Tag: Hillary Clinton

You Had One Job!

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It appears that the big donors people who donated over a billion dollars to the Clinton campaign are demanding answers about how it all went pear shaped:

When Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine greet the very top fundraisers and donors to their failed campaign at New York’s Plaza Hotel on Thursday evening, many of them will have one question in mind: Where’s the autopsy?

 The call for a deep and detailed accounting of how Clinton lost a race that she and her donors were absolutely certain she’d win didn’t begin immediately after the election — there was too much shock over her defeat by Donald Trump, and overwhelming grief. Her initial conference call with top backers, which came just days after the outcome, focused primarily on FBI Director Jim Comey’s late campaign-season intervention.

 But in the weeks since, the wealthy Democrats who helped pump over $1 billion into Clinton’s losing effort have been urging their local finance staffers, state party officials, and campaign aides to provide a more thorough explanation of what went wrong. With no dispassionate, centralized analysis of how Clinton failed so spectacularly, they insist, how can they be expected to keep contributing to the party?

 “A lot of the bundlers and donors still are in shock and disbelief by what happened. They’re looking for some introspection and analysis about what really happened, what worked and what didn’t,” said Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a top campaign bundler himself. “It may take some time to do that, but people are still just scratching their heads.”

 Or, in the words of a Midwestern fundraiser who’s kept in touch with fellow donors, “A lot of people are saying, ‘I’m not putting another f%$#ing dime in until someone tells me what just happened.’”

Here are a few of my suggestions for rules  to follow in an “autopsy”:

  1. Make sure that the incompetents lose their jobs and have to find a career outside of politics
  2. See rule number 1.

As to outcomes, I hope that Clinton machine is extracted root and branch from the Democratic Party.

    Hubris — Ate — Nemesis*

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    There is new information about the Clinton campaign emerging, and it reveals profound arrogance juxtaposed with an inability to find their ass with both hands. One would hope that this would bear negatively on future employment prospects in electoral politics for senior campaign staffers:

    Ever since election night—when Hillary Clinton tanked and Donald Trump became the next leader of the free world—the most prominent allies and alumni of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have maintained a succinct message for Team Hillary: We. Told. You. So.

    In the final months of the brutal and chaotic 2016 campaign, there were plenty of Democratic activists freaking out about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (the three states that ultimately cost the Democrats the White House) and Clinton’s fatal shortcomings there. Many of them were envoys of the Sanders camp who wanted to help fix those problems, including Clinton’s difficulties with the block of the mythical “white-working-class,” economically anxious voters who Sanders had championed during the primaries.

    “They f%$#ing ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,” Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee, told The Daily Beast. “We kept saying to each other like, ‘What the f%$#, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.’”

    According to Konst and multiple other people involved with these discussions, the Clinton campaign agreed to a meeting with a cadre of Sanders surrogates during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July. The purpose of the meeting, which included Clinton’s national political director Amanda Rentería and Team Hillary’s progressive outreach coordinator (and former Sanders senior aide) Nick Carter, was to address the concerns many Sanders camp alums were voicing about Clinton’s strategy going into the general election against Trump. Carter declined to comment on this story.

    ………

    “We were saying we are offering our help—nobody wanted [President] Donald Trump,” Konst continued, noting that the “Bernie world” side was offering Clinton’s team their plans—strategy memos, lists of hardened state organizers, timelines, data, the works—to win over certain voters in areas she ultimately lost but where Sanders had won during the primary.

    “We were painting them a dire picture, and I couldn’t help but think they literally looked like they had no idea what was going on here,” she continued. “I remember their faces, it was like they had never f%$#ing heard this stuff before. It’s what we had been screaming for the past 9 months… It’s like [they] forgot the basics of Politics 101.”

    ………

    Assurances were then made with various Clinton senior staffers that they would follow through with subsequent meetings and phone calls to address these gaps and warnings. Instead, meetings were canceled and “rescheduled” into oblivion.

    “We not only screamed about this, we wrote memos, we begged,” Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party chair and another Sanders booster who was at the DNC meeting, said. “I spent a good chunk of time writing memos about how [Bernie’s surrogates] could be utilized on the campaign trail, about ‘issue voters,’ about the environment, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Access Pipeline, rogue cops, you name it… I was [also] talking specifically about rural communities, and how [Hillary] completely ignored and abandoned anything that we cared about.”

    ………

    “The Clinton campaign believed they had the strongest and brightest people in the room… and they had no concept of why people would choose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton,” Kleeb continued. “They mocked us, they made fun of us. They always had a… model that was supposed to save the day. We were street activists and they don’t get that. And that’s a fundamental divide. They ran a check-the-box, sanitized campaign. And voters don’t think like that. You don’t win elections that way.”

    ………

    “A ham sandwich could beat Donald Trump,” Melissa Arab, a Michigan delegate for Sanders, told The Daily Beast during a protest outside the Democratic convention in July. “And Hillary cannot beat Donald Trump.”

    (%$# mine)

    “Strongest and brightest” is not the proper term. The proper term is “Best and the brightest”, who, after all did SUCH good job in Vietnam.

    I suppose that I could psychoanalyze why this happened, but I am an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit.‡

    *The cycle of the classic Greek tragedy: Hubris — Ate — Nemesis translated to Arrogance — Insanity — Destruction.†
    †Apologies to fans of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, etc. for conflating their works and the Clinton campaign.
    ‡I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

    No Person or Company Here Should Ever Be Employed by the Democratic Party Ever Again

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    In 2010, Martha Coakley was running for Senate in a special election, and she was asked by a reporter why it appeared that she was taking it easy after the primary.

    Her response is a fail for the ages, “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”

    She lost the election ………

    For what was Teddy Kennedy’s seat ………

    In Massachusetts, the only state to go for McGovern in 1972 ………

    Against a Republican.

    Well, it appears that every single senior official in the Clinton campaign decided to do exactly what Martha Coakley did:

    Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.

     They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.

     SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.

     Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

     Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.

     “They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”

    ………

    Nor did Brooklyn ask for help from some people who’d been expecting the call. Sanders threw himself into campaign appearances for Clinton throughout the fall, but familiar sources say the campaign never asked the Vermont senator’s campaign aides for help thinking through Michigan, Wisconsin or anywhere else where he had run strong. It was already November when the campaign finally reached out to the White House to get President Barack Obama into Michigan, a state that he’d worked hard and won by large margins in 2008 and 2012. On the Monday before Election Day, Obama added a stop in Ann Arbor, but that final weekend, the president had played golf on Saturday and made one stop in Orlando on Sunday, not having been asked to do anything else. Michigan senior adviser Steve Neuman had been asking for months to get Obama and the first lady on the ground there. People who asked for Vice President Joe Biden to come in were told that top Clinton aides weren’t clearing those trips.

    ………

    When top aides to the Trump campaign mapped out the best-case scenarios for election night, they always fell short of 270, and Michigan was always the state that they couldn’t see a way through.

    Trump’s last stop of the election was a massive rally in Michigan that went on past midnight, his campaign homing in on Trump’s chances there largely from nervousness it sensed coming out of Brooklyn.

    Walking out at the end, Trump turned to his running mate, Mike Pence, almost confused: “This doesn’t feel like second place,” he said, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

    The party establishment gave Coakley a 2nd chance, and she lost the governor’s race ………

    In Massachusetts, the only state to go for McGovern in 1972 ………

    Against a Republican.

    The Democratic Party establishment did the same thing when Clinton snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2008 in the primary, when she just could not bring herself to apologize for voting for Bush’s war in Iraq, and they gave her another chance.

    And she lost to an inverted traffic cone, aided and abetted by a Clintonite political machine that was too outlandishly incompetent to be the model for a Rowan Atkinson Britcom.

    Fire them all ……… Out of a cannon ……… And into the sun.

    OK, This Has Completely Blown Up

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    There has been poo flung all over the place over the past few days regarding allegations of efforts of the Russians to influence the US elections.

    With the exception of Marcy Wheeler’s astute observation that the CIA is studiously avoiding the obvious, that this is blowback against US regime change efforts against Russia and its allies:

    The most logical explanation for the parade of leaks since Friday about why Russia hacked the Democrats is that the CIA has been avoiding admitting — perhaps even considering — the conclusion that Russia hacked Hillary in retaliation for the covert actions the CIA itself has taken against Russian interests.

    Based on WaPo’s big story Friday, I guessed that there was more disagreement about Russia’s hack than its sources — who seemed to be close to Senate Democrats — let on. I was right. Whereas on Friday WaPo reported that it was the consensus view that Russia hacked Hillary to get Trump elected, on Saturday the same journalists reported that CIA and FBI were giving dramatically different briefings to Intelligence Committees.

    ………

    Remarkably, only secondary commenters (including me, in point 13 here) have suggested the most obvious explanation: The likelihood that Russia targeted the former Secretary of State for a series of covert actions, all impacting key Russian interests, that at least started while she was Secretary of State. Those are:

    • Misleadingly getting the UN to sanction the Libya intervention based off the claim that it was about protecting civilians as opposed to regime change
    • Generating protests targeting Putin in response to 2011 parliamentary elections
    • Sponsoring “moderate rebels” to defeat Bashar al-Assad
    • Removing Viktor Yanukovych to install a pro-NATO government

    Importantly, the first three of these happened on Hillary’s watch, with her active involvement. And Putin blamed Hillary, personally, for the protests in 2011.

    So, it’s pretty clear that IF Russia actively meddled in our election (and the operative word is if) it appears that their actions were fare less intrusive than what we did. in Libya, Syria, Russia, or the Ukraine, where we have supported jihadists and (not a term of art) fascists.

    In determining the veracity of the CIA’s assertions there are a couple of articles to review.

    First, an article from The Guardian that quotes Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, and close associate of Assange:  (See also more extensive comments from Mr. Murray here.)

    Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullsh%$”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”

    “I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

    “If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.

    “America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

    (%$ mine)

    Note that in ALL the articles, this is the only absolute claim that is made on the record.

    Also note that FBI and CIA have given conflicting briefings to lawmakers: (Also see here.)

    In a secure meeting room under the Capitol last week, lawmakers held in their hands a classified letter written by colleagues in the Senate summing up a secret, new CIA assessment of Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

     Sitting before the House Intelligence Committee was a senior FBI counterintelligence official. The question the Republicans and Democrats in attendance wanted answered was whether the bureau concurred with the conclusions the CIA had just shared with senators that Russia “quite” clearly intended to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton and clinch the White House.

     For the Democrats in the room, the FBI’s response was frustrating — even shocking.

     During a similar Senate Intelligence Committee briefing held the previous week, the CIA’s statements, as reflected in the letter the lawmakers now held in their hands, were “direct and bald and unqualified” about Russia’s intentions to help Trump, according to one of the officials who attended the House briefing.

     The FBI official’s remarks to the lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee were, in comparison, “fuzzy” and “ambiguous,” suggesting to those in the room that the bureau and the agency weren’t on the same page, the official said.

    I’m with what Glenn Greenwald wrote for The Intercept, “Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence.”

    Though I would include the caveat/cliché that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

    I would also note the following paragraph buried in the original Washington Post story, which relied entirely on anonymous sources:

    The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

    (emphasis mine)

    So, the actual facts of the matter are not clear, though people of different political bents are doing their best impression of blind men and an elephant.

    Certainly, Russia has an interest in undermining faith in the Democratic process in the United States.

    Additionally, Hillary Clinton’s record with Russia as Secretary of State was implacably and reflexively hostile to Russian concerns, so I could see how Russia might find the proverbial inverted traffic cone as a preferable alternative.

    This means that the assertions are plausible, but by no means persuasive, particularly since the CIA appears to be flying solo with these assertions.

    Additionally, the anonymous sourcing might imply that someone well into the “No f%$#s left give” category **cough** retiring Senator Harry Reid **cough* might simply be throwing some shade Donald Trump’s way.

    I’m not sure what to believe, but even if all the allegations against Putin are true, they are far less aggressive than what the Obama administration, and the Hillary Clinton State Department were doing with Russia.

    In any case, this all falls firmly in the “Sauce for the Gander” category for me.

    I Can Only Conclude that Hillary Clinton Deserved to Lose

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    Diane Hessan worked the Hillary Clinton campaign, and she followed a few hundred undecided voters for the months before the election.

    She went back through her notes, and discovered what the turning point was, and interestingly enough, it was when Hillary was at her most authentic and honest:

    ………

    Last week, I reread all of my notes. There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”

    All hell broke loose.

    George told me that his neighborhood was outraged, that many of his hard-working, church-going, family-loving friends resented being called that name. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.

    She told something like half the country that she loathed them, and for once they believed her.

    She is an avatar of the that right-wing subset of the Democratic Party that believes that if your life is tough, it’s because you were too lazy to get into Yale, and any issues that might have arisen from the increasing of multinational labor arbitrage, the assault on unions, deregulation, and the financialization of the economy is your own damn fault.

    You can call it the DLC wing of the party, or the New Dem wing of the party, or the Blue Dog wing of the party, or the Bob Rubin part of the party, of Republican Lite.

    I just call them a part of the problem.

    How Utterly Proper

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    Hillary Clinton is going to be throwing a thank you party to her millionaire donors:

    Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are throwing a party at the Plaza hotel on Dec. 15 to thank those who donated millions to the campaign.

     The party will be held in the Grand Ballroom on the third floor, to honor the Hillary for America finance leadership council.

     Guests expected are big bundlers including Harvey Weinstein, Anna Wintour, Alan Patricof, Tory Burch and Marc Lasry.

     One insider said, “Hopefully there’s no balconies so nobody can jump.”

    Hopefully, there is a balcony, and they will ALL jump.

    Quote of the Day

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    It is hard to think of an election defeat more singularly absent of important lessons, since the most important lesson of the election is glaringly obvious and shared by all sides: Don’t nominate Hillary Clinton for president again.

    —Jonathan Chait

    Wise words from what might have been the most clueless* pundit of this election cycle.

    *There were certainly pundits writing stupider things, but I think that it was malice and self interest, not pure stupidity that drove them.

    How Unsurprising

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    Fresh on statements that he would not attempt to have Hillary Clinton prosecuted, Donald Trump is contacting foreign governments to pressure them to investigate the Clinton Foundation:

    While President-elect Donald Trump earlier announced a U-turn on investigating Hillary Clinton, he is now reportedly planning to pressure foreign governments to look into the finances of the Clinton Foundation.

    During one of the campaign debates, Trump said once he is in the oval office he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s alleged misgivings, including the use of a private email server and involvement in the Clinton Foundation.

    “You’d be in jail,” he warned his rival if he were to win the election.

    After his election victory he made a U-turn on the threat. But according to the New York Post, the Trump administration would pressure foreign governments to investigate the financial dealings of the Clinton Foundation.

    He gets to look magnanimous, and he gets to look shocked when he is “Forced” by new facts uncovered by foreign governments to go after a possible rival.

    How convenient.

    Nope, No Corruption Here

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    Now that Hillary Clinton isn’t going to be President, the government of Australia is ending its contributions to the Clinton foundation:

    Australia has finally ceased pouring millions of dollars into accounts linked to Hillary Clinton’s charities.

    Which might make you wonder: Why were we donating to them in the first place?

    The federal government confirmed to news.com.au it has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million.

    The Clinton Foundation has a rocky past. It was described as “a slush fund”, is still at the centre of an FBI investigation and was revealed to have spent more than $50 million on travel.

    Despite that, the official website for the charity shows contributions from both AUSAID and the Commonwealth of Australia, each worth between $10 million and $25 million.

    We’ll be seeing a lot more of this, because the Clinton Foundation was structured to create this sort of, “moral ambiguity,” and now that Hillary Clinton will never be President, expect to see a lot of people ending the relationship with the organization.

    The Clintons won’t suffer, they never made any money from the Foundation, but it was an instrument for them to keep their “Posse” together, and the band ain’t getting back together.

    More Professional Class Arrogance

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    It is now becoming clear that Clinton’s ground game — the watchword for defenders of her alleged competence — was actually under-resourced and poorly executed. Like so much else in this election, her field strategy was hostage to the colossal arrogance and consequent incompetence of the liberal establishment.

    At the heart of the failure was the notion of the “new emerging majority.” According to this argument — pushed by, among others, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira — women, Latinos, blacks, and skilled professionals who support the Democrats were becoming the demographic majority. Thus the traditional white working-class base of the Democratic Party could be sidelined.

    Back in July Chuck Schumer summed it up: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

    From this theory and strategy flowed a deeply flawed set of tactics, and a badly fumbled get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort.

    A labor organizer in Ohio, who wished to remain anonymous, reports that Clinton’s early GOTV effort there focused on Republicans in the mistaken belief a significant number of them could be peeled away. This play largely failed. And it also involved serious opportunity costs: traditional Democratic constituencies like African Americans and the white working class were neglected, and Clinton ended up badly under-performing Obama among both groups, especially in the Rust Belt.

    Only in the last two weeks, according to this labor source, did the Democratic Party outreach effort really switch back to traditional Democratic voters. By then, it was too late. Due to lack of preparation, the voter lists guiding the effort had not been updated. Because poorer voters tend to relocate more frequently than home-owning suburbanites, many addresses were wrong. And for lack of more frequent contact the campaign was often unsure about the voters’ current political attitudes.

    ………

    The Clinton campaign’s assumption seems to have been that actual people living on the ground in actual places knew less about the population around them than did the data-savvy professionals at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.

    ………

    The computer-obsessed Clinton campaign — having lost touch with people but not big data — seems to have inadvertently turned out Trump voters!

    ………

    A point for the Left in all this: the DNC’s ideas are not only bad because they don’t advocate the social-democratic redistribution we would like to see — they are also bad because they don’t work at a purely technical level.

    Their arrogance and contempt for the working class produced a flawed political theory, which in turn produced a bad strategy, which in turn produced a tactically inept ground game.

    Too busy congratulating themselves and concurring with each other, the Clintonites couldn’t even get the rudiments of the campaign correct.

    The larger point here is that smug self-satisfied professionals are neither the basis for governing electorate nor are they a basis for a campaign.

    This was shown by the debacles in 1994, 2004, 2010, 2104, and 2016.

    It is only when the Republicans step on their own dicks (impeachment, Iraq, financial crisis, Mitt Rmoney) that this strategy, and this class, manages to win elections.

    Headline of the Day

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    Elite, White Feminism Gave Us Trump: It Needs to Die

    The thesis is that priviliged identity politics ignores the very real needs of ordinary folks who don’t get 6 figure payments for speeches from the Vampire Squid.

    Identity politics and class politics tends to be mutually exclusive, as Jesse Jackson once said when asked how he might get white steelworker votes, “By making him aware he has more in common with the black steel workers by being a worker, than with the boss by being white.”

    Tweet of the Day

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    Here’s the updated list of all Podesta docs published by @WikiLeaks that have been proven, or claimed, to be fake https://t.co/3QAb3LLxn0

    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 2, 2016

    Since Greenwald did not actually post the pic, just the link, I’ve attached the picbelow

    It is important to remind folks that while plenty of representatives of the Clinton campaign and the DNC have commented on the provenance of the hacked email, Not One has disputed the authenticity of the emails.

    Well Trolled

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    The Clinton Campaign is now offering tin foil hats with a rump theme:

    Hillary Clinton’s campaign is mocking Donald Trump with do-it-yourself tin foil hats.
    Cinton’s campaign website features a promotional brochure for a “Trump Tin Foil Hat.” The brochure ridicules the Republican nominee for his “conspiracies” and shares instructions to help supporters create their own “Make America Great Again” foil hats.

    “In fact if we elect Donald Trump, we could have a president dedicated to the truth: where is Elvis? Where did we film the moon landing?” the brochure reads.

    Grab your tinfoil hat and buckle up—it doesn’t look like Donald Trump will stop peddling conspiracies any time soon. https://t.co/PrwQ5jXQPq pic.twitter.com/iAzZMPbf7I

    — The Briefing (@TheBriefing2016) October 25, 2016

    Whoever did this deserves a promotion.

    What is Flat and Glows in the Dark?

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    The world during Hillary Clinton’s first term.

    Here’s a an under-reported bit of war-mongering from one of Hillary’s speeches to the Vampire Squid:

    US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has said the US could claim the Pacific Ocean as an “American Sea” if China claims all of the South China Sea, according to excerpts of her speech contained in hacked emails revealed by WikiLeaks.

    In a speech the Democratic candidate gave to bankers from Goldman Sachs in October 2013, she said the Chinese “have a right to assert themselves” in the South China Sea but the US needed to “push back” to keep Beijing from getting a “chokehold over world trade”.

    ………

    In the paid speech to Goldman Sachs, Clinton said she confronted Chinese officials about the South China Sea during her tenure as secretary.

    “I said, by that argument, you know, the United States should claim all of the Pacific. We liberated it; we defended it. We have as much claim to all of the Pacific. And we could call it the American Sea, and it could go from the West Coast of California all the way to the Philippines.”

    She said in the speech that she had told her Beijing counterparts the Chinese claims to the South China Sea were based on “pottery shards” from “some fishing vessel that ran aground in an atoll somewhere”, whereas the US claim to the Pacific would be based on “convoys of military strength” in the second world war and the claim Americans “discovered Japan”.

    She described this line of reasoning as “one of the greatest arguments that I had”.

    Clinton said that as the debate became “more technical”, the Chinese said they would claim Hawaii, and that she had countered by saying the US had proof of purchase.

    Oh

    My

    God

    We are so screwed.

    You Can Get the Goldwater Girl to Register as a Democrat, But You Cannot Get the Goldwater out of the Girl

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    One of the things that Hillary Clinton thinks is a good thing is pushing down wages of already meagerly paid Chinese workers.

    By extension, one could conclude that the same would apply to American factory workers:

    The general media has been treating the WikiLeaks disclosures of the Clinton campaign documents, particularly the transcripts of her lucrative talks with Goldman Sachs as much ado about nothing. I have not found any article about the disclosures, however, that reported on the extraordinary statements she made in her talk with Goldman Sachs on June 4, 2013.

    Hillary told the Vampire Squid that the “good news” was that China was removing workers’ (meager) legal protections so that their employers could “forc[e] down wages” in order to increase corporate profits. She used China’s (pathetically weak) legal protections for workers as her exemplar of China’s “structural economic problems.”

    Thirdly, they seem to — and you all are the experts on this. They seem to be coming to grips with some of the structural economic problems that they are now facing. And look, they have them. There are limits to what enterprises can do, limits to forcing down wages to be competitive, all of which is coming to the forefront…

    Clinton’s support for “forcing down wages” by removing China’s meager protections for workers reveals that her (leaked) admission that she is increasingly “far removed from the struggles of” the working and middle-class is a grave understatement. She is not simply “far removed” from their “struggles” – she continues when speaking secretly to Wall Street to attack workers’ interests.

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

    There is no moral conundrum forcing me to vote for her.

    God Bless Maryland.

    Tom Daschle Would Suck off a Corpse for a Cheeseburger

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    Tom Daschle, who never left Washington, DC after losing his bid for reelection in 2004, and has become a lobbying hired gun, and as Matt Taibbi noted in the above hed, has no shame.

    Case in point, lobbying Hillary Clinton while refusing to register as a lobbyist:

    Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle pushed Hillary Clinton’s top aides to consider supporting a massive health insurance merger for one of his clients — even though at the time he was not registered to be a company lobbyist.

    Daschle registered to be a lobbyist for Aetna in February of 2016, which subjected him to disclosure and ethics regulations. However, an email released Thursday by Wikileaks shows Daschle pressing the company’s agenda with political power players in October 2015.

    “I wanted to reach out in reference to Hillary’s statements today regarding the insurance mergers,” Daschle wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta on the day Clinton publicly raised questions about the merger. “I certainly understand her concerns over the pending deals. I’ve been working with Aetna on ACA [Affordable Care Act] involvement for the past several years. That has led to other health related matters including the merger. Their team has what they view to be compelling arguments around the benefits of the Humana merger and why it will be beneficial for consumers.”

    Then Daschle said: “Would you and your team be willing to have a conversation with them?”

    Clinton’s campaign ultimately declared its support for a Justice Department lawsuit aimed at blocking the merger.

    In 2015, a joint study by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation spotlighted how many former members of Congress appear to be circumventing ethics rules by working in government relations on behalf of corporate clients, but not registering as lobbyists.

    Daschle’s wife — a former federal aviation regulator-turned-airline lobbyist — opened her own lobbying firm in 2008.

    This isn’t just an ethics issue.  It’s what I call back loaded bribery, and it is a cancer on the American body politic.