Let's face it, this country can't function normally with Don the Con in the White House. Therefore, we should rename the country, temporarily. Please make suggestions in this thread. I for one will be much more at peace if Donald is the president of the Imperial Kingdom of North America, than if he is POTUS.

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https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/745765814557638656

By kos

Tuesday Jun 21, 2016 · 2:14 PM EST

?1466532614
Clinton stuck to her populist themes while speaking today in Columbus, Ohio.

I know, I know, some of you “don’t trust her,” but given opportunities to backtrack from primary promises, Hillary Clinton is actually doing the opposite—she’s doubling down. Some choice bits from her speech today:

I believe we can compete and win in the global economy. And reject any agreements like the partnership that don't meet my high bar for rising wages.

“The partnership” is obviously TPP. Clinton took too long during campaign season to come out against it (a factor in Bernie Sanders’ rise, I believe). I still believe it had more to do with trying not to embarrass the president than any real support for the trade deal, but whether cynical or not, her new position has held.

(Trump) has no ideas how to strengthen medicare or expand social security and his tax plan.

The campaign to expand Social Security appeared to be a pipe dream when a handful of bloggers (really, Atrios) started pushing it four years ago. It was an idea that was anathema to the Third Way crowd as recently as late 2015. And yet here we are, barely six months later, with our “establishment” presidential nominee proudly supporting it.

Continued at DailyKos

Former agents blast writer Gary Byrne for having 'underlying motives.'

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

06/21/16 05:22 AM EDT

The author of a new tell-all book about Hillary Clinton could never have seen any of what he claims — he was too low-ranking — say several high-level members of Secret Service presidential details, including the president of the Association of Former Agents of the United States Secret Service.

On Tuesday, AFAUSSS, which is strictly nonpartisan, is set to release a statement blasting Gary Byrne author of “Crisis in Character,” saying members “strongly denounce” the book, which they add has made security harder by eroding the trust between agents and the people they protect.

“There is no place for any self-moralizing narratives, particularly those with an underlying motive,” reads the statement from the group’s board of directors, which says Byrne has politics and profit on his mind.

AFAUSSS rarely issues public statements of any kind.

snip---------------

People familiar with West Wing security laugh at the idea that Byrne or any uniformed officer ever would have walked in on Bill Clinton anywhere, whether in a meeting or, as a New York Post article over the weekend claims, in the middle of a make-out session in the Map Room with the late daughter of former Vice President Walter Mondale. The Secret Service presidential detail would have stopped him. (That affair was a well-worn rumor during the Clinton years, though strongly denied by Eleanor Mondale, who died of brain cancer in 2011.)

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-bill-clinton-secret-service-224578#ixzz4CEkxjCgU
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The media are fond of reminding us that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both have high unfavorable ratings. However, the reasons for those unfavorables couldn’t be more different – not to mention that Donald’s are “setting modern records for political toxicity.”

By BNR Team
June 17, 2016

Much breathless discussion has been had among members of the national media about the high unfavorable numbers attached to both major-party presidential candidates. But one of these things is not like the other.

For one, Hillary’s high unfavorables are, as explained by Peter Daou, “the result of a billionaire-funded conservative effort to destroy her image.” For decades, she has been subjected to a relentless campaign of character assaults and rank sexism, until demonstrably false narratives about her get repeated – even and especially by journalists ostensibly reporting only facts – as though they were true.

--------snip

Greg Sargent took a look at an analysis of Donald’s “historically high” unfavorables and notes: “While Hillary Clinton is also disliked, there is just no comparison to Trump.”


--------snip

Conversely, most of the people who don’t like Donald can articulate precisely why without hesitation. There’s no invocation of some hazy unease based on something they might have heard once upon a time. It’s a concrete list of objections, a litany recounting any number of his myriad failings.

And this despite the fact that over the past year, the media have been tipping the scales in his favor.

Full Article at BNR

Another great piece by Prof. Krugman.

The Center for Turkish Studies at the Middle East Institute (MEI) and the Conflict Management Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) were pleased to host Charles Lister, Ahmet Sait Yayla, and Anne Speckhard in a discussion about why people take up arms with the Islamic State (ISIS).

Its declaration of a caliphate and its glorification of violence in pursuit of its aims have drawn adherents across the socioeconomic spectrum, from the United States and Europe to the Islamic world. Who are the people being recruited as ISIS militants, and why do they join? This expert panel examined the allure of ISIS in Europe, Turkey, and the Arab world and effective strategies to stem its growth.
http://www.mei.edu/events/recruiting-jihad-allure-isis
Event Details
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Johns Hopkins SAIS- Rome Auditorium

Hillary Clinton and her allies are hoping to cut into Donald Trump’s numbers among white voters by appealing to those with college degrees, women in particular. | AP Photo



If the blue wall holds, she needs only one swing state to win the White House.

By Shane Goldmacher and Annie Karni

06/19/16 07:34 AM EDT

Updated 06/19/16 09:56 AM EDT

Hillary Clinton’s super PAC has begun spending $145 million on ads in eight states through November — and there’s a realistic path for her to win the White House even if she carries only one of them.

It’s a sign of how strongly tilted the Electoral College map is in Clinton’s favor, as she begins a general election campaign building upon the demographic and geographic coalition that President Obama rode to two electoral landslides. Donald Trump, in contrast, must dramatically reimagine and redraw the political landscape to capture the presidency.

Rather than expand the 2012 map in any significant way, the Clinton campaign and its allies want to replicate it. They are obsessed with choking off Trump’s narrower path, hoping to strike a decisive victory in Florida — multiple Clinton officials declared there is nearly no path for Trump without it — while aggressively defending the Democratic-leaning states in the industrial Midwest that Trump has talked most about flipping — most importantly, Pennsylvania. Campaign officials say they think Clinton can turn out more female voters than Obama did. But they see one surrogate in particular as key to recreating the Obama coalition: President Barack Obama himself.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-clinton-path-victory-224228#ixzz4C377MLZn
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Election presents choice they had hoped to avoid: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump



By Peter Nicholas
June 19, 2016 5:30 a.m. ET
1 COMMENTS

CHICAGO—With visions of what-might-have-been, the liberal activists behind Bernie Sanders’s campaign commiserated over his loss to Hillary Clinton and plotted ways to keep the “Bernie” movement alive now that the candidate is exiting the presidential stage.

At a weekend-long conference, they were thinking through their role in a general election that presents a choice they had hoped to avoid: Mrs. Clinton or presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

------snip

Mr. Sanders wasn’t at the conference dubbed “The People’s Summit.” But the Vermont senator was everywhere all the same. Millennials walked through the halls wearing Sanders T-shirts bearing sketches of his receding hairline. In panels, participants dissected the campaign’s rise and fall and talked wistfully about how close Mr. Sanders came to vanquishing Mrs. Clinton.

The conference’s lead organizer is National Nurses United, one of the Sanders campaign’s most zealous backers. The approximately 3,000 attendees included socialists, union officials, community organizers and college students. Together, they represent the wing of the Sanders coalition that is the least enthused about coalescing behind the Clinton campaign.

“It’s a terrible place we find ourselves in,” said Becky Bond, a former adviser to Mr. Sanders’s campaign, in a session titled “Understanding our Movement Moment.”

The best a Clinton presidency would produce is a nation “slightly worse than it is under Obama,” Ms. Bond said.

-----------snip

Rosario Dawson, an actress who attended the conference, said in an interview she has no use for any pro-Clinton messages crossing her cellphone: “If she wants our vote, then she needs to go get it,” said Ms. Dawson, who campaigned for Mr. Sanders. “We didn’t register to vote and phone bank and canvass for her for a reason.”


------------snip

Nina Turner, a Sanders supporter and former Ohio state senator, said that even though she has been a lifelong Democrat, “a third party might not be bad for this country.”

“Let’s shake it up,” Ms. Turner said in an interview. “I want to see the Democratic Party live up to our values. And if we refuse to, then we need something to shake us up.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/sanders-supporters-seek-ways-to-keep-bernie-movement-alive-1466328604