Hillary Clinton is Seriously Dangerous

[Spiro C. Thiery]

theguardian.com
Revealed: male rape used systematically in Libya as instrument of war
Friday 3 November 2017 08.12 GMT

Male rape is being used systematically in Libya as an instrument of war and political domination by rival factions, according to multiple testimonies gathered by investigators.

Years of work by a Tunis-based group and witnessed by a journalist from Le Monde have produced harrowing reports from victims, and video footage showing men being sodomised by various objects, including rockets and broom handles.

Sexual violence is one of the most horrific weapons of war, an instrument of terror used against women. Yet huge numbers of men are also victims. In this harrowing report, Will Storr travels to Uganda to meet traumatised survivors, and reveals how male rape is endemic in many of the world's conflicts

In several instances, witnesses say a victim was thrown into a room with other prisoners, who were ordered to rape him or be killed.

The atrocity is being perpetrated to humiliate and neutralise opponents in the lawless, militia-dominated country. Male rape is such a taboo in Arab societies that the abused generally feel too damaged to rejoin political, military or civic life.

One man, Ahmed, told investigators he was detained for four years in a prison in Tomina, on the outskirts of Misrata.

“They separate you to subjugate you,” he said. “‘Subjugate the men’, that’s the expression that they use. So that you never hold your head up again. And they were filming everything with their phones.

“They take a broom and fix it on the wall. If you want to eat, you have to take off your pants, back on to the broom and not move off until the jailer sees blood flowing. Nobody can escape it.”
Guide

What happened after the Libyan revolution?
Muammar Gaddafi was ousted as president in 2011 after more than 40 years in power. But deep division between his supporters and adversaries persisted. An internationally recognised National Transitional Council took over, but quickly succumbed to schism, particularly between east and west.

How did things get so chaotic?
The transitional authorities found it impossible to extend their writ across the whole country, which was splintering into myriad factions: former regime loyalists, revolutionary brigades, local militia, Islamists, old army units, tribes, people trafficking gangs.

What about elections?
A General National Congress was elected in 2012 and established itself in Tripoli. But when a national parliament was elected in 2014, the GNC refused to accept the result; the new body had to install itself in the eastern city of Tobruk. Libya now effectively had two governments - the former buttressed by Islamist militias in its Tripoli stronghold, the latter supported by Khalifa Haftar, a renegade army colonel now head of the armed forces.

What about the international community?
Libya has become too unsafe for diplomats and most aid workers. The UN pulled its staff out in 2014 and foreign embassies followed suit. Tripoli international airport is largely destroyed by fighting.

Where has this left Libya?
The conflict has killed 5,000, ruined the economy, driven half a million from their homes and trapped hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking to get north to Europe in a nightmarish network of brutal camps. Diplomatic attempts at reconciliation have proven fruitless thus far.

Ahmed said 450 men were being held in his part of the jail.

“There was a black man, a migrant. In the evening, they threw him into one of our cells: ‘You rape this guy, otherwise, you’re dead!’”

The Gaddafi regime was accused of using rape as an instrument of war during the 2011 revolution that unseated the dictator. Until now there has been no conclusive proof.

“Gaddafi loyalists raped during the revolution,” said one of the Tunis-based exiled Libyans, who wishes to be known only as Ramadan for security reasons. “Once they were defeated, they suffered the same violence.”

The hub of the investigation is a small office in Tunis, where Ramadan and his chief collaborator, a large man called Imed, have spent three years collating evidence.

In one video shown to this reporter, a young man is seen sitting in the sand with his head down, terrified. An arm in a military outfit lifts him up, pulls down his trousers, then his pants, and places a rocket launcher up to his buttocks. The camera turns away. Ramadan turns away. “Stop it, it’s sadistic!”

The video cannot be independently verified, and it’s impossible to identify the militia group or where the rape took place.

Imed travelled to Libya with this reporter this year to gather testimony. In southern Tripoli he met a colleague, Mouna, who has documented dozens of cases.

In one case, a former soldier loyal to Muammar Gaddafi said he was raped repeatedly. “With a broom handle fixed to a wall?” Imed asked.

Mouna nodded. “They were all raped like this.”

Further evidence emerged from a group of associates based in a small building near Tripoli. They handed Imed 650 files arranged in alphabetical order.

Many contained rape allegations made by people from the Tawergha, a black African tribe accused of once supporting Gaddafi, and of raping their enemies during the revolution.

They faced a terrible revenge. Their city, Tawergha, was razed and 35,000 inhabitants were scattered to several camps for internally displaced people in Benghazi and Tripoli.

In one camp, south of Tripoli, a man called Ali recounted his experience. He was 39 but looked 65 and walked with a cane.

“Some of us were locked in a room, naked, for a whole night with groups of migrants,” he said. “The guards did not release them until they had all raped each other. Fortunately, I didn’t go through that, I only got the stick and the wheel.”

The “wheel” involved being put naked and folded double, through a tyre suspended from the ceiling, making it easier for torturers to penetrate him with weaponry. Ali said he now had physical problems, “leaks” as he called them.

In another camp in southern Tripoli, Fathia said women were not immune. She said her entire family was violated by a militia from Misrata, with the men being deliberately targeted.

“They dragged me in the street, in front of everyone, saying: ‘You raped our girls. We’ll do the same thing to you.’

“The worst thing they did to me,” she whispered, “is to rape me in front of my eldest son. Since then, he won’t speak to me.”

Asked about other inmates who suffered a similar ordeal, Fathia said: “I only heard men’s voices. They were screaming, day and night.”

Last year, the international criminal court prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, asked the UN security council for more funds to strengthen and expand her investigations into Libyan war crimes.

And on 15 August, the ICC issued an international arrest warrant for Cdr Mahmoud Al-Werfalli, a general accused of war crimes who is allied to Khalifa Haftar, the man who has controlled eastern Libya for years.

For the first time, videos posted on the internet showing summary executions allegedly committed by Werfalli have been admitted by the ICC as evidence.

In Tunis, the investigators were buoyed by this development: they now know their video testimonies will be legally valid if war crimes cases are brought against the perpetrators of the systematic rape.

They also expect more victims to come forward from clandestine jails in eastern Libya.

Cécile Allegra contributed this report to Le Monde. It was shared with the Guardian as part of a series by Politiken, Le Monde, El País, La Stampa, Der Spiegel and the Guardian.

[seemslikeadream]

WOW left field!


this coming from a guy that would let the Supreme Court go Right-Wing nuclear

and take a woman rights away

why don't you play that Spirit song for the women and men in Lybia?

tell them not to worry cause they are only spirits in a material world

It's ok if I am raped

Every 98 seconds someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. That means every single day more than 570 people experience sexual violence in this country.

[Rory]

This country is too small, and with such few resources to discuss more than one political scandal at a time without invoking the whataboutery amendment to the constitution.

Trump is the designated scandalee, and hereforth Clinton shall not be discussed

[seemslikeadream]

we are fucking discussing Clinton who fucking said we can not discuss Clinton, where are you getting this shit?

There are 128 pages discussing Clinton

I certainly said up thread ...fine go for it

you do what you want to do here I do what I want to do here

btw trump is president ...clinton is not

clinton ....DISCUSS

[Rory]

Trump is president? Really? That seems unlikely given how strong and popular a candidate Clinton was. He must have had help from a foreign and malign power

[seemslikeadream]

I just figured that you did not know who was president now because you didn't even realize that you could discuss Clinton

[Rory]

I'm glad that's cleared up

[seemslikeadream]

yea ...that's right....a bit late....follow your own advice

regaining their majority and occupying the White House.

let's see what happens in 2018

Your optimism will prove prescient and Democrats will continue to support the same policies. They'll just be framed brand-appropriate in their respective brand-appropriate entertainment news outlets.

I am a loyal Bernie person.....


A Left Majority Led By Women and People of Color

Democratic Voters Are Done with Party Centrists—and the Progressives Are a Majority
On the left, the voters are once again way ahead of the politicians.
By Richard Eskow / Progressive Breakfast November 2, 2017, 8:45 AM GMT

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders speaking with supporters at the Phoenix Convention Center.
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr

A new poll shows most Democratic voters want their party to move left, with new people in charge. In other words, they want a political revolution.

They’ve got the right idea.

If the party establishment thinks Robert Mueller’s investigation will save it, it’s probably wrong. After President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew were both removed from office for malfeasance, Jimmy Carter barely eked out a win in 1976. Four years later, Ronald Reagan’s victory ushered in 12 years of Republican leadership in the White House.

That’s a lesson for today’s Democrats. High crimes and misdemeanors don’t automatically translate into enthusiasm for the other party, especially in today’s murky political environment. Corruption is more likely to lead to cynicism than to citizen involvement, unless voters are given something to believe in.

A Left Majority Led By Women and People of Color

Democratic voters apparently know what they believe in. In the latest Harvard-Harris poll, a sample of the party’s base voters was asked: “Do you support or oppose movements within the Democratic Party to take it even further to the left and oppose the current Democratic leaders?”

52 percent of those polled said they support those movements, while 48 percent said they oppose them. That’s a call to political insurrection. These voters want to change the party’s ideology. They “oppose” (that’s a strong word, “oppose”) the people who have been running it for decades.

If the implications for the party’s upcoming races seem clear, the long-term implications are even more stark: 69 percent of voters aged 18 to 34 said they support those insurrectionary movements.

Among other things, the Harvard-Harris poll disproves the “Bernie Bros” canard so beloved by the party’s establishment. Democratic insiders have repeatedly insisted that the party’s left is dominated by white males. The implication is that the left is somehow sexist and/or racist.

But the poll shows that support for the left is greater among female voters (55 percent), Hispanic voters (65 percent), and African-American voters (55 percent) than it is among whites (46 percent) or men (49 percent).

Identity and Economy

It shouldn’t be surprising that Democratic women and people of color are more left-leaning than their white, male counterparts. They’re more likely to suffer the economic consequences of racism and sexism – forms of oppression that are structural as well as social in nature. Some of those signs of structural oppression include:

African Americans are the only racial group in the country who are still worse off economically today than they were in 2000. Black people in this country are more likely to lack health insurance, and the black-white wage gap is worse today than it was in 1979.

Women working full-time in the United States last year earned only about 80 cents for every dollar a man made, according to the latest Census Bureau data. (The marginal decrease in the gender wage gap was due at least in part to falling wages among men.)

Black women working full-time earned only 63 cents for every dollar earned by a white male, Native women earned only 57 cents and Latinas earned only 54 cents. Households led by women were much more likely to be impoverished than male-led households.

While some Democratic leaders, along with their media backers, have tried to argue that the left’s agenda is antithetical to “identity politics,” that dichotomy would have been rejected by pioneers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Margaret Sanger, both of whom were leftists.

As for younger voters, they’ve grown up under the most economically unequal conditions in more than one hundred years. Social mobility is down. Millions are burdened with staggering student debt. The entry-level job market has been poor since at least 2008, and their generation has been plagued with under-employment that’s likely to cripple their lifetime earning potential.

Is it any wonder they’re unimpressed with party leaders whose main claims to leadership are their lengthy résumés as members of the ruling elite?

Leftward Movement

Wisely, these voters are looking to “movements,” and not to the party itself, for answers. That’s where change is likely to be born – from the activism of those who understand that economics and identity are inseparable. It’s certainly not going to come from leaders who seem determined to purge the representatives of those movements, while at the same time trying to elevate corporate lobbyists to leadership positions.

Nothing could be more antithetical to the wishes of the party’s base, as expressed in this poll.

There are those who say the party’s base voters are wrong, as a hedge-funder turned Democratic operative did recently. They claim that a “left” agenda will lead the party to defeat. They’re wrong, for at least three reasons.

Working Class

First, many of the left’s ideas appeal to voters across the political spectrum. A number of polls – see here, here, and here, for example – have shown that most voters, including most Republicans, support expanding Social Security.

Donald Trump won the GOP nomination – and ultimately the presidency – in part because he adopted left-seeming positions on trade, job creation, and cracking down on Wall Street. A bitter irony, I know.

Despite improvement in the topline economic numbers, voters remain deeply uncertain about their economic prospects and the nation’s future. 60 percent of respondents to the Harvard-Harris poll said the country is “off on the wrong track.”

Economic uncertainty affects voting across racial and ethnic lines. Regarding Trump voters, pollsters Pete Brodnitz and Jill Normington told House Democrats earlier this year:

“We suffer from the lack of an identifiable positive agenda. Without it, voters will turn to Trump for progress. With it, we can make significant gains.”

That doesn’t mean Democrats should adopt a race-based approach. Turnout was down significantly for black and Hispanic voters last year, which may well have changed the race’s outcome. An “identifiable positive agenda” on the economy is likely to bring out more working-class people of color as well.

Democrats don’t need a “white” strategy. They need a “working class” strategy.

The Vanishing Persuadables

Second, establishment Democrats have spent far too long trying to appeal to that rapidly-vanishing creature known as the “persuadable” voter – perhaps because that approach suited their own ideology (or self-interest) very neatly. Survey datashows that fewer such voters exist with every passing year.

In this environment, turnout is a much more decisive factor than persuasion. Conservatives are more likely to vote than liberals, and early polling indicates that Republicans will outperform Democrats on turnout again in 2018.

To boost turnout, Democrats should look to candidates and policies that mobilize left-leaning voters.

A Movement is More Than a Party

The third point is the simplest one of all. it’s hard to argue that the leftward path leads to defeat when the party’s had so many losses under its current, more right-leaning ideology. Arguments about how to win are most persuasive when they come from people who win on a regular basis. Democrats are out of power in all three branches of the federal government and two-thirds of the states, which means the party’s current leaders don’t have much credibility on the subject.

With any luck, Mueller’s investigation will bring Donald Trump and his team the justice they so richly deserve. But that won’t save the Democrats.

The party’s voters are looking to movements to bring them new leaders and a leftward shift. That’s smart. Movements have energy, independence, and commitment. They can reshape a party’s leadership, infuse it with new ideas, and populate it with activists. That’s because a movement is more than a party. It’s something broader and deeper, something that infuses its members’ lives with purpose and meaning.

Party leaders will fight back, of course. In fact, they already are. But their record of failure shows that the tide of history is against them. On the left, at least, the voters are once again way ahead of the politicians.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... -move-left

Berniecrats Issue Report Criticizing the Democratic National Committee for Failing to Learn Lessons from 2016
The result is a deeply divided party heading into 2018.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet November 1, 2017, 12:43 PM GMT


Photo Credit: Photo by Steven Rosenfeld

During the 2016 campaign, a big reason that Hillary Clinton lost—according to longtime Democratic pollster and Clinton associate Stan Greenberg—was that her campaign didn’t look at what was happening on the ground in the final stretch in states like Michigan, where Donald Trump beat Clinton by the smallest margin of any state. The Clinton campaign stopped local tracking polls, pulled back on messaging and lost a state where voters that spring had enthusiastically delivered a presidential primary victory to Bernie Sanders.

Greenberg’s analysis is among a handful of recent reports suggesting what Democrats need to do differently as they look to 2018. But where he focuses on campaign nuts and bolts, and an upcoming New York Times Magazine story traces a hapless search for a compelling message, another report this week says the answer is staring the Democratic National Committee in the face—but they don’t see it.

“There has been a real desire for the national Democratic Party to learn key lessons from 2016,” said Norman Solomon, who organized 2016’s Bernie Delegates Network and is one of four co-authors of "Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis." “While there's been real progress in some state parties and local party entities, there are very few indications that the national Democratic Party has done much but double down on a failed set of policies.”

The national party hasn’t found ways to embrace those who elected 46 percent of delegates to 2016’s national convention. The DNC still does not know how to deal with these Berniecrats, even though some state parties have found ways to bridge gaps and cultivate relationships for 2018.

The DNC’s key failures, as elaborated by the "Autopsy" report, differ from Greenberg’s postmortem and the upcoming Times Magazine piece. Those portray national leaders either as clueless about their shortcomings or adrift in seeking a compelling message to rebuild their brand. In contrast, Solomon’s report emphasizes the DNC continues to run much as it did in 2016—when it didn’t recognize or respect Sanders' candidacy or the supporters drawn to the Vermont senator.

Since the election, the DNC has not made any structural changes to build bridges to the party’s Berniecrats, such as reforming its superdelegate system. In 2017 races like Virginia’s gubernatorial election, the way party leaders haven’t changed their voter outreach strategy is also offputting, Solomon said, because it’s prioritized white centrists and appears to take non-white voters for granted.

“The DNC’s biggest failure has been to largely disregard the base,” he said. “And we can define that as working-class people across the board, young people, people of color, to instead focus a tremendous amount of political framing, of pitching, and of money to try to shake loose votes from Republicans. We have this empirically going on in the past and in Virginia right now. Steve Phillips had that piece in The Nation [“The Obsession With White Voters Could Cost Democrats the Virginia Governor’s Race”]. That’s one huge thing; the idea that the way to Democratic Party victories is through pulling in some Republican votes. I just think it's been disproven again and again. That's number one. Stop doubling down on a failed policy.”

That mindset leads to the next failure, Solomon said, which is the party’s longtime habit of patronizing constituencies under the false assumption that because they have liberal values they will always vote for Democrats. That is seen by the DNC's failure to embrace social change movements. Instead, top party leaders rely on insider-driven affirmative action, such as appointing a few representatives of movement constituencies to be voting members of the DNC—as occurred at its recent meeting in Nevada.

“That relationship to social movements has to stop being simply opportunistic in terms of symbolism,” Solomon said. “There needs to be substantive engagement 52 weeks a year, not just election season, and a recognition that for so many people, for good reasons, social movements are not, and should not, be a subset of campaigns. It should be the reverse, that election campaigns are part of social movements.”

Arguably most important of all, the party has to phase out its anti-democratic features, starting with its superdelegate system, which accounts for one-sixth of all the votes to nominate presidential candidates (and which has corollaries in states like California, where unelected delegates stopped a Berniecrat from being elected state chair). This continues with a long list of DNC actions in 2016 that were biased toward Clinton.

“A party with Democratic as its first name has to stop being undemocratic internally,” Solomon said. “Even if people running the national party don't care for any other reason, they should care because it keeps people home rather than voting. It depresses enthusiasm, volunteers and contributions. It certainly harmed the contribution levels of the DNC in the last 50 weeks. (It has taken in half of its Republican counterpart.) We have the same people in some major positions who were party to an unfair process; what is, according to the party charter, supposed to be an evenhanded in the presidential primary and caucuses.”

Where the "Autopsy" report agrees with Greenberg’s take is the same data-driven political consultants who misread Sanders’ impact and resonance ran the Clinton campaign. This goes beyond nerd-bashing, Solomon said, as it underscores what’s most obvious about Sanders’ appeal that the DNC doesn’t grasp. “When the Bernie campaign started out in 2015, all those smart guys and gals at the DNC and the punditocracy said, ‘He'll maybe get single digits,’” he said. “They did all the calculations except [considering] the moral momentum of making clear, ethical, compelling statements.”

During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the party agreed to reform the superdelegate system. But that concession to Sanders has gotten bogged down in meetings since then. As a state vice-chair told AlterNet last week, the superdelegates are never going to surrender their power, because that perk is a reward for the unheralded work those organizers and activists do between presidential elections.

The resulting problem, Solomon said, is the DNC is protecting people and traditions at the expense of the very people the party needs to move forward.

“If there's one word that epitomizes all this, it's the word priorities,” he said. “When we know that voter suppression, not only voter ID but other forms, is such a huge factor, certainly a significant factor without any doubt, then why has, as we refer to in the report, the staffing been so paltry at the DNC to focus on that issue? I hate to think of what they spend on food and drink in their budget line items compared to having a—how can you, in mid-May of this year, only have one staff person, a total of one full-time staff person, devoted to voter suppression? And then with a big drum roll in late spring, they said, ‘Okay, we're going to expand it to four.’ This just to me is unconscionable.”

These criticisms could be dismissed as inevitable intra-party strife, with the old guard and new guard vying for power. But the Democratic Party has suffered terrible losses this decade. It has nearly 1,000 fewer elected representatives in state legislatures and federal office compared to before President Obama’s term. The Republicans’ extreme partisan redistricting has created red supermajorities in states that should be purple, like Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin. And it’s created a GOP lock on the House, where Democrats need to win 24 additional seats in 2018 for a majority.

All of this means the Democrats can’t rely on special counsel Robert Mueller, the Trump White House or the Republican-led Congress to deliver sought-after victory. They need positive messages and messengers that resonate locally.

“In a matter of months it’s going to be in the throes of the midterm election. We need to get up a head of steam before then,” Solomon said. “One thing we tried to emphasize in the report is to say, this is about defeating Republicans and promoting progressive values. Presumably, we could unite behind all of that, and I think arguments need to be made that the conventional wisdom doesn’t work. It’s not a left-right divide per se.”

“We need to say we need more democracy in the party,” he continued. “Just as we've seen with many social movements, like the antiwar movement and more recently for gay rights, gay marriage, and Black Lives Matter, and so forth. What is unthinkable from the party center or centrists becomes thinkable within a year or two when there's enough education, agitation, organizing. I think that really is the path forward.”
https://www.alternet.org/activism/berni ... ssons-2016

[liminalOyster]

Here’s your leftover turkey: The case for Hillary Clinton 2020
What better way to honor the holiday than with a spiteful argument for yet another Clinton candidacy?
MATTHEW ROZSA
11.24.2017•6:00 AM

Are you sick of Republicans? Or just right-wingers in general? Do you want to send a message to Washington that you aren't going to buy into their racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and classist nonsense for one second longer?
Then do the very thing that Donald Trump unintentionally encouraged in a recent tweet: Encourage Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2020!

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Crooked Hillary Clinton is the worst (and biggest) loser of all time. She just can’t stop, which is so good for the Republican Party. Hillary, get on with your life and give it another try in three years!
8:31 AM - Nov 18, 2017
78,700 78,700 Replies 51,322 51,322 Retweets 191,129 191,129 likes


I'm sure this is the part where the Clinton-haters — be they Trumpers, Bernie Bros or anything in between — will say something to the effect of, "Of course he wants her to run again. That's the only way he'll get re-elected!"
Slow your roll there. Clinton's poll numbers aren't too good right now (OK, they're downright atrocious), but there are still four great reasons to consider choosing her as the Democratic nominee in 2020. Even better, all but one of them has to do with an emotion that has no place in this season (which is why I absolutely had to write this article for Thanksgiving weekend): Spite. Delicious, nutritious spite.

1. Hillary Clinton is the Winston Churchill to Vladimir Putin's Adolf Hitler.

I agree with the basic principle of Godwin's Law: The first person to invoke Hitler in a political debate should normally lose. The exception, of course, has to be when someone has genuine Hitler-like qualities. A foreign despot who has invaded neighboring countries and has a right-wing nationalist agenda is about as Nazi-like as you can get.

This is where Clinton offers a quality that no politician in America can beat. While Republicans are trying to tar her with a bogus scandal connecting her to Russia (and anyone who believes Clinton did something wrong in the Uranium One deal lacks credibility on all matters political), the reality is that no candidate can be better described as Russia's nemesis than Clinton. Putin has always hated Clinton because of his innate sexism, which has manifested in his policies, and she certainly didn't endear herself to him by publicly criticizing Russian corruption in 2011. As the ample connections between the Trump campaign and Russia or its water-carriers like WikiLeaks clearly demonstrate, the one person we know we can trust more than anyone is the candidate who Putin very obviously did not want to see as America's president.

2. Hillary Clinton being elected president (at last) would monumentally piss off misogynistic trolls, and what's not to like about that?

I can't think of a single political figure in recent American history who has been hated as deeply, or for as long, as Hillary Clinton. From the moment she emerged on the national stage in 1992 as a distinctly feminist prospective first lady, she has been the target of right-wing wrath woefully out of proportion to anything she has ever said or done.

The reason for this is sexism. It's not the chic thing to say right now, but no other explanation really makes sense. Yes, Hillary Clinton is more centrist than either party likes these days, but why is she singled out for opprobrium here when her husband — who actually served as president — remains popular despite holding the exact same views? The same point can be made about the claim that she is corrupt or too establishment. To the extent that these accusations are valid, they are no more true of Clinton than of the vast majority of politicians from both parties (especially Trump).

At the very least, the next Democratic presidential candidate needs to be a woman — perhaps not Clinton specifically, but certainly a woman, to offset the symbolic gut-punch of the first female candidate getting cheated by an overt misogynist. And speaking of cheating ...

3. By winning the popular vote convincingly in 2016, Hillary Clinton has earned the right to be considered the presumptive nominee in 2020.

As I wrote in September, Clinton is the first defeated presidential candidate to win the popular vote without being automatically considered a frontrunner in the next election. Two of the previous four popular vote-winning also-rans were actually elected in the subsequent cycle (Andrew Jackson in 1828 and Grover Cleveland in 1892), while two others were widely regarded as frontrunners before dropping out for personal reasons (Samuel Tilden and Al Gore).

Let us not forget that, for all of the smack talk about how poorly Clinton ran her campaign, she bested Trump by nearly 3 million votes. This was no razor-thin margin of victory, but a decisive expression of the American public's preference. In terms of percentage points, her margin of victory was roughly comparable to that by which Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976 or George W. Bush beat John Kerry in 2004. She also held Trump to a lower percentage of the popular vote than that garnered by Mitt Romney in 2012.

4. We can expect her to be a good president.

Frankly, the worst thing that can be said about a potential 2020 Clinton candidacy, especially in America's current cultural and political climate, is that her husband still hasn't answered for the numerous sexual abuse accusations against him. While it may seem unfair for Hillary to be held accountable for Bill's alleged predations, it can plausibly be argued that she played a role in helping him cover them up. If that is ever proved beyond a reasonable doubt, she should be given the heave-ho.
Then again, Bill Clinton is also widely associated with the economic, social and foreign policy conditions of the beloved 1990s, and is greatly missed for that reason. And since few dispute that Hillary was her husband's co-president during that halcyon decade, that association can still remain a giant advantage.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Clinton demonstrated through the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform that she would work with progressives on pursuing a policy agenda very close to their own goals. On issues ranging from raising the minimum wage and fighting global warming to scaling back the war on drugs, she would stand exactly where the majority of grassroots activists in the party want her to be. Plus — while this has been noted countless times before, it deserves repetition — she has ample experience as a U.S. senator and secretary of state in actually getting things done.
That ability to get things done, by the way, is why Clinton had high approval ratings as secretary of state (usually in the 60s), even proving more popular than President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in 2011 and 2012. Her stock may be low now, but it's been low in the past (such as when she "ran" to be first lady in 1992), and it has always recovered. Arguably the big political question facing a potential Hillary 2020 campaign will be whether that bounce occurs at a fortuitous moment for her. It very well could, and wouldn't that be a giant helping of the dish best served cold?

[Elvis]

four great reasons to consider choosing her as the Democratic nominee in 2020

You can't be serious.

Salon is fucked up and bullshit. sigh.

[Wombaticus Rex]

four great reasons to consider choosing her as the Democratic nominee in 2020

You can't be serious.

Salon is fucked up and bullshit. sigh.

Salon was also running pedophile apologia and many of the most rabidly pro-Clinton / Bernie-smear propaganda pieces.

You have to wonder after a certain point whether Salon is a highly effective right-wing operation, few leftist publications manage to make the home team look so bad, so consistently.

It's not, of course. This is the dynamic that extinguishes popular movements: the true believer vanguard that goes so far off the rails their output is indistinguishable from self-satire. Bernie Cultists were shooting themselves in the feet with the same grim efficiency, I recall.

But it is a fascinating periscope into the corporate left petri dish -- quite interesting to see what messages the money behind the DNC wants to lose money promoting.

Mostly the same kind of stuff AD posts here. I wonder if he ever thinks about that? Probably not.

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvZ6M1dk2c4

LOCK HER UP

women.. children...gravely ill children.... Haitians... Puerto Ricans... people of color ....Muslims.....child victims of abuse.....victims of rape....environmentalists.....veterans.....transgenders....gays.....Native Americans..... 90,000 wild horses...net users..... all agree since we are all sick of winning

LOCK HER UP...LOCK HER UP....LOCK HER UP.....LOCK HER UP

[MacCruiskeen]

The G2 interview
Susan Sarandon: ‘I thought Hillary was very dangerous. If she'd won, we'd be at war’

Once the bete noire of the right, now the actor finds herself even more hated by the left [sic] for refusing to support Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. She talks about Hollywood sexism, female empowerment and playing Bette Davis

by Emma Brockes

Guardian, Sunday 26 November 2017, 13.00 GMT

[...]

It is often overlooked that in 2001, Sarandon supported Hillary Clinton’s run for the Senate. There are photos of them posing chummily together, grinning. Then Clinton voted for the war in Iraq and it all went downhill. During the last election, Sarandon supported Bernie Sanders, then wouldn’t support Clinton after she won the nomination, and now all the moderates hate her, to the extent, she says, that she had to change her phone number because people she identifies as Hillary trolls sent her threatening messages. “I got from Hillary people ‘I hope your crotch is grabbed’, ‘I hope you’re raped’. Misogynistic attacks. Recently, I said ‘I stand with Dreamers’ [children brought illegally to the US, whose path to legal citizenship – an Obama-era provision – Trump has threatened to revoke] and that started another wave.”

Wait, from the right?

“No, from the left! ‘How dare you! You who are responsible for this!’”

I ask if she’s aware that Katha Pollitt recently called her an idiot in the New York Review of Books and she looks momentarily taken aback. “I’m flattered,” she says. These people are furious with you, I say.

“Well, that’s why we’re going to lose again if we depend on the DNC [the Democratic National Committee]. Because the amount of denial ... I mean it’s very flattering to think that I, on my own, cost the election. That my little voice was the deciding factor.”

Is it upsetting to be attacked?

“It’s upsetting to me more from the point of view of thinking they haven’t learned. I don’t need to be vindicated.”

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/n ... -be-at-war

[seemslikeadream]

yea right unlike the fact that trump is a war right now with the American people...fuckin traitor


trump would like nothing better than being called a dictator








women.. children...gravely ill children.... Haitians... Puerto Ricans... people of color ....Muslims.....child victims of abuse.....victims of rape....environmentalists.....veterans.....transgenders....gays.....Native Americans..... 90,000 wild horses...net users..... all agree since we are all sick of winning

[MacCruiskeen]

^^ That's quality content, and like totally not OT.