18 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

1. Hillary Clinton's joke in Iowa doesn't seem to be working…

   By the way, you may have seen that I have recently launched a Snapchat account. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves.

   Should she start getting serious or double-down?

   Yes, some of the emails were marked as "classified," but I share this private server with Bill. I thought these were replies to his Craigslist ads.
   

    

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   1. I think she should take some advice from this columnist. As is always the case, yes the right is out to get her but that doesn't mean plenty of quite reasonable people aren't entitled to have reasonable concerns or to just not care for her lawyerly parsing. I'm one of them and my concerns are not that she's done anything criminal but that what one can technically get away with, what can't be legally pinned on a person, isn't my only standard for integrity. I also don't like being dismissed and insulted and lumped together with the righties just because I don't care for her complete refusal, as always with the Clintons, to acknowledge that she bears any responsibility for the fix she's in and that's exactly what she does every time she opens her mouth on this subject. Just because righties have always conspired against her doesn't mean everyone who dares to question her choices is a rightie conspirator. 

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/stop-digging-the-hole-secretary-clinton/2015/08/21/8f40c684-4824-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html

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      1. Just because they're after you, doesn't mean you're not paranoid.

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2. Interesting :  Consider the following results from this nationwide survey of voters. When asked, only 41 percent of those polled find Clinton "honest and trustworthy," while fully 54 percent do not. Among those who do not find Clinton trustworthy, fully 67 percent say they are voting for Clinton's opponent. The results seem to support the contention of political pundits that a candidate who is so widely mistrusted is unlikely to win the presidency. As one analyst puts it, "If you don't fundamentally trust someone or believe they are, at root, honest then how would you justify putting the controls of the country in their hands for at least four years?"

   How indeed? Except that this data comes from 1996 presidential election exit poll – the one taken on the day of the election. That was the election, you will recall, in which the deeply mistrusted candidate Bill Clinton handily defeated his opponent and man of sterling character, World War II veteran Bob Dole, 49.2 percent to 40.7 percent. Nor are the 1996 results a fluke.

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3. she's a pol with all that entails. She actually gives a crap about her fellow human beings, which is far more than any of the dipwad Republicans do. Bue she's a Clinton, and R's will always hate anyone named Clinton, and if we think we saw World Class Stupid from R's with Obama, most especially the obstructionism (that Bennet blames on "both sides" by the way), you guys just wait for what these Hateful 8' do to Hillary.

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   1. BTW, Obama started blaming it on both sides from day one himself. And it pissed me off royally from day one, too. But I'm glad you found a way to work Bennet into an unrelated discussion.  I was beginning to think you might be a little under the weather. 

      Can understand those of you who are so full of foaming at the mouth, hysterical hatred for Bennet but affectionate toward his policy twin, Obama, on likability grounds. But if HRC, every bit as cozy with Big Money and the corporate elite as Bennet is, is likable enough to justify the same wildly divergent attitudes in the face of such a high degree of political and policy similarity, I'm missing something.

      None of this is to defend Bennet. Just to defend making sense. I'm for it. I recognize that we're stuck with the Clinton juggernaut but I don't try to make myself feel better about it by kidding myself about who HRC is and has been all these years.

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4. And while we discuss how big of an A*hole Mike Coffman is, and how much of a Repressed Homosexual is Dr. Chaps, and whether Iran wants to kill the Jews while the Jews kill the Palestinians, that shining city on the hill ain't so shiny any more:

   God, will we never stop hearing about how "white, working-class voters" are open to an expanded welfare state as long as the Democratic Party salves their wounded fee-fees for them.

   In election after election, and in state after state, these same people regularly vote against their own best interests, and they do so animated not by a feeling that "politics has been corrupted and government has failed," but, rather, because they daily eat and drink their fill of the indigestible fried glop that comes at them from their favorite radio and TV hosts, and from the politicians who help serve it up.

   Here in the summer of Donald Trump, Greenfield radically underestimates the political salience of abandoned political wrath. The "reform of government" that too many of these people want is to stop sending their "hard-earned tax dollars" to poor people, and to throw the mooching brown people out of the country and back where they came from. Politics in places like Alabama and Mississippi and (god knows) Kansas has been rendered irretrievably moronic, and that has happened deliberately, and there was nothing that the Democratic party could have done to stop it, except stop being the Democratic party.

   And this is why being a Secret Dem, or a Less-Than-Pyschotic Republican is a failing strategy for "Purple State" D's. 

   Why? Cuz with all the noise about ISIS and Iran and fences and "Teh EPA!" (they're using these because they've clearly lost on gay marriage, weed, abortion) the Republican Party's raison d'etre remains in play, funneling wealth to the rich, sapping the strength of the Middle Class:

   I'm sorry Olsens, but if you sell obscenely overpriced crap for status obsessed suckers and stiff the children who help you, you're not America's little sweethearts anymore. You're Apple.

    

   […]

   Of course, the Olsens are really just a reflection of our post-greed-is-good world, where outrageous income inequality is simply accepted, even by most of the people getting fucked by it — people who should be in the streets, or in unions, or at least in the voting booth, but are not.

   As usual, Americans just find it easier to adapt, and that's how we got what economists now call the "sharing economy." We used to have stores that provided jobs, then commerce went on line. Now we just have apps.

   After taking apart the likes of Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Instacart, Luxe and Etsy, and plugging TRSRDeal.com, who will soon be renting Bill's pants for the low, low price of $5.95 a day, Maher asked how American ended up spending sixty years fighting communism and "end up in a barter economy on Craigslist?"

   All good questions. Maybe someone will think of something by next year. 

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   1. When I clicked on the link, I found Bill Maher and the Olsens reference. Otherwise, I would have been baffled. Why would anyone pay $55K for a handbag? Or work as an intern for the Olsens, for that matter? I get Maher's point here, that we Americans are glorifying income inequality and deserve what we get, (which might be Trump as the R nominee) but from there on I'm lost.

      And how exactly does this mean that the Democratic party is doing it all wrong and should be fitted for a shroud? I think this post is inscrutable because you're quoting from Charles Pierce, who never can be bothered to just say straight out what the heck his point is, because obviously his readers are too dumb to see through his brilliant irony and convoluted sentences.

      But truly, WTF? What does Pierce believe? What do you believe? Are you advocating that Dems go to a straight economic populism message, a la Bernie Sanders? Please clarify.

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5. Here is an article that AC "forgot" to link  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/21/1414152/-IAEA-Nuclear-Expert-Says-AP-Iran-Document-Appears-to-be-FORGED

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   1. Perhaps the Center for Medical Progress; a quintessential far right wing group; had a hand in the forgery. They're experts in producing fraudulent videos. Why not also doing the same with documents?

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      1. While not them, certainly others of a similar mindset.  Reality doesn't suit them, so they must invent their own, and drag down others into their hellish domain.

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6. Good to see that the Clinton campaign is on the lookout for liars trying to entrap them into campaign finance violations.

   O'Keefe's organization, the usual culprits, are asking staffers to do illegal things, and probably videotaping the incident for later editing.

   A Clinton campaign official alleges that the women engaged in several efforts to entrap supporters. In one scheme, described by Clinton staff, a woman attempted to pass a cash donation to Clinton volunteers and interns. In another, a woman approached the campaign on Aug. 19 and said both her parents had donated to Clinton the legal maximum of $2700 each and wanted to funnel an additional donation through their daughter, a violation of federal law. On Aug. 13, a woman claiming to be Canadian approached another Clinton fellow to ask how to falsify an address for a campaign donation.

   In another instance, a woman volunteering with the Clinton campaign on voter registration efforts in Iowa City returned to the campaign’s office in Des Moines and asked whether it was okay that she refuse to register people who don’t support Clinton, the campaign official said. The Clinton campaign maintains that its policy is to register all voters, regardless of their preference in candidates.

   I hope that all Democratic candidates and progressive issue campaigns are taking notes. If someone comes up to your least experienced interns and tries to talk them into doing something shady, say LOUDLY, "That's against the law. Why are you asking me to do it?" Then whip out your own cell phone and do a little reverse videotaping of the perps.

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7. Biden Watch:

   Because Dr. Jill Biden is teaching a full course load in 2016– so the speculators figure that means she won't be on the campaign trail, and therefore Joe is not running. Seems a bit thin to me.

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   1. If I get elected President, will you play intern?

      

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8. mj55: I don’t think Biden is running. I think he’ll throw some bombs at Clinton and endorse Bernie.

   (Since the editor thingy is gone again)… https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/21/joe-biden-democrats-start-party-get-private-money-politics/ – as the reason why he won’t endorse Clinton.

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9. Just testing to see if the editor thing is indeed gone again

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10. Nope. I've still got edit.

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11. Doug Bruce, Republican Hero and Anti-tax Radical has probably done more to bring down property values in Colorado than any single person. If these properties were out in the sticks, Bruce could probably generate a nice little Fox News phony outrage movement. As it is, his status as Slumloard Extraordinaire shall never be challenged.

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