US Election: 2016

[Jed]

You guys crack me up.  [

 

[Jed]

Agree with cupper's post.

Sen Cruz is scary. I would not be surprised that if he was elected he will do what Pres Obama does now, Presidential Decrees, except they will be what he believes are conservative beliefs, must have/do.

He has already proven in the Senate that he will do what Cruz thinks is the conservative way. Only Cruz knows what is best for conservative America. He is an opportunist.

Cruz and Trump are handing America over to the Dems.

Well, Trump is for sure now as probably only 20 % of the female vote will now go for him.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

I can easily see a Trump-Cruz ticket.

Why? Just to make sure that no rational/intelligent thoughts can come out of the Republican party? The fact that those two are the best that party can produce (same for Clinton/Sanders) is disconcerting

 

[Lumber]

I can easily see a Trump-Cruz ticket.

Don't the two have way too much animosity right now?

How about a Trump/Cruz - Kasich ticket?

 

[QV]

How about Trump/Sanders (independent)

 

[a_majoor]

Meanwhile, in Dem land, it looks like the minority support for Hillary Clinton is collapsing. The explanation may be as simple as people are finally figuring out she is an unlikable person willing to pander to anyone in a naked grab for power (not to mention the various shenanigans with classified emails on an unsecured server, the Clinton Foundation raking in billions while only @ 15% of the money is disused for charity, the rest going to "salaries and expenses"; Hillary providing preferential treatment as Secretary of State to donors to the Clinton Foundation; serial lying about her "accomplishments" as SoS, Lybia from the commencement of the war to Benghazi, etc. etc.) :

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/01/hillary-clintons-support-among-nonwhite-voters-has-collapsed

Hillary Clinton’s Support Among Nonwhite Voters Has Collapsed
bySeth Abramson

On February 27th, Hillary Clinton led Bernie Sanders among African-American voters by 52 points.

By March 26th, she led Sanders among African-Americans by just nine points.

And on Thursday, Public Policy Polling, a widely respected polling organization, released a poll showing that Sanders leads Clinton among African-American voters in Wisconsin by 11 points.

"The Clinton campaign is in the midst of an historic collapse — much of it due to the unraveling of support for Clinton among nonwhite voters — and the national media has yet to take any notice."

It’s all part of a dramatic national trend that has seen Clinton’s support among nonwhite voters dwindle to well under a third of what it was just a month ago — not nearly enough support to carry her, as it did throughout the Deep South, to future electoral victories in the Midwest and Northeast.

So no, it’s not a coincidence that, in the 18 state primary elections since March 1st, Bernie Sanders has won on Election Day in 12 of them.

(That’s right: Bernie won among live and provisional ballots in Arizona, Illinois, and Missouri.)

Of Clinton’s five post-March 1st Election Day wins, four (Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and North Carolina) were in the South, and were made possible by a level of support among nonwhite voters that Clinton no longer enjoys. Indeed, this coalition was already collapsing when Clinton won in Florida and North Carolina on March 15th. At the polls in North Carolina on Election Day, Clinton won just 52 percent to 48 percent, including the tens of thousands of provisional ballots cast (which, still being counted, have gone, as expected, 57 percent for Senator Sanders). In Florida, the 36-point edge Clinton held in the first three weeks of early voting (February 15th to March 7th) dwindled to a 13.4-point edge among those who made their decision regarding who to vote for from March 8th to March 15th.

In short, the Clinton campaign is in the midst of an historic collapse — much of it due to the unraveling of support for Clinton among nonwhite voters — and the national media has yet to take any notice.

Clinton’s 48-point lead in New York less than two weeks ago is now just a 12-point lead, according to the latest Quinnipiac Poll. That poll shows Sanders with approximately 300 percent more support among African-American voters in New York than he had in Mississippi earlier this month.

Meanwhile, in the only poll taken in Indiana, Sanders is said to be beating Clinton handily.

Sanders is leading by 8 points in West Virginia.

And the only polling done so far in Kentucky — among nearly 1,000 students at the University of Kentucky — has Sanders up on Clinton there by more than 70 points.

But what the latest Reuters polling underscores is that even Clinton’s support in the South has collapsed.

Between February 27th and March 26th, Clinton’s lead among Southerners — the group whose primary votes (and thus delegates) comprise the entirety of her 228-delegate lead over Bernie Sanders — decreased from 15 points to just 6. Given the percentage of Southern Democrats who are African-American, even without cross-tabs available there is reason to believe Clinton’s declining numbers among nonwhite voters are partially responsible for this decline. Certainly, it was the strength of Clinton’s support among this polling demographic that assured Clinton of massive delegate hauls in nearly every Southern state: according to CNN exit polling, on March 1st black voters in Mississippi favored Clinton by 77 points, in Georgia by 71 points, in Virginia by 68 points, in Texas by 68 points, in Tennessee by 79 points, in Arkansas by 66 points, and in Alabama by a whopping 85 points.

Now that Clinton’s lead among black voters nationwide is fluctuating between the high single-digits and the mid-teens, it appears the sort of voting margins among nonwhite voters that made Clinton’s present delegate lead possible are never coming back.

Case-in-point: last week, Sanders beat Clinton in three of the ten most diverse states in America (Hawaii, Washington, and Alaska) by 39.8 points, 45.6 points, and 61.5 points, respectively.

Yet even after “Western Saturday,” the media clung to its narrative that Sanders cannot win among nonwhite voters, arguing — sometimes implicitly, often explicitly — that only strong performances among African-American voters would be sufficient to dislodge the narrative the fourth estate has run with about Sanders since late 2015. Indeed, after the release of the latest Marquette University poll in Wisconsin, Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight.com tweeted, “All I see on the Democratic side is the Marquette poll matching the demographic expectations [in the primary race].”

In fact, the poll showed Clinton leading Sanders among all nonwhite voters by a mere 16 percent.

Again, as a point of comparison, Clinton beat Sanders by 82 points among nonwhite voters in Alabama, by 66 in Arkansas, 62 in Georgia, 71 in Tennessee, 48 in Texas, and 52 in Virginia.

Outcry among Sanders supporters at the false narrative regarding Sanders and nonwhite voters continues to go unheard, even as this new Public Policy Polling data shows the Senator beating Clinton among black voters in Wisconsin by 11 points. Instead of a mass mea culpa from the media, Sanders supporters were confronted with a Chicago Tribune column, published Thursday, that says of polling in the Democratic primary race, “Of course polls can change, but there’s no particular reason to believe they will.”

No reason indeed.

Three weeks ago, Sanders won Michigan while losing among nonwhite voters by 29 points. So the 16-point deficit reported by Marquette and the 11-point advantage reported by PPP constitute dramatic improvements for Sanders over even a recent winning performance in the Midwest — in fact, Sanders’ most important win of this election season. This bodes well for Sanders’ future performance in other key Midwestern states like Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Indiana.

As for Sanders’ performance among nonwhite voters in the Northeast — where New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey voters will head to the polls in the coming weeks — it’s always been substantially stronger than the media, again inexplicably stuck on Deep-South exit polls, has claimed it to be.

In Massachusetts, Sanders lost the nonwhite vote by only 18 points, per CNN exit polling. In New Hampshire, where close to 20,000 nonwhite voters cast ballots back in February, Sanders actually won the nonwhite vote 50 percent to 49 percent.

In short, when the media — which seems to be reporting election results as though today were the “SEC Primary” — indicates that Sanders is in trouble in upcoming states with slightly more diverse populations, it’s not clear what recent numbers they’re looking at. Though the nonwhite voting population in the upcoming primaries and caucuses is exclusively a Midwestern and Northeastern one, the media appears to be ignoring all extant data from Wisconsin, Michigan, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire in favor of exit polls from states — like Alabama — that are nothing like these four politically, culturally, or in any other respect.

For those wondering about the exit polls in the Midwestern states that voted in mid-March — for instance, Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri — we can say that these, too, show that Clinton’s lead among nonwhite voters outside of the Deep South is nothing like it was in those red-state strongholds.

In Illinois, Sanders won Latino voters 50 percent to 49 percent and lost African-American voters by a percentage (-40) midway between his recent, improved performance in Wisconsin and his March 1st performance in the Deep South (-73.5 average). These numbers were born out also in Missouri, where Sanders lost African-American voters by 35 points and nonwhite voters by 23 points. These data aren’t surprising or disheartening for Sanders or his supporters — indeed, the figures, taken together, are almost algebraic — given that Sanders lost African-American voters by 73.5 points on March 1st, 40 points on March 15th, and was ahead in Wisconsin among this group by 11 points by March 31st.

In other words, nonwhite voting offers the media a clear and unambiguous narrative about Sanders — an unmissable trajectory — if only they’re willing to see it.

And the same dramatic trajectory — albeit in the opposite direction — is evident for Clinton.

Indeed, putting aside for a moment her loss of support among African-American voters, Clinton has offered the media a narrative of her domination among Latino voters that likewise has taken a serious hit of late.

While Clinton won early voting in Arizona — which took place around the time of voting in the Deep South — by a 25.4 percent margin, Election Day and provisional ballots in the heavily Latino state (which all came in as Sanders was decimating Clinton’s lead among nonwhite voters in mid-March) favored Sanders 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent (82,470 votes for Sanders, 77,849 for Clinton). Given that Arizona has the sixth-largest Latino population of any American state, it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine Sanders beating Clinton in non-early voting there by nearly 3 points without performing exponentially better among Latinos than he had at the beginning of the month (e.g., his 42-point loss among Latinos in Texas on March 1st, which contributed substantially to his 32-point loss in the state).

It’s worth noting, too, that Arizona still has thousands of predominantly Sanders-voter provisional ballots to count, so the Senator’s 3-point margin in Election Day and provisional voting there is almost certain to widen. And the counties now giving him the largest additional margin in provisional voting are counties with sizable populations of Latino voters.

In short, there simply is no evidence available to suggest that Hillary Clinton’s robust coalition of nonwhite voters still exists — certainly not in anything like the form it was just four weeks ago. How else to explain an 82-point margin among nonwhite voters in Alabama, and similar margins in every other Southern state, on March 1st, and just a 6-point lead among all Southern Democrats (who are, depending upon the state, between 27 percent and 71 percent African-American) on March 26th?

Indeed, even where Clinton now outperforms Sanders among nonwhite voters, the margin — when and as there is one — is perfectly in keeping with competitive politics in the contemporary era. And it is dwarfed, as it happens, by Sanders’ lead among other key groups, notably voters under 30 (particularly Latino voters under 30) and independent voters.

The Clinton-Sanders tilt remains at a stage in which nearly all the real-time data favors Sanders, and all the television and print coverage favors Clinton because of a delegate lead she built up during Deep-South voting a month ago. The race as it is being reported therefore bears no relation to the race as it is, which is why the Clinton camp has all but pulled out of Wisconsin — anticipating a sizable loss there that will emphasize the momentum (actual and internals-supported) Sanders developed in Mountain-state and Western voting over the past two weeks.

Consider: in North Carolina two weeks ago, Sanders handily defeated Clinton among white voters (+9) and narrowly lost among all voters on Election Day (-4). However, the Senator’s performance (-61) among African-American voters — many of whom voted early, well before March 15th — doomed him to lose the state as a whole by 13.8 percent.

If Sanders had had the African-American support during early voting (and some Election Day voting) in North Carolina that he enjoys today, he would have lost all voting in North Carolina by fewer than four and a half points — 52.7 percent to 47.3 percent (514,447 for Clinton, 460,828 for Sanders). But here’s the key: in a Midwestern or Northeastern state, rather than a Southern one — indeed, in any state with racial and ethnic demographics in the middle 50 percent of American states — those same internals would result in a massive Sanders win.

Which, as it happens, is what the State of Wisconsin may well be for Sanders in just five days.

In other words, hold onto your hats, folks.

 

[CougarKing]

Wait a minute, didn't the GOP lose the 76 election to Carter? (I wasn't born yet then, but some of you would remember)  ;D

Bloomberg

Trump Hires Veteran of ’76 GOP Fight to Lead Delegate Effort: New York Times

Donald Trump enlists strategist Paul J. Manafort, who has experience with convention battles, to oversee the businessman’s procurement and retention of delegates in the fight for the GOP presidential nomination, NYT reports (http://nyti.ms/1Sjbiax).

    NOTE: Manafort helped manage the 1976 convention floor for then-President Gerald Ford against challenger Ronald Reagan, last time Republicans entered a convention with no candidate having clinched the nomination


(...SNIPPED)

 

[tomahawk6]

Trump could hardly hire Karl Rove,as Rove doesnt believe in Trump the candidate.

 

[cupper]

Wait a minute, didn't the GOP lose the 76 election to Carter? (I wasn't born yet then, but some of you would remember)  ;D

Bloomberg

They lost because the contested convention was Ford vs Reagan. They pick the incumbent sitting president over the challenging outsider, which kinda makes sense. Until you realize that the guy they passed over goes on to beat Carter in the next election.

Karma will run over dogma all the time.

 

[cupper]

Had a lot of time to listen to news and politics radio on the two day drive to Canada yesterday and today.

One interesting comment I heard was a discussion on Trump's foreign policy cred.

The person commenting said "Trump knows more about hotel bathroom fixtures than foreign policy." "He can probably give you more insight on financial returns on casino games that he can on global politics"

 

[a_majoor]

Another issue which *should* be highlighted (especially by the GOP), since the CRA worked so well the *last* time it was applied:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/230629/

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN! Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-administration-pushes-banks-to-make-home-loans-to-people-with-weaker-credit/2013/04/02/a8b4370c-9aef-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html

As we saw in 2008 when Bill Clinton’s efforts in that department reached their full fruition, that will end well. Again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RZVw3no2A4

Earlier: “Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.”

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it....

 

[a_majoor]

Donald trump and sidewalk chalk teach a valuable lesson for students in hundreds of US universities. The real question is will they take the lesson to heart?

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/230707/

RICH LOWRY: Do Not Fear The Chalk.
Rarely before have a few scribblings been so traumatizing — and written not even in ink or paint or some other difficult-to-remove substance, but in the same chalk used to mark out hopscotch courts and write temporary promotional messages about sorority mixers and student theatrical productions. That chalk messages can be considered tantamount to a physical threat captures the crisis of free speech on campus perfectly.

What has become known on social media as “the chalkening” demonstrates how some college kids can’t be exposed to the simplest expression of support for a major presidential candidate without wanting to scurry to the nearest safe space. By this standard, a “Make America Great Again” hat is a hate crime waiting to happen. It’s not clear how any of these students can turn on cable TV or look at the polls for the Republican nomination these days without being triggered. Pro-Trump chalking took off after the reaction at Emory University, where some students were reduced to tears by the messages and said they felt “fear.” Protesters gathered at an administration building and let loose the antiphonal chant “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” This might have been an appropriate response if the kids had been tear-gassed, rather than seeing a positive phrase about a candidate that is supported by some significant plurality of the American public. . . .

The reaction to the chalkening is a testament to the electric charge surrounding Trump. He is like the Washington Redskins of political candidates — so politically incorrect that some people can’t bear to see or hear his name. (The New York Times columnist Charles Blow actually refuses to use it.) This branding isn’t prudent positioning for a general election, but it makes Trump a perfect vehicle for provoking the other side, and it’s in that thumb-in-the-eye spirit that the Trump chalking is spreading. The students getting the vapors over it don’t understand free expression or what it means to live in a free society, where you inevitably encounter people who have ideas and support candidates that you oppose. They hate Donald Trump. Fine. That is reason to argue and agitate against him, not to seek protection from any contact with supporters of his, no matter how tenuous.

The thing is, they’ve been taught the opposite since Kindergarten.

 

[a_majoor]

A higher level overview of what drives the Trump (and to a lesser extent Sanders) phenomena. The taxpayer/citizen class has had enough, but no real leader has stepped forward yet, hence Trump and Sanders. This could also go under the Grand Strategy for a divided America thread, since the toxic environment the political establishment has created is driving the situation we are in today:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/donald-trump-and-the-ghost-of-christopher-lasch/

Donald Trump and the Ghost of Christopher Lasch
America’s yeoman class revolts.
By GILBERT T. SEWALL • April 5, 2016
 
Milos Stojanovic / Shutterstock.com
Donald Trump is a bad casino act, yes. He is a classic demagogue with a mean streak. He is also the catalyst of yeoman America’s ongoing political pushback to globalism, diversity, and progressive dogma. How could this happen, the nation’s elites are wondering. They still have no idea how their arrogance spawned Trumpism or why someone with so many defects has kept against all odds trending up.

Fifty years of liberal campaigns to make American society inclusive and “fair” with exacting standards have backfired. The rump of middle-class, salt of the earth, white America realizes it’s been abandoned and humiliated. For the ruling class, connection and concern for flyover America—and for that matter the nation—is tentative or less. Donald Trump is a demagogue made to order for the dispossessed.

Trump’s expansive narcissism brings to mind the social critic Christopher Lasch’s 1979 landmark study, The Culture of Narcissism, which described the rise of individual self-involvement and politics as celebrity theater. But his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites—published the year after he died of cancer at 61—provides the backstory to the class wars underlying this year’s fractious election.

In The Revolt of the Elites Lasch foresaw the disconnect between the nation’s political classes and the governed, as UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge has recently observed. America’s elites have devoted so much energy to building their collective moral system that they expect ideological obedience. When Trumpists say strong families in the 1950s were a positive, the cognoscenti respond: “So what. It was a terrible time for minorities and gays.” 

Trump’s armies feel the sting of comfortable, upscale, post-industrial winners who can barely conceal their contempt for those they dismiss as Wal-Mart people. The disdain for yeoman America—which is overwhelmingly white—is visceral, longstanding, and profound.

“Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television,” Lasch wrote in 1995, not yesterday. “They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.”

As Lasch anticipated, the nation’s ruling classes style themselves to be citizens of the world, living in “a global bazaar” to be savored indiscriminately, “with no questions asked and no commitments required.” From Pacific Palisades to Cambridge, far from the madding crowd, well-heeled transnational citizens of the world may hold assets in Singapore or the Cayman Islands. Their identities are post-national. Amid the affluence, obsequious Third World helpers work at minimum wage or off the books, doing the scut work and producing an exotic, multicultural vibe as a bonus.

Abandoning the left’s original intent to protect the common man, Lasch observed, progressives chose instead to pursue diversity, secularism, and cultural revolution. Families, schools, and churches were left behind. For thought leaders, family values, mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, white racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women stood in the way of progress.

For progressive elites, delicate moral confections and debatable ethical positions became acts of faith. “It is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view,” Lasch pointed out. “It is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic – in other words, as politically suspect.” When these novel moral systems are challenged, Lasch added, progressives react with “venomous hatred,” the toxic ill feeling that seems abundant in the 2016 election year.

“Diversity – a slogan that is attractive on the face of it – has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean,” Lasch remarked. “In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.”

The elites who run the nation’s institutions “labor under the delusion that they alone have overcome racial prejudice,” said Lasch. “The rest of the country, in their view, remains incorrigibly racist.” This unhealthy “monomania” on race suggests a mixture of self-righteousness and panic, he observed.

Multicultural obsessions—and above all, ideological purity on all things African-American and ascriptive—mark a multivalent “civil rights” movement now many decades old. Movies, advertisements, lectures, awards, history months, and news stories keep the narrative in motion, shaming anyone who does not openly spurn America’s white, straight middle class that clings to religion, guns, and more.

Since Lasch wrote, liberal elites have solidified their public and private institutional control, wielding political power through the Democratic Party. They expect affirmation, not only compliance. On campus, Black Lives Matter, rape culture, curriculum witch-hunts, and a lengthening list of ideological tests overwhelm the pursuit of knowledge and quality. On and off campus, elites with assets and institutional power have the luxury to be high-minded. It is in their interest not to rock diversity’s boat but to steer it instead.

Said Lasch, the new American elites insist on sanitizing society according to their own moral precepts. On one hand, they want to set rules of enlightened thought and interpersonal relations. At the same time, they unwisely seek to “extend the range of personal choice where most people feel the need for solid moral guidelines.”

For America’s winners, compassion is abstract, as Lasch realized. As often as not, up-market altruism is staged to signal virtue and magnanimity. Emotional causes and feel-good politics keep all-important dopamine and self-esteem levels healthy and high.

Yeoman America is not protected or rich enough to be abstractly high-minded. It gets panhandled at the 7-Eleven. It travels Economy Class Group 3. It doesn’t get the scholarships or set-asides. It lives too close for comfort to seedy section 8 neighborhoods. Loose cultural standards and industrial decline have coarsened many who are prisoners of celebrity culture.

A Trump victory of course is “impossible.” It would require a massive, almost unimaginable white, yeoman flight from the Democratic Party. It is quite likely that we are even now experiencing Peak Trump. But “impossible” now stands in quotes.

Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States since 1945 and editor of The Eighties: A Reader.

 

[CougarKing]

Not an April Fool's joke from last week: if "the Queen" ends wearing an orange jumpsuit by the end of this year, the prospect of Bernie Sanders presidency doesn't seem a remote possibility anymore. Yikes!

CBC

How a criminal indictment could affect Hillary Clinton's run for U.S. presidency

CBC
April 1, 2016

Depending where you sit on the political spectrum, an indictment against Hillary Clinton over her lingering email scandal is either as unavoidable as an eastern sunrise or the longest of long shots.

Clinton has apologized for having used a private, non-secure email account and home-based server while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. She has said none of the emails sent or received via her clintonemail.com account was marked classified at the time, but several of the emails were upgraded to "top secret" status in January to prevent them from being released.

(...SNIPPED)

And the Trump steamroller losing steam as the MSM outlets continue to say?

Associated Press

After big loss, Trump presidential bid hinges on fixing a weakness: organization
[The Canadian Press]
Alexander Panetta,
April 6, 2016

WASHINGTON - Donald Trump expressed indifference a few days ago to the boring parts of campaigning — like the rules about how delegates get chosen for the presidential nominating convention.

"Somebody said (to me), 'Well, there's a rule and another rule.' I don't care about rules, folks," Trump told a rally in Milwaukee.

"I go out, I campaign, we win."

(...SNIPPED)

Video Report: Yahoo News

Trump falters in Wisconsin, as Cruz wins big

Holly Bailey
April 5, 2016

NEW YORK — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz soundly defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin’s Republican presidential primary Tuesday, winning close to 50 percent of the vote in a three-man contest and potentially giving a burst of new energy to efforts to stop the real estate mogul from clinching the GOP nomination. The outcome appeared to increase the odds of a contested convention this summer.

“Tonight is a turning point. It is a rallying cry,” Cruz declared at his primary night party in Milwaukee. “We have a choice, a real choice.”

(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

Yep, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy keeps growing:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/230947

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: No ‘coincidence’ Romanian hacker Guccifer extradited amid Clinton probe.


One of the notches on Guccifer’s cyber-crime belt was allegedly accessing the email account of Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, one of Clinton’s most prolific advice-givers when she was secretary of state. It was through that hack that Clinton’s use of a personal account — clintonemail.com — first came to light.

Former law enforcement and cyber security experts said the hacker, whose real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar, could – now that he’s in the U.S. – help the FBI make the case that Clinton’s email server was compromised by a third party, one that did not have the formal backing and resources of a foreign intelligence service such as that of Russia, China or Iran.

“Because of the proximity to Sidney Blumenthal and the activity involving Hillary’s emails, [the timing] seems to be something beyond curious,” said Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division from 2012-2014.

The FBI had no comment, of course, but it’s been obvious almost from the start that clintonemail.com was improperly secured. It seems impossible that the Secretary of State’s “private” emails were in Russian hands nearly in real-time, which makes yesterday’s report on Clinton’s Kremlin connection even more curious.

Hillary may be the most deeply compromised person ever to hold high office in this country — and she has a good chance of attaining the very highest office.

The Kremlin connection:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/230903/

JOHN SCHINDLER: Panama Papers Reveal Clinton’s Kremlin Connection: John and Tony Podesta aren’t fooling anyone.

Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, DC. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO is John Podesta, one of the best-connected Democratic machers in the country. Formerly chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, then counselor to President Barack Obama, Mr. Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider. Outsiders engage him and his well-connected lobbying firm to improve their image and get access to Democratic bigwigs.

Which is exactly what Sberbank, Russia’s biggest financial institution, did this spring. As reported at the end of March, Mr. Podesta registered with the U.S. Government as a lobbyist for Sberbank, as required by law, as did three other Podesta Group staffers: his brother Tony plus Stephen Rademaker and David Adams, the last two former assistant secretaries of state. It should be noted that Tony Podesta is a big-money bundler for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign while his brother John is the chairman of that campaign, the chief architect of her plans to take the White House this November.

Sberbank (Savings Bank in Russian) engaged the Podesta Group to help its public image—leading Moscow financial institutions not exactly being known for their propriety and wholesomeness—and specifically to help lift some of the pain of sanctions placed on Russia in the aftermath of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine, which has caused real pain to the country’s hard-hit financial sector.

It’s hardly surprising that Sberbank sought the help of Democratic insiders like the Podesta brothers to aid them in this difficult hour, they understand how American politics work—the question is why the Podestas took Sberbank’s money. That financial institution isn’t exactly hiding in the shadows—it’s the biggest bank in Russia, and its reputation leaves a lot to be desired.

Well, to be fair, it’s not like the Podesta brothers have ever been squeaky-clean. And as for Hillary, well . . . .

 

[cupper]

So, the alternative to Trump is someone who is less palatable to the electorate outside the extreme right of the GOP. And it seems the GOP establishment may be lining up behind him to stop Trump from getting the nomination outright.

Personally I believe they are only doing it to ensure that the convention is contested and they can take the opportunity to install their own more electable nominee. Cruz is their tool to getting that done.

But here is a good primer of why Cruz really isn't a viable alternative to Trump. (Hillary maybe,  > )

Cruz would be the most conservative nominee in generations
The Texas senator has staked out positions that put him to the right of Barry Goldwater.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/ted-cruz-most-conservative-republican-nominee-221729

Ted Cruz casts himself as the guy who can unify the Republican Party and stop the Donald Trump juggernaut.

But should the Texas senator win the nomination, he would be the most conservative Republican presidential choice in several generations — to the right even of Barry Goldwater, the party’s 1964 nominee, who was clobbered by Lyndon Johnson.

Cruz wants to resurrect the gold standard — an idea that went out of fashion with the Great Depression and is panned by most economists. He calls climate change a "pseudoscientific theory."

He opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest — exceptions that got nods from Republican nominees Mitt Romney, John McCain and President George W. Bush.

And he would eliminate the payroll taxes that fund popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. He would also get rid of the Export-Import Bank, reviled by tea party Republicans but championed by most GOP moderates and business groups — as well as the federal agencies overseeing commerce, energy, taxes and housing.

In rankings of right-leaning groups such as the Club for Growth, the National Taxpayers Union and the American Conservative Union, Cruz consistently ranks as one of the most conservative members of the Senate — much further right, in the ACU’s assessment, than, say, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But some of his policy prescriptions may hurt him if he becomes the nominee and needs to pivot to appeal to a wider swath of voters outside of the evangelical base he has courted assiduously this primary season.

“Cruz would be a disaster with Latinos and nonwhite voters — though he does not say insulting things about women — but his views on choice, gay rights, economic issues are very far right,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory College.

Establishment Republicans, like Ari Fleischer, former spokesman for Bush, say these conservative policy stances may end up in Democratic attack ads if Cruz becomes the nominee.

“There are two ways to look at Ted,” Fleischer said. “Standing on his own, he does not have a history as a unifier,” Fleischer said. “Standing next to Donald Trump, it is amazing what a unifying figure he can become.”

On foreign policy and national security questions, Cruz has sounded, at times, like an uber-hawk, eager to build up the military and fight foreign powers, and at others like an isolationist, similar to Sen. Rand Paul, who doesn’t want to arm rebels to fight the violent regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and who would curtail National Security Agency surveillance.
Cruz received widespread criticism for saying he would “carpet bomb” ISIL-occupied territories — a tactic that targets a large area with little regard for civilian casualties. And he was put on the defensive last month after he called for police patrols of Muslim neighborhoods.

On military spending, Cruz has tried to appease both the hawkish and noninterventionist wings of the party. Last year, he blasted fellow lawmakers for a bipartisan budget deal that "completely annihilates" self-imposed congressional spending caps — an effort to appeal to fiscal conservatives in the GOP. Months later, Cruz is now pushing a defense spending plan that would blow through those same caps by hundreds of billions of dollars. In his campaign, Cruz calls for 50,000 more Army soldiers, more than 75 new Navy warships and nearly 500 additional Air Force planes.

Even some defense hawks who support him seem motivated primarily by antipathy for Trump. “I don’t think [Cruz] would order our troops to commit war crimes,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “I feel far more comfortable with his view of foreign policy than I do Donald Trump’s.”

On abortion, Cruz’s views are out of sync with those of the majority of Americans — roughly 51 percent of adults in the U.S. say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to 2015 polling from the nonprofit Pew Research Center. Forty-three percent say it should be illegal in all or most cases, according to Pew — a partisan divide that’s been largely unchanged for years.

Cruz does not support abortion, even in cases of rape and incest — a position that is likely to alienate independents as well as many Democrats. The anti-abortion group National Right to Life does not keep statistics on the number of senators who espouse that position, says President Carol Tobias. (The group condones abortion only in cases when the life of the mother is in danger.)

Unlike Trump, who describes himself as anti-abortion but supports Planned Parenthood because of other services it offers women, Cruz says he would prosecute and defund the women’s health care agency, which he says in one ad “treats the unborn like another form of currency.”

Cruz has promised to eliminate a handful of federal agencies, from the IRS to the departments that oversee energy, commerce, housing and education — a vow that may be problematic to many Americans. Just 18 percent support the abolishment of the energy, education, commerce and housing departments, while just 34 percent support scrapping the IRS, according to a Gallup poll done in March. The headline on the Gallup poll reads: “Americans Reject Eliminating Departments of Government.”

Climate change is another area where Cruz’s view may seem extreme to many independent voters. He contends climate change is a partisan myth — “the perfect pseudoscientific theory because it can never, ever, ever be disproven,” as he told voters in Conway, New Hampshire. “The climate has always changed since the beginning of time. It will continue to change till the end of time."

In a 2015 interview with The Texas Tribune, Cruz even compared the criticism that climate change deniers face to the harsh treatment that Galileo faced in the 1600s. "Today, the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers,” Cruz said. “It used to be [that] it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.”

Those views put him at odds with 64 percent of Americans who told Gallup pollsters in March that they were worried about global warming — up from 55 percent in March 2015 — and an all-time high response since Gallup asked the question in 2008.

Notably, though, they may not hurt him with Republican voters. Fifty-two percent of Republicans consider the reports about record-high temperatures in 2015 to be accurate, while only 27 percent of them believe that humans are causing climate change, according to another Gallup poll taken in March. By contrast, 84 percent of Democrats believe those temperature reports are accurate, with 72 percent attributing the cause to human activity.

In 2015 in the Senate, Cruz voted for legislation that would gut the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Clean Water Rule that protects small streams and wetlands: the drinking water of one in three Americans, according to the environmental group the League of Conservation Voters. That same year, Cruz also voted for bills to block the EPA’s restrictions on carbon pollution from existing power plants — regulations introduced by the Obama administration. These moves earned Cruz a score of zero in 2015 on the League of Conservation Voters’ National Environmental Scorecard.
On the issue of taxes, Cruz wants to radically overhaul the tax system. He would slash income tax rates and consolidate all the tax brackets into a single flat tax of just 10 percent and a 16 percent consumption tax “that allows every American to fill out his or her taxes on a postcard." In his 1996 election campaign, even billionaire publisher Steve Forbes did not go as far, proposing a 17 percent rate — met with bemusement since it would have lowered taxes on the rich and raised them on the poor.

“Trump keeps the current structure of the tax system in place, whereas Cruz is much more in line with the flat tax type of proposals that really do offer a significant departure from the current system,” said Joseph Rosenberg, a senior research associate with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, which conducted the analysis.

The cost to the federal government? It would be $8.6 trillion over a decade, or 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product. Trump’s tax plan, in contrast, would cost the government $9.5 trillion over a decade.

The most unexamined and potentially controversial part of Cruz’s tax plan, however, is the way he eliminates payroll taxes, the employer and employee taxes that fund the trusts of Social Security and Medicare.

“What he does not tell us is what he is doing with the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare, and whether any part of the value-added tax [he has proposed] would go into a trust fund. I don’t think he has ever been asked that question,” said Michael Graetz, a former tax policy official in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Other Republican policy wonks raise similar questions about other Cruz planks as he emerges as a potential alternative to Trump.

"The question is not whether Cruz is too conservative or not, or whether he has modernized the agenda or not. It is: Is he creative enough to adjust to the changing times and changing demographics? That is the challenge to Republicans,” said Peter Wehner, a longtime policy expert who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

These nuances will not matter to Democrats, who see Cruz's and Trump’s conservative policies as ripe for attack ads.
“I think it is hard for Cruz to tack to the center, and he has shown no desire to do so,” said longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

 

[cupper]

It's not like the Trump bar is all that high a challenge...

Former CIA chief Hayden: Clinton better prepared than ‘incoherent’ Trump
Donald Trump is a national security threat, George W. Bush’s spymaster tells Glenn Thrush in an exclusive interview for POLITICO’s ‘Off Message’ podcast.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/off-message-michael-hayden-hillary-clinton-2016-221276

Earlier this month, former CIA Director Michael Hayden found himself on the not-so-hot seat at "Fox & Friends" with noted national security expert Brian Kilmeade, who asked him this: Which one of the remaining GOP candidates would he trust most on national security?

Easy. Hayden (who describes Donald Trump’s fist-in-face foreign policy pronouncements as “incoherent”) answered, “John Kasich,” whose mainstream Republican views most closely resembled his own and those of his chosen candidate, the bygone Jeb Bush.

But Hayden — spectacled spy eyes dancing behind a blank-page technocrat’s mien — knew he’d dodged a more interesting question: It doesn’t look like Kasich is going to win — so who is your second choice?

“No. 2 … in the narrowly defined national-security lane — I’m not talking about all the stuff to the right and all the stuff to the left — No. 2 right now, best prepared from Day One: Secretary Clinton,” he told me, in roundabout fashion, during a 45-minute sit-down for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast last Friday.

Hayden is by no means a Clinton supporter (though, interestingly, he wouldn’t explicitly rule out voting for her up the line). And his praise for her is tempered by disapproval of her handling of her homebrew email server (he doesn’t buy her argument that she was following in Colin Powell’s footsteps) and Benghazi (he thinks her actions before and after the attacks — but not during them — were indefensible).

Moreover, the retired four-star Air Force general remains fiercely loyal to a national spy-and-surveillance apparatus he tamed over four decades as an affable but steely insider. True, in his new book, "Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror," he calls for greater transparency and an end to what he sees as reflexive over-classification. But he’s not exactly Frank Church. Hayden is a loyal Republican, a skeptic when it comes to the Obama administration’s softer-touch terror policy, a defender of enhanced interrogations (in principle) — and a caustic critic of James Risen, Jane Mayer, Glenn Greenwald and anybody else who spills secrets without explicit government say-so.

Yet like an increasing number of conservative national security experts, Hayden is coming to grips with the possibility that Clinton just might be a safer bet than Trump, who is on pace to represent the party of Bush, Ike and Reagan.

“Who is a larger threat,” to national stability on security matters, I asked him: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

“Donald Trump,” Hayden answered without hesitation.

“I view his current statements as erratic. … I just don’t know what it is he’s going to do,” he explained.


As for Clinton, she’s impressed him the few times they’ve interacted in person.

“I had two or three weeks’ overlap with her as I served for President Obama until Leon Panetta was confirmed [as CIA director],” Hayden said. “I did brief her on CIA covert actions, which is required, since she was the incoming secretary of state. She was a quick study.”

Then Hayden — who alienated congressional Democrats during his three-year CIA tenure by advocating a continuation of the enhanced interrogation program, albeit a limited one — plunged forward, a little sheepishly: “By the way, a lot of my friends will point to Benghazi and a whole bunch of other things, but this is an experienced diplomat, an experienced woman, who seems to have taken these questions seriously.”

As I was talking to the 71-year-old Pittsburgh native, Trump was sitting down for an epic 100-minute chat with two New York Times reporters that seemed to underscore Hayden’s impression of Trump as a low-information, high-testosterone gunslinger.
Tear up agreements with Saudi Arabia, Trump told Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, if they don’t start paying their way. The same holds true, he added, for deadbeats Japan and South Korea — they might want to think about building their own nukes — and why not pull U.S. troops off the tinderbox North Korean border if Seoul doesn’t cut Uncle Sam a big check? Trump touted his own “unpredictability” — you know, just like Nixon — and said “I wouldn’t want them to know what my real thinking is,” referring to the brain chess he planned to play against the Russians, Chinese, terrorists or anyone else dismissive of America’s uncontested puissance.

“Mr. Trump,” the authors concluded drily, “explained his thoughts in concrete and easily digestible terms, but they appeared to reflect little consideration for potential consequences.”

Trump’s national security patter is precisely the kind of vague, bombastic talk that really spooks a spook. “It’s not so much wrong or overly certain. It’s incoherent,” said Hayden, whose criticism played a part in Trump walking back his call for U.S. forces to “go after” the families of terrorists.

He deplores Trump’s call to temporarily ban Muslims from the country — and thinks it has already aided extremist recruitment efforts (“it has made the United States less safe than it would otherwise be”). He hated the bit about ordering up hits on terrorists' families and, in general, thinks the developer-turned-pol doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. But Hayden — who admits his own culpability in providing some of the spurious “storytelling” on weapons of mass destruction that led to the invasion of Iraq — is most offended by what he sees as Trump’s indifference to fact.

Take Trump’s insistence on telling “the story about the families fleeing two days before 9/11,” Hayden says. “There is no data that supports any thread of that story. Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren’t married, none of them had families inside the United States, and there’s no evidence that any family members moved before, during, or after 9/11. It was completely made up. … [That] doesn’t seem to matter to some fraction of our electorate.”

But here Hayden makes a significant pivot: Trump, he believes, is a histrionic symptom of otherwise sensible conservative frustration with President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to make the war on terror a top priority.

And he endorses Trump’s oft-repeated call for the return of “tougher” terrorist interrogations and a wider reliance on targeted killings, though he doesn’t explicitly embrace waterboarding or “worse,” as Trump has — nor call for “bombing the shit out of ISIS,” as Trump does.

“Trump is saying we need to be tougher,” Hayden adds. “Yeah, that’s actually a fair argument. I do think we need to be tougher. I do think our tolerance for collateral damage is far too low.”

Hayden has been grappling with these issues as long as anybody, since he was barely old enough to drink. His first significant Air Force post came in 1967, as a 22-year-old officer in Colorado, tasked with sending first-generation drones on intelligence-gathering missions over North Vietnam (“No live-streaming video. It flew a pre-programmed path, we hope, took pictures along that path. We developed the wet film,” he recalls). From there, it was on to Guam, where he was tasked with synthesizing the intelligence needed to send flights of B-52s over Vietnam to flatten 3-by-1-mile “boxes” in the jungle, a point-and-pray spray of 500-pound bombs that were woefully imprecise.

He doesn’t engage deeply when I ask him to tell me what it’s like to know your work resulted in the deaths of real people. He’s more eager to address the macro — how massive technological improvements since the 1960s have made bombing exponentially more precise and made Americans less willing to tolerate the killing of civilians, even for a quantifiable military goal. “We had a higher demand for exquisite intelligence; the American tolerance, overall, for collateral damage went down, as well,” he says.

Of course, most of Hayden’s late career was spent far from the battlefield, at the center of the two major policy debates likely to dominate national security discussion for the foreseeable future — the enhanced interrogation of terror suspects and the widening scope of surveillance, electronic and otherwise.

A few hours before we spoke, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) blasted Hayden’s claim, in the book, that some enhanced interrogation techniques — especially sleep deprivation — helped shake loose valuable intelligence from terrorists. He’s battled Feinstein and her staff for years, and after engaging on the topic for a couple of minutes, he stopped in mid-sentence, glared and declared: “Frankly, I tire of this issue.”

Another thing that frustrates Hayden: The intelligence community is fighting the Feinsteins and Greenwalds of the world constrained by the anachronistic shackles of self-imposed secrecy. In the book he argues against overclassification, and not only for the usual public-interest reasons: He thinks the intelligence agencies, which have been battered publicly since 9/11, have to step out of the shadows for their own self-preservation.

Somewhat surprisingly, Hayden thinks the government needs to release greater details of its targeted killing programs, to win the public relations war and demystify a process he thinks is vital for national security.

“We very often vacate the field of argument on that by not putting sufficient data out there” that would counter a “journalistic record” focused on the deaths of innocent civilians rather than successes, he says. “There’s an instance where I actually think the government would be more well-served by being more transparent.”

For a man who has spent his life keeping secrets, Hayden has grown strikingly resigned to the idea that “crowdsourcing” has made that enterprise increasingly difficult and, often enough, pointless. He faced that very challenge in the writing of his book: The CIA censors didn’t ask him to remove any significant details, but he voluntarily struck several sections dealing with previously undisclosed covert actions. He’s not enthusiastic about the redactions and doesn’t expect them to stay secret for long.

“Everything becomes public sooner or later,” he said with a shrug.

 

[a_majoor]

Donald Trump is a national security threat, George W. Bush’s spymaster tells Glenn Thrush in an exclusive interview for POLITICO’s ‘Off Message’ podcast.

Donald Trump's private unsecured email server has classified emails on it?

 

[cupper]

Donald Trump's private unsecured email server has classified emails on it?

You don't expect the former Director of the NSA to say that storing classified material on an unsecured server is a bad thing to do, do you? [

 

[a_majoor]

Weirdly enough, it is Bernie Sanders who challenges the mythological unemployment numbers released by the BLM. Whoever can present the real economic and unemployment numbers in a clear and compelling manner may be able to upend the narrative and really open up the election campaign:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/231006/

FIRST QUARTER ECONOMIC NUMBERS LOOK SO BLEAK THEY’LL NEED THE ADDITION OF OBAMA’S MINIONS’ NUMBER-MASSAGING HELP: “They’re not going to let it be negative, as that would set up the possibility of an official recession just before the election (two negative quarters in a row). They’ll make sure it comes in at at least 0.1.”

Flashback: National Bureau of Economic Research redefines recession definition to move recession back from the third quarter of 2008 to December of 2007. Similarly, in the fall of 1992, the media hid the economic recovery occurring under George H.W. Bush’s watch to enable the Clintons’ “Worst recession in 50 years” lie. Or as a Time magazine headline writer described it with maximum self-satisfied snark on December 7th of 1992, “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.” The economy would grow 4.2 percent that quarter, but you never would have known it from the DNC-MSM until after November 3rd.

Flash-forward: “‘The Greater Depression Has Started’ — Comparing 1930s & Today.” Soon, we could be partying like it’s 1929…