Category: Presidential Campaign

An UNBELIEVABLY Appropriate Use of the KKK Act

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Various Biden campaigners have sued Texas terrorists who attempted to force their campaign bus off of the road in October of last year under the Klu Klux Klan act of 1871.

This seems about right:

Timothy Holloway clutched the wheel of a Biden-Harris campaign bus last October, swerving and dodging as one hostile car bearing a Trump flag after another tried to run him off a Texas highway.

“We were terrified,” Holloway said in a news release. “They were clearly trying to scare us and prevent us from arriving at our destination in peace.”

The tactic worked — the Biden campaign canceled the rest of the day’s events, saying it feared for the safety of campaign staffers, supporters and local political candidates. Some prominent Republicans cheered the effort by the self-proclaimed “Trump Train,” while President Donald Trump himself lauded their efforts, calling the drivers “patriots” who “did nothing wrong.”

Now, Holloway — along with a White House staffer, a former Texas lawmaker and a campaign volunteer — are suing several members of the caravan, accusing them of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which bars violent election intimidation, as well as local Texas laws. The group is also suing local law enforcement, claiming they failed to provide protection.

“Those on the bus feared injury or for their lives. All suffered lingering trauma in the days and months thereafter,” says one of a pair of federal lawsuits filed to the Western District of Texas court on Thursday. “The events of October 30 arose from a campaign of politically motivated intimidation.”

………

The case isn’t the only recent attempt to invoke the Ku Klux Klan Act against Trump supporters. In February, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, invoked the Klan Act in a lawsuit against Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani and two extremist groups whose members are accused of participating in the insurrection. Thompson alleged that Trump and Giuliani violated the act by inciting the riots with false claims of a rigged election. The lawsuit is ongoing.

This was terrorism, pure and simple, and they should be treated at LEAST as severely as the Muslim losers that the FBI entraps in their sting operations.

Take their guns while the trials are going on, and seize their trucks, as they are the instruments of the crimes.

And Clinton Throws the Democrats an Anvil

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So, now that the clusterfuck known as Donald is hanging around Republican’s neck like a millstone, Hillary Clinton is busy trying to remove that particular albatross: (welcome to the Matthew Saroff mixed metaphor festival)

Hillary Clinton is trying to entice Republican voters to ditch Donald Trump by portraying him as outside the mainstream of their party, putting her at odds with congressional Democrats who want to link the party’s House and Senate candidates to Trump’s controversial brand of politics.

In a speech on Aug. 25 that flayed the Republican nominee as an outlier channeling the views of white supremacists and courting the “fringe element” of his party, Clinton invoked the names of former President George W. Bush, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Arizona Senator John McCain and former Senator Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican nominee, to set up the contrast with Trump.

Republicans who’ve already voiced their opposition to Trump welcomed having the Democratic presidential nominee make their argument—that he doesn’t represent the party or mainstream conservatism.

“I’m glad that even Hillary Clinton recognizes that this isn’t our whole party,” Katie Packer, a former adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, wrote on Twitter. “This is strong,” Republican strategist Ana Navarro said of Clinton’s praise for past Republican nominees. “It’s easily the best speech of any candidate this year,” Tony Fratto, a former spokesman for Bush, tweeted.

It’s Bill all over again:  Throwing the party, and the party’s ideals over the cliff in the quest for personal gain.

I am so going to take a sh%$ in the ballot booth this year. (I am not speaking figuratively here.)

I Don’t Vote for Internet Trolls

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Nor do I vote for those who knowingly and deliberately employ internet trolls :

When the Internet’s legions of Hillary hecklers steal away to chat rooms and Facebook pages to vent grievances about Clinton, express revulsion toward Clinton and launch attacks on Clinton, they now may find themselves in a surprising place – confronted by a multimillion dollar super PAC working with Clinton.

 Hillary Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront  social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.

 In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.

………

 “It is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical,” said Brian Donahue, chief executive of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital.

 “That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about,” he said. “It runs the risk of being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime political operatives and high-level consultants.”

 ………

 The mere mention of Correct the Record makes some critics seethe. Super PACs are typically prohibited from working in tandem with candidates, but Correct the Record is doing just that by exploiting a loophole in campaign finance law that it says permits such coordination with digital campaigns.

(emphasis mine)

I’ve spent way too much of my time online dealing with these ratf%$#s, and Hillary Clinton is paying to make more of them.

I am so glad that I do not live in a swing state.

Sh%$ I Don’t Care About

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Musical chairs amongst the hired guns at political campaigns.

I get it: Paul Manafort, Trump’s now-former campaign manager has resigned.

This is definitely news, and it should be covered by normal news sources.  (I am not a news source, I am an essayist whose writing is driven by lazy thinking, dubious sourcing sourcing, and the worst writing on the internet™.)

I just don’t think that it should be page 1 news, even below the fold on a slow news day:  It’s just inside baseball.

Snark of the Day ……… Week ……… Month ……… Year ……… Decade ……… Century ……… Mellenium

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The anarchist group INDECLINE decided that they need to show that the emperor had no clothes, with said emperor being Donald J. Trump.

To do this, they erected 5 naked sculptures of him all across the nation: (This is amusing, but not truly great snark)

For much of the past year, Donald Trump proved uniquely untouchable, a political force of such mind-boggling invulnerability that he even bragged about attracting voters after hypothetically shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.

Hoping to strip away the Teflon Don’s legendary confidence to reveal the fleshy mortal beneath the expensive suits and long ties, members of the anarchist collective INDECLINE decided they would showcase the aspirant president in the most humiliating way they could imagine: without his clothes.

The group unveiled life-size statues of Trump in the nude Thursday morning in public spaces in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Seattle.

“The Emperor Has No B—s,” [Balls because WaPo is too chickensh%$ to say it] as the project is called, arrives several months after the group covered stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with the names of African Americans who have been killed by police. In the past, the collective has also claimed responsibility for an anti-Trump “Rape” mural on the U.S.-Mexico border and a massive piece of graffiti art in California’s Mojave Desert.

Yes, this is amusing, but it still isn’t great nark.

The great snark was from the New York City Parks Department, which promptly removed the statue, and a spokesman explained their reasoning as follows:

NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small.

Brilliant! 

You win the internet.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

How Utterly Proper

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Hillary Clinton has selected right wing pro-fracking pro TPP DINO Ken Salazar to head her transition team:

Two big issues dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both.

Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric.

Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity.

She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen.

And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments.

As a senator, Salazar was widely considered a reliable friend to the oil, gas, ranching and mining industries. As interior secretary, he opened the Arctic Ocean for oil drilling, and oversaw the botched response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since returning to the private sector, he has been an ardent supporter of the TPP, while pushing back against curbs on fracking.

He said this:

“We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone,” Salazar told the attendees, who included the vice president of BP America, another keynote speaker at the conference. “We need to make sure that story is told.”

He is ignoring many cases of contaminated water, including some cases where the water would burn.

And he claims that there is not one single case of a problem.

As interior secretary, he was waiving environmental reviews for BP project as its as its Deepwater Horizon was still spewing thousands of barrels a day in to the Gulf of Mexico,

And this ratf%$# will be vetting her staff, which means that in a very real way, he will have more impact on the shape of her administration than anyone but her.

If you think that Clinton is a progressive, I have some of Donald Trump’s debt to sell you.

A Noun, and a Verb, and 91………Whatever

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Rudy “A Noun, a Verb and 9/11” Giuliani some how managed to forget the 911 terrorist attacks:

In early January 2010, Rudy Giuliani, known for his obsessive focus on the 9/11 attacks, made a bizarre comment on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The former mayor argued, “What [President Obama] should be doing is following the right things that [George W. Bush] did – one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror.”
Giuliani added, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”
Of course, we had a very memorable domestic attack under Bush. The “one” under Obama, in this case, apparently referred to “Underwear Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab, who attempted to detonate a concealed explosive on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, but who failed. This “attack,” fortunately, led to zero casualties.
More than six years later, Giuliani is still confused.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Monday said terrorists failed to successfully strike the United States in the eight years before President Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton took office.
“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States,” Giuliani said Monday ahead of a speech by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on foreign policy. “They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

Seriously.  Giuliani is a man who has been a horror show his entire life, (he announced his divorce in a press conference before he told his then wife) with the exception of one day, and when it is inconvenient, it slips his mind.

What a horrible man.

Billy West Should Get a Nobel Prize

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The voice actor, known for Doug and Ren and Stimpy, as well as the voice of Fry, among others, in Fututama.

One of the voices that he did on the latter show was that of Zapp Branigan, the egotistical, incompetent, and misogynist ship commander who once had a fling with Turanga Leela, much to Leela’s chagrin.

Mr. West decided to read Donald Trump quotes as if they were spoken by Zapp Branigan and posted it to Twitter (#MakeAmericaBrannigan), and it is brilliant and amazing.

Donald Trump IS Zapp Branigan.:

Zapp presents…Famous Quotes from Donald J Trump#MakeAmericaBrannigan pic.twitter.com/FnJNn2zIAq

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 15, 2016

Billy West is a national treasure.👏 RT @TheBillyWest: ZAPP presents…Famous Trump Quotations!#MakeAmericaBrannigan pic.twitter.com/y14Uxpqo8j

— Q. Allan Brocka (@allanbrocka) August 13, 2016

ZAPP presents…Famous Trump Quotations! pic.twitter.com/cFq1rQ4veY

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 11, 2016

Zapp (& Kif) present…Famous Quotes from Donald J Trump#MakeAmericaBrannigan pic.twitter.com/JLxemUhRFW

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 15, 2016

ZAPP presents … Famous Trump Quotes! #WednesdayWisdom #ManWithAPlan pic.twitter.com/dpKJOVkTmA

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 10, 2016

ZAPP presents… Famous Trump Quotations! pic.twitter.com/jGzmsKM9cF

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 10, 2016

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 10, 2016

Zapp presents…Famous Quotations from Donald J Trump#MakeAmericaBrannigan pic.twitter.com/cyDReNPT7U

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 11, 2016

Zapp presents…Famous Quotes from Donald J Trump#MakeAmericaBrannigan pic.twitter.com/JUrQvzPHYo

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 14, 2016

Zapp presents…Famous Quotes from Donald J Trump#MakeAmericaBrannigan pic.twitter.com/iSimNkFTZ9

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 14, 2016

ZAPP presents…Famous Trump Quotations!#MakeAmericaBrannigan pic.twitter.com/guqadM7P02

— Billy West (@TheBillyWest) August 12, 2016

Remember When I Suggested That Some Hillary Supporters Were a Bit ……… Hinky?

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Well, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who wants very much to be the next CIA Director, who recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, is calling for the assassination of Russians and Iranians in Syria:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell said in an interview Monday that U.S. policy in Syria should be to make Iran and Russia “pay a price” by arming local groups and instructing them to kill Iranian and Russian personnel in the country.

Morell was appearing on the Charlie Rose show on PBS in the wake of his publicly endorsing Hillary Clinton on the New York Times opinion pages.

Clinton has expressed support for increased military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government. Iran and Russia are backing Assad.

“What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price,” Morell said. “When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.”

Morell said the killing of Russians and Iranians should be undertaken “covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it, you don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say ‘we did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

Morell also proposed that U.S. forces begin bombing Syrian government installations, including government offices, aircraft and presidential guard positions. The former acting CIA director said that he wanted to “scare Assad.” Morell clarified that he wasn’t actually calling for Assad’s assassination.

………

Morell’s endorsement of Clinton was quickly seen as a sign that he was interested in a role in a possible Clinton administration. He wrote that Clinton would be a “highly qualified commander in chief” and a “strong proponent of a more aggressive approach” to the conflict in Syria.

………

This weekend, Hillary Clinton touted Morell’s endorsement on her Twitter page:

“She will deliver on the most important duty of a president—keeping our nation safe.” —Michael Morell on Hillary https://t.co/zmI3BOCH9Y

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 7, 2016

Anyone can say that they endorse you, but the fact that you are touting the endorsement of this Fruitloop does engender confidence in your judgement.

When Donald F%$#ing Trump can make an argument that he is the peace candidate, you are doing something seriously wrong.

Seriously? Boasting About an Endorsement from John f%$#ing Negroponte?

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It appears that the latest endorsement for Hillary Clinton from the “Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity” crowd is in, and her campaign is crowing about John Negroponte’s Endorsement, probably because Henry Kissinger was busy:

In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte. ………

 ………

 Well, that’s special, isn’t it? And what did Negroponte do while serving “in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960”? I’m glad you asked.

 In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country’s murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)………

 In any case, the essential Robert Parry has been dogging this story for nearly 40 years now. From In These Times:

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador in the early ’80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that’s one of the reasons Bush picked him. Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran military in the ’80s.

 In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States. “Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.” It’s unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

 ………

 “Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous,” said Dodd. “I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987],” [Senator Christopher] Dodd said.

Hillary Clinton has been completely captured by they dysfunctional, immoral, and incompetent foreign policy consensus that has been mismanaging our foreign policy since the 1960s.

This The Best and the Brightest crap really needs to end.

It has produced nothing but death and misery and failure.

Tweet of the Day

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The anti-Trump surprise candidate is a former CIA agent and Goldman Sachs guy who does TED talks, he’s going to take votes away from HIllary

— Will Menaker (@willmenaker) August 8, 2016

Seriously, for all the big deal that people are making about his candidacy today, it’s about as useful as tits on a bull.

Note also that Evan McMullin has already dropped his time with the Vampire Squid from his online resume ……… Like that’s gonna make a difference.

H/t  naked capitalism

I am as Disengaged in this Year’s Election as I Have Ever Been

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I’ve not teased out all the reasons, but I have a profound and deep ambivalence about this Presidential campaign.

The last time I cared this little about a campaign, I was 6 years old, and living in a pre-oil boom Alaska (Humphrey-Nixon), and like most 6 year olds, I had only the vaguest understanding of the political process.

I’m still voting, but I’m probably writing in Vermin Supreme.

I am so glad that I live in a safe state where my vote does not count, because I cannot bring myself to care.

Not a Surprise………

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Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee are now former officials of the DNC:

Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee will leave their posts this week amid the controversy over the release of a cache of hacked emails from the committee.

Chief executive Amy Dacey, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall and Communications Director Luis Miranda will leave the DNC just days after a new leader took the helm.

A trove of nearly 20,000 emails were posted on WikiLeaks last month. They included some emails that raised questions about the faith of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), and others that seemed to disparage donors.

This is not a surprise.

Dacey and Marshall had the now infamous email exchange about targeting Sanders on his religion, and Miranda was hired by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and functioned primarily her personal publicist.

The organization needs to be fixed, and this will mean more than just getting rid of DWS toadies at the organization.

Economy Grew at Less Than ½ of Forecasts in Q2

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Forecasts were generally at a 2.5% annual rate, and the actual rate was 1.2%:

The U.S. economy expanded less than forecast in the second quarter after a weaker start to the year than previously estimated as companies slimmed down inventories and remained wary of investing amid shaky global demand.

 Gross domestic product rose at a 1.2 percent annualized rate after a 0.8 percent advance the prior quarter, Commerce Department figures showed Friday in Washington. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a 2.5 percent second-quarter increase.

 The report raises the risk to the outlook at a time Federal Reserve policy makers are looking for sustained improvement. While consumers were resilient last quarter, businesses were cautious — cutting back on investment and aggressively reducing stockpiles amid weak global markets, heightened uncertainty and the lingering drag from a stronger dollar.

So it’s 3 months until the general election, and the economy is slowing down.

Lovely.

Who Needs Legal Ethics?

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Plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are requesting that the organization’s “White Shoe” law firm, Perkins Coie, be removed from the case for gross conflicts of interest:

A high profile law firm is now caught up in the DNC WikiLeaks mess. A group of Bernie Sanders supporters filed a class action lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, and the now-former chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz. In a letter sent Monday, they are demanding that attorneys from Perkins Coie LLP be removed from the case due to a conflict of interest. New emails discovered through the WikiLeaks dump show that attorneys from the law firm have given strategy advice to hurt Sanders, well before he dropped out. To add fuel to their claim, they’ve now discovered that attorneys from Perkins Coie are representing both the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign.

………

Internal emails discovered through WikiLeaks show that Perkins Coie attorneys advised the DNC on how to fight allegations from Bernie Sanders. This spring, the Sanders campaign accused Hillary Clinton of ‘laundering’ money through the Clinton Victory Fund. Marc Elias, who serves as the Clinton campaign’s general counsel and also a partner at Perkins Coie, fired off an email to DNC staff stating:

My suggestion is that the DNC put out a statement saying that the accusations the Sanders campaign are not true. The fact that CNN notes that you aren’t getting between the two campaigns is the problem. Here, Sanders is attacking the DNC and its current practice, its past practice with the POTUS and with Sec Kerry. Just as the RNC pushes back directly on Trump over “rigged system”, the DNC should push back DIRECTLY at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful the Democratic party. [emphasis added]

………

However, attorneys for Bernie Sanders supporters contend that the federal court rules bar Perkins Coie lawyers from representing the DNC as defense counsel in the case. They say that the Perkins Coie attorneys may become “potential material witnesses” or “defendants” in the case and should be disqualified. They plan to file an official motion in court.

Seriously, what is up with this?

Some of the partners, i.e. the bosses at the firms, are working for a political campaign, and are likely to be called as witnesses, and they are still representing the DNC?

This is f%$#ed up.

He’s just F%$#ing with Us Now

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If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2016

This is an epic troll

At a press conference, Donald Trump just called for Russia to hack Hillary’s emails:

Donald Trump appeared to incite Russia to hack into and publish Hillary Clinton’s private emails, as her campaign sounded “alarm” at growing evidence of a foreign power “interfering in an American election”.

 ………

 Trump, meanwhile, speaking at a press conference in Florida, raised the stakes again, as he urged Russia to hack into and release Clinton’s emails from the personal server she used while she was secretary of state.

 “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.

 “I think you you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That will be next.”

 The Republican nominee added: “They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted … I hope they do … because you’d see some beauties there.”

Trump has since stated that he was being sarcastic, which is no surprise.

Over the past week, we’ve seen what can only be described as a campaign of Red baiting by the Clinton campaign (seriously, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?), I would be inclined to be sarcastic as well:

Donald Trump says he was “being sarcastic” when he suggested Wednesday that Russia should find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

“Of course I’m being sarcastic. And they don’t even know frankly if it’s Russia,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade set to air in full Thursday morning.

Even by the standards of the the crazy season that is a Presidential campaign, this season is completely batsh%$ insane.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The Clinton Campaign is now Trying to Red Bait Trump?

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It appears that the Clinton campaign is now trying to claim that the DNC hacked emails are a campaign by the Russian FSB to benefit Donald Trump’s campaign.

The idea of casting Trump as some sort of Manchurian Muscovite Candidate is completely nonsensical, and the claims in this article has claims from anonymous experts who present no concrete proof for their accusations:

An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyberspecialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?

 Until Friday, that charge, with its eerie suggestion of a Kremlin conspiracy to aid Donald J. Trump, has been only whispered.

 But the release on Friday of some 20,000 stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, many of them embarrassing to Democratic leaders, has intensified discussion of the role of Russian intelligence agencies in disrupting the 2016 campaign.

As an aside here, I would note that it’s right for people to be shocked here, because the US never meddles in other nations elections. (And, as Sir William Schwenck Gilbert wrote, “Married men never flirt.”)

The emails, released first by a supposed hacker and later by WikiLeaks, exposed the degree to which the Democratic apparatus favored Hillary Clinton over her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and triggered the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chairwoman, on the eve of the convention’s first day.

 Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult. But researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers. Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.

 On Sunday morning, the issue erupted, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump” citing “experts” but offering no other evidence. Mr. Mook also suggested that the Russians might have good reason to support Mr. Trump: The Republican nominee indicated in an interview with The New York Times last week that he might not back NATO nations if they came under attack from Russia — unless he was first convinced that the countries had made sufficient contributions to the Atlantic alliance.

The accusations are repulsive, and they reek of desperation, and they are every bit as offensive as Donald Trump’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’ dad was involved in the assassination of JFK.

This is not the image that the Clinton campaign wants to promulgate.

I would also note that if the folks at the DNC were doing their job properly the emails would have been rather anodyne.

This really is the equivalent of the unmasked villain at the end of a Scooby Doo episode saying, “I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for your meddling kids.”