Octopus Overlords

Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder.
...
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Isgrimnur wrote:Also, a quick read doesn't indicate timing. Were these donations primarily made before speaking with her or after?

Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder.
...
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.

That seems like a rather long con if the donations were made specifically for access to Clinton.

Rip wrote:

Isgrimnur wrote:Also, a quick read doesn't indicate timing. Were these donations primarily made before speaking with her or after?

Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder.
...
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.

That seems like a rather long con if the donations were made specifically for access to Clinton.

They were hoping for access to a POTUS, they just had to settle for SECSTATE.

Best to get in early before the price goes up.

raydude wrote:

Rip wrote:

Isgrimnur wrote:Also, a quick read doesn't indicate timing. Were these donations primarily made before speaking with her or after?

Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder.
...
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.

That seems like a rather long con if the donations were made specifically for access to Clinton.

They were hoping for access to a POTUS, they just had to settle for SECSTATE.

Best to get in early before the price goes up.

Obviously.

The stark fact highlighted in the AP’s tweet and social share card is, for starters, totally false.

If you read that and thought to yourself that it seems wrong for the secretary of state to be spending so much time in meetings with Clinton Foundation donors rather than talking to US government officials and representatives of foreign countries, then you are in luck. To generate the 154 figure, the AP excluded from the denominator all employees of any government, whether US or foreign. Then when designing social media collateral, it just left out that part, because the truth is less striking and shareable.

Even so, the number 154 is preposterously low, as Clinton would routinely meet dozens of civil society leaders, journalists, and others on any one of her many foreign trips as secretary of state. In the campaign’s official response to the AP, they argue that the data is "cherry picked" from a "limited subset" of her schedule.

But regardless of that, the AP’s social media claims are simply false — ignoring well over 1,000 official meetings with foreign leaders and an unknown number of meetings with domestic US officials.

...

Publication bias is the name of a well-known but hard to solve problem in academic research. A paper with a striking new finding is much more likely to be accepted at a top journal than a paper that says, "I investigated an interesting hypothesis, but it turned out to be wrong." This means that spurious findings — statistical coincidences and such — make it into the published literature, while boring null results don’t. This gives a distorted picture of reality simply because everyone is trying to be interesting.

Similarly, the AP’s basic reporting project here seems like it was worth a shot and probably also fairly time-consuming. But it did not come up with anything. Clinton tried to help a Nobel Prize winner. She went to the Kennedy Center Honors. She had a meeting with the head of the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics about a State Department charitable initiative.

There’s just nothing here. That’s the story. Braun and Sullivan looked into it, and as best they can tell, she’s clean.

Unfortunately, there’s a financial incentive to lean in the other direction. NBC News found that one major Clinton Foundation donor was a for-profit college whose interests Hillary Clinton has utterly failed to champion, so NBC turned it into a hypocrisy story.

hepcat wrote:"I got a great brain."

- Trump

em2nought wrote:White lies matter. Probably not. LMAO

hepcat wrote:"I got a great brain."

- Trump

Defiant wrote:

hepcat wrote:"I got a great brain."

- Trump

Who's?

No, wait, I bet I can guess...

GreenGoo wrote:Can someone post the "why does everyone hate Clinton" article again (the specific, Dear Abby format one)? It should explain why there was a hit piece on Hillary 20 years ago.

In any case, as long as her hands aren't small and her dick size is "not a problem, believe me" we've got everything we need in a presidential candidate.

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

Defiant wrote:There's also the graph here

Max Peck wrote:He didn't really provide a lot of fresh insight, but I will give Cecil Adams (as if that's his real name) credit for tackling the Clinton question for his Straight Dope column last week.

Seriously — why do so many people dislike Hillary Clinton?

August 12, 2016

Dear Cecil:

Why do so many Americans dislike Hillary Clinton? It seems to predate her time as secretary of state or even as senator. Does it have something to do with her husband’s two terms in the White House?

— Jonathan Pearce

Cecil replies:

In 1964 Barry Goldwater quipped about nuking the Kremlin men’s room and equated Medicare with giving old folks free resort vacations, cigarettes, and beer. Just before Lyndon Johnson strolled to victory that November, Gallup found that 46 percent of Americans viewed his Republican opponent unfavorably, with 26 percent of respondents into the “highly unfavorable” camp. For five decades, Goldwater has been the most unpopular major-party presidential candidate ever, a record that some deemed unbreakable.

Well, they used to think nobody would ever hit 62 home runs in a season either. By Gallup’s latest reckoning, back in June, exactly half the American public views Hillary Clinton unfavorably, 33 percent highly so. But Hillary Clinton and mass unpopularity are old pals. The first major attempt to suss out the source of the antipathy, Henry Louis Gates’s “Hating Hillary,” appeared in the New Yorker in 1996 — meaning this idea is now old enough to vote.

The thing is, though, Clinton’s popularity numbers have never stayed put. She wrapped up her secretary of state gig in 2013 with a 64 percent favorability rating, and even that wasn’t peak Hillary — in 1998, at the kickoff of Bill’s impeachment, 67 percent of Americans were on her side. Now, we’re a polarized people. A third of Americans will always approve of Hillary Clinton, while another third forever will be ready to holler “Lock her up!” But what’s with that middle that can’t make up its mind?

Clinton’s spin on her fluctuating favorability is that she’s a wooden campaigner whose numbers dip during the election cycle, but a hard worker who forges her way back into our hearts with her sturdy competence. As she said at the Democratic convention of her career in public service, "The service part has always come easier to me than the public part." Fine, she’s no natural politician. But a charisma deficit alone isn’t enough to turn half a nation against you.

What about ethical concerns? Knowing full well the scrutiny they’re under, the Clintons have often seemed oddly unworried about appearing too chummy with big donors to their campaigns and charitable work, and a fog of impropriety clings to Hillary even when specific claims are disproven. Certainly no presidential candidate has faced so much congressional scrutiny immediately prior to an election: Republican-controlled committees have been hammering away at Clinton for three years now, first on Benghazi, then on her usage of email. And that kind of shelling from the opposition is nothing new — in the '90s, Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of everything from real-estate shenanigans to outright murder.

Hillary might have chosen a less dramatic-sounding phrase to describe the well-financed network of conservative operatives who had coordinated their messages against the Clintons than her much-ridiculed “vast right-wing conspiracy.” But their detractors — whether politicians, news commentators, or your relatives on Facebook — have shared a singleness of purpose that’s unquestionable even if you believe its cause is righteous. And it’s come from both sides: mainstream liberals like the New York Times’ Howell Raines and Maureen Dowd were dogged critics of the Clintons’ ethical lapses, real or perceived.

And yet Bill Clinton has emerged from the battles of the past unscathed: as recently as 2014 his favorability polled at 64 percent. Meanwhile Hillary suffers the scorn of a reinvigorated left that’s retroactively critical of her support for her husband's policies — adopted in the aftermath of the Reagan years, when Democrats were stumbling over each other in their efforts not to appear too liberal. How did Hillary get stuck holding the bag?

Let’s not dance around the obvious: Hillary Clinton is a woman. Surely it’s a double standard that allows Bill to seem like a charming rapscallion who just cuts a few corners while Hillary is cast as a shady crime boss. Back in the ’90s, as the first working woman to serve as first lady, Clinton initially took a lead role in healthcare policymaking but hit massive turbulence from D.C. traditionalists who thought she’d misread her job description. Such paleo-anti-feminist rancor — and an accompanying rap as presumptuous and pushy — is something that more recently prominent female politicians, like Elizabeth Warren, have largely been spared.

None of this is to make excuses for her — politics is a tough game, and a better operator might have handled things more deftly. As that 1996 New Yorker piece suggests, Hillary’s always just rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. Then again, “Why doesn't anyone like you?” is a hell of a question for even the savviest politician to field continuously for 25 years.

However, friends, we live in wondrous times, and in 2016 Hillary’s not even our least popular presidential candidate. Gallup again: 59 percent of Americans don’t like Donald Trump, including 42 percent who can’t stand him. Fortunately, nobody's writing in to wonder why — I’d never get it all in a single column.

— Cecil Adams

OTOH, if he's lucky Ted Cruz might get to answer that same question for a quarter decade.

“The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for this group,” Hillary Clinton says of the so-called “alt-right,” a loose confederation of online conservatives who view multiculturalism as a threat to white identity. “A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican party. And this is part of a broader story - the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world.”

Clinton lambastes Donald Trump for appearing with Nigel Farage in Mississippi last night, describing the former head of Ukip as someone “who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union.”

“Farage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and health services, has said women are, quote, ‘worth less’ than men and supports scrapping laws that prevent employers from discriminating based on race - that’s who Trump wants by his side when speaking to Americans.”

“No one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here,” Clinton says of the alt-right. “The names may have changed: Racists now call themselves ‘racialists;’ white supremacists now call themselves ‘white nationalists;’ the paranoid fringe now calls itself ‘alt-right;’ But the hate burns just as bright.”

“And now Trump is trying to rebrand himself as well. But don’t be fooled.”

“This is not conservatism as we have known it,” she continued. “This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are racist ideas, race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women, all key tenets making up the emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right.”

The Clinton campaign has long been faced with the question of whether to portray Trump as a bigot or a madman, a genuine authoritarian or an unstable and ever-changing entertainer. This speech suggested that there is a way to do all of the above.

Desperate and willing to do anything to win, the Clintons resorted to a naked form of racism aimed directly at white working-class voters in the rural portions of the state. Their message: Barack Obama cannot win because he’s black.

In the early stages of the campaign, it was Clinton’s cadre who kept playing the race card. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s co-chair, Billy Shaheen, accused Obama of being a drug dealer; then there was the photograph of Sen. Barack Obama in Somali garb leaked to the press by Clinton’s staff.

In the aftermath of the South Carolina primary, former President Bill Clinton compared Obama’s victory to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. His message was clear: Obama was a marginal, black candidate.

Rip wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L65RBwrtOeQ

KKK Grand Dragon Will Quigg gives Hillary his endorsement.

Holman wrote:

Rip wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L65RBwrtOeQ

KKK Grand Dragon Will Quigg gives Hillary his endorsement.

Snopes. (We've been through this one already.)

In any case, the reason he gives for supporting her is that her secret agenda is identical to Trump's plans. Shouldn't you be on board, then?

tgb wrote:

Holman wrote:

Rip wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L65RBwrtOeQ

KKK Grand Dragon Will Quigg gives Hillary his endorsement.

Snopes. (We've been through this one already.)

In any case, the reason he gives for supporting her is that her secret agenda is identical to Trump's plans. Shouldn't you be on board, then?

Could it be he knows the story is bullshit and is just trolling?

Never. Not our Rip.

Rip wrote:Says it is unproven. Doesn't say it isn't true.

hepcat wrote:

Rip wrote:Says it is unproven. Doesn't say it isn't true.

Oh, cool! That means I can continue saying that the reason Trump won't reveal his taxes is because he's afraid folks will find out he's funding the website for stormfront.org. You know, that site you like to link to for your "facts"?

Oh, and Trump is dying. That's why he had someone forge his doctor's letter.