He has not seen these and has no idea if there is anything in them.
The emails are not from Clinton’s server, and apparently are mostly between Clinton and her campaign staff.
Such an FBI announcement is unprecedented and prosecutors everywhere are calling it inappropriate and an obvious political move, as there is no legal reason to announce an investigation before you have even looked at the evidence.
Hillary has called for all of the emails to immediately be released so everyone can see that there is nothing incriminating or illegal in them — just like there was nothing incriminating or illegal in all the other emails that have been released.
Meanwhile, Republicans who gleefully jump on this are happily supporting a man who has a rape trial and a fraud trial scheduled within the next few months.
Let’s face it, Hillary Clinton has one person she will need to thank for destroying Donald Trump on November 8th, and that person is Donald Trump. She isn’t winning by a big margin so much as he is losing by a big margin. I still hold that had the Democrats nominated anyone else, the election would be even more of a wipeout.
The saddest thing is that after the election is over, the nightmare that we’ve experienced in this campaign will continue.
The craziest and most extreme Trump supporters, emboldened by his refusal to accept democracy coupled with the Bundy “not guilty” finding, will take arms to the streets under the delusion that treason is patriotic.
The less crazy (including Trump) will yell that the election was fixed despite the possibility that this may be the biggest popular vote blow-out since Nixon defeated McGovern. They’ll fill the right-wing blogs with enough conspiracy theories to keep them busy till the next election.
The Republicans will dig their heels in even more and, since they will probably still hold the House, start impeachment proceedings against Clinton while spending millions more on investigations that will most likely once again lead to nothing.
Dear God, it will never end.
Trump has destroyed much of the Republican party and has done great harm to democracy, and we’re not going to recover from that quickly or easily.
I posted this map, pointing out that the states in blue pretty much are in the bag for Democrats right now, and that alone gets the candidate 252 votes toward the 270 needed to win.
Well, I was wrong about one thing — Iowa isn’t necessarily voting Democratic this time. They’ve become more red over the years. On the other hand, Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico can pretty safely be moved to the Democratic side, having been reliably blue for the last few elections and becoming moreso each time.
So if we take out Iowa and add those states in, we get to — oh look! 273.
These are the states that every single person who studies these things will tell you are 99.99% in the bag for Clinton. Currently, they all have Clinton at least 5 points ahead of Trump (according to Nate Silver’s weighed averaging of the polls)
So let’s compare that to the states that have Trump ahead by 5 points. (5 points in an election is a lot.) The uncolored states are the real battleground states.
Even if Trump were to win all the current “battleground states” where the margin is less than 5 percent, he still wouldn’t win. Clinton was already over the 270 mark she needs.
And of these battleground states where the margin is less than 5%, she’s ahead in all of them except Georgia, and even that is moving in her direction. (Trump is ahead of her there by only 2.5%.)
Here, look — this is the map that shows what would happen if the election were held today:
This, of course, assumes that we all vote. If we get complacent and sit on our butts instead, assured of victory … well, honestly, there’s very little chance of Clinton losing at this point but we really need to sweep her in with a huge mandate, as well as elect lots of Democratic senators, representatives, and state house people to really send a message.
You ever notice how there aren’t many funny conservatives? There’s no equivalent to the Daily Show or John Oliver’s show or Stephen Colbert…
Why that is is a subject for another column, though. I just wanted to point out that the liberals tend to have the better comedians, and some of them have clearly written some wonderful jokes for Hillary Clinton.
Last night, at the Alfred E. Smith dinner in New York — an annual tradition where politicians kind of roast each other — Hillary got some great lines in. Trump, on the other hand, was mostly just mean and was even booed with some of his lines. (He even, at one point, looked at his script and made a comment about how poor his jokes were, as if he had not even read them until that point.)
Anyway, check out some of these zingers:
There are a lot of friendly faces here in this room, people I’ve been privileged to know and work with. I just want to put you all in a basket of adorables.
And you look so good in your tuxes — or as I refer to them, formal pantsuits.
Donald, after listening to your speech, I will enjoy listening to Mike Pence deny that you ever gave it.
People look at the Statue of Liberty and they see a proud symbol of our history as a nation of immigrants, a beacon of hope for people around the world. Donald looks at the Statue of Liberty and sees a four. Maybe a five, if she loses the torch and tablet and changes her hair.
Now, you notice, there is no teleprompter here tonight, which is probably smart, because maybe you saw Donald dismantle his prompter the other day. And I get that. They’re hard to keep up with, and I’m sure it’s even harder when you’re translating from the original Russian.
Donald really is as healthy as a horse. You know, the one Vladimir Putin rides around on.
Sharing a stage with Donald Trump is like, well, nothing really comes to mind. There is nothing like sharing a stage with Donald Trump.
I think the good news is that the debates finally allowed Republicans to unite around their candidate. The bad news is, it’s Mike Pence.
And whoever wins this election, the outcome will be historic. We’ll either have the first female president or the first president who started a Twitter war with Cher.
if Donald does win, it will be awkward at the annual presidents’ day photo when all the former presidents gather at the White House, and not just with Bill. How is Barack going to get past the Muslim ban?
I said no to some jokes that I thought were over the line, but I suppose you can judge for yourself on WikiLeaks in the next few days.
“Donald Trump — as he’s prone to do — he didn’t build the building by himself, but he slapped his name on it and took credit for it.”
That was President Obama last week, rightly pointing out that the GOP can pretend that Trump does not share their positions and that he is not really one of them, but the fact is that they built that Building of Deplorables that allowed Trump to move in and declare himself their king.
“The problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does,” Obama said. “The problem is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience.”
It’s not like the warning signs weren’t there. It’s not like there weren’t plenty of us (and even plenty in the GOP) who predicted that this would happen. They could have done more to prevent this, and now it appears they’re going to lose the Presidency as well as the Senate (and maybe even the House).
And it’s their own damn fault.
So when some Republican says that they can’t support Trump and they act all surprised that such a terrible man could have ever grabbed the support of a majority of their members, take it with a grain of salt. The warning signs were there all along, and they just continued to drive off that cliff.
I have had clients who grabbed women when they didn’t want to be grabbed. You can read all about these clients on the Megan’s Law website, listing sexual predators.
Donald Trump’s statements about how, as a star, he can “grab women by the pussy” and kiss them and get away with it are upsetting, but he and his supporters don’t get why it’s upsetting. He defends himself by saying it’s just “locker room talk” and other defenders are saying “Oh, yeah, well worse things are said by rappers!” (None of whom, it should be noted, are running for President of the United States.)
Look, It’s not the word “pussy” that is objectionable — it’s the word “grab.”
Trevor Noah pointed this out on the Daily Show:
You tell me which is worse: “Yesterday, I escorted a young lady back to her residence and proceeded to caress her genitals despite her lack of invitation.” or “I was rolling with this bad bitch and asked, ‘Yo, you gonna let me smash that ass?’ When she said no, I was like, “OK, no pussy for me!”
Which one is worse? While neither is ideal, one is crude and the other is against the law.
“Oh, yeah?” the Trumpettes scream. “Why are all the women who read 50 Shades of Grey getting all upset?” Well, maybe it’s because they can tell the difference between fiction and reality. I mean, come on, I liked the movie Mad Max but that doesn’t mean I’d like to live there.
And even so, as I’ve said before, 50 Shades is a BDSM fantasy that many people have. In real life, there would be a safe word there but having the characters in the movie use a safe word would ruin the fantasy. It would be like having James Bond turn to the audience and say “You know we’re not using real bullets, right?”
But you know what’s worse? Many Republicans don’t seem to care about this. Billy Bush, the guy who did the interview with Trump that led to these quotes, was just as bad and he lost his job because of it. It’s a shame that the standards for a TV show host are higher than those for the Republican candidate for President.
“Hillary does not look Presidential because she doesn’t have stamina” – 1st debate
“What I admire about her is that she never gives up and works hard.” – 2nd debate
Trump will claim a win. Then Hillary’s team will have the new ads showing all the lies he said. Like last time, he denied saying things he actually said and there will be videos showing him saying those things. (I mean, really, do Republicans even understand how technology works?) Pence did the same thing during his debate, using the old Stalinesque tactic of “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
Trump played to his followers, who still cheer when he claims, like a dictator, that he will jail his opponent. I don’t think he widened his base at all, and probably scared away potential new voters.
He has no clue about what Americans want, and does not know how to talk to anyone who isn’t a white male. When a black man asked him a question about bringing people together, he immediately started talking about inner city crime because, of course, all black people live in the inner city, right? When a Muslim asked how Trump could fight against the prejudices Muslims face, he talked about terrorism, because Muslim = terrorist, right?
As the spoiled man-child, he once again whined that everyone was against him and that any time he doesn’t win, it means someone else cheated. He protested the mean questions he got (because, you know, Presidents never get asked tough questions) and claimed he was not getting as much time as Clinton (even though he actually ended up talking more than her).
Even worse, he was being questioned by two women and a gay man with a woman opponent. You could see his anger as he lurked behind Clinton as she spoke and paced nervously. He just can’t stand not being the center of attention and losing it to a woman? Unthinkable.
The bar was set so low that all he had to do was not throw up and some people would declare him the winner.
This is the saddest election I have ever seen. I am embarrassed for my country. While many of us had predicted this sort of thing happening over the years as the Tea Party radicals on the right controlled the GOP, I don’t think we ever expected it to get this bad.
In an announcement that shocked the world, Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate William Weld today made a statement that acknowledges that yes, the real world does exist out there.
Libertarians are a strange cult that believes that government is the root of all evil. “All taxation is thievery” they are fond of saying. “Any law we don’t like is the same thing as tyranny.” They think that if the government would just stop regulating everything, we’d all live in peace and harmony and ride unicorns and the Invisible Hand of Capitalism would make sure that no one in the world would ever take advantage of someone else ever again and they all lived happily ever after.
This, of course, is contradicted by the fact that such a thing has never happened in the history of the planet for any society ever. However, the reality of the real world has never stood in the way of hardcore libertarian philosophy.
Weld has acknowledged that there is no way his ticket can win, and despite all the libertarians who want to “send a message,” he is aware that this message will be meaningless and that Trump such a huge threat to the country that stopping him is more important than any message one could send.
In other words, even he thinks that voting 3rd party is wasting your vote.
It is unclear whether Weld had an epiphany of insight or if he was secretly not a libertarian after all. This columnist proposes that the second option is true. In fact, I actually voted for William Weld back in the ’80s when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts because, despite being a Republican, he was the more liberal candidate. While I disagreed with many of his positions, he always seemed reasonable, rational, and willing to compromise — traits rarely seen among the more rabid libertarians, who tend to carry around Ayn Rand books and argue for the morality of selfishness.
So this is indeed a banner day, and it provides hope that perhaps, in our lifetime, with your help, we can find a cure for libertarianism.
“Oh yeah?” someone posted recently in response to Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson’s inability to name even one foreign leader. “Let’s see how many you can name!”
That’s not the point. I’m not running for President.
If I was applying for a job with a law firm and they asked me to name one of the amendments to the United States Constitution and I couldn’t even think of one, would you hire me? In your own job, there are things you need to know that I don’t know at all, which is why I would never be qualified to demand to be hired, much less to be hired as head of the entire business.
The President of the United States is, in many ways, the most powerful person on the planet. Shouldn’t there be some specific qualifications for the job?
Imagine you own a huge corporation that has a trillion dollar budget and millions of employees. You’re looking to hire a new CEO to run things. Who are you going to hire — the person who has spent their entire life working in exactly the field in which your corporation does business, who has numerous college degrees, who has definite plans on how to improve your business and who has proven she can work with others to accomplish your corporation’s goals — or the guy who has absolutely none of those qualifications but “tells it like it is”?
This is something I have never understood about politics — how some people are more interested in voting for the “guy they want to have a beer with” instead of the “guy most qualified for the job.”
Of course charisma is part of the job. Qualifications are more than just what is on your resume, and they include having the personality necessary to accomplish your goals. But even the dumbest most incompetent person can have a winning personality.
Last time we elected the “guy we want to have a beer with” we got the biggest terrorist attack on our soil ever, the complete crashing of the economy, and a costly, unnecessary deadly war.
People are saying that Trump abuses cocaine. That’s why he was sniffing so much during the debates. I’m not saying it, but some people are. Reliable people. Credible sources. People who would know. Believe me. Questions are being raised. Sad.
Trump should take a drug test. And we need to see the long forms of this drug test to be sure. Why won’t he? Hiding.
An extremely credible source has told me Trump uses cocaine. Extremely. No more apologies.
Media silent. They know. Believe me.
People tell me, I know. They tell me they need to know. I’m just reporting, don’t blame me. This could be huge. There are people out there who say this is all a lie and not true. So why won’t Trump submit to a drug test then? What is he hiding? I don’t know, I’m just asking. Sad.
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