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Month: October 2016

A hall of mirrors

A hall of mirrors

by digby

This quote from a former Wikileaks employee from a couple of years back struck me. He quit the organization over ethical concerns and they fought him back. He writes:

Seeing yourself portrayed by WikiLeaks is like walking through a circus hall of mirrors: there’s just enough resemblance for you to recognize yourself, but you’re seriously distorted—and usually in a way that makes you look grotesque.

I have no idea what’s going on with them at the moment, but they are openly taking a partisan position in the election on behalf of Donald Trump even though Trump is an authoritarian opposed to everything they used to stand for. No one who works for Trump in the name of civil liberties can be trusted.

I will treat them the same way I treat Breitbart and the Daily Caller going forward: as a propaganda outfit. I don’t know on whose behalf they are propagandizing but their support for Trump makes it clear that it’s not an entity that shares my values.

*And for the record, I do not conflate Edward Snowden with Wikileaks. Snowden is a whistleblower not a partisan. I’ve seen no evidence that he’s interested in playing the kind of games Wikileaks is playing.  I doubt he’s much enamored of either candidate since Trump is a monster and Clinton is an establishment politician who is unlikely to be any more sympathetic to his situation than President Obama. One might hope that the media’s obsession with her correspondence and the hacking of her campaign emails would open up her perceptions a bit on the necessity to protect privacy from both hackers and the government but it will be surprising. Government officials are almost unanimously oriented toward protecting the intelligence communities’ prerogatives.

Buzzfeed has an updated version of this story by the same person. yikes.

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Politics and Reality Radio with Joshua Holland: A Debate With Kshama Sawant, HRC vs Trump

Politics and Reality Radio with Joshua Holland: A Debate With Kshama Sawant: Is a Vote for Jill Stein Wasted?

by Joshua Holland

This week, we start off with a debate between Joshua Holland and Seattle City Councillor Kshama Sawant about whether a vote for Jill Stein is an investment in breaking the two-party system in the future (Sawant) or a waste of time for ad ineffective and self-marginalizing third party (Holland). The debate was produced by KUOW public radio in Seattle, which was kind enough to offer us permission to include it in this week’s show.

Central to Sawant’s argument is that efforts to push Dems to the left have been fruitless. So our second guest gives this week’s show a theme of sorts.

We’re joined by Kaitlin Sweeney, press secretary for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group that’s dedicated to promoting the idea of the Warren/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. And Sweeney gives us a recap of the third and final presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Playlist:
A-Punk: “Vampire Weekend”
U2: “In a Little While”
Eric Clapton: “Wonderful Tonight”

Waterboarded by the issues

Waterboarded by the issues

by digby

Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said early Sunday that Donald Trump has been “waterboarded” in this presidential campaign.

“He’s been waterboarded by these issues,” Brewer, a top Trump surrogate, told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“It’s seems like it’s really been kind of somewhat of a put-up oppression of Donald Trump from all of these people lining up. It’s just unbelievable.”

I don’t know what she was saying since it’s gibberish. But I do know that Donald Trump says he loves waterboarding and thinks it’s great:

Now Donald Trump is probably going to fade away and people are going to want to forget that he was a GOP nominee for president. But NEVER FORGET how many millions of people voted for that sadistic fascist — listen to their cheers when he said he loves torture. These people live among us.

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When she heard

When she heard

by digby

The moment lifelong Cubs fan Hillary Clinton heard they’re going to the World Series for the first time since 1945:

Turnout, turnout, turnout by @BloggersRUs

Turnout, turnout, turnout
by Tom Sullivan

Democrats prospects for winning the Senate improved markedly in recent days, according to Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight:

Thanks to big shifts in several key races, Democrats now have a 73 percent chance of winning the Senate, according to the FiveThirtyEight polls-plus forecast, and a 72 percent chance according to polls-only. Both those numbers are up by more than 15 percentage points from last week, when the polls-plus model gave them a 56 percent chance and the polls-only model 54 percent.

That report is a couple of days old. That has slipped to 69 percent since then.

Real Clear Politics predicts Democrats will pick up Indiana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Illinois for a 50-50 tie. In Pennsylvania, Democrat Katie McGinty holds a narrow lead in FiveThirtyEight’s rankings.

Eric Levitz has a rundown on the current state of competitive seats at New York magazine. Regarding North Carolina, he writes,”incumbent Republican Richard Burr retains an advantage over Democratic challenger Deborah Ross. But Ross is gaining ground. And early voting in the Tarheel State suggests Republican turnout may be down significantly from where it was in 2012.”

More about North Carolina in a minute. Levitz concludes, unsurprisingly:

Ultimately, turnout could be the decisive factor in all of these races. The central hope of every anxious GOP operative is that, eventually, Trump’s collapse will actually redound to the benefit of down-ballot Republicans. The idea being that Americans will vote for a check on President Clinton, out of a misguided belief that divided government would produce compromise, instead of dysfunctional gridlock.

Early voting commenced in North Carolina on Thursday. Early numbers indicate no “enthusiasm gap.” There were long lines at voting stations across the state:

Dr. Michael Bitzer at Old North State blog summarizes the first two days of voting:

Demographic and party shifts are changing how the state votes. A majority of registered voters indicate they were born outside the state. Bitzer writes:

In comparison to four years ago, the total number of absentee ballots (both mail-in and in-person) is down about 3 percent (501,651 compared to 2012’s cumulative total of 513,188 on the same day out from Election Day), but there are significant shifts in party registration numbers within those totals.

A reporter from Die Welt asked me yesterday about Trump’s field game. He asked me why I laughed. Here’s why:

The Democrats have 27 field offices in North Carolina compared with 11 for the Republicans, according to the FiveThirtyEight political blog and by my own count. (Nationally, the Democrats have 489 field offices while the Republicans have 207 offices.)

[…]

The Democrats also seem to have far more staff operatives in the state, with staff even working in such small but Democratic-leaning areas as Bertie County in the northeast. Democrats say there are more than 150 staffers in the state with some 40,000 volunteers.

“This is a ground game that is as robust as we have seen since 2008,” said Brad Crone, a veteran Democratic consultant. “There is no comparison between what the Democrats have done with their field plan and what the Republicans have done.”

Deborah Ross, down 2.8 points to incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Burr in the RCP Average, will need that turnout advantage to pull out a win in North Carolina on Election Day. No matter how favorable the early voting numbers look for Democrats, no matter how it appears they have run up the score, one always has to remember Republicans bat last.

Anecdotally, the GOP here is in disarray. One of the drivers who resupplies Democratic poll greeters here throughout the day reported speaking briefly with a GOP volunteer outside an early voting site on Saturday. The man said he was there for a couple of hours and that was all for this cycle. It was his only shift. Our driver told him he was scheduled for four hours, and then for several other days during early voting.

“That sounds like a lot of work,” the Republican volunteer said.

As Yoda might say, “That is why you fail.”

He’s always been a jerk

He’s always been a jerk

by digby

You remember this from the last debate, when he angrily tore up his notes at the end ….

He’s prone to such tantrums:

If you’ve seen Home Alone 2 or The Little Rascals, you already know that Donald Trump used to get a kick out of playing himself in movies. According to a new Newsmax report, producers in the entertainment industry described him as someone who “wasn’t a hard get” because he would be in any movie as long as he could highlight his fame and wealth. To that end, they also described him as “incredibly pompous.”

One of the most interesting parts of the Newsmax report is the story of Trump’s appearance alongside then-wife Marla Maples on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The article says this:

According to a member of the crew—who spoke on condition of anonymity because she fears jeopardizing her current job—Trump threw a small tantrum backstage. He was holding a paper-clipped stack of pages with his lines when he became annoyed about something. He motioned as if to hand them off to Maples and, when she reached for them, threw them all over the floor so the pages went flying.

Maples was reportedly extremely apologetic for her husband’s behavior and told Fresh Prince production staff not to worry about helping her clean the mess. No one could remember exactly what set Trump off, but executive producer Gary H. Miller was able to recall that Trump was worried his lines weren’t funny enough.

“I would never think of giving you any advice about real estate, because I don’t know about real estate,” he said he told the mogul. “But I do know comedy—and trust me, you’ll get a laugh.”

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A real email scandal

A real email scandal

by digby
This is a Newsweek story from a month or so ago that you might want to keep handy when some rightwinger starts screaming about emails:

For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

President Bush and Former American Vice President Dick Cheney in the Presidential Limousine. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.

The media paid some attention to the Bush email chicanery but spent considerably less ink and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton’s digital communications in the past 18 months. According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.

In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which mandated that all presidential and vice presidential records created after January 20, 1981, be preserved and that the public, not the president, owned the records. The following year, the Reagan administration installed the White House’s rudimentary first email system.

Despite the PRA, neither the Reagan nor the George H.W. Bush administration maintained email records, even as the number of White House emails began growing exponentially. (The Bush administration would produce around 200 million.) In 1989, a federal lawsuit to force the White House to comply with the PRA was filed by several groups, including the National Security Archive, which at the time was mostly interested in unearthing the secret history of the Cold War. The suit sparked a last-minute court order, issued in the waning hours of the first Bush presidency, that prevented 6,000 White House email backup tapes from being erased.

When Bill Clinton moved into the White House, his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort to uphold a side deal he’d cut with the National Archives and Records Administration to allow him to treat his White House emails as personal. At the time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White House communications director—defended the resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn’t want subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails.

The Clinton White House eventually settled the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—even invited members of the National Security Archive into the White House to demonstrate how the new system worked. If anyone tried to delete an email, a message would pop up on screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA.

“We were happy with that,” recalls Blanton, who edited a book on the Reagan-Bush email evasion, White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Messages the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy.

Eight years later, in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.

The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.

Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney’s office were in the administration’s system but he couldn’t get them.

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney listens as former President George W. Bush makes remarks about the U.S. defense budget after meeting with military leaders at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., November 29, 2007. Larry Downing/Reuters

The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, “They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush’s assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”

In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months’ worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emailsdeleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.

Eventually, the Bush White House admitted it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then, in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s administration—the White House said it found 22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005, that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache was given to the National Archives, and it and other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009, to settle theirlawsuit. But the emails have not yet been made available to the public.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating on a different track but having no more luck. In a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys. The penalties for contempt are fines and possible jail time, but no punishment was ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals court stayed the Senate’s ruling in October 2008, while the White House appealed. Rove’s lawyer claimed Rove did not “intentionally delete” any emails but was only conducting “the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly,” according to the Associated Press.

By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration basically ran out the clock. And neither the Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter.

The committee’s final report on the matter was blunt: “[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened. The reasons given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, and the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort.”

At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency on the White House’s part, butThe Washington Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House explanation that the emails could have been lost due to flawed IT systems.

The mystery of what was in the missing Bush emails and why they went missing is still years away from being solved—if ever. The National Archives now has 220 million emails from the Bush White House, and there is a long backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests already. But not all of the emails will be available to the public until 2021, when the presidential security restrictions elapse. Even then, with currently available archiving and sorting methods, researchers still have years of work to figure out whether Cheney deleted days’ worth of emails around the time of the WMD propaganda campaign that led to war, Blanton says.

“To your question of what’s in there—we don’t know,” he says. “There was not a commitment at the top for saving it all. Now was that resistance motivated by political reasons? Or was it ‘We gotta save money’?”

Former U.S. President George W. Bush winks to a member of the audience before he delivers the final State of the Union address of his presidency at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 28, 2008. Tim Sloan/Reuters

Like Leahy, Blanton has doubts that the emails were ever truly “lost,” given that every email exists in two places, with the sender and with the recipient. But unlike watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has been relentless about forcing the State Department to publicly release Hillary Clinton’s emails, Blanton and his fellow researchers have decided not to press their fight for the release of the Bush emails.

Blanton says he has no idea whether the Bush email record will be found intact after 2021, when his group will be allowed to do a systematic search and recovery process in the National Archives. “Did they find all of them? We don’t know,” he says. “Our hope is that by that time, the government and the National Archives will have much better technology and tools with which to sift and sort that kind of volume.”

Blanton says he’s not expecting that kind of upgrade, though. “Their entire budget is less than the cost of a single Marine One helicopter,” he says. “It’s an underfunded orphan.”

Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A source involved with the stymied congressional investigation recalled the period as “an intense time,” but the Obama administration didn’t encourage any follow-up, devoting its political capital to dealing with the crashing economy rather than investigating the murky doings that took place under his predecessor. Since then, no major media outlet has devoted significant—or, really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly, the Bush administration was hiding (or losing).

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Trump’s Gettysburg disaster

Trump’s Gettysburg disaster

by digby

It was bad, very bad. This lede from the Washington Post says it all:

Donald Trump traveled Saturday to the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, where he suggested that the United States is nearly as divided now as it was then. But instead of laying out his vision for uniting the country, as President Abraham Lincoln once did here, Trump declared that the system is rigged against him, that election results cannot be trusted, that Hillary Clinton should have been barred from running for president, that the media is “corrupt” and that he will sue all of the women who have accused him of sexual assault.

He actually called it “hollowed ground.”

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Bannon-Ryan cage match

Bannon-Ryan cage match

by digby

I’ve been posting right wing emails excoriating Paul Ryan for well over a year now. They hate him. For reasons of their own, the Village refuses to see this and they believe dreamboat Ryan is a “unifier” who can bring everyone together. Nah guh happen:

A right-wing website closely tied to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is taking its war against House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to new levels.

Breitbart News on Saturday published as its lead story an article written by Julia Hahn, headlined: “He’s with her: Inside Paul Ryan’s months-long campaign to elect Hillary Clinton president.”

Accompanying the story is an image of a grinning Ryan beside the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign slogan, “I’m with her.”

The piece is brutal even by the standards of Breitbart’s proudly scorched-earth approach to journalism, asserting that Ryan “leads the pro-Islamic migration wing of the Republican party.”

The 2,800-word attack on Ryan comes amid a concerted strategy by the pro-Trump nationalist wing of the GOP to ensure Ryan isn’t re-elected Speaker in January.

Influential Fox News host Sean Hannity — a major Trump booster — is leading the charge against Ryan, calling him a “saboteur.” Members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus held a conference call last week in which they discussed challenging Ryan’s leadership role.

The Breitbart piece, which claims that the Speaker has been conspiring for months to “sabotage” Trump, is straight from the playbook of Stephen Bannon, the Breitbart chairman who last month became CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign.

As The Hill revealed earlier this month, Bannon has given private orders to Breitbart’s editorial staff to destroy Ryan. An internal email obtained by The Hill showed Bannon telling senior staff in December 2015 that the “long game” for the news site was for the Speaker to be “gone” by the spring.

This latest anti-Ryan story gives further insight into the Bannon-Trump worldview.

It accuses Ryan and Clinton of being essentially the same person, and of both wanting to destroy the very concept of America as a nation state. This argument neatly dovetails with the language Trump is using in his stump speeches and media interviews.

In an extraordinary situation, the GOP presidential nominee is now using his campaign megaphone to attack not only Clinton, but the highest-ranking elected official in his own party. He’s ignored the counsel of GOP establishment figures and is advancing the
view that a cabal of “globalist” elitists — which includes Ryan, Clinton and international bankers — are undermining American sovereignty by pushing for open borders in trade and immigration.

This war within the GOP is already very, very ugly. And my bet is that rather than a Trump trouncing calming the waters, it’s going to get uglier. When you have 40 million or so people voting for a proto-fascist it’s not likely to simply fade away. They want the party.

Trumpie’s don’t give a damn about Ayn Rand. They have other fish to fry.

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Highlights of the roast

Highlights of the roast

by digby

I’d guess some of you didn’t catch the Al Smith dinner — or only caught the Trump “jokes” that crash landed.  Here are a few of Clinton’s jokes:

My personal favorite:

Gotta get that money up front.

The tradition at the dinner is to give an inspiring closing. Trump didn’t bother. This is Clinton’s:

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