US Election: 2016

[CougarKing]

Trump was reportedly observed as "sharp" in tonight's GOP Primaries debate.

Fox News

PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES

Christie, Paul clash over NSA as Trump becomes lightning rod

The prime-time Republican debate opened with sparks flying over Donald Trump’s refusal to rule out an independent run, seemingly opening the floodgates for the rest of the field to define their differences – with the debate catching fire in a heated exchange between New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Long-simmering tension between Christie and Paul exploded when Christie stood by his criticism of the senator for opposing NSA bulk collection of American phone data.

Paul said he’s “proud of standing for the Bill of Rights,” but Christie called his stance “completely ridiculous” – suggesting he wants to cherry-pick only some data. 

“When you’re sitting in the subcommittee just blowing hot air about this, you can say things like that,” Christie said.
(...SNIPPED)

 

[CougarKing]

;D Ha! The article writer described these two men as two "self-important" people sticking together.

Foreign Policy

Billionaires Sticking Together: Emirati Tycoon Endorses U.S. Tycoon for President

(...article at link above)

 

[CougarKing]

"You're Fired!" (Trump to Obama next year?)  ;D

Canadian Press

The sultan of slurs: Donald Trump explains his passion for putdowns

By Alexander Panetta, The Canadian Press

WASHINGTON - Anyone professing shock over the symphony of personal slurs delivered by Donald Trump clearly wasn't paying attention to him before he became a presidential candidate.
For more than a quarter-century, he's chronicled in exhaustive detail his passion for put-downs. He's written, granted interviews and tweeted repeatedly about the value of vengeance.
He even titled an entire book chapter, ''Revenge.''
His current political rivals John McCain, Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina, and Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, will recognize the modus operandi spelled out in his pre-politics musings.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[CougarKing]

Trump may think he may be gaining, but his alienating of US veterans starting with McCain will bite him back at the actual election 2016 if he ever gets the GOP nomination. Veterans are one of the largest voter demographics that consistently vote Republican in the US.

CBC

Donald Trump's appeal to 'angry' Republicans keeps hopes alive
CBC – 14 hours ago


Donald Trump seems to have a knack for insulting wide voter demographics — Mexican-Americans, veterans, women — at least according to his critics.

Despite frequently making headlines for these crass remarks, Trump continues to come out ahead of his 16 opponents in the race to secure the Republican U.S. presidential nomination.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, taken after last week's first candidates' debate and Trump's celebrated feud with a female television anchor, found him with essentially the same support, 24 per cent, double his closest rival, that he had going into the event.

"There's an old saying that nobody ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American people," says Lewis Gould, author of The Republicans: A History of the Grand Old Party.
The politically incorrect, tell-it-like-it-is wannabe politician is an example of that, Gould says.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting write up of Governor Scott Walker. He has a relatively solid record in office, and looking at how he handled the massive attacks brought against him by the Left suggests he isn't "boring" in any ususal sense of the word; perhaps quiet and methodical mighyt be a better description:

https://ricochet.com/scott-walker-and-a-return-to-normalcy/

Scott Walker and a ‘Return to Normalcy’
Jon Gabriel, Ed.
August 11, 2015 at 6:21 pm

Despite what The Donald and Jeb! and Carly said in last week’s debate, Scott Walker’s closing statement tackled an even larger elephant in the room: “I’m a guy with a wife, two kids, and a Harley. One article called me ‘aggressively normal.’” The Wisconsin Governor’s detractors aren’t as euphemistic. Let’s face it: Scott Walker is B-O-R-I-N-G.

He brags about the bargain rack at Kohl’s. He spends his Sunday mornings at church and his Sunday afternoons watching the Packers. He live-tweets his haircuts and getting the oil changed in his Saturn. His only unhealthy obsession seems to be an addiction to hot ham and rolls after church. (He really loves hot ham.)

In a news cycle filled with burning cities, beheaded Christians, and transgendered Kardashians, how does a dull Midwesterner stand out? He showed how Thursday night. To paraphrase a reporter talking about Barry Goldwater’s presidential strategy, “my God, Walker is running as Walker!”

This isn’t the first time a politician listed “aggressively normal” as a selling point. In 1920, America’s political climate was in even greater tumult than today’s. President Wilson had fundamentally transformed the federal government into an oppressive entity that regularly jailed detractors, instituted a then-unimaginable level of regulation, and created the first income tax. Our battered soldiers returned from the charnel houses of Europe to find an executive branch pushing for an even more robust internationalism. By the time the president was incapacitated by stroke (a fact hidden for months), most Americans had had enough.

In a field of flashy candidates, a dull Midwesterner caught the zeitgeist by calling for a “Return to Normalcy”:

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding’s promise of a boring four years delivered a landslide victory from an exhausted electorate. After dying in office he was replaced by our dullest president, Calvin Coolidge, who was succeeded by a third steady hand, Herbert Hoover.

In many ways Walker is the heir to Silent Cal; a leader focused on concrete results with minimal rhetoric and even less drama. He spent his time as a county executive and governor methodically rolling back the worst excesses of government as the world flailed around him. The unwashed progressives in Madison ranted and raved, but Walker remained the eye of the storm. Unions threatened his family, judges harassed his friends, and MSNBC’s Ed Schultz held a year-long St. Vitus’ dance, while the governor stretched in his church pew, dreaming about hot ham.

As an ideologue, I’m more attracted to conservatarian activism. If a candidate promised to cut government in half, I would think it was merely a good start. Forget balancing the budget, I want spending well below incoming revenues for the next decade. And if the next government shutdown doesn’t last a year, don’t bother. So, on paper, a “return to normalcy” shouldn’t be that appealing.

But Walker appeals to an exhaustion with politics in general. Like most small-government enthusiasts, I don’t want to think about Washington, D.C. every minute of every day. My ideal politician is someone I only hear about at election time and maybe in January when he submits his State of the Union address in writing. I would much rather focus my time on family, business, and art, than waste Christmas Eve watching C-SPAN’s live congressional feed. I long for the days when supermarket magazine racks featured celebrity weight loss tips instead of FLOTUS lecturing me about kale.

If we’re frustrated with politics now, we’ll be desperate for relief by November 2016. If Scott Walker is able to capitalize on that mood — starting with a definition of what “normal” even means anymore — the White House chef might need to stock up on hot ham and rolls.

 

[CougarKing]

Trump as commander-in-chief leading US troops back to Iraq?  (and into a protracted Syria land campaign)

Canadian Press

Trump says Mideast nations should pay for US support, would send ground troops to fight IS
The Canadian Press
By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is outlining a foreign policy in which the United States would put ground troops in the fight against Islamic State militants and demand money from Middle East countries supported by the U.S.

In a wide-ranging interview that aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," the billionaire businessman and former reality TV star says he would consider shutting down the federal government over funding for Planned Parenthood. He says he isn't sure whether he has donated money to the organization in the past but adds that he would oppose providing federal funds if it continues providing abortion services.

Trump says he would ask nominees to the Supreme Court about their views on abortion and would take their views into consideration as he made a decision on whom to nominate. He says he opposes abortion except in case of rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

Trump is promoting Trump, as usual. What is interesting is that his unfiltered, un-PC ranting is so popular among American voters, but no one seems to have either picked up on that (voters are really interested and responsive to these views), nor have they figured out ways to incorporate some of the views into their own campaigns (in perhaps toned down or reworded formats).

I suspect the first person who can go "Trump" without actually being Trump and backing things up with some facts and figures will run away with the nomination.

Another interesting observation posted by Instapundit:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/212601/

WHO ARE TRUMP’S SUPPORTERS? Not Who You Think. I think to some degree it depends on what you mean by “supporters.” Lots of people support Trump’s kicking sand in the faces of the media and GOP establishment who don’t actually support him for President.

UPDATE: It’s paywalled for some people, apparently, but I can get through fine. But here’s an excerpt for the gist, for those who can’t read the whole thing.
Today’s prototypical conservative base voters are infamously principled. Their views are hardened, their heels dug in. They are armed with all kinds of litmus tests and purity tests to make sure the “fake” conservatives are weeded out from the good ones, often to the chagrin of the party.

It shifts with time, but at the moment the ideological guillotine falls on issues like immigration (are you for a pathway?), abortion (are you for exceptions?), guns (are you for universal background checks?), education (do you support Common Core?) and climate change (do you think it’s real?). Departing from doctrine on just one of these can cast a foreboding shadow of skepticism upon an otherwise devout and disciplined conservative.

For Republican base voters, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush are unforgivably moderate. While to the rest of the country people like John McCain and Mitt Romney are sufficiently conservative if not “severely” conservative, to use Romney’s phrasing, to the hardened base voters the 2008 and 2012 presidential losses were proof that voting for the so-called electable candidate, instead of the principled one, leaves them with nothing to show for it. They got neither the satisfaction of voting their conscience — be it for Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum — nor the consolation of a less than conservative Republican in the White House.

The idea that in 2016 these voters would simply turn off their hard-wired orthodoxy and support a guy who has voted for Democrats, said “the economy does better under the Democrats,” refused to pledge to support the Republican nominee if it’s not him, openly defended Planned Parenthood, approved of exceptions to abortion bans, supported a single-payer health care system, backed an assault weapons ban and advocated a one-time 14.25 percent mega-tax on the wealthy to erase the national debt is, to put it in Trumpian language, really, really stupid.

Base voters will stick with candidates like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who demonstrated their conservative bona fides by shutting down the government, filibustering the Patriot Act and pledging to repeal Obamacare. The more evangelically inclined will support Huckabee and Santorum, or maybe even Marco Rubio, who recently said he personally opposes any exceptions — rape, incest, health of the mother — for abortion.

So who is the Trump supporter, if not the conservative base? I’d argue it’s mostly disaffected moderates who no longer strictly identify with either party. They think the political system is rigged. They think politicians are corrupt. They want a total collapse of the ruling political class.

While Trump probably gets more support from the right, running as a Republican, he attracts from the left as well.

 

[Old Sweat]

I was watching Fox News Sunday, and they played a clip showing Trump claiming he got his military advice watching "Meet the Press." I need confirmation before I embrace the theory that he is uninformed on matters of national security.

 

[cupper]

Well, on "Meet The Press" he said he gets it from the TV shows. So….

And with respect to Trumps current lead in the GOP polls, and Sanders on the Dems side the prevailing thought is that it is a reflection of how tired both bases are with the current state of national politics, and the lack of progress in anything meaningful with  respect to the real issues that the voters want addressed.

And it is also reflected in the better than expected standing of the so-called Washington outsiders such as Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. 

 

[cupper]

Looks like it's gonna be a "Hold your nose and Vote" election. At least for the primaries.

Why No One Likes The 2016 Presidential Field

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/18/432719996/why-no-one-likes-the-2016-presidential-field

The 2016 elections certainly aren't going to be a popularity contest.

In fact, the current crop of White House hopefuls is among the least liked by voters in recent history, with many starting out with very high negative ratings.

Usually such numbers spell doom for candidates, but it's a problem across the board for this field — and a marked change from previous presidential cycles.

"This is a time when people are unhappy with politicians and Washington, and people feel frustrated," said Iowa-based pollster J. Ann Selzer. "The mood of the nation is negative."

That was certainly borne out in last month's NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Hillary Clinton's numbers continued to be upside down, with a net negative rating of 11 points. It's a troublesome trend the Democratic front-runner has tried to shake, even airing new, softer biographical spots that talk about her mother's rough childhood.

But she's hardly alone. The candidate with the highest negatives by far is billionaire businessman Donald Trump — who is nonetheless currently leading in every GOP poll. He may have captured a quarter of the Republican electorate, but he remains off-putting for voters overall. He has a 30-point net negative rating, as just 26 percent of voters had a positive view of him while 56 percent held a negative view.


Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, still trying to shake his brother's shadow, is at a net negative 14 points. Also in the red are New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose favorability took a hit amid the Bridgegate scandal, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is beloved by the Tea Party but a polarizing figure otherwise.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also start out with negative ratings too. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker nearly breaks even, but a plurality still doesn't have an opinion of him.

Among Republicans tested by the poll, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich had net positive ratings, but Kasich remains largely unknown.

It's Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, the insurgent Democratic candidate, who has the highest ratings among voters, with a 5-point net positive rating. It's not huge, but it speaks to the niche he's been able to tap into with his message. Sanders, like Kasich, is still relatively little known nationally.

General disapproval hasn't always been the case with presidential candidates. At the close of the 20th century, the economy was surging and the country was hopeful, and that was reflected in the upcoming elections. In September 1999, the comparable point in the presidential cycle of 2000, eventual winner George W. Bush had soaring approvals, as did another Republican hopeful, Red Cross President (and later North Carolina senator) Elizabeth Dole. Publishing executive Steve Forbes also had a net positive rating of 9 points.

Only then-Vice President Al Gore started off with a negative view, hampered by his time in the Clinton White House. But even Gore's deficit was minimal. His Democratic rival, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, had a high 20-point net positive rating. (It didn't help him much, as Gore wrapped up the nomination early in the primaries.)

The positive attitude of the public remained, for the most part, throughout the next decade. Remarkably, in the run-up to the 2008 elections, nearly every candidate began in positive territory, including Clinton. Even those seen more negatively at the beginning, including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, were within the margin of error.

Candidates who represented hope — primarily then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama — did the best in the poll. The eventual winner had a 17-point net positive rating, and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who spoke of uniting "two Americas," had a high positive rating as well. For Republicans, it was former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a symbol of perseverance after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, who was atop GOP ratings at this stage of the 2008 race.

But in 2011, something changed — the electorate became more polarized, the economy got worse and distrust of the government and Congress grew. Every candidate tested by NBC/Wall Street Journal in September 2011 had a negative rating, with Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann suffering the worst — even as she finished first in the Iowa Straw Poll. Bachmann would finish last in Iowa and drop out after.

Now in 2015, the country is even more polarized and Americans' regard for government is at an all-time low. According to Republican pollster David Winston, it's a symptom of how voters view politicians in general, not just these specific candidates.

"We've seen probably the longest extended negative attitude about the direction of the country that I can remember," Winston said.

Now, he says, the challenge is for candidates to not just lift their own ratings but to get people optimistic about the direction of the country.

"I think everyone is getting painted with that brush because the political discourse is so unsatisfactory," Winston said. "That's the challenge to the candidates on both sides — how do they turn this discourse into something that is actually meaningful for the electorate."

Selzer, the nonpartisan Iowa-based pollster, said the rise of social media is partly to blame for the growing negative shift.

"There are just far more outlets for people to learn far more and often, with a negative tone to it," she said. "The civility that used to accompany news coverage of presidential candidates is now in competition with other approaches."

But, Selzer said, that doesn't mean that voters won't eventually pick one of these candidates, even if they suffer from sustained negative ratings.

"People are able to hold what seem like incongruous thoughts and dislike them and still vote for them," she argued. "They'd rather have a Republican they hate than a Democrat they despise, and vice versa."

 

[cupper]

The GOP meme du jour is birthright citizenship.

3 Things You Should Know About Birthright Citizenship

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/18/432707866/3-things-you-should-know-about-birthright-citizenship

Every few years, the common law concept of jus soli — or birthright citizenship — comes back into the news.

This time, it was thrust onto the stage by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who just unveiled an immigration plan. One of his proposals is to stop automatically giving citizenship to most people born on U.S. soil. Rival GOP candidate Scott Walker issued a similar call.

The concept of jus soli has a storied history in the United States that dates to the late 1800s.

Here are three things that will bring you up to speed on the issue:

1. It's in the Constitution

The issue of citizenship was brought into focus by a Supreme Court ruling in 1857 that essentially declared that blacks — even the daughters and sons of freed slaves — were not U.S. citizens.

In 1868, the U.S. ratified the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The first sentence reads: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

That language made it clear the Supreme Court's ruling in the Dred Scott case was overturned and that black Americans would enjoy U.S. citizenship.

2. It still left some big, open questions

As we've explained in the past, there's one key clause in that sentence from the 14th Amendment — "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" — that left wiggle room for interpretation.

As a Congressional Research Service report from 2010 puts it, what that clause means has been the subject of great debate. Did it mean that the children born to Chinese immigrants — who were once under law not permitted to become naturalized citizens — conferred birthright citizenship? Did it include Native Americans born on sovereign reservations?

All those questions were eventually settled in the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Essentially, the court said the common law concept of jus soli should be applied to the 14th Amendment. Congressional Research Service explains:

"The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment affirmed the traditional jus soli rule, including the exceptions of children born to foreign diplomats, to hostile occupying forces or on foreign public ships, and added a new exception of children of Indians owing direct allegiance to their tribes. It further held that the 'Fourteenth Amendment ... has conferred no authority upon Congress to restrict the effect of birth, declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship' and that it is 'throughout affirmative and declaratory, intended to allay doubts and settle controversies which had arisen, and not to impose any new restrictions upon citizenship."
In other words, the 14th Amendment excludes children born to diplomats or hostile occupying forces and those born on foreign public ships.

Those are some very narrow restrictions that most legal scholars agree do not exclude the children of illegal immigrants from receiving automatic citizenship. To be clear, it means that current jurisprudence indicates the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants are given citizenship by the 14th Amendment.

As for Native Americans, the court ruled that the amendment did not confer birthright citizenship to those born on reservations, because they are not technically subject to U.S. jurisdiction. As Congressional Research Service reports, the Nationality Act of 1940 "finally and unambiguously declared all Native Americans born in the United States to be U.S. citizens."

3. Birthright citizenship is a New World philosophy

As University of California, San Diego sociologist John Skrentny told NPR in 2010, the U.S. is an anomaly in the world when it comes to this issue.

Most of the rest of the world, for example, gives people citizenship based on a concept known as jus sanguinis, literally "by right of blood."

"The idea there is that the nation, the people are bonded together through ancestry," Skrentny said. "The other notion of nationhood is generally understood as a civic notion of nationhood. And this is the idea that folks are bonded together by where they are, by locality and by the ideas that they might share. And that's what we have in the United States. There are folks who say that, you know, to be an American is to embrace an idea."

It is, Skrentny added, a philosophy that works well for countries made up of immigrants, such as the U.S. and Canada.

In 2012, the Law Library of Congress took a comprehensive look at France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the U.K. and found that none of those countries automatically give citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrant parents.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which tends to favor more restrictive immigration policies in the U.S., took a worldwide look at the issue in 2010 and found that "only 30 of the world's 194 countries grant automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens."

 

[Lumber]

CNN/ORC Poll: Donald Trump now competitive in general election

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/19/politics/2016-poll-hillary-clinton-joe-biden-bernie-sanders/index.html

'Murica!

:facepalm:

 

[a_majoor]

CNN/ORC Poll: Donald Trump now competitive in general election

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/19/politics/2016-poll-hillary-clinton-joe-biden-bernie-sanders/index.html

'Murica!

:facepalm:

Before you facepalm, remember to ask why so many voters are apparently turning to Trump :

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/212601/

So who is the Trump supporter, if not the conservative base? I’d argue it’s mostly disaffected moderates who no longer strictly identify with either party. They think the political system is rigged. They think politicians are corrupt. They want a total collapse of the ruling political class.

What are the alternatives? The Democtrat front runner has apparently committed felony level security breaches as Secretary of State (and her activities involving interventions on the behalf of doners to the Clinton Foundation while acting as Secretary of State probably don't pass the sniff test as well), while their next most popular candidate is a 73 year old Socialist who's new ideas were already old when the New Deal was enacted.

The Republicans are still sorting through a huge field of declared candidates, most of whom are not really differentiated from the others, nor are (at this point) presenting a compelling message.

All the parties are avoiding issues that galvinized the Occupy movement on the left and the TEA Party movement on the right (and whatever you think of either movement, they still represent a large and vocal constituency), as well as trying to deep six any sort of substantive debate on the Immigration issue, despite the issue being front and center among a large majority of voters.

 

[Lumber]

They want a total collapse of the ruling political class.

Or maybe (alternatively or in addition to) they are tired and exhausted with politics and just want to see a good show.

I am rather enjoying the show.

 

[a_majoor]

Another view of Trump. This may end up being a bit like the interpretation of Oskar Schindler in the movie version of Shindler's list: a project or idea which took a life of its own (in the movie, it seems Schindler was initially schmoozing with Nazi officials for a get rich quick scheme of his own, which eventually gave rise to the events for which he became justly famous. Donald Trump may have started his Presidential Campaign as a means of self promotion, but as more and more people are really listening to what he as to say....)

http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2015/08/scott-adams-predicts-president-trump.html

Scott Adams predicts President Trump

And also Vice-President Cuban, which would be nearly as amusing:

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics, focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I don’t think he put much effort into it. Imagine what he could do if he gave up golf.

As far as I can tell, Trump’s “crazy talk” is always in the correct direction for a skilled persuader. When Trump sets an “anchor” in your mind, it is never random. And it seems to work every time.

Now that Trump owns FOX, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public, I’m going to predict he will be our next president. I think he will move to the center on social issues (already happening) and win against Clinton in a tight election.

I also saw some Internet chatter about the idea of picking Mark Cuban as Vice Presidential running mate. If that happens, Republicans win. And I think they like to win. There is no way Trump picks some desiccated Governor from an important state as his running mate. I think Cuban is a realistic possibility.

He's certainly demonstrated himself to be a master of rhetoric. Whether that is sufficient to bring the Republican Party establishment to heel, I do not know. Regardless, one can certainly learn a lot from the man; he is like a walking, talking exemplar of Aristotle's Rhetoric brought to life.

 

[Rifleman62]

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/08/20/deceptions-hillary-clinton.html

The deceptions of Hillary Clinton

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano Published August 20, 2015

While the scandal surrounding the emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton during her time as U.S. secretary of state continues to grow, Clinton has resorted to laughing it off. This past weekend she told an audience of Iowa Democrats that she loves her Snapchat account because the messages automatically disappear. Not everyone is laughing.

Clinton admits deleting 30,000 government emails from her time in office. She claims they were personal, and that because they were also on a personal server, she was free to destroy them. Yet, federal law defines emails used during the course of one’s work for the federal government as the property of the federal government.

She could have designated which of the government’s emails were personal and then asked the government to send them to her and delete them from government servers. Instead she did the reverse. She decided which of her emails were governmental and sent them on to the State Department. Under federal law, that is not a determination she may lawfully make.

Yet, the 55,000 emails she sent to the feds were printed emails. By doing so, she stole from the government the metadata it owns, which accompanies all digital emails but is missing on the paper copies, and she denied the government the opportunity to trace those emails.

When asked why she chose to divert government emails through her own server, Clinton stated she believed it would enable her to carry just one mobile device for both personal and governmental emails. She later admitted she carried four such devices.

Then the scandal got more serious, as Clinton’s lawyers revealed that after she deleted the 30,000 emails, and printed the 55,000 she surrendered to the feds, she had the server that carried and stored them professionally wiped clean.

She had already denied routing classified materials through her server: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. … did not send classified material.”

Then, the inspector general of the State Department and the inspector general of the intelligence community, each independent of the other, found four classified emails from among a random sample of 40.

Then the State Department inspector general concluded that one of the four was in fact top secret. Since it discussed satellite imagery of a foreign country and since it revealed intercepts of communications among foreign agents, it received additional legal protections that were intended to assure that it was only discussed in a secure location and never shared with a foreign government, not even an ally.

When Clinton was confronted with these facts, she changed her explanation from “I did not send classified material” to “I never sent or never received any email marked classified.” Not only is she continually changing her story, but she is being deceptive again. Emails are not “marked classified.” They are marked “top secret” or “secret” or “confidential.” Her explanations remind one of her husband’s word-splitting playbook.

Last weekend the State Department located 305 of her undeleted emails that likely are in the top secret or secret or classified categories.

What should be the consequence of her behavior with the nation’s most sensitive secrets?

If Clinton is indicted for failure to secure classified information, she will no doubt argue that if one of the above markings was not on the email, she did not know it was top secret. If she does make that incredible argument -- how could satellite photos of a foreign country together with communications intercepts of foreign agents possibly not be top secret? -- she will be confronted with a judicial instruction to the jury trying her.

The judge will tell the jury that the secretary of state is presumed to know what is top secret and what is not. The only way she could rebut that presumption is to take the witness stand in her own defense and attempt to persuade the jury that she was so busy, she didn’t notice the nature of the secrets with which she was dealing.

Not only would such an argument be incredible coming from a person of her intellect and government experience, but it begs the question. That’s because by using only her own server, she knowingly diverted all classified emails sent to her away from the government’s secure venue. That’s the crime.

Will she be indicted?

Consider this. In the past month, the Department of Justice indicted a young sailor who took a selfie in front of a sonar screen on a nuclear submarine and emailed the selfie to his girlfriend. It also indicted a Marine who sent an urgent warning to his superiors on his Gmail account about a dangerous Afghani spy who eventually killed three fellow Marines inside an American encampment. The emailing Marine was indicted for failure to secure classified materials. Gen. David Petraeus stored top-secret materials in an unlocked desk drawer in the study of his secured and guarded Virginia home and was indicted for the same crimes. And a former CIA agent was just sentenced to three years in prison for destroying one top-secret email.

What will happen if the FBI recommends that Clinton be indicted and the White House stonewalls? Will FBI Director Jim Comey threaten to resign as he threatened to do when President George W. Bush wanted him to deviate from accepted professional standards? Will Clinton get a pass? Will the public accept that?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.

 

[Lumber]

Dear god... did I just enjoy reading something published by Fox News???

 

[cupper]

Dear god... did I just enjoy reading something published by Fox News???

No, it just feels that way.

It's like eating Chinese food.

You feel full and satisfied now, but in an hour you will feel empty and looking for something more substantial. >

 

[cupper]

How Google intends to take over the world, or How I learned to love Donald Trump and support the Communist PArty of the United States.

How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election

Google has the ability to drive millions of votes to a candidate with no one the wiser.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548.html?hp=m2#.VdZovEuRtC0

America’s next president could be eased into office not just by TV ads or speeches, but by Google’s secret decisions, and no one—except for me and perhaps a few other obscure researchers—would know how this was accomplished.

Research I have been directing in recent years suggests that Google, Inc., has amassed far more power to control elections—indeed, to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs—than any company in history has ever had. Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated, according to experiments I conducted recently with Ronald E. Robertson.

Given that many elections are won by small margins, this gives Google the power, right now, to flip upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide. In the United States, half of our presidential elections have been won by margins under 7.6 percent, and the 2012 election was won by a margin of only 3.9 percent—well within Google’s control.

There are at least three very real scenarios whereby Google—perhaps even without its leaders’ knowledge—could shape or even decide the election next year. Whether or not Google executives see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giant’s algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day. The adjustments they make increasingly influence our thinking—including, it turns out, our voting preferences.

What we call in our research the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered. Our comprehensive new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), includes the results of five experiments we conducted with more than 4,500 participants in two countries. Because SEME is virtually invisible as a form of social influence, because the effect is so large and because there are currently no specific regulations anywhere in the world that would prevent Google from using and abusing this technique, we believe SEME is a serious threat to the democratic system of government.

According to Google Trends, at this writing Donald Trump is currently trouncing all other candidates in search activity in 47 of 50 states. Could this activity push him higher in search rankings, and could higher rankings in turn bring him more support? Most definitely—depending, that is, on how Google employees choose to adjust numeric weightings in the search algorithm. Google acknowledges adjusting the algorithm 600 times a year, but the process is secret, so what effect Mr. Trump’s success will have on how he shows up in Google searches is presumably out of his hands.

Our new research leaves little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. The impact of viewing biased rankings repeatedly over a period of weeks or months would undoubtedly be larger.

In our basic experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups in which search rankings favored either Candidate A, Candidate B or neither candidate. Participants were given brief descriptions of each candidate and then asked how much they liked and trusted each candidate and whom they would vote for. Then they were allowed up to 15 minutes to conduct online research on the candidates using a Google-like search engine we created called Kadoodle.

Each group had access to the same 30 search results—all real search results linking to real web pages from a past election. Only the ordering of the results differed in the three groups. People could click freely on any result or shift between any of five different results pages, just as one can on Google’s search engine.

When our participants were done searching, we asked them those questions again, and, voilà: On all measures, opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored in the rankings. Trust, liking and voting preferences all shifted predictably.

More alarmingly, we also demonstrated this shift with real voters during an actual electoral campaign—in an experiment conducted with more than 2,000 eligible, undecided voters throughout India during the 2014 Lok Sabha election there—the largest democratic election in history, with more than 800 million eligible voters and 480 million votes ultimately cast. Even here, with real voters who were highly familiar with the candidates and who were being bombarded with campaign rhetoric every day, we showed that search rankings could boost the proportion of people favoring any candidate by more than 20 percent—more than 60 percent in some demographic groups.

Given how powerful this effect is, it’s possible that Google decided the winner of the Indian election.  Google’s own daily data on election-related search activity (subsequently removed from the Internet, but not before my colleagues and I downloaded the pages) showed that Narendra Modi, the ultimate winner, outscored his rivals in search activity by more than 25 percent for sixty-one consecutive days before the final votes were cast. That high volume of search activity could easily have been generated by higher search rankings for Modi.

Google’s official comment on SEME research is always the same: “Providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would undermine the people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change course.”

Could any comment be more meaningless? How does providing “relevant answers” to election-related questions rule out the possibility of favoring one candidate over another in search rankings? Google’s statement seems far short of a blanket denial that it ever puts its finger on the scales.

There are three credible scenarios under which Google could easily be flipping elections worldwide as you read this:
First, there is the Western Union Scenario: Google’s executives decide which candidate is best for us—and for the company, of course—and they fiddle with search rankings accordingly. There is precedent in the United States for this kind of backroom king-making. Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, was put into office in part because of strong support by Western Union. In the late 1800s, Western Union had a monopoly on communications in America, and just before the election of 1876, the company did its best to assure that only positive news stories about Hayes appeared in newspapers nationwide. It also shared all the telegrams sent by his opponent’s campaign staff with Hayes’s staff. Perhaps the most effective way to wield political influence in today’s high-tech world is to donate money to a candidate and then to use technology to make sure he or she wins. The technology guarantees the win, and the donation guarantees allegiance, which Google has certainly tapped in recent years with the Obama administration.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

No, it just feels that way.

It's like eating Chinese food.

You feel full and satisfied now, but in an hour you will feel empty and looking for something more substantial. >

Kind of like the old saying about eating Chinese food in a German restaurant; two hours later you're hungry for power.