is an saying, “Republicans fear their base, and Democrats hate their base.”
To the degree that Sanders talks to the base, and talks about the existential issues surrounding excessive (and undeserved) inequality in our society.
He is talking directly to the base, and they hate him.
It should make interesting time in South Carolina.
I think that it is going to be close though.
I think that Clinton has to win this, because if she loses it, then Sanders will clearly win in New Hampshire, and then South Carolina becomes iffy for Clinton, and Sanders is likely to run the table.
On the other hand, if Sanders loses, he still is likely to win in New Hampshire, particularly with the just announced debate on Thursday, which will be intensely watched by likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters.
Sanders is, I think, less effected by the results, because his campaign was intended as an issue campaign, and remains that at its core, and could return to that with a minor adjustment.
With his large base of small donors, and a low burn rate, he can run throughout the primaries.
In either case, I do not expect O’Malley to continue his campaign beyond the March. He’s just not getting any traction.
It seems that whenever you have a conspiracy theory nutcase, they will eventually descend into antisemitism and/or Holocaust denial.
Case in point, Oscar winning director Oliver Stone:
Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington’s foreign policy for years.
In the Sunday interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the “Jewish domination of the media,” adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.”
“There’s a major lobby in the United States,” Stone said, adding that “they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington.”
The famed Hollywood director of such films as “Platoon” and “JFK,” also said that while “Hitler was a Frankenstein,” there was also a “Dr Frankenstein.”
“German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support,” Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 [million killed].”
Referring to the alleged influence of the powerful Jewish lobby on U.S. foreign policy, Stone said that Israel had distorted “United States foreign policy for years,” adding he felt U.S. policy toward Iran was “horrible.”
So not a surprise.
I owe almost my entire Wall Street career to the Clintons.
Mr. Arnade continues, “I am not alone; most bankers owe their careers, and their wealth, to them. Over the last 25 years they – with the Clintons it is never just Bill or Hillary – implemented policies that placed Wall Street at the center of the Democratic economic agenda, turning it from a party against Wall Street to a party of Wall Street.”
He goes on to explain that the history of the Clintons is that they are creatures of big finance, and he uses the 1995 bailout of Mexico, which was really a bailout of big finance.
If you like Rubinomics, and believe that an excessively financialized economy is the future of America, by all means, vote for her in the primary.
Me, I’m hoping that my vote matters when Maryland votes on 26 April.
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.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is wondering where the compassionate conservatives have gone in the Republican Party:
Back in 2000, George W. Bush did something fascinating: On the campaign trail he preached “compassionate conservatism,” telling wealthy Republicans about the travails of Mexican-American immigrants and declaring to women in pearls that “the hardest job in America” is that of a single mother.
Those well-heeled audiences looked baffled, but applauded.
That instinct to show a little heart helped elect Bush but then largely disappeared from Republican playbooks and policy. Yet now, amid the Republican Party’s civil war, there are intriguing initiatives by the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and some other conservatives to revive an interest in the needy.
Has the columnist, aka Mr. “Sh%$ for Brains” actually read these proposals?
They are all the same: “Make the alternative starvation, and the poor will pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
As fellow Times pundit Paul Krugman noted Eight Years Ago, “Compassionate Conservatism” was, “A dog-whistle to the religious right:
Oy. Why are political writers still unaware that Bush’s phrase “compassionate conservatism” wasn’t an acceptance of the Great Society, but rather a dog-whistle to the religious right? It comes from Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion. From the Publisher’s Weekly review:
Compassion means tough love in which those who give must demand self-help from those who receive … Olasky adds a proviso that the giver too must be personally involved. He holds up the example of 19th-century charity workers, whose religious beliefs made them compassionate and willing to deal intimately with the poor … Olasky does not blame the system for poverty. He faults the poor, along with social workers back to Jane Addams and the founders of the settlement house movement.
Paul Ryan and the rest of them have no plan beyond making the poor even poorer.
My conclusion is that Nicholas Kristof is in a competition with Tom Friedman for dumb-assery.
Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, aka the “Human Bowling Jacket”, is proposing a return to the guillotine:
Maine Gov. Paul LePage says his state is too easy on drug crimes, suggesting it should bring back the guillotine for serious offenders.
The Republican governor, known for his controversial statements, was speaking on local radio Tuesday about combating the drug epidemic in his state.
“What I think we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he told WVOM. “We could have public executions and have, you know, we could even have (guessing) which hole it falls in.”
He said that he was “all in” on fighting drug criminals and said a recent proposal to establish a minimum sentence of four years for drug traffickers was too lenient.
“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people that kill Mainers,” LePage said.
………
Even as the hosts of the show tried to wrap the interview, LePage interrupted to show his resolve, suggesting the guillotine be used for public executions, joking that the idea was part of his French ancestry.
“I like French history,” he said.
It’s only the latest controversial comments from LePage. Earlier this month, he made waves talking about drug dealers in his state.
“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” he said. “They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.”
Seriously, can the legislators of Maine please impeach his flabby white ass?
We already know that he has abused his official power to engage in a personal vendetta, and the investigation is ongoing, but it needs to move faster.
This guy is a clear and present danger to the state of Maine.
H/t Charlie Pierce.
Following the arrests of the Y’all Qaeda militants yesterday, the FBI has blockaded the remainder of the militants at the Malheur refuge:
Federal agents sealed off an Oregon wildlife refuge occupied by armed protesters Wednesday, hours after authorities arrested several members of that group and killed one of the most prominent occupiers.
The frenzy of activity at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County marked a sudden escalation in the ongoing standoff that has simmered for more than three weeks, ever since a small group of men and women took control of a remote facility in southeastern Oregon.
Officials set up checkpoints and roadblocks around the refuge, saying that people who tried to travel inside would be arrested and calling for the armed people remaining there to leave. That message was echoed by the leader of the group later in the day. But law enforcement officials suggested Wednesday that the situation at the refuge would not continue indefinitely and placed blame for the fatal encounter a day earlier on those occupying the refuge.
“They had ample opportunity to leave the refuge peacefully,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Greg Bretzing said at a news conference late Wednesday morning. “And as the FBI and our partners have clearly demonstrated, actions are not without consequences.”
They really should have done this weeks ago.
LaVoy Finicum might be alive if they had not held off, and given those inbred morons ime to develop a sense of impunity.
Instead, they were allowed to come and go as they pleased ……… At an occupation.
That was some seriously weak tea from law enforcement.
They finally arrested 6 Y’all Qaeda members, including the two of the Bundy brothers:
Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed seizure of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, was arrested and one was person was killed Tuesday night during a traffic stop in rural Oregon, the F.B.I. and the Oregon State Police said.
Five other people, including Mr. Bundy’s brother Ryan Bundy, were arrested, the authorities said.
The Bundy brothers and four supporters were arrested during a traffic stop along Highway 235 around 4:25 p.m., officials said in a news release. Shots were fired during the arrests, and two people who were with the Bundys were struck. One of them died, and the other was arrested and taken to a hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.
………
Each of the defendants faces a felony charge of conspiracy to impede federal officers from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats. They remained in custody late Tuesday.
Arrested on Tuesday were Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nev.; Shawna Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah; and Ryan Waylen Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont. Joseph Donald O’Shaughnessy, 45, of Cottonwood, Ariz. was arrested in a separate incident, the authorities said. Officials said they were waiting for the medical examiner’s office to identify the person who was killed.
It is unfortunate that one of the protesters was killed: I am sure that the next right wing domestic terrorist will use it as an excuse for the deaths he causes.
According to local reports, it was LaVoy Finicum who was shot and killed, and Ryan Bundy was lightly wounded.
ON the other hand, but the impartial enforcement of the law against right wing militia types is long overdue.
In addition to occupying a federal building, they looted an Indian archaeological site, and bulldozed a road across a nature preserve.
This should have happened weeks ago.
I understand that Track Palin, Sarah’s kid, is alleged to have beaten and brandished a firearm at his (hopefully former) girlfriend.
I also heard Sarah Palin blaming Barack Obama, because Track was in Iraq, and has PTSD.
I’m inclined call bullsh%$ on former ½ Governor Palin, because the best evidence is that Track Palin has always been a been prone to violent outbursts.
That being said, articles like this one that claims that Track could not have PTSD because he never saw combat, are crap:
………
The head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Rick Rieckhoff responded to Palin’s statement, saying she shouldn’t “politicize” the issue of PTSD and hoped it “doesn’t become a portable chew toy in a political campaign.”
In addition, Track Palin’s public records indicate that not only did he only serve one year in Iraq, which was under the George W. Bush administration, he also didn’t even see one moment of combat. An anonymous fellow solider also spoke about the issue, debunking Palin’s earlier claims. “Speaking as a combat vet who literally slept in the same barracks as Track Palin, his mother is wrong and her son is not a victim.”
Let’s be clear here: This is NOT how PTSD works.
There are doctors, and nurses, and MPs, and supply officers who never saw a shot fired in anger who have PTSD.
Not being shot at, or shooting someone, does NOT rule out PTSD.
Honestly, I think that the PTSD explanation is likely Palin alibiing (again), but painting with that broad a brush maligns a lot of people who have a very real condition, and need treatment.
To understand the Saudi royal family, you don’t go to the Kennedy School of Government, you read Shakespeare!
—Bruce Riedel, former CIA national intelligence officer for the Middle East
It’s in the 2nd ‘Graph of the article linked above.
It describes the rather convoluted and dysfunctional succession politics in the House of Saud, and it’s a good read.
It appears that the current king suffers from dementia, and his two most likely successors are engaged in a death match to assume the throne.
When the House of Saud falls, and it is when, not if, it will start with a dynastic dispute, and honestly, I think that this might be the time.
Saudi family politics have always been dicey, but with the King being pretty much a figurehead, and his successors being young enough that either one would have a reign of decades, this looks to end up a complete hairball.
They came back with indictments ……… of the antiabortion Taliban that created the video:
A grand jury here that was investigating accusations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two abortion opponents who made undercover videos of the organization.
Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress — an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue — had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.
That leader, David Daleiden, 26, the director of the center, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his efforts to procure tissue for research. Another center employee, Sandra Merritt, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record.
………
On Monday, the Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, said in a statement that grand jurors had cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing.
………
The case here started in August, when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican and an outspoken opponent of abortion and Planned Parenthood, asked Ms. Anderson to open a criminal investigation into the organization. His request came after the release of an undercover video recorded at a Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast office in Houston with a research official for the organization. Mr. Patrick said the video showed the group “discussing the gruesome and barbaric work of Planned Parenthood and what appears to be its profiteering from selling body parts from aborted babies.”
………
This month in federal court in San Francisco, Planned Parenthood sued the center, Mr. Daleiden and other abortion opponents involved in the videos. The suit accused them of engaging in a three-year criminal enterprise to target the group.
“These people broke the law to spread malicious lies about Planned Parenthood in order to advance their extreme anti-abortion political agenda,” Eric Ferrero, a spokesman for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement Monday. “As the dust settles and the truth comes out, it’s become totally clear that the only people who engaged in wrongdoing are the criminals behind this fraud, and we’re glad they’re being held accountable.”
In making the videos, Mr. Daleiden and others have been accused of setting up a fake company called Biomax Procurement Services, creating fake identities and claiming to be part of a legitimate provider of fetal tissue to researchers. The charge of tampering with a governmental record appeared to be related to Mr. Daleiden’s and Ms. Merritt’s use of fake ID cards.
“We know that they used fake IDs that had their real photographs but fake names and fake addresses purported to be issued by the state of California,” said Josh Schaffer, a Houston lawyer who represents Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in the Harris County criminal investigation. Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt presented those IDs to security at the Planned Planned office to gain entry to the building. “They never denied that they presented a fake ID,” Mr. Schaffer said.
Mr. Schaffer said he believed the misdemeanor charge stemmed from laws prohibiting offers to buy fetal tissue. He said that following the meeting with Planned Parenthood officials in Houston, Mr. Daleiden sent an email to them offering to buy fetal tissue for $1,600 per sample.
“It does not surprise me that a grand jury that chose to correctly apply the law to the evidence that was presented would return this result,” Mr. Schaffer said. “The written charges have not been released publicly yet, so at this point I am working on my knowledge of the investigation.”
I am so amused by all of this.
Considering the nature of their actions, I’m thinking that Homeland Security should put Daleiden and his co-conspirators on the no fly list, but that is probably a pipe dream.
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.
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.
“Stochastic” is a word for an event that seemingly occurs randomly, but actually follows statistical patterns, which means that one can look there is some sort of cause and effect relationship involved.
Elisabeth Parker uses the term Stochastic Terrorism to describe the right wing’s use of language and mass communications to inspire the occasional “Lone Wolf” mass shooter:
I recently argued for treating all mass shooters and bombers as terroristic threats. Now I’ll explain how the GOP ratchets up the threat level through a process called stochastic terrorism.
As we mourn the victims of the latest mass shooting, we can also clearly see a pattern: The shooters (or sometimes bombers) nearly always turn out to be white males with right-wing political leanings, and the media nearly always describes them as “insane” or as “disturbed loners.” Philly Mayor Michael Nutter and others view these attacks as looming terroristic threats, but — because the killers often lack formal ties with extremist groups — we often don’t want to call them “terrorists” because we’re still struggling to describe what has grown more and more obvious.
Luckily for us, someone has already coined the term we’re looking for: “stochastic terrorism.” G2Geek came up with it on Daily Kos back in 2011 in response to the Tucson shooting that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) with a severe brain injury that cut her term short.Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.
To further clarify, G2Geek later updated his post to explain that the stochastic terrorists aren’t the ones who pose the actual terroristic threats. No, they’re the ones who use their access to the media to broadcast extreme views that inspire “disturbed loners” like Dylann Roof and Robert Lewis Dear to attack. In his post, G2Geek specifically calls out hate-mongering people on Fox “News” like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Now, GOP officials, lawmakers and 2016 presidential candidates have likewise come under fire for their over-the-top, insane and hateful rantings about immigrants, gays, Planned Parenthood, blacks, and Muslims.The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the “missile” set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those “missiles” in motion.
Ms. Parker asserts, and I agree that this is a part of a deliberate strategy, and I agree.
In, fact, I would argue that this strategy is already bearing fruit, as the fear of another Oklahoma City bombing, a classic example of Stochastic Terrorism, is keeping law enforcement officials from enforcing the law at the Malheur reserve in Oregon.
The question is how to stop it.
H/t Pieter Lugt