Octopus Overlords

Rip wrote:No he hasn't said reset. He has said he is going to work with them, that goes well beyond a reset. Much more like embrace them.

“I don’t recall a previous candidate saying they didn’t believe” the information from an intelligence briefing, said John Rizzo, a former CIA lawyer who served under seven presidents and became the agency’s acting general counsel. “These are career people. They aren’t administration officials. What does that do to their morale and credibility?”

Former acting CIA director John McLaughlin said all previous candidates took the briefings to heart.

“In my experience, candidates have taken into account the information they have received and modulated their comments,” he said. Trump, on the other hand, “is playing politics. He’s trying to diminish the impression people have that [a Russian hack of the DNC] somehow helps his cause.”

[...]

Trump has consistently adopted positions likely to find favor with the Kremlin. He has, for instance, criticized NATO allies for not paying their fair share and defended Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s human rights record.

“It’s remarkable that he’s refused to say an unkind syllable about Vladimir Putin,” Hayden said. “He contorts himself not to criticize Putin.”

Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, said in the vice-presidential debate last week that the United States should “use military force” against the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

Trump disagreed. Rather than challenge Assad and his Russian ally, Trump said in the second debate, the United States should be working with them against the Islamic State. “Assad is killing ISIS. Russia is killing ISIS. Iran is killing ISIS,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. Russia and Syria have mostly been targeting opposition groups as well as civilians trapped in Aleppo — not the Islamic State.

“That’s the Syrian, Russia, Iranian narrative,” Hayden said of Trump’s assertion.

Rip wrote:No he hasn't said reset. He has said he is going to work with them, that goes well beyond a reset. Much more like embrace them.

So what is Clinton's plan now that the reset blew up in her face? Let's ask Jill Stein.

“You know, I don’t pretend to be able to do TV diagnosis, but I think the guy has a problem,” said the 66-year-old candidate, who is averaging somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent in most national and state polls, enough (Clinton people say) to put a scare into the Democrat in too-close-to-call states. “The guy has a lot of problems — physical, mental, emotional, cognitive,” Stein said of Trump.

“It’s hard to, you know, to think too hard about anything Donald Trump says because he will change his mind in the next hour, if not the next day, or whatever,” she added. “Today, suddenly, after five years, he became convinced that it’s not an issue. Yesterday it was an issue. It will probably become an issue again for him. You know, the guy may have a memory problem. Who knows what it is? But he’s incapable of having a consistent thought or policy.”

Stein also thinks Trump’s getting a free pass because he spent his career in private business, and she wants him to release his tax returns. (She wants everybody else to do the same.) “At least with Clinton, you know, there was some degree of transparency,” she said. “But what’s going on with Trump, you can’t even get at, and what he said was that even to clarify 15 out of these 500 deals, these are just like the most frightening mafiosos around the world. He’s like — he’s a magnet for crime and extortion.”

A leaked email from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign Chairman John Podesta referenced a 2015 BuzzFeed article in which Sen. Mark Kirk predicted nuclear war in the Middle East in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal.

Podesta's email, which was released Friday by WikiLeaks along with a cache of documents from the Clinton campaign chair, was in response to a message from John Anzalone of Anzalone Liszt Grove Research that bore the subject line, "you call it." In his email, Anzalone included a link to the BuzzFeed article and a quote from Kirk.

“This agreement condemns the next generation to cleaning up a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf,” Kirk told BuzzFeed at the time. “This is the greatest appeasement since Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler.”
“Yup,” Podesta said in response to the email.

Interviews with more than three dozen millennials in Raleigh, a voter-rich battleground within a battleground state, revealed a profound sense of anger and alienation about the 2016 election. This bitter campaign — waged by two candidates who polls say are historically unappealing — has left younger Americans feeling punched in the gut.

“Basically, Trump is everything wrong with America’s culture, and Hillary is everything wrong with our government,” said Janae Petitjean, 19, a Wake Technical Community College student who will be voting for the first time this year.

In 2008, enthusiastic younger people celebrating a moment of social and political change helped usher Barack Obama into the White House and turn North Carolina blue, a feat not seen since Jimmy Carter in 1976. As Obama’s historic presidency draws to a close, the latest crop of young voters here and across the country is in danger of becoming disillusioned just as it comes of political age.

The Clinton campaign says Kaine's speech is the first delivered fully in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking church by a candidate on a presidential ticket.

tgb wrote:Meanwhile, Tim Kaine goes to Florida and attempts to campaign in Spanish.

(Second or third item down)

The Clinton campaign says Kaine's speech is the first delivered fully in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking church by a candidate on a presidential ticket.

That may be, but is "Hola, senorita. Donde esta la biblioteca?" really an effective platform?

Max Peck wrote: I'm told that Kaine is actually fluent in Spanish.

gilraen wrote:

Max Peck wrote: I'm told that Kaine is actually fluent in Spanish.

He is, since he lived in Honduras for a year working as a missionary. He's given interviews to Univision and Telemundo in Spanish since the start of this campaign, and he's given speeches from the Senate floor in Spanish before.

tgb wrote:Meanwhile, Tim Kaine goes to Florida and attempts to campaign in Spanish.

(Second or third item down)

The Clinton campaign says Kaine's speech is the first delivered fully in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking church by a candidate on a presidential ticket.

That may be, but is "Hola, senorita. Donde esta la biblioteca?" really an effective platform?

The Web site Politifact jumped all over Rudy Giuliani earlier this year when he said, “Hillary Clinton is for open borders.” It spent about 700 words sifting the evidence and ended up rating the former New York City mayor’s claim “false.”

Now we know that Politifact blew its call because it lacked access to the most important datum — Hillary Clinton’s real view.

For that, it would’ve had to be present at one of her paid speeches at a major financial institution, in this case the Brazilian bank Banco Itau. In May 2013, Clinton told her audience at the bank, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”

Ding, ding, ding — there’s the magic phrase, in Hillary’s own words.

A faux cosmopolitanism is a thread running through the WikiLeaks e-mails. If you think Clinton aides root for terrorist acts not to be committed by Muslims, lest political and policy complications ensue, you’re right.

Hillary aide Karen Finney wrote John Podesta an e-mail in December 2015 about the San Bernadino shooting. She wrote “damn,” and forwarded a tweet from MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes relating that one of the shooters was named Syed Farook. Podesta lamented that it wasn’t instead a journalist named Syed Farook reporting on a shooting by Chris Hayes, who has a much more convenient, Irish surname.

A certain high-handedness and bad faith pervades the entire Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton was perfectly comfortable with the globe-trotting financiers throwing six-figure speaking fees at her, but then had to turn around and shovel boob bait for Bubba at her party’s inflamed left-wing activists, who hate those very financiers and their views on trade, among many other things.

The Clinton campaign’s predicament was captured in microcosm by spokesman Brian Fallon. In September 2015, he worried about an op-ed attacking the Keystone Pipeline that, he noted, had already been extensively edited and re-edited.

Secretary of State Clinton had, reasonably enough, indicated she’d likely support the pipeline and now she was coming out against. Will her newly aggressive opposition, Fallon wondered, “be greeted cynically and perhaps as part of some manufactured attempt to project sincerity?”

For all the chaos and unpredictability and the sometimes appalling spectacle of this election season, the question of which candidate actually deserves to be president has never been a difficult one.

Vogue has no history of political endorsements. Editors in chief have made their opinions known from time to time, but the magazine has never spoken in an election with a single voice. Given the profound stakes of this one, and the history that stands to be made, we feel that should change.

Vogue endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States.

Perhaps that sentence won’t come as a surprise. Vogue has enthusiastically covered Hillary Clinton’s career, her rise from Yale law student to governor’s wife to First Lady to senator to Secretary of State. She has been profiled by the magazine six times.

(For the record, we have also featured Donald Trump—or, more particularly, his family members Ivana, Marla, Melania, and Ivanka—multiple times in our pages.)

We understand that Clinton has not always been a perfect candidate, yet her fierce intelligence and considerable experience are reflected in policies and positions that are clear, sound, and hopeful.

She supports comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship. She speaks up for racial justice, for reforming policing and sentencing laws. Her years as Secretary of State have shown that she understands how to strengthen alliances abroad, respond to global crises, and continue American leadership in the world. She is forceful in her support for LGBTQ rights, including an end to discrimination against transgender people. She knows the challenges working women face. Her tax proposals and commitment to infrastructure investment will be a boon to the middle class. She will continue the important work on health-care reform begun by President Obama. She is a sane voice on guns.

Can Clinton unify a deeply divided America? Heal the wounds of this unbearably fraught political season? Our divisions are real, and it will take more than one intensely qualified leader to heal them.

And yet two words give us hope: Madam President. Women won the vote in 1920. It has taken nearly a century to bring us to the brink of a woman leading our country for the first time. Let’s put this election behind us and become the America we want to be: optimistic, forward-looking, and modern.

Let’s head to the polls on Tuesday, November 8, and vote.

El Guapo wrote: 538 still has Trump as the overwhelming favorite in Texas, but I guess we'll see after tomorrow. The election update also has some interesting stuff about how dramatically Clinton is outperforming Obama in the South (and to a slightly lesser degree, in the west).

Defiant wrote:

El Guapo wrote: 538 still has Trump as the overwhelming favorite in Texas, but I guess we'll see after tomorrow. The election update also has some interesting stuff about how dramatically Clinton is outperforming Obama in the South (and to a slightly lesser degree, in the west).

Yeah, one of the polls the other days that gave Clinton a sizable national lead also only put her down 1 point in The South (with her gains in FL, VA, NC outweighing her being down in the smaller states).

Still her priority should be to focus on winning, and helping down ballot races.

El Guapo wrote: Yeah, while it would be interesting to see states like Alaska, Utah, Arizona, and Georgia go blue, they're ultimately irrelevant to the outcome, unless they also help flip house or senate races.

Defiant wrote:

El Guapo wrote: Yeah, while it would be interesting to see states like Alaska, Utah, Arizona, and Georgia go blue, they're ultimately irrelevant to the outcome, unless they also help flip house or senate races.

I want to see Utah go Yellow (or purple, or whatever the hell color it would be).

Defiant wrote:Though.. one good reason to have a bigger electoral win is as a rebuke to Trump. Although I care more about him getting a lower percentage of the popular vote than in the electoral vote.

GreenGoo wrote: Or worse, they'll become atheists!

There is one corner of Washington where Donald Trump’s scorched-earth presidential campaign is treated as a mere distraction and where bipartisanship reigns. In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama’s departure from the White House — and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton — is being met with quiet relief.

The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy, via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House.

It is not unusual for Washington’s establishment to launch major studies in the final months of an administration to correct the perceived mistakes of a president or influence his successor. But the bipartisan nature of the recent recommendations, coming at a time when the country has never been more polarized, reflects a remarkable consensus among the foreign policy elite.

This consensus is driven by broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East. “There’s a widespread perception that not being active enough or recognizing the limits of American power has costs,” said Philip Gordon, a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama until 2015. “So the normal swing is to be more interventionist.”

GreenGoo wrote:Looks like kraken is right.

We'll see.

“Michael Moore in TrumpLand” isn’t quite the film that I expected it to be, and that’s all to the good. Moore is, of course, a genius of political satire, deploying his persona—as a populist socialist skeptic with a superb sense of humor and a chess player’s skill at media positioning—to deeply humane ends that are mainly detached from practicality, policy, and practical politics. The very idea of the new film—a recording of Moore’s one-man show from the stage of a theatre in a small, predominantly Republican town in Ohio—runs the risk of self-parody, being a feature-length lampooning of Trump, laid out with meticulously researched facts set forth with the sublime derision of which Moore is a master. It would have been a highly saleable version of preaching to the converted.

Instead, Moore—a well-known and outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary campaign—has done something different, better, and even majestic. He has made a film that, at its frequent best, raises his own celebrity to a political object and transforms that celebrity into a mode of combative yet deeply empathetic practical politics, even turns it into a political weapon of the sort that’s seemingly ready-made to combat Trump, whose candidacy, after all, is itself purely a product of the celebrity industry.

Max Peck wrote:So apparently Michael Moore in Trumpland isn't anti-Trump so much as pro-Clinton.

“Michael Moore in TrumpLand” isn’t quite the film that I expected it to be, and that’s all to the good. Moore is, of course, a genius of political satire, deploying his persona—as a populist socialist skeptic with a superb sense of humor and a chess player’s skill at media positioning—to deeply humane ends that are mainly detached from practicality, policy, and practical politics. The very idea of the new film—a recording of Moore’s one-man show from the stage of a theatre in a small, predominantly Republican town in Ohio—runs the risk of self-parody, being a feature-length lampooning of Trump, laid out with meticulously researched facts set forth with the sublime derision of which Moore is a master. It would have been a highly saleable version of preaching to the converted.

Instead, Moore—a well-known and outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary campaign—has done something different, better, and even majestic. He has made a film that, at its frequent best, raises his own celebrity to a political object and transforms that celebrity into a mode of combative yet deeply empathetic practical politics, even turns it into a political weapon of the sort that’s seemingly ready-made to combat Trump, whose candidacy, after all, is itself purely a product of the celebrity industry.

I think the reviewer just might be a fan. I, on the other hand, am not, but I think I'd be willing to watch this if it comes out on a streaming platform that I can access.

Holman wrote:

Max Peck wrote:So apparently Michael Moore in Trumpland isn't anti-Trump so much as pro-Clinton.

“Michael Moore in TrumpLand” isn’t quite the film that I expected it to be, and that’s all to the good. Moore is, of course, a genius of political satire, deploying his persona—as a populist socialist skeptic with a superb sense of humor and a chess player’s skill at media positioning—to deeply humane ends that are mainly detached from practicality, policy, and practical politics. The very idea of the new film—a recording of Moore’s one-man show from the stage of a theatre in a small, predominantly Republican town in Ohio—runs the risk of self-parody, being a feature-length lampooning of Trump, laid out with meticulously researched facts set forth with the sublime derision of which Moore is a master. It would have been a highly saleable version of preaching to the converted.

Instead, Moore—a well-known and outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary campaign—has done something different, better, and even majestic. He has made a film that, at its frequent best, raises his own celebrity to a political object and transforms that celebrity into a mode of combative yet deeply empathetic practical politics, even turns it into a political weapon of the sort that’s seemingly ready-made to combat Trump, whose candidacy, after all, is itself purely a product of the celebrity industry.

I think the reviewer just might be a fan. I, on the other hand, am not, but I think I'd be willing to watch this if it comes out on a streaming platform that I can access.

I'm not sure that second paragraph says anything at all.

gilraen wrote:Moore usually makes his movies available online pretty reliably, I'm sure this one won't be an exception.