IT’S A LONG LIST: Hillary Clinton’s big ideas for tanking the US economy.
Looks like we’ve got some fundamental transformation yet to go.
Archive for 2016
November 7, 2016
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1278.
BUT OF COURSE: Clinton adviser admits that some donors giving money to the foundation ‘had bad intentions’ in latest Wikileaks dump.
In a freshly Wikileaked exchange, Hillary Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri admits that some Clinton Foundation donors probably did expect some favors for their money.
Writing to aides, including John Podesta, whose emails were hacked, Palmieri discourages having Clinton answer too many questions about foundation donations because ‘[t]here aren’t great answers and in many cases not her place to answer them.’
‘I think it does make sense for her to publicly state that she never did anything at state to help a donor,’ Palmieri said. ‘At least this way she will have taken off the table any notion that there was a quid pro quo even if some donors may have had bad intentions,’ the top aide argued.
The fact that there “aren’t great answers” is exactly why Clinton should be asked for them, repeatedly.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: From Hope And Change To Fear And Loathing:
So this is how Hope & Change ends. With the FBI in turmoil, with surging anti-police violence, with fears of voter fraud and foreign hacking, with a sluggish economy, with a terror warning and with two unpopular presidential candidates tearing at each other like wolves.
Heckuva job, Barack Obama!
The 44th president made history by being elected, but leaves behind a nation on the verge of a crack-up. He flatters himself by insisting his tenure has been a roaring success, but the public mood tells a different story.
Obama promised to unite America, but exits amidst far greater divisions. It is telling that he has stopped portraying himself as a uniter and, like Jimmy Carter, blames the public.
Carter saw malaise, Obama sees bitter clingers, racists and xenophobes. While Obama’s lectures convey disappointment in his fellow Americans, it never occurs to him that he is a disappointment to them.
His failure to come to grips with the polarization, combined with an aggressively liberal agenda spearheaded by executive orders and a politicized bureaucracy, means his successor will inherit a country broken along every fault line imaginable. Voices of discontent and even estrangement are rising among Americans of all stripes and persuasions.
It would have been hard for him to have done more damage if that had been his goal all along.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Virginia Gov. Pardons 60,000 Felons, Enough To Swing Election.
ROGER SIMON ON JULIAN ASSANGE: “The True Hero of 2016.”
STRONG HORSE: Pro-Russian candidate wins first round of Bulgarian election.
Rumen Radev wants to EU to drop its sanctions against Moscow.
THE BULLYING ISN’T A FLAW. THE BULLYING IS THE WHOLE POINT: Show Trials: Progressives are prosecuting conservative dissenters for ‘hate crimes.’ Criminalizing politics not only crushes diversity—it’s just plain wrong.
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COMMUNIST RULE RETURNS TO COMMUNIST CHINA: China Ousts Finance Minister Lou Jiwei in Surprise Reshuffle.
Shortly before Lou Jiwei was appointed China’s finance minister in the spring of 2013, the outspoken Communist Party veteran expressed a wish to Premier Li Keqiang: to let him serve his full five-year term.
Mr. Lou’s pitch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, was that he had a plan to overhaul the country’s creaky fiscal system and tax code and needed time to carry it out. The chat with Mr. Li helped launch him as the highest-profile finance minister China has had in years and a voice for market-oriented changes in China.
On Monday, with nearly two more years to go before his term ends, the 65-year-old Mr. Lou was unexpectedly removed from his position and replaced by a relatively low-profile bureaucrat.
President Xi Jinping is apparently trying to make himself into China’s most powerful leader since Mao.
2016, MAN: “Trump faced a fusillade of angry attacks from Democrats after he refused to say whether he’d accept the outcome if he loses, but the poll shows that Clinton voters are actually slightly more adamant they won’t accept the election results if the GOP businessman wins. Twenty-two percent of Clinton voters indicated they won’t accept a Trump win, while 20 percent of Trump voters said they won’t accept a Clinton victory.”
TALKING POINT REACHED: IT WAS NECESSARY FOR THE ALREADY NON-OBJECTIVE MSM TO DITCH OBJECTIVITY TO DEFEAT TRUMP:
Saturday’s New York Times anti-Trump roundup included an ironic compliment to the Trump campaign, which has freed journalists to label (Republican) politicians as liars and racists. Times editorial board member Brent Staples perversely celebrated “The Election That Obliterated Euphemisms.” The text box: “Donald Trump made it impossible to avoid the word ‘racist.’” Staples certainly didn’t.
Staples is following the path of colleague Jim Rutenberg’s notorious August 8 front-page opinion, “The Challenge Trump Poses to Objectivity,” which argued that treating Trump like a racist demagogue was a basic journalistic duty.
Ahh, the same media that concluded in 2012 that words such as “golf,” and “Chicago” were racist. The same newspaper whose columnist tweeted that year, “Stick that in your magic underwear,” to the Republican nominee. The same newspaper whose then-ombudsman wrote way back in 2004, “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”
But this year was totally different from all of the previous election years. Until 2020, when (if Trump loses tomorrow) whoever the Republican nominee is, he’ll be considered a reactionary troglodyte compared to Trump’s nuanced views on abortion, gay rights, etc.
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
CROOKED HILLARY: Wikileaks releases an internal campaign document examining “her vulnerabilities.”
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “disregarded ethics guidelines” to raise more than $72 million for the U.S. Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Shanghai in 2010, taking money from big-name contributors who later “received favorable treatment” from her State Department and also contributed to her namesake foundation, according to a 2015 internal Clinton research document revealed Sunday by WikiLeaks.
“Her vulnerabilities” as a candidate will be vulnerabilities if she’s president. Except they’ll become national vulnerabilities.
RIP: Janet Reno, first female U.S. attorney general, dies at 78.
She’ll also be remembered for taking “full responsibility” for the Waco massacre, but then keeping her job anyway.
OBAMA’S “WAR OF NECESSITY.” Afghan Governor pleads for Australian help as soldiers defect to Taliban.
FASTER, PLEASE: Disney’s stock dips following ESPN’s big subscription loss.
ESPN’s management decided they would rather be MSNBC with somewhat more interesting visuals. So they shouldn’t be too surprised that their ratings are moving into MSNBC territory. Or as Iowahawk would say:
POLITICO: How the Harry Reid Machine May Have Killed Trump’s Chances.
Harry Reid built this. After two years of boosting voter registration among key Democratic demographics, the retiring Senate minority leader has brought turnout among Hispanics in the state to record levels. In doing so, he’s almost surely delivered the state for Hillary Clinton—and possibly with it the presidential race (Trump has only the narrowest path to 270 electoral votes without Nevada). The reality of this election is that if Clinton wins, especially if she ends up needing Nevada, it’s not a stretch to declare that Reid was the single most important person in her victory.
…
A microcosm of the country, with its melting pot population and growing Latino voting bloc, Nevada signaled with its early voting turnout and record Hispanic participation that Trump has proven a better turnout driver of that demographic than anyone could have imagined—and for all the wrong reasons. It is ironic now to recall the GOP strategists behind that Republican National Committee autopsy in 2012, whose main exhortation was to reach out to minority voters lest another election be lost. As if in answer to that, GOP primary voters nominated the antithesis of its prescription.
Reid would be up for reelection this year, but opted to retire instead. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture him with a comfy post-Senate lifestyle, far beyond anything he’s actually produced — other than votes.
JOEL KOTKIN: Hillary’s Dilemma:
Can the party of oligarchy also be the party of the people? Besides fending off the never-ending taint of corruption, which could weaken the extent of her “mandate,” this may prove the central challenge of a Hillary Clinton regime.
No candidate in recent memory — at least, not since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 — has enjoyed more universal support from the rich, powerful and well-connected. They have provided her with “a towering cash advantage,” as a recent Bloomberg column described it, over her opponent. By one estimate, she is getting funds from 20 times as many billionaires as Trump.
Yet, at the same time, Clinton faces a challenge from strident, and often anti-business, populists who now control much of the party base. The presidency may soon belong to Hillary, but its heart belongs to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
These trends will pose a difficult, but not necessarily insurmountable, challenge. The Peronist Kirschners, Nestor and Christina, ruinously dominated Argentina’s politics for 12 years by providing lavish favors for business supporters while they expanded the country’s welfare state.
It’s an old formula, and it always ends badly for the nation, but the oligarchs often do okay.
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Single Mother Facing Prison for Selling Homemade Mexican Dish to Undercover Cop.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL ROT THAT INFESTS ACADEMIA:
I find it hard to believe that people are willing to be so vengeful over a single instance of bad judgment. Whatever happened to mercy and forgiveness? And what about our shared interest in living in a culture where people aren’t fearful that their lives could be ruined if they said one thing wrong — even when they were trying to say something quite bland (like why can’t we all get along)?
By the way, the professor, Nancy Shurtz, was not just a white person dressing up as a black person, she was also a woman dressing as a man, and a law professor dressing as a doctor. Why is the one crossover an outrage when the other 2 are not? How about some actual intellectual exploration of the subject of inhabiting alternate identities?
It’s Gleischschaltung all the way, even when you’re not sure what you actually believe in. . . .
Related: “Now, I’m not dumb enough to go there. And my own politics are very strong — I’m a left communist. But I think that in fact, the crazier and crazier that this left gets, this version of the left, the more the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off plus getting more pissed. Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point.”
Plus: “That is, he’s a lefty, criticizing lefties, but he wanted to disguise himself as a righty. Talk about costumes! When do we get to inhabit someone else’s identity?” When it sends the right political message, and no other time, because what is not mandatory is forbidden.
IF TRUMP WINS, THIS WILL BE WHY:
“I was working back home at the local coffee shop over the summer and a man in his 50s came into the shop and, while he was waiting for his cappuccino, said to me out of the blue, ‘If you are planning to vote for Trump, don’t expect me to pay for my drink.’
“Nothing I said or did should have prompted him to say that to me, yet he felt he was entitled to do that. That is why I have given up Facebook and Twitter and everything else. People are like that online all of the time.”
Yes, yes they are.
SO THE CYNICAL TAKE ON COMEY’S ACTIONS IS THAT HE STALLED AN INTERNAL REVOLT BY HIS STATEMENT LAST WEEK, and now that it’s too late for any of the upset staffers to leak anything that will affect the election, he’s undone it.
Is that too cynical? It’s 2016.
CNN: OBAMACARE STINKS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS, YOU KNOW.
I’m old enough to remember back in 2009, when, acting as cheerleaders for the president’s policies, CNN was singing a much happier tune about Obamacare. Literally.