Hillary Clinton: I Used to Love Her

[broncofan]

Small anecdote: A friend of mine has been on disability for about ten years. His physical condition finally improved so that he can work. He lives in California where the minimum wage passed. He has a high school degree and very little work experience. We started calculating what he can buy on $15 an hour.....he was initially very excited until he started calculation all of his expenses and realized he just wasn't under water anymore. These are not great times and a living wage is not elevating people to the middle class but it's a small mercy.

But I guess my point is that you're right. It's hard for something like that to excite people enough on election day. You calculate the difference between the current minimum wage and the living wage and you can take care of things a little better but I can understand why people would look at these programs and say "fuck it, I'll go all in with orange snowcone head. Maybe he can make America great".

[trish]

The storyline is that the current split in U.S. politics is not Right vs Left, but uneducated, labor whose economic status as been declining vs educated, technicians and professionals who economic status is climbing. Trump supporters are drawing from the first group regardless of prior political affiliation.

I doubt the latter class is being accurately characterized. Silicon Valley has few, if any unions. They’ve adopted the practice of hiring visiting technicians (typically from India) with work visas and them ‘letting them go’ instead of promoting them, and hiring another batch of technicians on work visas. The earlier batch then has to go home because they lost jobs and with them their visas. Teacher’s unions are under attack in every state of the union, especially in states with business aligned governors (e.g. Walker in Wisconsin and Rauner in Illinois) who believe the key to balancing the budget is to cutback state revenues, cutback state funding for schools, for universities, for the elderly and those who are dependent on social services, for infrastructure and to give every break imaginable to the Walmarts of the world. (Btw, Rauner hasn’t gotten a budget passed in nearly a year!) The breaking of unions started with Ronald Reagan and their sad demise has been steady ever since, bringing in the wake of their collapse the economic decline of the blue collar worker who once made up more than half of our middle class. With nearly all of the private labor unions gone, attention has turned to destroying those of government workers. When those unions are gone I not sure who will be left who can even afford to shop at Walmart or eat at MacDonald’s.

Meanwhile multibillionaire and New Jersey resident David Tepper is so wealthy the State of New Jersey is in a tizzy because he’s moving to Florida. Because one man is moving to Florida the State will loose hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue (even though - not counting loopholes - Tepper is paying at most 8.97%. ( http://nyti.ms/1O3FxkN ).

I’m not an adopter of the new storyline, myself. Nor have I adopted Bernie’s view of our current political divide. I still tend to see it as a theoretical split. The Right believes in supply side economics and the Left is still somewhat Keynesian. Since Reagan, government policy leaned heavily supply-side. The success of the supply-siders has (inadvertently - I trust) decimated the blue-collar half of the middle class. They’re feeling disenfranchised and Trump is promising something shiny and new: an old con: bait and switch. ( http://nyti.ms/1R5at59 )

Besides the presidency and economics being up for grabs, there’s so much more. The Supreme Court has been making some very serious mistakes on social and political issues. They’re eating away at women’s rights and with Citizen’s United they gave away the entire legislative branch of government to anyone with the highest bid. Then there’s the Middle East. Does anyone really think the solution to ISIS is carpet bombing? - I mean besides Cruz...and Carly...and Trump (who wavers between the nuclear option and isolationism!) ...and the whole clown car of Republican losers?. Etc. etc.

[fred41]

Small anecdote: A friend of mine has been on disability for about ten years. His physical condition finally improved so that he can work. He lives in California where the minimum wage passed. He has a high school degree and very little work experience. We started calculating what he can buy on $15 an hour.....he was initially very excited until he started calculation all of his expenses and realized he just wasn't under water anymore. These are not great times and a living wage is not elevating people to the middle class but it's a small mercy.

To be fair though...$15 dollars would probably go a lot further in a state that isn't California or NY. ..and you're right - Mrs. Clinton seems like a safe choice. Of all the candidates left in the octagon, she's the middle of the road, establishment candidate. The Right will call her too liberal, but there's nothing I can see too actually support that...and she certainly now has enough of a track record that you can look up. If anything, she seems more to the right than the President...and probably is as far as foreign policy goes.
As I've mentioned before, I usually vote Republican...but I can't vote for Trump. He's just too silly to me....and I can't stand Ted Cruz (and apparently neither can ANY of his co-workers http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/28/john-boehner-ted-cruz/?_r=0) Hell, even satanists don't like him...lol http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/satan...ry?id=38785064. John Katich might've been tolerable...but it ain't happening and Trump being in the mix knocked out any true establishment candidate out of the republican ranks a long time ago.

[trish]

Of Trump and Cruz, Kasich is the more sane and likable. But he's way to far right for my tastes. This year he work to defund Planned Parenthood in Ohio and succeeded.

[Stavros]

The media war continues with a video called Hillary Clinton lying for 13 minutes straight...
It then appears that most of the video does not show Mrs Clinton lying, but changing her opinion over the years on policy issues such as same-sex marriage and the North America Free Trade Agreement. Surely there has to be some sort of warning attached to this material if in fact the video does not show Mrs Clinton telling outright lies, even if one expects a politician to play fast and loose with the truth. I also wonder why, after 11 hours of testimony before the House Committee on Benghazi which had print-outs of those famous emails, nothing has been found that proves Mrs Clinton broke the law. It may be the case that the FBI is still investigating but the record on indictments for the Clintons over the last 25 years is not good and I don't think it is because the Bilderberg Group or the Illuminati or the Rothschilds are pulling strings in the background. And anyway, an indictment is not a guilty verdict.

In 1982 I might have said 'Vote Labour!' and in 2010 'Don't Vote Labour!' I was not lying, I just changed my mind.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7040551.html

[trish]

In attack politics never using "changed her mind," instead use "flip-flopped". Never use "intransigent," instead use "pigheaded." When you have to dispute the truth call it a "conspiracy of lies". When your opponent changes her mind say you "caught her in a lie." Dems the rules. If everyone followed them, then everything will actually be a conspiracy of lies.

[fred41]

haven't heard this old favorite used yet.

[Stavros]

Trivial, but factual -I have never eaten a waffle. Not even sure what they are.

[Stavros]

So the FBI is not going to indict Mrs Clinton and that comes as no real surprise. Although the FBI says that
of the 30,000 emails returned to the state department, 110 emails in 52 chains were determined to contain classified information at the time they were sent. Eight of those chains contained information that was top secret at the time, 36 chains contained secret information at the time, and eight contained confidential information, the lowest level of classification...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-investigation

For those who are interested, Wikileaks has published thousands of the Clinton emails -not, as far as I am aware, any of the classified emails- and I spent around 2 hours today sifting through them using search terms mostly related to UK politics, such as 'Tony Blair', 'Peter Mandelson', 'Liam Fox' and I also put in 'Paul Ryan'. The Wikileaks exposure merely reveals what a curse email might be for anyone in a large organisation. Most consist of chains of emails containing the same information and most of them are print outs of news reports from Reuters, the Washington Post and so on, all material that is in the public domain. Most of the emails I saw were from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton and of little interest other than gossip about Mandelson ('a sectarian in a sect of one, himself'), Gordon Brown (both loathed) and Tony Blair (clearly a friend) and it is Mrs Clinton who is most notable by her absence as I could only find two direct comments in an email from her, one regarding a minor dispute over a statue of Ronald Reagan erected in the grounds of the US Embassy in London, the other an email to Cherie Blair saying how sorry she was to have missed her when the latter was in DC. or New York or wherever it was. There might be something juicy somewhere, but my guess is we would know about it by now.
The emails re Paul Ryan were of little importance other than that he was not invited to breakfast with Mrs Clinton as was also the case with John Boehner, presumably because wet croissants are not what people want for breakfast.

I think the problem is one of 'entitlement'. Mrs Clinton has been the wife of the Governor of Arkansas, 'First Lady' of the USA, Secretary of State -I doubt she has ironed Bill's shirts for 40 years, I doubt she needs to get the A train to travel up town or wait for the Bus in Chappaqua (if they have buses) to get her to the train station. The idea she is going to take an intense interest in an email server is I thnk a weak idea as I suspect she regards these things being done for her by others who know what they are doing, just as a man as rich as Donald Trump has probably forgotten what it is really like to queue for a coffee in Starbucks or work for 12 hours in a bakery for less than he spends on a pair of shoes, or socks for that matter.

Anyway if you want to sift through them the 50, 547 emails are here-
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/

[hippifried]

Hey Stavros:
You left out her stint in the Senate.
At least with Hillary, nobody can whine later that they didn't know what they were getting. You know... The way all the so called "progressives" (still don't know what that means) did when President Obama wouldn't jump through their hoops and carry out their agenda. With everybody else, especially Donald Trump, predicting what they might do in the White House is a crapshoot at best.

Anyway... You need to get some waffles before the Flems shut down the Chunnel & won't let you into Belgium.