October 16, 2015

On Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties, Hillary Clinton Is NOT A PROGRESSIVE

If George Bush claimed he were a progressive, we would rightly laugh. Yet no one -- no one -- challenged Clinton's unequivocal claim to progressivism at the CNN Democratic debate earlier this week. Below is a list of six reasons why Clinton -- far from being a progressive -- could be little different from a slightly liberal George Bush, especially on foreign policy and the protection of constitutional rights.

October 16, 2015

DNC Revealed as Un-Democratic,TopDown Authoritarian Election Rigging Fiefdom Run By Hillary Insiders

October 16, 2015

Obama’s Comments on Clinton Emails COLLIDE With F.B.I. Inquiry

WASHINGTON — Federal agents were still cataloging the classified information from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal email server last week when President Obama went on television and played down the matter. “I don’t think it posed a national security problem,” Mr. Obama said Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He said it was a mistake for Mrs. Clinton to use a private email account when she was secretary of state, but his conclusion was unmistakable: “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.” Those statements angered F.B.I. agents who have been working for months to determine whether Ms. Clinton’s email setup had in fact put any of the nation’s secrets at risk, according to current and former law enforcement officials. Investigators have not reached any conclusions about whether the information on the server had been compromised or whether to recommend charges, according to the law enforcement officials. But to investigators, it sounded as if Mr. Obama had already decided the answers to their questions and cleared anyone involved of wrongdoing.



The White House quickly backed off the president’s remarks and said Mr. Obama was not trying to influence the investigation. But his comments spread quickly, raising the ire of officials who saw an instance of the president trying to influence the outcome of a continuing investigation — and not for the first time. A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. But Ron Hosko, a former senior F.B.I. official who retired in 2014 and is now the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, said it was inappropriate for the president to “suggest what side of the investigation he is on” when the F.B.I. is still investigating. “Injecting politics into what is supposed to be a fact-finding inquiry leaves a foul taste in the F.B.I.’s mouth and makes them fear that no matter what they find, the Justice Department will take the president’s signal and not bring a case,” said Mr. Hosko, who maintains close contact with current agents. Several current and former law enforcement officials, including those close to the investigation, expressed similar sentiments in separate interviews over several days. Most, however, did so only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the case. The White House said Thursday that Mr. Obama was not commenting on the merits of the investigation, but rather was explaining why he believes the controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s emails has been overblown. The president, officials said, was merely noting that the emails that have been publicly released so far have not imperiled national security.



cont'


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/us/politics/obamas-comments-on-clinton-emails-collide-with-fbi-inquiry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

October 16, 2015

Joe Biden CRYPTICALLY LAYS OUT Campaign Platform, Like a Guy Who’s Decided to Run for President

Following the first Democratic debate, many political analysts declared it's too late for Joe Biden to enter the 2016 race, but it appears the VP isn't listening. Despite claims that he has little chance of beating a reinvigorated Hillary Clinton, Biden recently teased reporters who asked for his decision, his staff met with the DNC to learn the ins and outs of running for president, and a source let it be known that the International Association of Firefighters, a powerful union, will back him if he runs.

On Thursday night we got one of the biggest clues yet about Biden's political future. The Associated Press has obtained an email from former Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman, one of Biden's closest advisers, that lays out what his potential campaign would look like. Ostensibly it was meant for the eyes of former Biden staffers, but as Gawker notes, why would Biden's friend send their associates an email with lines like these:



It's not news to people who've spent years working with closely with Biden that he'd run an optimistic and unscripted "campaign from the heart." Is it possible that Kaufman is just an overzealous Biden supporter trying to keep hope alive for his 2016 bid? Sure. But Kaufman, who served as Biden's chief of staff before he replaced the newly elected VP in the Senate, is also one of three advisers who's spent the past few months huddling with Biden about whether he should run. A source tells the AP that the group met at Biden's home to discuss his potential campaign just last night.

Time is running out for Biden to make a decision. The first state primary filing deadline is on November 6, and the longer he deliberates, the more potential delegates he loses; if he isn't on state ballots by mid-January he'll essentially have no path to victory in the Democratic primary.


cont'

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/Joe-biden-2016-campaign-message-.html

October 16, 2015

Insurrection ERUPTS At the Democratic National Committee

“..For someone who’s the head of a national party, you would think she’d be better at, you know, politics,” says a senior Democrat with close ties to the DNC. “How do you not line up your own folks? How do you not touch base and say, ‘This is what I need from you guys’? At best, you consult; at least, you notify. But her default is to see her vice chairs as nuisances, not partners—not even close. The word partner would never cross her lips...”

Get rid of her!!..............





~snip~

For most debate viewers and Democratic voters, the Gabbard flap, if it registered at all, was little more than a sideshow. But among Democratic officials and strategists, the dust-up was an embarrassing public spectacle—a boiling-over of long-simmering frustrations and resentments within the party hierarchy at a highly inopportune moment. Of two dozen Democratic insiders with whom I spoke this week, including several DNC vice chairs, not one defended Wasserman Schultz’s treatment of Gabbard. Most called it ridiculous, outrageous, or worse. Many argued, further, that the debate plan enacted by the chairwoman is badly flawed—an assessment shared by many party activists, left-bent supporters of Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, and those candidates themselves, all of whom see it as a naked effort to aid and comfort Hillary Clinton. And they maintained that the plan was a clear reflection of Wasserman Schultz’s management style, which many of them see as endangering Democratic prospects in 2016 and beyond.


One top Democrat who feels precisely this way is DNC vice chair R.T. Rybak, a former mayor of Minneapolis who along with Gabbard has publicly called for more debates. But Rybak’s indictment of Wasserman Schultz is more sweeping—and pointed—than that. “In the days before and after the debate I kept my mouth shut,” Rybak told me by phone on Thursday. “But I’ve begun to deeply question whether she has the leadership skills to get us through the election. This is not just about how many debates we have. This is one of a series of long-running events in which the chair has not shown the political judgment that is needed.” I asked Rybak if he was calling for Wasserman Schultz to resign.



~snip~

Rybak and other Democratic critics of Wasserman Schultz have been holding their tongues about what they see as her deficiencies for years. But the dispute over debates has proven sufficiently contentious that it is suddenly causing those tongues to loosen. The road to this place began in May, when the DNC announced that there would be just six sanctioned debates, and that candidates who took part in forums not green-lit by the committee would be excluded from the approved ones. Clinton’s camp, which had lobbied against an early DNC proposal for eight debates, was well pleased. Sanders, O’Malley, and their people were less so. But the wider Democratic world mostly yawned. Then, in August, the DNC released the debate schedule, with only four debates scheduled to take place before the nomination contest begins in earnest in Iowa on February 1—and with that, all hell broke loose. Whatever debate plan the DNC pursued was always bound to be controversial. But the manner in which Wasserman Schultz crafted the scheme all but guaranteed an eventual blowup. According to several people with front-row seats for the hatching of the plan, the chairwoman made her decision unilaterally, without consulting or even telling the rest of the committee’s high command, including her vice chairs, in advance.

“She presented this to us as a fait accompli as she was about to go out and announce it to the whole committee,” Rybak told me. “I said to her, ‘Well, at least there's some way you can explain why you came to that decision.’ She didn't even do that. She gaveled people out of order without any explanation.”

I asked Rybak if he agreed with those who cast Wasserman Schultz as dictatorial. He said that he did. Calling her decisions “arbitrary” and “reckless,” he went on, “As a Democrat, you have to be able to bring people you don't agree with into the tent. You can't gavel them down out of order when they have a different opinion. You can't go on national TV and say things about them that aren't true. And this is something that frankly a lot of people have kept their mouth shut about for a long time. I have too. But I think the time has come for all those people who come up to me and say this is a problem to stop hiding behind their political expediency … We have the candidates. We have the issues. There's only one single thing that I see standing between us and a great election coming up and that's the fact that the person who is supposed to leading us is not leading us.” As Rybak suggested, he is far from alone in casting broader doubt on Wasserman Schultz’s stewardship of the DNC. Her critics level an assortment of charges against her: that, in the age of super-PACs, the Koch Brothers, and an array of other Republican billionaires prepared to devote vast sums to the causes of recapturing the White House and retaining the GOP’s hold on Congress, she is ill-equipped to steer the party as it navigates the forbidding electoral terrain ahead; that she is insufficiently tech savvy; that she is neither attuned to the party’s grassroots nor focused on the methodical expansion of the Obama coalition; that she and her staff are not unlike Selina Myer and hers on “Veep.” Says the Democrat with close ties to the committee: “The next chair is going to have to burn the place down and rebuild it.”



cont'


http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-10-16/insurrection-erupts-at-the-democratic-national-committee

October 15, 2015

Clinton Doubles Down On ATTACK AGAINST SANDERS

She laid into her main Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, on guns. And she began road-testing a new campaign slogan she debuted earlier this week on the debate stage, "I'm a progressive who likes to get things done." Campaigning at a raucous 2,500 person outdoor “Latinos for Hillary” rally in San Antonio two days after the first democratic debate, Hillary Clinton began to demonstrate how the exchanges with her opponents on the CNN stage are helping to refine her campaign message and attacks on her opponents.


Clinton was in town to pick up the endorsement of Housing Secretary Julian Castro, the former mayor here whose name is often tossed around as a potential vice president pick, and make an appeal to Latino voters. But she used the appearance to hit back at Vermont Sen. Sanders on the one issue where she can attack him from the left, gun control — she responded forcefully to a debate comment he made that "all the shouting in the world" will not keep guns out of the hands of killers. On the CNN stage Tuesday, Sanders said that “as a senator from a rural state, what I can tell Secretary Clinton, is that all the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns and end this horrible violence we are seeing.”


Clinton appeared eager to address his claim at the top of her speech. “No matter what anyone says, this isn't just an urban problem, no way. It's a problem in small towns, suburbs, out in the country, across America,” said Clinton. “I've been told by some, to quit talking about this, quit shouting about this,” she said. Clinton also tried to paint Sanders’ gun control views as out of touch with where the majority of the country is on the issue. “I will tell you right now I will not be silenced,” she said, “and we will not be silenced. I will keep taking on the NRA. How many more people have to die before we take action? How many people have to think twice now about going to church? The majority of Americans and the majority of gun owners support the changes I am recommending.”


Sanders’ team was pushing back, post-debate, against the hits he took from his fellow Democrats for voting against the Brady Bill, which mandates federal background checks on gun purchases, and against an attack from Clinton who said Sanders' positions on gun control don't go far enough.







cont'

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/hillary-sanders-hispanics-214856

October 15, 2015

The WORST THING Hillary Clinton Has Ever Done

Politicians are often said to be skilled in the art of talking out of both sides of their mouths. This was exemplified in the first 2015 Democratic presidential debate, on the evening of Oct. 13. When asked which enemy he was most proud of, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley boldly declared “the NRA.” The problem is O’Malley took $40,000 from the NRA in 2012, according to disclosures obtained by The Intercept. Yet O’Malley is not the only candidate who says one thing and does another.



This is true — Clinton not only worked with Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), a non-profit advocacy organization that seeks to help American youth; she served as the head of its board. Later in the debate — amid her hawkish rhetoric — Clinton twice more mentioned her work with CDF, wielding it as an example of her purportedly progressive policies. The problem with Clinton’s claims, however, is that she betrayed children as First Lady. Under the guise of welfare reform, the Clinton administration worked with Republicans to gut social services, ignoring their own senior officials’ warnings that, by doing so, they would be plunging over a million children into poverty. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 on the campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” In 1996, he — with the wholehearted support of Hillary — succeeded, passing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA). PRWORA was based on legislation first proposed by Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The act was opposed by the left-wing of the Democratic Party, but the Clinton administration joined hands with Republicans and conservative Democrats to push it through.


As part of PRWORA, the Clinton administration axed the Aid to Families with Dependent Children federal assistance program, which had been created 61 years before by the Social Security Act, in the New Deal. They replaced it with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which was drastically weaker and — as the name stresses — temporary. Hillary, as First Lady, advocated strongly for the restructuring of welfare. Her former co-workers at CDF, on the other hand, were infuriated. CDF founder and President Marian Wright Edelman declared that President Clinton’s “signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.” “Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics,” the CDF president told Democracy Now in a 2007 interview. At the time, CDF “profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so,” Marian Wright Edelman explained.


Three senior officials on welfare policy resigned from the Clinton administration in response to Bill and Hillary’s scrapping of welfare. Peter Edelman, a legal scholar who at the time served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, told The New York Times, “I have devoted the last 30-plus years to doing whatever I could to help in reducing poverty in America. I believe the recently enacted welfare bill goes in the opposite direction.” Wendell Primus, another high-ranking official in the department, quit in protest as well. A scientific study he had overseen showed that, because of PRWORA, more than a million children would fall into poverty. Peter Edelman disclosed that this study was “personally handed” to President Clinton, but was ignored. To remain in the Clinton administration then, Primus maintained, “would be to disown all the analysis my office has produced regarding the impact of the bill.”



cont'

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/the_worst_thing_hillary_clinton_has_ever_done/

October 15, 2015

Millenials Are The Key To Democratic Success And Overwhelmingly, THEY WANT BERNIE

Obama rode a wave of youth support to the Democratic nomination and the White House in 2008, connecting with them and motivating them to show up in November. In 2014, however, Democrats saw their Senate majority slip away as candidates across America ran to the center to appeal to the oft-cited-and-fawned-over "swing voters," and Millenials stayed home as a result.

Millenials (ie the 18-34 demographic) are the most fickle of all voter groups, and it's tough to get them to turn out. Older, mostly retired voters can be counted on to turn out regardless, but the trick to success is getting the Millenials excited. So then, who gets the Millenials excited? Overwhelmingly, the answer is Bernie Sanders.

The latest national Quinnipiac Poll breaks down favorability by age:




So while Hillary is underwater with Millenials at (-1%), Bernie sports a stunning +32% favorability rating, with -- and this is important to note -- 37% still yet to make up their mind. If the undecided voters break for Bernie at the same rate as the decideds, that will come out to a 75-24 spread for a 51% favorable rating for Bernie, giving him a whopping 52 point favorability lead over Hillary among Millenials. The age gap here is stark. Boomers may not be "feeling the Bern", but Millenials love Bernie, and it's the latter that Democrats are going to be counting on next November to put down their smartphones and show up at their nearest polling place to pull the lever.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/15/1432947/-Millenials-are-the-key-to-Democratic-success-and-overwhelmingly-they-want-Bernie

October 15, 2015

Bernie Sanders: 'You DON'T CUT Social Security, You EXPAND IT"

WASHINGTON -- Tens of millions of Social Security beneficiaries will not get a raise in 2016, the government announced on Thursday. "With consumer prices down over the past year, monthly Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits for nearly 65 million Americans will not automatically increase in 2016," the Social Security Administration said in a press release. The news comes on the heels of a debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has advocated changing the way cost-of-living adjustments are calculated so that seniors are more likely to get annual raises.

Clinton, on the other hand, declined to say during the debate if she supported expanding benefits in the way Sanders did. Her campaign has not responded to further requests for comment from The Huffington Post. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), meanwhile, indicated this week that he wanted to make Social Security's cost-of-living adjustments less generous as part of a budget deal with President Barack Obama.



cont'


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/social-security-cola_561fcbcee4b0c5a1ce624d1f

October 15, 2015

Bernie Sanders HEATS UP The ‘ELLEN’ Set While Dancing To ‘Disco Inferno’