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BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Showing posts with label Hillary Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hillary Clinton. Show all posts
17 September 2017
NPR POLITICS; Conservatives Fume Over DACA Immigration Deal & more... 16SEP17
10 March 2017
Say It With Me Again: James Comey Elected Donald Trump President 8MAR17
james comey. No matter what he does if his remaining years as director of the fbi his legacy will be his interference in the 2016 presidential election resulting in donald drumpf/trump becoming (NOT MY) president. The question remains why he released the letter when he did? Is he a putin lackey? Does drumpf/trump have something damning on him? Is he a rabid, misogynous, fascist pig? Does he hate Hillary Clinton that much? Why did he focus on Clinton and ignore the growing evidence of ties between putin, Russia and drumpf/trump and his campaign? One this is certain, as long as he remains the fbi director it will be difficult to believe anything he and the entire agency reports. From +Mother Jones .....
Say It With Me Again: James Comey Elected Donald Trump President
MAR. 8, 2017 11:05 AM
Engagement Labs is a company that tracks "what people are talking about." Brad Fay, one of their executives, tells us that during the presidential campaign people were talking very negatively about everyone. They were more negative about Donald Trump, but they were plenty negative about Hillary Clinton too. However, the gap between the candidates changed from time to time based on external events:
Most decisively, there was a sudden change in the net sentiment results that followed immediately after FBI Director James Comey released his Oct. 28 letter to Congress about a renewed investigation of Clinton emails. Immediately afterwards, there was a 17-point drop in net sentiment for Clinton, and an 11-point rise for Trump, enough for the two candidates to switch places in the rankings, with Clinton in more negative territory than Trump. At a time when opinion polling showed perhaps a 2-point decline in the margin for Clinton, this conversation data suggests a 28-point change in the word of mouth "standings." The change in word of mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.
Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words:
In late October, Clinton leads Trump by 24 points in the Engagement Labs survey. Two days after the Comey letter is released, Trump is ahead by 4 points. Trump kept that lead until Election Day.
Once again: Clinton did nothing particularly wrong in her campaign. She didn't ignore working-class whites. She wasn't too cautious on policy. She didn't overestimate the impact of educated voters. She wasn't complacent. What happened was simple: 12 days before the election, the FBI director released a letter saying he had found a brand-new trove of emails and implying that this might finally be the smoking gun about her private email server. That's it.
We'll never know for sure if James Comey did this because he's terminally stupid and didn't realize what impact it would have, or if he did it knowing full well what impact it would have. But he did it. And that's why Donald Trump is president.
03 February 2017
02 December 2016
Trump Abandons Promise to Lock Up Hillary Clinton & The Kremlin Would Be Proud of Trump’s Propaganda Playbook 22&21NOV16
THE right wing fanatics, the voluntarily ignorant, those mislead and deceived by the drumpf/trump-pence campaign, are finding out so much of what they ran on was just propaganda, first telling the masses what they should want and believe, then promising them they would deliver. It is becoming obvious their campaign was all smoke and mirrors. drumpf has decided he is not going prosecute Hillary Clinton for her use of a private e mail server as an act of national healing after a very bitter 2016 presidential election. The real reason is there is no reason to prosecute her, the fbi made that clear while conducting their investigation even though fbi director james comey used his office to reinforce the drumpf/trump-pence campaign's lies and deception about Hillary Clinton. This from +Mother Jones .....
Trump Abandons Promise to Lock Up Hillary Clinton
NOV. 22, 2016 1:17 PM
During the 2016 election, the chant of "Lock her up" followed Donald Trump everywhere he went. And he reveled in it. He promised on national TV to do exactly that, and during the final days of the campaign—after James Comey released his calamitous letter—he practically spoke about nothing else. Hillary Clinton was the most corrupt person ever in history, and when he became president he'd make sure she spent the rest of her natural days behind bars.
His fans loved it. But apparently they're going to be disappointed:
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump essentially said: "never mind," signaling that he does not intend to pursue investigations into his rival's use of a private email server or the financial operations at the Clinton family's global foundation.In an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump campaign manager and a senior adviser to his transition, said the president-elect wanted to "move beyond the issues of the campaign" and confirmed that Mr. Trump did not want his promised Clinton investigations to take place."If Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that's a good thing," Ms. Conway said.
Isn't that sweet? Trump is going to help Hillary Clinton "heal." What a guy.
Of course, he's also signaling that he won't undertake the most corrupt use of the Justice Department since Watergate. So that's a positive, I guess.
Anyway, the bottom line here is that shipping Hillary off to Sing Sing was never something Trump planned to do in the first place. It just sounded good and made his crowds happy. Once the election was over, he didn't care anymore. I wonder how many more of Trump's promises fall into that category? His supporters are about to find out just how far the Trump con goes.
The Kremlin Would Be Proud of Trump’s Propaganda Playbook
The Donald is a master of these four techniques of misinformation.
Donald Trump masks
On April 16, 2015, one month after Russian soldiers entered eastern Ukraine and joined Moscow-backed separatists in the slaughter of more than 130 Ukrainian troops in a town called Debaltseve, Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to perpetuate a claim that was growing increasingly ludicrous. "I can tell you outright and unequivocally that there are no Russian troops in Ukraine," he declared in a broadcast to the Russian people.
The denial was a classic propaganda move. "The first Russian approach to negative reporting or comment is to dismiss it, either by denying the allegations on the ground, or denigrating the one who makes them," writes Ben Nimmo, a British-based analyst of Russian information warfare and strategy. Specifically, this approach is an example of dismissal, one of four distinct ways the Putin government tries to spin facts and misinform the public, as identified by Nimmo. He calls it the 4D Approach: dismiss, distract, distort, and dismay.
Though Putin has put these tactics to good use, he did not invent them. Nor is he the only image-conscious, scrutiny-averse world leader to employ them. Over the past months, President-elect Donald Trump has also proved adept at using the propaganda techniques Nimmo describes. "The fact that the Trump campaign is doing the same kind of thing does not necessarily mean that they got it from Russia. These techniques are pretty universal; it's just there's a commonality of approach," Nimmo says.
Some examples of The Donald's mastery of the four Ds of propaganda:
Dismiss: Dismissing uncomfortable allegations or facts is second nature to most politicians. When nine women accused Trump of groping or kissing them without their consent, he first accused Hillary Clinton's campaign of orchestrating the allegations. A day later, during the third presidential debate, he claimed, falsely, "Those stories have been largely debunked."
"The point is to get people so emotional and so confused that they give up on the debate."
Throughout his campaign, Trump repeatedly dismissed the press as "scum," "horrible people," and "dishonest." In the week since winning the election, he has taken to Twitter on six occasions to excoriate the New York Times and its coverage, casting it as "very poor" and "highly inaccurate." Unsurprisingly, as Philip Bump of the Washington Post points out, Trump's complaints about the New York Times are most commonly about stories that have proved true. But, dismissal plays well with Trump's supporters, who are already inclined to distrust the mainstream media. "Why would you listen to your critic if he is intrinsically not worth listening to?" notes Nimmo.
Distract: Another way propagandists dodge facts is to throw out distracting stories or counterclaims. For example, when Western countries condemned Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2015, the Kremlin shot back by claiming that NATO did the same thing with Kosovo during the late 1990s. That wasn't accurate, but, as Nimmo explains, "The point is not to convince anyone, the point is to put you on the back foot."
Trump's standout moment of distraction came when he was asked about the Access Hollywood video during the second presidential debate. Rather than addressing his taped boasts of grabbing women "by the pussy", he went afterBill Clinton. "There's never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that's been so abusive to women," he said. Then he pivoted to Hillary Clinton, accusing her of attacking her husband's accusers "viciously" and claimed that as a lawyer, she once laughed at a 12-year-old rape victim. Clinton responded by quoting Michelle Obama: "When they go low, we go high." This was a smart response to Trump's distraction techniques. "A reasonable person's response is going to be, 'No I didn't,'" Nimmo says. "As soon as you've done that, the distraction technique has worked because the conversation has shifted from what they did to what you did."
Distort: If you don't like the facts, invent your own. Long after it was shown that a Russian missile shot a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in 2014, Russia presented doctored satellite imagery to claim that a Ukrainian aircraft shot down the civilian jet.
As has been well documented, Trump is shameless about distorting his (and other people's) record. (Trump has earned three full pages of Pants on Fire ratings from Politifact.) Let's look at his claims about his yearslong crusade to prove that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. In September, Trump said he believed the president was born in the United States and tried to pin the ugly birther episode on Clinton. "Her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy," Trump claimed. "I finished it."
Dismay: The final tool in the propagandists tool kit is the least subtle. "If you don't like what somebody is planning politically, scare them off," Nimmo explains. For example, in October, Norway agreed to host 330 US Marines for a training deployment. Russia responded by threatening to add Norway to its nuclear strike list. (So far, Norway hasn't backed down.)
Trump's use of this tactic could be heard in the mantralike "Lock her up!"chants at his campaign rallies. At the second debate, he openly threatened Clinton, warning her that, "If I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation." When she responded that it was "awfully good" that someone with Trump's temperament was not in charge of the law in the country, he interjected, "Because you'd be in jail."
Even as Trump slings propaganda like a pro, he's also susceptible to it. During the first presidential debate, Trump said Google "was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton." He didn't cite a source for that information, but the claim had been kicking around in conservative media outlets, including Breitbart, InfoWars, and Fox. They attributed it back to Sputnik News, a Russian government-controlled news agency, which two weeks before the debate had published a report written by the psychologist Robert Epstein that claimed Google's search suggestions were biased in Clinton's favor.
"Create enough doubt for everything so that when the proof comes it is washed in the same disdain for all alleged truth."
The Sputnik report was prompted by a viral video released in June that claimed Google was actively altering search recommendations to benefit Clinton. (Search engine optimization experts quickly debunked the video.) Interestingly, that video credited a 2015 Wired article about research conducted by the same author of the Sputnik report—Epstein. Nimmo dug into the story and found that a full six months before Sputnik ran the report, both Sputnik and its sister television outlet, Russia Today, started reporting on Epstein's controversial claims as if they were already proven, interviewing him five times before Sputnik released its big report in English and seven other languages.
The ultimate purpose of all this—the 4Ds, the phony news stories, and the trollsand bots that amplify them—isn't so much to prove a particular set of facts, but rather to distort information so that no one knows what to believe. This uncertainty benefits the propaganda pusher, whether it is Trump or the Kremlin. "The point is to get people so emotional and so confused that they give up on the debate. And once you've done that, you've silenced the voice of a potential critic," says Nimmo. "If they can do it long enough and if people generally switch off from the mainstream media, it gets so much easier to spread the lies."
What's more, this approach works even when the lies are debunked. "The issue, which is seriously real, is literally tailor-made to be dismissed as conspiracy theory and therefore ignored," says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who now works at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm. "That's that whole point of the Russian effort. Create enough doubt for everything so that when the proof comes it is washed in the same disdain for all alleged truth."
"Sometimes when fake news is debunked, among certain circles it actually gives it more legitimacy," says Aric Toler, an analyst at Bellingcat, an open-source investigative outlet. "It's the, 'This is what they don't want you to know,' argument." To effectively combat it, each fake story has to be turned inside out and transparently debunked at every step. News stories that quote experts won't convince skeptics, says Toler. His advice for the news media: "Assume you have no credibility." Perhaps Obama said it best in a post-election interview with The New Yorker: Our new information landscape "means everything is true and nothing is true."
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04 November 2016
29 October 2016
VIDEO: The Daily Show - Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse - Conspiracy Theories Thrive at a Trump Rally
The Daily Show - Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse - Conspiracy Theories Thrive at a Trump Rally
Published on Sep 21, 2016
Jordan Klepper gets Donald Trump supporters to share their non-reality-based opinions about Hillary Clinton and President Obama.
18 October 2016
Newt Gingrich: Clinton’s Supreme Court Could Censor The Lord’s Prayer 18OKT16
CHRISTIAN newt gingrich is using lies and deception and manipulating the voluntary ignorance of many Americans who believe the lies of Christian / religious persecution in America that this is sure to get them up and arms and busy spreading this and many other right wing lies. The faith of these people is so weak if they faced real persecution they would just shrivel up and die. If their Christian faith played any role in their lives, their being, they would recognize this as propaganda and challenge gingrich on it. But then if their Christian faith played any role in their lives they wouldn't be endorsing the lies, hatred, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, bigotry, racism and violence of the drumpf/trump-pence campaign. From PFAW/Right Wing Watch .....
Newt Gingrich: Clinton’s Supreme Court Could Censor The Lord’s Prayer
By Miranda Blue | October 18, 2016 2:07 pm
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich joined a teleconference last night hosted by the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) to discuss the presidential election, warning the group that if Hillary Clinton is allowed to nominate Supreme Court justices, she could pick “fanatics who want to impose a secular America on the rest of us” and who might even go so far as to require churches to remove the words “our Father” from the Lord’s Prayer.
Claiming that recent WikiLeaks emails show that Clinton’s aides are “radically anti-religious” and “radically anti-Christian,” Gingrich said that this means that Clinton’s court picks would be “people who do not believe in the right of religious liberty, people who believe that the government should define what you’re allowed to say, even in church.”
“And, by the way,” he continued, “there’s an organization in Massachusetts now, a government commission on transgender rights, that’s looking at potentially defining for churches what kinds of pronouns they could use, raising the specter, for example, of eliminating ‘our Father’ from the Lord’s Prayer, because, after all, that’s a particular pronoun. This stuff, in my judgment, is madness, but nonetheless these are people who are dedicated, I think, fanatics who want to impose a secular America on the rest of us and who are willing to use the government to do it.”
The Massachusetts guidance he referred to says that transgender nondiscrimination rules “could” apply to churches when they hold “a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public.”
Gingrich added that a Supreme Court with Clinton-nominated justices would “almost certainly eliminate the Second Amendment.”
17 October 2016
14 October 2016
Donald Trump’s Contempt For The Constitution & Right Wing Round-Up 13OKT16
THE drumpf/trump-pence campaign is a threat to the American Republic. drumpf/trump has a big mouth and encourages violations of his opponents civil liberties and civil rights, but mike pence is a greater threat because he is a professional politician who knows how to package the revocation of civil liberties and civil rights in a propaganda campaign that can deceive many into supporting the eventual imposition of authoritarianism on themselves. This from +The Huffington Post and PFAW's Right Wing Watch.....
Donald Trump’s Contempt For The Constitution
In a debate dominated by Donald Trump’s insults, ranting and smears, one of his many disturbing moments received decidedly less attention than others.
Trump’s claim that he would jail Hillary Clinton if elected president was shocking—and rightfully so. But left largely unnoticed was his attack on the Sixth Amendment, or the right of defendants to receive a fair trial with “the assurance of counsel.”
During Sunday’s presidential town hall forum, Trump railed against Clinton for having represented an accused rapist while practicing law in Arkansas back in 1975, even bringing the woman, who was a minor at the time she was raped, to the debate and a press conference as evidence that Clinton, and not Trump, is the true enemy of women.
The fact that Clinton represented a man accused of rape is no secret. Clinton wrote about it herself in her book “Living History.” But many conservatives have seized on that case to argue that Clinton is the true abuser of women, most recently as they try to run interference for Trump after the release of a 2005 recording of him bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Clinton reluctantly represented the accused rapist after receiving a request from the judge. The case was ultimately resolved when the defendant pled guilty to a substantially reduced charge.
Those who assail Clinton for representing an accused criminal seem to be under the impression that anyone accused of any crime should be automatically found guilty, doing away with that pesky need for a trial in which the accused is presumed innocent and has a right to legal counsel.
Yes, even people accused of crimes as vile as rape should have their day in court and a zealous defense, no matter how guilty they appear.
Clinton isn’t the only one who’s faced political criticism for doing her job as a lawyer representing an unsavory client.
The Republican National Committee recently came out with an ad attacking Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine for defending people on death row. Two years earlier, the Republican Governors Association launched similar ads against a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina, accusing him of protecting “criminals, not us.” Earlier this year, a conservative group rallied against a federal judge who was a potential Supreme Court nominee by citing her work as a public defender.
Such attacks undermine our legal system and the Constitution.
We can only imagine the negative advertisements that these groups would have created to assail John Adams, who successfully defended several British soldiers implicated in the Boston Massacre, or Abraham Lincoln, who successfully represented accused murderers.
But as in other instances, this patent hostility to a bedrock constitutional principle mainly comes from one party—the party that has nominated a man who campaigned on restricting religious liberties and the freedom of the press; a man who to this day continues to smear the Central Park Five; a man who supports breaking treaties, committing war crimes and using torture “even if it doesn’t work“; and a man who lamented that the suspect in the recent New York bombing case would receive medical treatment and legal counsel after being arrested. And it’s the same party that is keeping a Supreme Court seat vacant in hopes that this man will fill the vacancy.
While Trump’s attacks on core American values are disgraceful, he is sadly not alone in them.
Trump’s claim that he would jail Hillary Clinton if elected president was shocking—and rightfully so. But left largely unnoticed was his attack on the Sixth Amendment, or the right of defendants to receive a fair trial with “the assurance of counsel.”
During Sunday’s presidential town hall forum, Trump railed against Clinton for having represented an accused rapist while practicing law in Arkansas back in 1975, even bringing the woman, who was a minor at the time she was raped, to the debate and a press conference as evidence that Clinton, and not Trump, is the true enemy of women.
The fact that Clinton represented a man accused of rape is no secret. Clinton wrote about it herself in her book “Living History.” But many conservatives have seized on that case to argue that Clinton is the true abuser of women, most recently as they try to run interference for Trump after the release of a 2005 recording of him bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Clinton reluctantly represented the accused rapist after receiving a request from the judge. The case was ultimately resolved when the defendant pled guilty to a substantially reduced charge.
Those who assail Clinton for representing an accused criminal seem to be under the impression that anyone accused of any crime should be automatically found guilty, doing away with that pesky need for a trial in which the accused is presumed innocent and has a right to legal counsel.
Yes, even people accused of crimes as vile as rape should have their day in court and a zealous defense, no matter how guilty they appear.
Clinton isn’t the only one who’s faced political criticism for doing her job as a lawyer representing an unsavory client.
The Republican National Committee recently came out with an ad attacking Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine for defending people on death row. Two years earlier, the Republican Governors Association launched similar ads against a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina, accusing him of protecting “criminals, not us.” Earlier this year, a conservative group rallied against a federal judge who was a potential Supreme Court nominee by citing her work as a public defender.
Such attacks undermine our legal system and the Constitution.
We can only imagine the negative advertisements that these groups would have created to assail John Adams, who successfully defended several British soldiers implicated in the Boston Massacre, or Abraham Lincoln, who successfully represented accused murderers.
But as in other instances, this patent hostility to a bedrock constitutional principle mainly comes from one party—the party that has nominated a man who campaigned on restricting religious liberties and the freedom of the press; a man who to this day continues to smear the Central Park Five; a man who supports breaking treaties, committing war crimes and using torture “even if it doesn’t work“; and a man who lamented that the suspect in the recent New York bombing case would receive medical treatment and legal counsel after being arrested. And it’s the same party that is keeping a Supreme Court seat vacant in hopes that this man will fill the vacancy.
While Trump’s attacks on core American values are disgraceful, he is sadly not alone in them.
October 13, 2016 5:34 pm- Brian Tashman @ The Huffington Post: Donald Trump’s Contempt For The Constitution.
- Alan Colmes: Jeffress: A Claim Against Trump ‘Doesn’t Mean It’s Reality’.
- Tom Gara @ Buzzfeed: Here’s Donald Trump’s Response To Being Called A “Sexual Predator” In 2006.
- Zack Ford @ Think Progress: Jerry Falwell Jr. will vote for Donald Trump even if he sexually assaulted women.
- Michael Fitzgerald @ Towleroad: Ben Carson: Gay Marriage Will Lead to ‘Mass Killings’ and ‘Utter Chaos’.
- Travis Gettys @ Raw Story: Longtime Trump exec explains why her ‘vindictive and dishonest’ ex-boss should never be president.
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