John Ashe Is Dead. So What?

On June 22nd, 2016, John Ashe (the one on the left in the above photo) died. He was working out in his home in Dobbs Ferry, New York when he over-fatigued himself while doing bench-presses. The barbell fell onto his throat, crushing his trachea. He died of asphyxiation.

Tragic. And a bit freaky. But so what? Well, it turns out that John Ashe was a former diplomat representing the twin-island nation of Antigua/Barbuda and former President of the United Nations General Assembly. The position itself had no real power, but apparently it held enough influence that Ashe used it to accept bribery payments from a Chinese investor named Ng Lap Seng. This same Chinese investor was accused back in 1996 of being part of a conspiracy to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars from China into the DNC as part of a campaign to gain more Chinese influence in American politics, including Bill Clinton's reelection campaign.

And here's where it gets interesting. He was facing charges relating to his bribery scandal, and was reportedly on the verge of giving sworn testimony in trial regarding his relations to Ng, and the Clintons. How strange that he should conveniently die right before doing so! Someone must be trying to protect Hillary from further embarrassment!

Well, no. As has often been the case this election year, the claims regarding Hillary were completely false.

Let's hear it for Snopes! They completely exposed this hoax, and you can read about it here. But Snopes did a cursory job, and I thought I should go into it with more detail.

First, while his death was the freakiest of freak accidents, there is no evidence that Ashe was murdered. Second, he did not die right before he was set to give testimony in trial. The U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York told Snopes that Mr. Ashe was only set to attend some preliminary pre-trial proceedings a few days after he died. The actual trial was to be much, much later.

And also, he was not going to testify against Hillary Clinton.

Hillary not only has no connection to the U.N. bribery scancal between Ng and Ashe, she doesn't have any real connection to the 1996 "Chinagate" scandal, either. To remember why, it is necessary to go back and revisit this scandal from the mid-90's and see just how bad it was for Bill.

There was much hemming and hawing regarding the prospect of Chinese money influencing the DNC. FOX News was not yet a political force, but right-wing talk radio was, and it was having a field day in 1997. But for all the complaining of the Republican controlled Congress, no evidence could be found of any link between Chinese money and Bill Clinton's reelection campaign. There were a few instances of donations at the legal limit coming from Chinese sources, such as those funneled through Bill's friend, Arkansas businessman Yah Ling "Charlie" Trie. But in every case, that money was returned, even after being legally donated, just to avoid any appearance of impropriety. There was a Department Of Justice investigation, but it found nothing. There was also a Congressional committee investigation, but it also found nothing solid. On a party-line 8 to 7 vote, Republicans said there was enough evidence to conclude there was criminal activity. The Republicans rallied around former Law and Order actor Fred Thompson, who said that there was "not any one real big thing" but "a lot of things strung together that paint a real ugly picture." The Democrats rallied around former astronaut John Glenn, who said that he was convinced the Chinese money was only used to influence congressional elections. Since the Democrats lost, it seemed reasonable to conclude the Chinese money couldn't have bought much influence, if at all. An independent council to investigate the matter seemed warranted, but Attorney General Janet Reno declined to appoint one. This, more than anything, is the real scandal of the entire affair, because an independent council could have exonerated the DNC once and for all. Instead, the scandal festered, and was a possible factor in the upset election of 2000. If you want a thorough exploration of that event, check out the Wikipedia page here.

What has this got to do with Hillary? Absolutely nothing.

Hillary was First Lady at the time, meaning that she would have been out of the loop regarding any campaign financing issues. Also, what sort of influence could the Chinese possibly buy from a First Lady? The answer is pretty much none. There was no market for bribery, hence there was no bribery. If the Chinese really wanted to pay money to the First Lady hoping to buy her influence, they could certainly try to do so, but they might as well have lit a large pile of money on fire for all the good it would get them.

Years later, a Chinese businessman Hillary has no connection to, but her husband just might have, is implicated in a bribery scandal with a U.N. official she has no ties to, and is about to give sworn testimony that could have no possible connection to her even in the most elastic of stretches. Okay, the guy died. But again I must ask, so what?

Was this dropped barbell supposed to protect Hillary from something?

The original conspiracy theory comes from a blogger who goes by the name of Sorcha Faal, who publishes bullshit tabloid crap on the conspiracy website whatdoesitmean.com. To say that this person is a crackpot is an insult to crackpots. His reputation is so bad that even other conspiracy nuts disrespect him. The official he quotes as calling Mr. Ashe's death "conveniently timed" is, you guessed it, an anonymous source.

So we have a proven fraudster giving out a phony story on a red-flag-ridden website and the official quote comes from an anonymous source on top of that. Fuck, if you want to implicate Hillary in a scandal why don't you just toss some chicken bones onto the ground and have a goddamned witch doctor determine Hillary's guilt or innocence?!

But, this is the age of the Internet, where old liars never die. They just get continuously shared on Facebook and re-tweeted on Twitter.

Why this blog doesn't have that kind of power, I'll never know. Maybe that's the price I pay for reporting responsibly.


Eric

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Exit Polls Again - Because You Need It, Lee Camp

This one is primarily for you, Lee Camp. Oh, how I hope you can break free of the black hole of conspiracy theory nonsense before you cross the event horizon!

If you simultaneously believe that exit polls show that Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the primary, while at the same time citing a fake Stanford paper that says Hillary did better in non-paper-trail states, you are debunking yourself. The states with paper trails have solid proof not only that Hillary won, but that the early exit polls which sore-loser Bern-outs have put so much stock in are verifiably and empirically wrong. Paper trails, you see.

I could end the blog post right there and do a victory dance. But, as usual, I need to spike the ball in the end zone several dozen times before anyone acknowledges I've scored anything. So, here's me spiking the football once more for the sake of you die-hards out there.

Okay, for everyone who missed it the first three times, here it is again. Here's how exit polls actually work:

Say you're an exit poller. You stand outside a polling station, holding your clipboard, waiting for those people who are exiting to come and answer the survey you are pleading with them to fill out.

Now, there are two basic types of potential respondents. There's the younger, more enthusiastic Bernie supporter, who is empowered both with emotion and free time, and who is 180% more likely to answer some fuckwad of a volunteer's survey.

Then there's the other type. That person is older, wiser, and has been through this shit 1000 times before, and who looks at the exit-poller as only one of any number of countless vultures who want to feed upon the five damned minutes of free time he or she has left. So of course he or she is unwilling to sacrifice what little has been left unpicked off the bones of what once had been laughingly called his or her private moments! Because they're too busy raising the idiot kids who will vote for the next charismatic but devoid of substance candidate in the next election!

So, bearing these two basic types in mind, you can imagine that the exit polls would be totally biased in favor of the first type of voter. You know, the type who takes exit poll conspiracy theories far too seriously in the first place?

Adjustments are then made to the exit poll data. How? Why, by the exit poller guesstimating the head counts of different demographics walking out of the poll station. The pollster is mentally noting how many elderly, black, latino, middle-aged and young people are walking out. They will then note their estimates on a separate clipboard and use these to adjust the totals after.

This is an open process. Journalists know damned well exit pollers do this, and this is why the early results are shit, and the later results are more reliable. This is also why they don't pay much attention to conspiracy-nuts like Richard Charnin (or, for now at least, Lee Camp) because they know too much to be fooled by it. The experts aren't fooled.

But, in all things politics, its fun to muddy the water, even for those who worship clarity. And so some people think that this early exit poll process, this utterly qualitative and subjective , somehow represents the truth of election results. They will use it to say that Bernie Sanders actually defeated Hillary Clinton, because the early exit poll results show him leading her in the percentages.

Well, what the fuck did you think such early results would show?! I mean, you have the youth gap, the enthusiasm gap, the racial gap, and any number of smaller factors that have made exit polling so much more biased in favor of the underdog than in 2008 or any other era! In fact, this is the era where exit polling is more unreliable than at any other time period in history, and that's saying something in the history of exit poll data!

But no. That's not enough for many people. They are still obsessed with the conspiracy theory that exit polls show the real thing. The obsessive, young, uber-enthusiastic, overly-hyper, free-time saturated Bernie supporters get to pretend that by stuffing the ballot box of the exit pollers, they have somehow swindled them and achieved victory over the Hillary people.

Really fools? Really?

And in light of the potential disaster of a Trump presidency, I'm entirely justified in asking, "Et tu, Brute?"

Case in point, is one of the latest vlogs of Lee Camp, the comedian who I think has so much potential, and yet is squandering it on this propeller-hat nonsense. I honestly don't want to dignify repeating the entire thing, but I almost have to, because it's a classic tin-foil-hat sort of rant. If you want to see it yourself, you can see it here. But here are the highlights (which, I'm sorry, is about 60% of his whole vlog):

"First off, they're not 'early exit polls.' They're just, 'the exit polls.' After the machine results come in, the exit polls are adjusted to fit with the machine vote. 

No. They are adjusted to fit the observed demographic data recorded by the exit poller. And it's not adjusted right away because exit pollers can't do that kind of complex calculation in the field. The earliest results are therefore crap.

However, at that point, once they've been adjusted, it's no longer an exit poll. It's just a bunch of sh*t done to cover up possible fraud and ruin the validity of the polls. So every time Nate Cohn says, 'early exit polls' in [his] article, he means the un-manipulated polls - the original exit polls.

Yes, the original, and fucked up exit polls. Lee literally has his shit bass-ackwards. He continues:

And you would think an 'amazing New York Times journalist' would want to know why do they alter the exit polls to fit the voting machines? What good does that do other than to cover the one thing that could tell us whether the machines are working properly? The one thing is exit polls! That's the only way! Does that bother Nate Cohn at all? Does he want any proof these voting machines are accurate? If so, where would he, uh, where would like to get that? Where would he like for that to come from? Maybe he could get it from the same place he, uh, he got this article. He could pull it out of his a**! Really the title of his article should be, 'New York Times reporter says there is no way to verify whether voting machines are accurate! Wow! That is - that is some story! 

Oddly, the question does bother Nate Cohn (whom Lee Camp persistently mispronounces as 'Kahn,' instead of 'Cone.'). That's why the article that Lee cites from below, deals exactly with that question! You can verify that by reading it for yourself, here. It would appear (though I desperately wish otherwise) that Lee didn't even bother fully reading the article he cites.

Secondly, he says Bernie Sanders did better in the exit polls that he did in the final result. That is true. Bernie Sanders did a lot better. In fact, it happened in a lot of primaries. And it often happened way outside the margin of error. The odds of the exit polls skewing towards Bernie and then the results skewing towards Hillary that many times in a row, by chance, is one in 76 billion! Mr. Cohn failed to mention that! 

He failed to mention it because it wasn't relevant. Those figures come from a moon-bat named Richard Charnin, a sincere yet totally fucked-in-the-head conspiracy theorist. But Cohn didn't have to. I already debunked his bullshit here.

Nate Cohn fails to mention the drastic poll location cuts in Arizona and Puerto Rico. The idea that the primary was rigged in multiple ways is, is, you know, inconvenient for Nate.

True, Nate didn't cover that. But again, it was irrelevant. The poll location cuts in Arizona and Puerto Rico were indeed troublesome, but both of these affected a plurality of voters. Some who were unable to vote were Bernie supporters, and some were Hillary supporters. And the ratio of Bernie to Hillary votes among the disaffected would have to be so dramatically one-sided to result in a Bernie victory that it would be nearly impossible. Yes, the polling problems are serious. But one was caused by Republicans who wanted to influence the general election in November (buuuusted!), and the other was caused by a financial crisis which has left Puerto Rico virtually insolvent. These were problems that did not explicitly favor Hillary over Bernie. How could they?

Nate Cohn fails to mention the Harvard study that ranks America the worst in the Western World for fair elections. 

Yes he does. That's because the Harvard study cited many problems with the American electoral system, and exit poll data disagreeing with final results was not among them! Instead our problems are things like gerrymandering, long lines, poorly trained pollsters, voting machines breaking down, voter ID laws, money in politics, unfairness to smaller 3rd parties, etc., etc. Read about that, here.

Nate Cohn fails to mention the 120,000 knocked off the rolls in Brooklyn alone! That's one burrough! In one borrough! Again, any sign of election fraud is not good for Nate's point. And as I've said before, the purging of the voter rolls that happened in New York was no accident. 

Yes, about 126,000 registered voters were removed in Brooklyn. This came to light when some, not all, voters removed from that roll showed up to vote. What happened to these suddenly unregistered voters? They were given a ballot anyway, they voted, and their vote counted!

According to Michael J. Ryan of the New York Elections Board, about 12,000 had moved out of the borough, another 44,000 people were moved from active to inactive voters and an additional 70,000 people were taken off  the inactive voter list. These were people who had been sent a mailer and did not respond. You can read all about that particular news story, here.

Yes, this is troubling. Yes, New York has some cleaning up of its act to do. But no, this did not significantly affect the election's outcome. If it did, it again affected a plurality of both Hillary and Bernie voters. Yes, Bernie Sanders hails from Brooklyn, but Hillary was New York's Senator, too.

Nate Cohn fails to mention the Chicago voting machine audit that showed the machines were wrong in favor of Clinton. When the audit witnesses brought this to the, uh, the Chicago board of elections, their response was, 'Here's how many f*ucks we give!' So that either means they know the machines are rigged for Hillary and they want them that way, or they didn't know they were rigged for Hillary, and they just don't care at all! Either one is not a good thing! 

Actually, that wasn't quite their response. Their response was that the machines were wrong during an audit to measure the performance of the machines, but was not an official count or re-count of the actual vote. This audit failed, and 21 Bernie votes were wiped out and 49 Hillary votes were added in. Read about it here. This is deeply disturbing. I don't know which is worse, the fact that 21 votes were removed from one column or that some number other than 21 got added back in. I have heard of suspicious Diebold machines screwing with the vote before, and I don't like it.

But not to worry. We need to be pissed about the machines all right, but we also know that the Illinois totals were legit, even with this particular vote-tally machine malfunctioning. Why? You will see below.

Nate Cohn fails to mention poll workers in California were instructed to give out provisional ballots like they were fake ti*ts in Hollywood. (Here's you, and you, and you...) Basically, these are placebo ballots. They're designed to make you think you think you voted and go home. Get the hell out of our way! 

I could very easily frame my response to this as a bitter resentment about those whose vote never counted because they never fucking voted when it was supposed to count. You know, the people who didn't show up in 2010 and 2014, and who are now unsurprisingly confused by the ballot process because it's the first time they've actually bothered to see a ballot, and they're now in their goddamned 30's! Well, I won't take that approach. Instead I will remind everyone that the story regarding the ballots was out in the press weeks before the California primary ever happened. Bernie stumped about it at every speech. Everyone who was paying attention had their vote count. Everyone who was not paying attention, some of whom were supporters of Hillary, may have had their vote nullified. But even though some voters were disaffected, they would not nearly overcome Hillary's lead in the state. And even if it somehow overcame Hillary's lead in the state, it would not be enough to sway enough delegate votes to win Bernie the nomination. The most wild-eyed and ridiculous vote estimates are claiming that Bernie won California by something like 65% to 35%, even though pre-election polls showed a Hillary lead, and the most optimistic polls for Bernie showed a statistical tie. Even then, Bernie needed a ridiculously-high percentage of 78% or more to overcome Hillary's delegate lead. He would also have needed similar margines in New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico, North and South Dakota and D.C. That obviously wouldn't have happened. Hillary really only needed 25% of what was left to secure herself more pledged delegates than Bernie. But she not only won at the end, she slam-dunked it!

So complain about California all you want. There were several other states whose outcome you can't contest, and it was over long before then, anyway. (Like, April 26th.) I told you so back then.

Nate Cohn also says, 'All of this starts with the basic mis-conception that the exit polls are usually pretty good. I have no idea where this idea comes from because anyone who knows anything about early exit polls knows they are not great.' This is what they call in the biz, 'horsesh**!' Ask New York Times bestselling author Greg Pallast. 

Ask Greg Pallast what? Lee never really clarifies that part.

Let's assume Nate is right, uh, and exit polls are terrible. Just for a second. Let's assume - exit polls are terrible. Then why would CNN or others report on them at all! Man, Nate! You should do a ground-breaking expose about how every media outlet is reporting totally wrong exit polls! Hold the precious! Someone put Wolf Blitzer back in his cage! Now get back in there! The exit polls are all - then stop reporting on it! Oh, wait! The reason no one is saying that is because exit polls are quite good. Pollsters know how to account for things like the youth vote and the non-response rate. They know how to deal with that. But no. Nate Cohn would rather believe expert pollsters are idiots, and nothing they've ever done is correct. In fact he said, 'There's a persistent decades-long bias in the exit polls - even in the final "adjusted" data...' There's a decades-long massive mistake in exit polls? And no one at the exit poll company, Edison Research in this case, has thought to fix this? Oh, my god! Those guys should be - arrested! And no one at CNN or MSNBC or CBS has ever thought to say, 'Hey! Dear viewer, we're going to be telling you about these exit polls. We're going to be talking about them extensively. But they are tremendously wrong. They are nonsense numbers. My two year old makes more sense. They are the ramblings of an insane man on LSD. Don't listen to anything we are about to say, because the exit poll companies, which have been paid millions to do this, are f**king idiots! And for some reason, despite having decades to fix their problem, they just don't know what to do. They just keep pumping out completely wrong exit polls decade after decade after decade. That's what Nate Cohn wants you to believe. 

The funniest thing about this rant is that the article he cites, which again you can read here, is about that very subject! Nate Cohn explores the inaccuracies of exit polling and how the pollsters estimate the demographics of those leaving the polling station, continuously doing a mental and sometimes physical head-count of old/middle-aged/young, white/black/Latino/Asian, male/female.

I want to give Lee the benefit of the doubt, here. I want to see him come around and succeed as a comic. Maybe even be the next Jon Stewart. But objectively I am forced to the conclusion that he didn't even bother to fully read this article. He scanned it, found a couple of sentences that said what he thought he wanted to hear, and ignored the rest!

Come on, man! You can't be The Man if you don't do The Homework!

Nate Cohn also fails to mention Hillary Clinton did best where voting machines flunked hacking tests. This is backed up by a Stanford paper showing that Hillary did statistically significantly better in states with no paper trail. Man! There's a lot that Nate Cohn missed!

Here, Lee Camp is citing this report from Counterpunch that names several states where Hillary did well. When the article finally gets to naming states, it names nine: South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, and New York. Two-thirds of these, the article says, are states with machines that are all or mostly ten years old or greater. These six states are South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Mississippi and Ohio. So clearly, Hillary had an advantage in these states, right?

Ah, no! Remember that argument Lee Camp used above, where Chicago voting machines in one district failed an audit for accuracy? The implication was that this Chicago district was flipped for Hillary and that consequently Hillary stole the Illinois primary. Well, now in virtually the same breath, Lee is arguing that Hillary did better in states with no paper trail. Now, I thoroughly debunked the bogus "Stanford" paper that claimed Hillary did better in non-paper trail states. (One disclaimer I must share is that the bogus Stanford paper used exit poll data to come up with its Bernie victory numbers. If one uses the actual tally, as I did in my re-calculation, one does not get a Bernie victory no matter which way one twists the numbers. But that was my original point, so I stand by it.)

Here's the kicker: Illinois is a state with a paper-trail! And Hillary won!

So, it was said early on in this blog post, and bears repeating here: On the one hand, Mr. Camp wants to say that bad voting machines stole the election for Hillary in Illinois, but at the same time, he is admitting that Illinois has a paper trail which proves she won.

Lee! My brother! Are you capable of hearing yourself?

And of the six states cited by the Counterpunch article as having outdated voting machines (as if somehow outdated and fraudulent were the same thing), two of them, Massachusetts and Ohio, have paper trials which verify Hillary won fair and square.

And again, as said earlier Lee, how can you cite paper-trail states when that very paper trail doesn't match with the early exit poll data you put so much stock in?! You can't simultaneously argue that exit polls show that Bernie won while at the same time citing paper trails that show Hillary won instead! It proves that your exit poll conspiracy theories are full of shit!

Lee, man, I hope you hear me. Plug your ears with wax and tie yourself to the mast like Odyssius before the siren-song of Richard Charnin's bullshit pulls your ship onto the rocks!

(I know, I know, it was only the crew that put wax in their ears, but you get my point.)


Eric

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Brexit: I Smell Opportunity

The U.K. has voted to leave the European Union! Oh, shit! Sound the alarm! Sell off all the accounts! This is an utter disaster! Get Colonel K. to call Danger Mouse! This is undoubtedly the dastardly work of Baron Silas Greenback!

All right, seriously, hang on people. Let's all calm down. Chances are, good ol' Great Britain will get itself a do-over somehow, whether by Scotland and Northern Ireland suing in the courts, or by some other means, I predict it will happen. The millions who voted to leave in order to blow off steam have realized their mistake, and are experiencing a severe case of buyers' remorse. One way or another, the British will eventually do the smart thing, as is their reputation.

But in the midst of the chaos of the Brexit vote, I smell an opportunity. No, not a financial one. If I knew of a way a person of modest means like myself could cash in on the Brexit vote, I'd be doing it myself and not blogging about it to anyone so that I could horde it all. No, I mean a political one. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fix the European Union's greatest fault, namely, the fact that it isn't a democracy.

Not a democracy, you say? That's right. Because the European Union is led by people who are elected by the leaders who are elected by the people. It's a politician-ocracy. A politocracy, if you will. And it isn't only the British who are fed up with having regulations imposed upon them from people living in an ivory tower whom they never had a chance to vote for.

Here in the United States, we have many separate governments united by a federal system. In a way, it's not dissimilar from the European Union's structure, except that the states were founded within a federation (or as a colony) and are all united by a common language and, to a large extent, culture. The states are not merely provinces! They could, if they really wanted to, break away to exist as their own, separate countries. (That very nearly happened in 1860, and only a war kept it from being permanent.) It might be better if they were provinces (yeah, I'm an anti-federalist to the core), but they aren't. And the American system works primarily because the people get to vote for the leaders at the federal level directly. Their votes get cast for the president, the Congress and the Senate without any middle-man.

And can't you just imagine how pissed off everybody would get if the only people who got to vote for their leaders in Washington D.C. were the idiots in their state assemblies, senates, and governors' mansions. Does that image piss you off? It should. And now you know how the Brits feel, along with significant factions in all European Union member states. And add to this the resentment that comes from those giving the orders coming from a different language and culture from your own!

This is really where the righteous anger comes from. The politicians who lead the E.U. never have to campaign in the areas they represent. They don't have to hear people give their opinions in town halls or glad-hand their way across the countryside hugging every widow and kissing every baby. And it is precisely this failing that led British politician Nigel Farage two years ago to disparagingly shout at Herman Van Rompuy, then-President of the European Council, saying, "Who are you?! I'd never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you! I would like to ask you, Mr. President, who voted for you?!"

The politicians voted for him. That was the point. Nigel may have been acting like a complete asshole, but that didn't prevent him from having a completely and unassailably legitimate point.

So let's fix that! Now! As long as the wrecking ball of the Brexit vote has knocked the whole shit to pieces already, let's rebuild it right instead of trying to rebuild the failed system that we had before!

Now, I know how all the pundits are saying that the E.U. will not give concessions in order to persuade Great Britain to come back, but I say why the hell not? This may be a financial disaster for the Pound and the Euro, but it's a golden opportunity for the E.U. to finally be a democracy.

Why not push for a change which allows the people to vote for their representatives directly? Oh yes, I know, the plebs are idiots. The fact that the Brexit vote happened at all, in fucking England, of all places, proves this. But if you don't give the common people their voice now, they'll get their voice later! The Brexit vote proved that, too! It's time to let the idiots have their turn at running the machine, or else they'll become Luddites who rip the machine apart.

I know, I know, it's ten times more terrifying than letting your teenage children drive the family car isn't it? But you know it has to happen someday. Might as well let the kids drive.

They'll love you for it. Even if they crash.


Eric

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So What's With All This "Pro-Hillary" Stuff?

Well, we've covered a lot of ground on this blog about Hillary Clinton. We've gone over:

• Whether Hillary is a Goldwater Girl
• Hillary's days on the Walmart Board of Directors
• Hillary and Benghazi
• The email scandals regarding her private server
• Whether Hillary brokered arms deals in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation
• The Clinton/Kissinger connection
• Hillary's claim of being under sniper fire in Bosnia, 1996
• Whether Hillary is too chummy with big Wall Street money
• Whether Hillary is a war hawk
• And various phony claims of election fraud

That's been a lot of ground to cover! And so far, it's been a fun ride. But a few might wonder why my usually pro-Bernie and pro-Hillary blog has suddenly gone decidedly Hillary-esque.

The answer to that is simple. I'm seeing a lot of irrational stuff out there regarding Hillary Clinton, and it's driving wedges in between me and my dearest friends on the Left. I don't much like that, and I want to do something about it. I also recognize that even if Hillary somehow were a corrupt, warmongering whore to big-money special interests, it would still be preferable to the dangerous insanity of Donald Trump. Unless you're an anarchist who wants to burn it all to the ground, I see no reason for voting for him.

Add to this the fact that many of my friends are Bernie supporters. Nothing wrong with that, but a percentage of them have drunk the Fox News Kool-Aid regarding Hillary with a gusto I have never encountered before. And this liberal-on-liberal cannibalism not only breaks my heart because it's threatening to break up some of the dearest friendships I've known, it also breaks my heart because it's tearing the entire Left apart.

I knew I had to do something to keep the family together. So I started doing a series of blog posts to help me with various anti-Hillary arguments. I knew I was going to have to stump, and do it often. So to make it easier, I wanted to have each of my arguments spelled out in a way that I could simply "cut & paste" and be done arguing my point. By simply re-posting from my own blog, I would save time and increase effectiveness. I could take on dozens of verbal assailants on Facebook at once this way.

I didn't start out thinking that I would do much more than cast Hillary as a viable alternative. I figured I was just going to make her palatable. In other words, make the case that, even though she might not be all that good, she was at least not that bad.

But I surprised myself. Instead of finding that Hillary was merely 'not that bad,' I found that she was actually pretty damned good! There was a small nugget of truth in most of the accusations levied against her, but that nugget was always hyper-inflated beyond reason. In the end, she is a woman who has walked the tightrope between being too ruthless and not feminine enough for her entire life. And while she has emerged scarred by a few landmines, she has, for the most part, avoided stepping on them herself.

What's that? The emails? Well, that's still a quagmire rather than a landmine. It could be a landmine if the FBI ever tells the Justice Department to indict her. But that hasn't happened yet, and even Bernie Sanders seems to realize that it's not likely to. But if it does, all I can say is that I wish the FBI would quit dragging its ass! Shit or get off the pot, FBI! You guys have had a year and a half. If you have something before the convention, use it. If you don't have something by then, at least wait until after November.

But that's getting off track. The fact of the matter is that Hillary is one of the best candidates to come along in quite awhile. Her husband Bill was a lying sack of shit, but Hillary has been fairly honest for a politician, and we do ourselves a disservice by equating the two of them as if they were somehow one and the same. Look at what FactCheck.org has had to say about her.

Clinton's true and mostly true put her at 51% of her evaluated statements. Now let's look at another politician:

Bernie Sanders' true and mostly true statements put him at 52%, but his mostly true statements are a greater bulk of that, and his flat-out true statements are quite a bit less than Hillary's - 14% to 23%. Hillary also has had more statements evaluated than Bernie. Overall, it's safe to say that Hillary is one of the most honest politicians to come along in quite a long while. She's at least as honest as Bernie, and arguably more so.

Let's look at another one:

Trump rates only 2% true, 7% mostly true, 41% false and 20% pants on fire. Now, that's some serious lying! Relay that to the next person who tries to tell you that there's little or no difference between voting for Hillary vs. voting for Trump.

With each claim against Hillary I investigate, I repeatedly find lack of substance, egregious assumption, or outright wishful thinking. But I can't begin to defend her as well as a blogger named Michael Arnovitz. His blog post caught the attention of NewDealer who writes for Daily Kos, and it struck him as so profound that he re-posted it in its entirety. You can read it yourself here. But if you just want the highlights, here's the best of it:

Below is a chart compiled by none other than Nate Silver. It shows Hillary's favorable and unfavorable numbers going back to her early days as First Lady. It demonstrates fully how her approval numbers were high when she didn't seek power, but as soon as she sought power, her favorable numbers went down and her unfavorable numbers went up. In other words, it demonstrated an inner bias that society has against "uppity women."

No male politician would ever have to endure the kind of shit she has had to go through, even over her e-mail server. A male Secretary of State would have had that resolved one way or the other in only a few months, if that. But her emails make for big news, and combing through them in endless fun. And so the beat goes on, with hundreds of thousands of emails leaked, and no smoking gun found yet.

Don't believe me? You can look through them yourself. The Wikileaks archive of Hillary's emails can be found here. But search and search though you might, you cannot find any connection between selling arms to nations like Saudia Arabia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation, or indeed any other example of Hillary leaking classified information. And yet the cartoon shown on the Wikileaks page looks like this:

Why show a cartoon depicting something that your own searchable database does not reveal?

It's no secret that Julian Assange, the man behind Wikileaks, has his own views of Hillary Clinton and does not want to see her become president. As Secretary of State, Assange was a thorn in her side, and bad blood built up between the two of them during her tenure. An interesting article about that and a connection with Google can be found here. But had Hillary been male, Assange would likely have merely seen Hillary's actions as just doing her job. Her gender, in my opinion, led to Assange taking things a little too personally.

People will disagree with me on that, I understand. But putting a cartoon depicting an act of corruption next to a searchable database which proves that such corruption does not exist is a new bottom-rung of stupidity. Yet it is also a twisted kind of genius. Assange assumes, quite correctly, that many people will find the database page, see the cartoon, and assume the rest, not bothering to do any actual searches. It's a sneaky, dirty trick that, in my mind, tarnishes the reputation of a man who I might otherwise defend as a servant of the people's interests.

Fuck you, Assange. Your job is to expose. Not to advance your own personal vendettas.

But I will let Michael Arnovitz defend Hillary further by quoting from his own blog post. He put it so much better than I would have.

Compare for example the treatment Hillary is getting due to her private email “scandal” to that of General David Petraeus. Hillary has been accused of hosting a personal email server that “might” have made classified documents less secure, even though the documents in question were not classified as secret at the time she received and/or sent them. (Side note: some government documents receive secret classifications “at birth”, while other can be retroactively classified as secret.) In order for Clinton to have committed a criminal act, she would have had to knowingly and willfully mishandle material that was classified at the time she did so. After months of investigation no one has accused her of doing that, and it doesn’t appear as if anyone will.

General Petraeus on the other hand, while he was Director of the CIA, knowingly gave a journalist, who was also his mistress, a series of black books which according to the Justice Department contained, “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions quotes and deliberative discussions from high level National Security Council meetings and [Petraeus’] discussions with the president of the United States of America.” Petraeus followed that up by lying to numerous government officials, including FBI agents, about what he had done. And lets not forget that according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is itself a court-martial offense. And I remind you that none of this is in dispute. Petraeus admitted to all of it.

Petraeus’ violations were significantly more egregious than anything Clinton is even remotely accused of. And yet Republicans and other Hillary foes are howling about her issue, wearing “Hillary for Prison 2016” t-shirts while insisting that this disqualifies her from public office. Meanwhile even after pleading guilty to his crimes Petraeus continued to be the recipient of fawning sentiments from conservatives. Senator John McCain stated that, “All of us in life make mistakes and the situation now, I hope, can be put behind him…” Politico quoted a former military officer who worked with Petraeus as calling the entire situation “silly”. Prominent Republicans have already made it clear that they would call him back to work in the highest levels of government if they win the Presidency. And some are still attempting to convince him to seek the Presidency himself.

Why is Hillary Clinton being held to such an obviously different standard than Petraeus? Is it really only politics?

Yes, Michael, it is. But worse, it's gender politics. This is the kind of shit the first woman president will have to put up with.

This is the kind of shit we have to recognize as shit.


Eric

*

Is Hillary A War Hawk?

The accusation that Hillary is a war hawk is one of those odd accusations I find rather unfair, because it holds Hillary to a standard that no male politician ever has to face. As a senator aiming for a run at the White House someday, or as Secretary of State even, if she had taken a peace-loving approach to foreign policy she would have been attacked as a weak-willed bleeding-heart female, or perhaps even a wimp. Instead she took tough-line approaches on some, but certainly not all, foreign policy issues, and got attacked as a war hawk instead. And Hillary had the bad luck to serve as Secretary of State during one of the most turbulent periods in world history, forcing her hand regarding the use of military forces. It's a classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't" type of situation, and it's not fair play.

Still, Hillary took the more militaristic approach and received the war hawk label. If your only two choices for a label are 'liberal, naive peacenik' vs. 'war-loving agent of the military industrial complex,' I suppose the warmonger one is the lesser of two evils, especially if you're a woman gunning for the highest office in the land. But is there any real truth to it? Is Hillary really a war hawk?

Those who say she is point to four main examples: Iraq, Libya, Syria and Israel. In each case, she has indeed not been gun-shy. In the case of Israel, while advocating a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, she has clearly played favorites on the Israeli side. Her position on Syria while Secretary of State was to topple Assad by arming the rebels. In fact, she generally sided with toppling dictators in general, as her most well-known example of this was when she persuaded Obama to join in NATO bombings to help topple Qaddafi in Libya. "We came, we saw, he died," she later joked. People who strongly felt the United States should not get involved in yet another Arab military conflict were appalled.

Now, I see no reason why I should have to defend Hillary's desire to push for regime change in Libya, but I must. Too few don't remember or aren't aware of the realities that Libya faced at that time. Qaddafi was a bad man with a long list of prior offenses, and he had to go. The result afterwards in that nation was chaos, and Libyans are still struggling to stabilize their nation.

But Libyans love us! How many Arab nations can we say that of? We helped them get rid of their dictator, and then got out. They appreciated that, and still do. Yes, they have their problems, but they are their problems, and wouldn't want it any other way. From that standpoint, Libya was a tremendous success.

Bombing and then getting out is not the action of a warmonger. Zero boots on the ground is not the action of a warmonger. And staying out of a nation's conflicts after removing its dictator is certainly not something any warmonger would do. The wisdom to leave a nation alone to find its own path is the action of one who uses military might only when absolutely necessary.

But the accusations of Hillary being a warmonger continue. The example everyone points to the most is her Senatorial vote in favor of the Iraq war in 2002. Surely, someone who was in favor of Sonny Bush's invasion of a sovereign nation is evidence enough that she relishes using American military might as a solution!

Or is it? Remember, back then, it was not a vote for war. It was only a vote for the authority to invade if certain conditions based on U.N. resolutions were not met by Saddam Hussein. It was thought to be a vote for peace. The world wanted unilateral United Nations inspections to verify that Hussein did not have a program for Chemical, Biological or Radiological weapons. It was common wisdom that only the threat of United States invasion could force Hussein to the negotiating table. But for that threat to exist, Congress had to authorize the president. It was a tough decision, and Hillary sided with those who wanted to give the UN some teeth so that Hussein and other dictators would stop thumbing their noses at the rest of the world.

A beautiful write-up on this difficult decision is given in The People's View, which you can link to here. The resolution ultimately passed the Senate by a 77-23 vote, meaning Hillary was siding with a popular opinion among both Democrats and Republicans alike.

"This is a difficult vote," Hillary said on the Senate floor. "This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make. Any vote that may lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction...My vote is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of preemption or for unilateralism or for the arrogance of American power or purpose...is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president. And we say to him: Use these powers wisely and as a last resort."

Of course, as we all remember, Bush used those powers foolishly as a first resort. The betrayal was not just against Clinton, but against the entire nation.

What about Iran? She convinced China And Russia to go along with more severe sanctions against Iran in order to force it to the negotiating table to give up its nuclear program. The long-term strategy was to achieve an agreement like the one which was finalized last year, in which Iran would give up its nuclear weapons program for ten years in exchange for the lifting of trade sanctions. It worked. Secretary John Kerry might have finalized the deal, but the workings got started under Hillary.

A warmonger would not have taken this approach. A warmonger would have located the suspected sites of the Iranian nuclear program and strategically bombed them. Many Republicans have been calling for exactly this sort of thing. But Hillary didn't. And the result was peace with Iran rather than war. And possibly even an Arab Spring event in that country, as the Iranian people have only one enemy left - their own government. The "Great Satan" is not threatening them with bombs anymore.

Okay, but these are still aggressive tactics in dealing with world affairs. Has Hillary done anything truly lasting that brought about peace without leaning on the military or using severe sanctions?

There are. For example, when Kyrgyzstan emerged from civil war to establish a fledgling democracy, she worked with Russian president Medvedev to ensure that it would not descend into conflict again. The result is that there is one more democracy there today that might not be, had it not been for Hillary. And also her efforts in Myanmar (formerly Burma), and her correspondence with the revolutionary leader Suu Kyi, helped to transform that little nation, just north of Vietnam, from a military Junta into a new democracy. Yes, the land of "The King And I" now has no king, and no dictator, thanks to Hillary.

These are small victories, to be sure. But they are significant ones, and examples that prove that Hillary is not the war hawk she has been presumed to be.

Perhaps the charge of warmongering comes primarily from those with significant pull who are convinced that this is indeed her modus operandi. For example, an article in the Huffington Post by Jeffrey Sachs lent significant weight to the charge of Hillary being a war hawk. You can read that article here. Sachs, a top-notch economist from the political left and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, has quite a following, and so when he made his accusation against Hillary of warmongering, many took notice. But Sachs is an adviser to Bernie Sanders, and like many who support his campaign, is quite bitter towards Hillary in ways that are not merited. In his article, he makes many of the arguments I have refuted above. But when pressed for additional warmongering accusations to add to Hillary's list, he piles on with items which are questionable at best. For example, he cites the Iraq Liberation Act, signed by President Bill Clinton on October 31, 1998, that made it official US policy to support “regime change” in Iraq. It read:

"It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."

Sachs then says, "Thus were laid the foundations for the Iraq War in 2003."

Fucking what?! Bill Clinton makes it a policy to merely "support efforts" to remove a brutal dictator, and Sachs sees that as, what, a declaration of war? The United States government had, and still has, such policies for nearly all dictators, worldwide! And this he takes for warmongering by Hillary? A woman who wasn't even in power? A woman whose husband's infidelities with Monica Lewinsky had just been confessed to her the previous August, and who therefore was nowhere near Bill Clinton, or even talking to him, when this policy item was signed?

But this isn't enough of a reach for this otherwise brilliant man. He then cites the 1999 Kosovo war, in which NATO elected to bomb select targets in and around Kosovo when diplomatic solutions proved unable to stop the fighting. Although it didn't have the sanction of the UN, NATO called it "a humanitarian war."

"I urged him to bomb," said Hillary, as Sachs quotes her in an interview she gave to Lucinda Frank.

So did we all. Sachs calls this an example of Hillary's "warmongering." But in the strife in Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs were fighting fiercely, and in some cases were engaging in ethnic cleansing. Thousands were dying, and nobody could put a stop to it. A NATO bombing was the only thing that would stop the combatants and break their supply lines. So bomb they did, and the fighting finally stopped.

Sachs apparently thought it would have been more humane for America to sheath its sword and let them all continue to kill each other. But sometimes one really must resort to war in order to maintain peace. Pax par tridentum. Hillary understood this. I think she still does.

But to Sachs, stopping others from warmongering is apparently being a warmonger too.

I get it. We don't want America to get involved in any more foreign wars we can't win. But if we aren't willing to use the military to protect the interests of peace now and then, the result is often a descent into war. Sometimes the wars are civil wars, other times religious wars, but too many areas of the world are unstable for us to take an isolationist view.

I don't think our choices are as stark as a war hawk vs. an ostrich with its head in the sand, but I do think that an objective analysis shows that Hillary is somewhere in between the two.

Right where a potential president should be.


Eric

*

Loony Charnin Is At It Again.

I exposed Richard Charnin's nonsense numbers in an earlier blog post, but that hasn't caused Charnin to change his tune. He's still playing the same old song, dissonant, off-tempo, shrieking notes and all, and nothing seems to be able to snap him out of his dream-world where he sees himself as some kind of rock star.

In yet another of my blog posts, I exposed the so-called "Stanford" study (read, paper) that claimed Hillary did well in states without a paper trail, but did not win in states which did have a paper trail. When I corrected that paper's math, it was shown that Hillary still had a large margin in non-paper-trail states, but that she won in paper-trail states as well, thus nullifying the argument of the poorly-written paper.

Well, wouldn't you know it, stupidity loves company. Not long after the fake Stanford paper came out, Richard Charnin posted to his blog on June 15th. And what did he claim? Why, he made exactly the same sort of argument that the fake Stanford paper made, but did an even worse job!

He opens with:
"This [link to the original paper]  is an excellent analysis of the Democratic primaries from Axel Geijsel of  Tilburg University -(The Netherlands) and  Rodolfo Cortes Barragan of  Stanford University  (U.S.A.) ."

Oh it is, is it? Just wait until you see what happens next.

First he points out that Hillary did quite better in the non-paper-trail-states, implying that the paper-trail states showed a truer percentage of the actual vote. Never mind demographic differences between the states. Never mind the differences in urban concentrations in non paper-trail states. And never mind that many of the non-paper-trail states are also significantly bigger. Having a paper trial in gargantuan states like Texas or Pennsylvania is a logistical nightmare! Yet Charnin would have us believe that it's all part of a Clinton conspiracy.

Now, Hillary did do better in states without paper trails, that much is true. Taking a look at which states went her way, it is easy to see why. Hillary's measured strengths are well documented. She does well with older Democrats and minorities. And the states without paper trails where she got these votes big-time were Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. A mix of big and small states, but most of them with big percentages of older Democrats and minority voters. Florida is a very geriatric state. Mississippi's Democrats are largely African-American. Georgia follows Atlanta, a very black city. Arkansas, the state where Bill Clinton was once governor? Naturally home turf! The only state on this list which Hillary lost was Indiana, and she didn't even campaign there.

But as I showed in my previous blog post, she also did quite well in states that did have a paper trail. In both cases, she won quite handily. The biggest states, New York, Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina, which are the 4th, 5th, 7th and 9th largest states by population, were all won by Clinton. When you tally the percentages based on actual number of votes, Hillary beats Sanders by a healthy 8 percentage points. Geijsel and Barrigan, in their paper, made the mistake of merely tallying the percentages of each state together and then simply dividing by the number of states, giving them an obviously wrong number.

But Charnin, when he did his calculations, took a slightly different tactic. He correctly weighted the totals based on the percentage of the actual number of votes, but he did so using the exit poll respondents to weight his averages instead of the actual vote totals. This gives a percentage of 47.4% for Hillary and a 52.6% percentage for Bernie.

Meaning he saw the mistake, and refused to comment or correct upon it. Why? Because it agreed with his own conclusion, of course.

Charnin's results still show an apparent win for Bernie. But unexpectedly, he blew the lid off any purported reliability of unadjusted exit polls, because by putting the two "studies" close together, we see a problem. The pre-adjusted exit poll data does not match in each "study." For example, in Alabama, Geijsel and Barrigan showed 73.16% support for Hillary, whereas Charnin showed only 70.6%. In Maryland, the G&B numbers showed 65.64% in pre-adjusted poll numbers for Hillary, while the Charnin numbers showed only 63.8%. In Wisconsin, the G&B show early exit polls were 37% in favor of Hillary, whereas Charnin showed that they were 43.5%.

Just whose unadjusted exit poll data is right, here?

Conspicuously, 37% was also the exit poll number given for Arizona.

Wait a minute, Arizona? I thought Arizona didn't have any exit poll data.

That's right! Arizona didn't have any exit poll data! Arizona's figure of only 37% support for Hillary, a state she won with 57.6% of the vote, is a number which Geijsel and Barrigan completely pulled out of their ass! That absurdly low number then was used to pull Hillary's percentage down to one that seemed to show a clearer win for Bernie.

The 37% assigned to Wisconsin was also probably pulled out of their asses. You know, if you're going to cheat while accusing someone else of cheating, at least pick a different number! Or use one with a fucking decimal!

Charnin must have noticed this. But he didn't care. In his spreadsheet, which he foolishly allowed people to see here, you can clearly tell he used the Geijsel and Barrigan numbers faithfully, knowing damned well they were wrong!

Conspiracy theorists are apparently of a unique mindset. They will play along with other people's bad information if they feel that it will gain their cause additional exposure, if not credibility. So Charnin went along with the antics of Geijsel and Barragan, noticing their mistakes and yet ignoring them, using their bullshit numbers and ignoring that too.

If he's that shoddy with the numbers he got from Geijsel and Barragan, just imagine how shoddy he is with his conclusions.


Eric

*

Is Hillary Too Chummy With Big Money?

Ah, this one's hard to refute, right? Hillary is in bed with big money. She's a corporate whore, a Wall Street insider, an oligarch seeking highest office within the oligarchy. Hell, her nickname is even $hillary. Who can argue with the fact that she'll sell out Main Street for Wall Street?

Um, actually, I can. And the surprising thing is, it's not that hard.

The accusations fall into three basic categories, which I will deal with individually. First, that Hillary gave speeches to large corporations in exchange for exorbitant compensation. This translates to Hillary owing favors to such large corporations, and therefore she cannot be trusted. Second, that Bill and Hillary conspired with big banks and corporations to loosen regulations during Bill Clinton's tenure, thus leading to the Great Recession of 2008. Third, that Hillary has been more than willing to accept the big-money donations for her campaign and allow superpacs to operate on her behalf. She is therefore part of the corrupt oligarchic system and is ruled out as a viable candidate.

Let's start with her speeches to the big banks, since that's the one we hear the most. Yeah, I kind of wonder what she said in that speech she made to Goldman Sachs too. That event earned her $225,000, and her typical going rate is upwards of $200,000. She gave 92 speeches between 2013 and 2015, earning 21.6 million in only two of those years. She gave 8 speeches to big banks, earning $1.8 million dollars according to CNN. Surely she must feel obligated towards the interests of those big banks, right?

Well, no. Because the truth is that while that amount of money is pretty substantial for a woman, it's not at all an unusual fee for big-name male speakers generally. Donald Trump, for example, will not even take your phone call for a speech if you aren't willing to pony up $200,000, and that's doing him a favor. He charged $1.5 million per speech at The Learning Annex’s ‘real estate wealth expos’ in 2006 and 2007,” according to an article in Forbes. That same article points out that Ronald Reagan gave a speech for $1 million in 1989. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair charged $500,000 for a speech in 2007. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani commanded a speaker's fee of $270,000 back in 2005, and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan gave a $250,000 speech to Lehman Brothers in 2006. In fact, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke tops even that, charging between $200,000 and $400,000 per speaking engagement. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner typically charges $200,000 per speech. George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice both charge about $150,000 per speech. Al Gore and Sarah Palin both command fees of about $100,000. Larry Summers commands a speaker fee of $135,000, and I'll bet you never even heard of that guy! (He's and economist, former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, and former president of Harvard University, 2001 - 2006.) David Plouffe is somebody I'll bet you haven't heard of, either. (He's the guy who ran Obama's 2008 campaign.) He makes about $100,000 per speech. All this and more was confirmed by ABC news not long ago. The website zFacts reports the only other high-earning female speaker out there (that I could find, at least) is Lady Gaga, who also commands about a $200,000 fee. That's about the same as what Jerry Seinfeld charges. Comedian Bill Maher tends to charge upwards of $100,000 for each comedy speech he gives.

There's more from other articles. Carly Fiorina made $786,000 in speaker fees in 2014. She may earn even more after her failed presidential bid and brief vice-presidential nomination to run alongside Ted Cruz. Richard Branson, the CEO of Virgin Galactic, usually gets $100,000 to give a speech. Shark Tank host Robert Cuban typically charges $50,000 to $100,000 to give a speech, and Mitt Romney's usual fee is about $70,000.

What the fuck could they be talking about?

Regardless of whether anyone is worth that kind of money, it's clear that the fees Hillary charges are comparable to other A-List celebrities and even some B and C list ones. $100K to $150K is about right for a male celebrity. It's more than $200K for a major male celebrity.

And for the most visible first lady in history? Honey, asking $200,000 isn't taking a bribe. It's breaking a glass ceiling!

Add to this the fact that Hillary gives most of that money away. She may have made 21.6 million in a couple of years worth of speaker fees, but she also gave away 17.6 million to the Clinton Foundation and other charities.

There's no pay-for-play here. Hillary is not beholden to Goldman Sachs or any other big bank. In fact, the $225,000 she received from Goldman Sachs is lower than what she usually got in 2014, which was her most profitable public speaking year. That year she usually got upwards of $300,000, such as what she got paid from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which paid her $335,000.

Goldman Sachs actually low-balled her.

So we can breathe a sigh of relief about that much, at least. Hillary doesn't owe a damned thing to the big corporations, especially Goldman Sachs, because 1) her speaker fees were comparable to that of other celebrities, 2) Her speaker fees send the message that women are also worth that level of public speaking money, and 3) she gives most of that money away.

Great, but what did she say to Goldman Sachs and others in those speeches? Why doesn't she just release the transcripts and be done with it?

Because public speeches like that probably say a bunch of flattering things to the target audience that are not at all sincere. (Duh!) If Hillary released the transcripts of the speeches, people would pick apart this or that flattering thing she said about Goldman or Lehman Brothers or whomever, and say, "See? She's a corporate puppet!" Her defense would be, "But I didn't mean it when I said it!" And that would be 100% factual. But you and I both know that nobody would give a damn about that. It would be the equivalent of another email scandal all over again. Hillary is absolutely correct not to release those transcripts! She'd be a fool to do so.

"But Hillary is still chummy with Wall Street!" I hear you say. "Didn't Bill and Hillary cause the Great Recession of 2008 by deregulating the banks?"

We on the left first heard this back in 2008 when the economic collapse hit just in time for the November election - the ultimate October surprise. And we all laaaaaaughed! We laughed and laughed that anybody could blame the Clintons, of all people, for the economic inanity clearly visited upon a hapless population by George W. Bush! Silly Fox News!

And now so many from the left are saying it! What the fuck!

Let me remind you now of what you knew back then, but have apparently forgotten.

Bill Clinton did much to promote prosperity during his tenure, but he also did pass some deregulation bills. These are the ones Fox News tried to point to as the real causes of the Great Recession of 2008. So let's recap what Bill did so that we can take a good look at how they factored into what happened eight years after he left office.  Certainly one of his biggest mistakes was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass-Steagall had been cornerstone of Depression-era regulation and an important check upon over-aggressive bank investing for nearly three quarters of a century. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. But back in 1995 Clinton also loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. And it was sub-prime lending, you may recall, which was a key component to the 2008 financial crisis.

These things had a role later on, true. Bill allowed them because he wanted to pass other measures, and the only way to do that with a Republican congress was to give them something in exchange for what he wanted. But by themselves these trade-offs could not have caused the kind of economic collapse that happened in 2008. Far from it. And this is proven by the housing bubble not manifesting itself until well after 2000. For the kind of massive calamity we saw in 2008 to happen, Bill's concessions to a Republican-led congress had to be multiplied together with an ultra right-wing conservative economic agenda of deregulation led by George W. Bush. A few seeds were planted by Bill Clinton as a concession to a congress which refused to play nice. But Bush watered those seeds and cultivated the resulting weeds instead of pulling them out by the roots as he should have done. And even if he didn't pull them, they couldn't have gotten very big on their own. But by cultivating them to the extreme, they grew out of control.

No sooner was Bush in office than he passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This allowed derivatives and credit default swaps (CDSs) to flood the market. By 2003, Warren Buffet was already sounding the alarm, calling derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction." But Bush didn't stop there. Knowing they had the green light from the White House and a Republican Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission loosened the net capital rule. This allowed banks to vastly increase the level of risky debt they were taking on, and they did.

So that was the one-two punch. Republicans forced Bill's hand in setting up the economic time bomb, then they added the explosive and detonated the fuse during Bush's tenure. To blame Bill Clinton for this travesty is ludicrous and irresponsible.

Oh, I almost forgot. Where was Hillary when Bill was signing away Glass-Steagall? Why, she was still recovering from the lies her husband had told her regarding the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In her book Living History, she describes the months of estrangement between herself and Bill after he confessed everything to her in August of 1998, and how she really didn't begin talking to him about matters other than their relationship until she began her run for the United States Senate. That means that when Bill gave Glass-Steagall away, Hillary was giving him zero advice. Hell, she was barely talking to him at all! And who can blame her? She went after those who accused her husband with the viciousness of a pit viper, and when she discovered that his infidelities were true... Well, it was too horrible to even contemplate. That level of betrayal! (I'll do a whole separate blog post on this one.)

Um, not that I need to remind any intelligent people about this at all, but Bill is also not on the ballot this time. All Hillary ever did after failing to help reform healthcare was travel around and give speeches about "It Takes A Village." She publicly supported Bill, true, but we all know that's just standard operational bullshit. Let's not blame Hillary for the things Bill has done. His role as First Gentleman will not translate to her taking his advice seriously.

Hell, I don't think Hillary has taken Bill's advice very seriously for decades.

But what about Hillary accepting the big money for her campaign? What about all the superpac money she is refusing to oppose?

Welcome to the realities of the horrible Citizens' United ruling of January 1, 2010. Also known as the day democracy in America was transformed into an oligarchic plutocracy. On that day, candidates who refused to accept the big money were virtually guaranteed to lose. On that day, candidates who pledged to oppose such corruption would end up shooting themselves in the foot before the race.

Oh, yes! There are exceptions to this, as people have often pointed out to me. Bernie Sanders had a good cash-raising run. Until New York, that is. Then, suddenly, the donations dried up. He still held huge rallies, and even did well in some remaining states, but the money? Gone! And yes, there was that thing with Jeb Bush. Nobody had more superpac money than he did, not even Hillary. And it didn't help. He lost and lost big. But these exceptions do not prove the rule, in my opinion. They came about as a result of the anger festering over the Citizens' United ruling. That's good, but unless that anger can actually win a primary, it's not yet enough.

In other words, you can decry the dirty money all you want, but in order to change that, you first have to win! Losers never get to change anything, and those who don't take the dirty money nearly always lose! Yes, sometimes the Minnesota Twins beat the New York Yankees for the pennant, but it's pretty fucking rare!

Am I saying that Hillary, for all the accusations of her corruption, is our only chance this term at rescuing our democracy from being totally digested by oligarchy and plutocracy once and for all?

YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!

Let her be chummy with the big money. Then watch her stab the big money in the back! You heard it here first.

But what if I'm wrong? What if this fails? What if we elect Hillary, and she turns out to be exactly the sort of oligarch everyone fears she is?

In that case, we saved the Supreme Court. And that means we get to save democracy long enough to fight another day. For a purported "betrayal" that wouldn't be half bad.

Bernie Sanders said it best: "On her worst day, Hillary Clinton is 100 times better than any Republican." (Late Night with Seth Myers, NBC, April 7, 2016.)

Hillary or not, it's not over yet. The groundswell against the oligarchy has begun, and begun big. All is not lost if Hillary fails us. We have one silver bullet left, and that's the changing demographics of the country. Young people get it, and every four years even more of them who get it become registered voters, and more members of the old guard die off. The outsider vote was the big story this election cycle, and it will be an even bigger one in the next election cycle. Don't worry. The revolution will not be over.

The revolution is never over. You know your vote counts because they keep trying to steal it! When elections are nullified - that's when to start worrying!

Trump might just do that.


Eric

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