Month: November 2016

Generally, I Find Trotskyites Pretty Useless………

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But the folks at the International Committee of the Fourth International have put out a righteous rant regarding yesterday’s election.

It’s worth a read, if just to understand the mind of the Trots:

The victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election is a political earthquake that has exposed before the entire world the terminal crisis of American democracy. Such is the degeneration of bourgeois rule that it has elevated an obscene charlatan and billionaire demagogue to the highest office in the land.

 Whatever conciliatory phrases he may issue in the coming days, a president Trump will lead a government of class war, national chauvinism, militarism and police state violence. In addition to the executive branch, all the major political institutions in the United States—including both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court—will be in the hands of the far right.

 Under Trump, America will not be made “great again.” It will be driven into the dirt.

Of course, since they are Trotskyites, it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but it is a diverting read.

Quote of the Day

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The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

—Thomas Franks

I agree, though I am not yet ready to join the Official Monster Raving Loony Party ……… Yet.

Drunk Blogging the Election

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For those of you on Facebook, please click through for updates.

  • 9:00 PM:  I just turned on the TV, and I am alternating between MSNBC and CNN.
  • 9:02 PM: I just hard that Evan Bayh lost his race for the Senate.  Good.  I hate that smarmy entitled asshole.  He is the archetype of a preening corrupt conservative Democrat.  Joe Lieberman with a bit more charm.  Take a drink in celebration.
  • 9:07 PM: CNN is doing a county by county breakdown.  I love it on the screen or on paper, but on the TV, not so much.
  • 9:09 PM: On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow is unbelievably chipper.  She really loves this stuff.
  • 9:15 PM: Reports that Tammy Duckworth has beaten Mark Kirk.  Take a sip.
  • 9:21 PM: Trump is definitely outperforming polls.  Take a shot.
  • 9:30 PM: Florida is too close to call.  Not again!  Take a shot. 
  • 9:35 PM:  My cat, Meatball, is demanding my attention.  It’s hard to focus on politics when a cat is demanding your attention, particularly when I am already a little bit toasted.
  • 9:41 PM: The crawl on MSNBC says that Fl, PA, OH, GA. MI. NC. VA. MN. NH, ME.  This is going to be a long evening.  Take a sip.
  • 9:50 PM: A picture for your perusal.
  • 9:55 PM: I hate listening to listening to Chris “Tweety” Matthews.
  • 10:16 PM: Rubio beat Murphy.  Not a surprise.  You cannot beat an incumbent, even an incumbent nothing like Rubio, with a nothing like former Republican trust fund baby Patrick Murphy..
  • 10:20: Trump wins Ohio.
    • We are  completely f%$#ed.  Take a drink.
  • 10:24 PM: This is as close as it is because the status quo is 
  • 10:26 PM: MSNBC just called Virginia for Hillary Clinton. 
  • 10:33 PM: I hate Steve Schmidt on MSNBC, but I hate everyone on CNN more.
  • 10:36 PM: I should note that the entire Democrat Party establishment really needs to be fired.  ……… Out of a cannon, into the Sun.
  • 10:39 PM: If you are Jewish, here is the link for aliyah, if you want to trade Netanyahu for Trump.
  • 10:41 PM:  Dow Jones futures are down by something like 600 points, and the Mexican Peso is in freefall.  People are panicking, which means that people with level heads are doing them like a drunk sorority girl.
  • 11:03 PM: Russ Feingold was defeated by the wingnut Ron Johnson. A truly decent man lost to a walking piece of sh%$.  Take a shot.  I am bumming. 
  • 11:05 PM:  Sh%$.  The Daily Show is on.  Changing Channel. 
  • 11:15 PM: Meh. On today’s Daily Show.
  • 11:30 PM: Trump is called to win Florida and Utah.  I am drunk and depressed, and I think that Donald Trump will be President-elect in the morning.  I am done for the evening.

    Something Else to Watch Election Night

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    Needless to say, big pharma is blowing a gasket over this:

    One of the election season’s most fiercely fought campaigns is over a California ballot initiative that promises to control drug prices, but would affect only a fraction of the state.

    Yet it’s making the drug industry very nervous.

    Proposition 61 requires California state agencies to pay no more for drugs than the price paid by the US Department of Veteran Affairs, which, by law, receives a 24% discount on drugs, and can negotiate even lower prices. While the cost savings could be significant, most Californians don’t receive drugs from the agencies covered, which include universities, state prisons, and some parts of the state’s low-income insurance program, Medi-Cal. Depending on whose numbers you believe, the number of people covered ranges from 4.4 million to 7 million, in a state with about 40 million residents.

    Despite the relatively small impact, the drug industry has been working furiously to defeat the referendum, raising $109 million as of Nov. 2, according to Ballotpedia, a website which tracks such things. Merck & Co., Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer each contributed at least $9.3 million to the campaign, while dozens of other companies also have chipped in. Combined with the $16.9 million spent by advocates—mostly the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which runs a chain of clinics—it’s the most costly ballot initiative in US history.

    Here’s the hoping that the good guys win on this one, but I initiative petition in California tends to be driven by money, and pharma has been dumping a lot of money into this.

    I Will be Drunk Blogging the Election

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    I will be bouncing around various channels, but here is the game
    Take a sip:

    • Every mention of exit polls. 
    • Any mention of the ground game. 
    • Any mention of millennials. 

     Take 2 sips:

    • Any mention of Reagan. 
    • Any mention of Bill Clinton’s penis. 
    • The word “Battle Ground”. 
    • The Democrats regain control of the Senate. 
    • Someone disparages millennials. 

    Take a full shot:

    • CNN unveils a stupid flashy tech gimmick.
    • Evan McMullin wins Utah. 
    • Race is called for a candidate. 
    • Voting problems in Florida. 
    • Trump Refuses to Concede. 
    • Trump starts trying to sell the Trump network.
    • A winner is declared.
    • The Republicans retain control of the Senate. 
    • The Democrats regain control of the House. 

    Finish off the bottle:

    • When they rip off their masks and reveal themselves to be Kang and Kodos.
    • Trump admits that this was actually the greatest practical joke of all time.

    Screw it.  I’m just going to wing it, starting at 9:00pm, after I pick up Charlie from his youth group.

      Not The Onion

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      In attempting defend their antiabortion law, the Kansas Solicitor General has cited Dred Scott v. Sanford:

      The question of what’s the matter with Kansas has become even deeper and darker since Governor Sam Brownback completed his project of turning the entire state into a lab rat for bad economic theories, and since the state elected Kris Kobach, the big daddy of voter-suppression—and of demanding that brown people carry their papers at all times—to be its secretary of state. But now the state’s Solicitor General, Steven McAllister, is getting into the act in a spectacular way.

      ………

      We now present a portion of the latter brief.

      Courts across the country have recognized that “[t]he Declaration of Independence is a statement of ideals, not law.” Schifanelli v. U.S. Gov’t, 1988 WL 138496, at *1 (4th Cir. Dec. 22, 1988). See also Swepi, LP v. Mora Cty., N.M., 81 F. Supp. 3d 1075, 1172 (D.N.M. 2015) (same); Minyard v. Walsh, 2014 WL 1029835, at *4 (C.D. Cal. Mar. 17, 2014) (“Claim 4’s assertion of a violation of Plaintiff’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not cognizable. Those principles, described in the Declaration of Independence, do not guarantee enforceable rights.”); Black v. Simpson, 2008 WL 544458, at *2 (W.D. Ky. Feb. 27, 2008) (“There is no private right of action to enforce the Declaration of Independence.”); Borzych v. Frank, 2006 WL 3254497, at *8 (W.D. Wis. Nov. 9, 2006) (“the Declaration of Independence is not binding law”); Coffey v. United States, 939 F. Supp. 185, 191 (E.D.N.Y.1996) (“While the Declaration of Independence states that all men are endowed certain unalienable rights including ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ it does not grant rights that may be pursued through the judicial system.”). See also Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 407 (1856)…


      Wait. What was that again?

      See also Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 407 (1856)…

      Holy cow. The state of Kansas has a lawyer citing Dred Scott in support of its position. In defense of a law aimed at limiting a woman’s right to choose. What in the fck is the matter with Kansas?

      Dred Freaking Scott!

      I am not a lawyer, nor am I a legal scholar, although I do function as one here in the shebeen. But there’s a nice shiny nickel for anyone who can tell me the last time anyone cited that monstrous ruling in support of anything. Jesus, these people.

      (emphasis original)

      This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

      Quote of the Day

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      ………Our current governing apparatus is neoliberal. What does that actually mean? What is neoliberalism?

      Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or Amazon.

      This definition is my paraphrase of Greta Krippner’s “Capitalizing on Crisis”, a pretty good book about what happened from the 1960s to the 1980s in terms of financial politics. Her thesis is that the liberal democratic system was dismantled because it was too explicit about who was making choices. People would get mad at politicians when they didn’t have, say, mortgage credit, or when the price of milk went up too high. The answer came to be neoliberalism, or creating a veil of financial markets to make all those decisions seem apolitical. Milk too expensive? Ah, those darn markets. Sure you can get mortgage credit, but market is going to charge you 19%. Can’t afford that? Oh those darn financial markets.

      Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.

      —Matt Stoller

      To quote Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend, “It’s a put on.”

      H/t Atrios.

      The Dirty Secret of Journalism

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      Not only can you buy off reporters, but you can do so with some free food and booze:

      When Robert Moses, the notorious New York master builder, wanted to cow the journalists who covered him, he knew he didn’t have to harangue or threaten his way to a favorable story. Food and drink did the trick. A reporter on the Moses beat, whether covering the opening of a new hydroelectric power dam or a row of toll booths, could expect to be treated to a fountain of liquor, a 40-foot buffet table, or a chartered airplane packed with celebrities. In addition to these Dionysian ribbon cuttings, Moses hosted “working” lunches for the press, a way to advance his agenda while offering special access.

      “Hospitality has always been a potent political weapon,” Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker, his seminal biography of Moses. “Moses used it like a master.”

      This practice continues unabated, as made clear in a recent batch of hacked emails released by WikiLeaks. The meals may be smaller and the settings less lavish, but the goals remain the same: for a person in a position of power, in this case Hillary Clinton, to groom a friendlier press corps. Non-journalists, as well as conservative outlets, reacted with anger and incredulity at emails—the Clinton campaign has not disputed their validity—that showed the campaign setting up off-the-record dinners and cocktails with John Podesta, the campaign chairman, and Joel Benenson, her chief strategist. (The Huffington Post had reported on the Podesta meeting previously.) Journalists mostly shrugged at the revelations.

       Their dismissal is misguided. The emails may highlight business as usual, but it is a business practice that has helped stoke distrust of the press in 2016 and has propelled a narrative, pushed by Donald Trump, that the mainstream media is in the bag for Clinton. The implications of that will linger long after Election Day.

       On April 9th, 2015—shortly before Clinton officially announced she was running for president—Podesta cooked for at least 28 reporters at his Washington DC home. The reporters came from leading national outlets like the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC. According to the leaked email, the dinner had five goals for the Clinton campaign: “Getting to know” reporters closely covering Clinton; “setting expectations” for the announcement and “launch period”; “framing” Clinton’s message and the race; “demystifying key players” on Clinton’s campaign; and “having fun and enjoying good cooking.”

      ………

      If the reporters understand, implicitly or explicitly, that these events exist solely to advance the agenda of a particular candidate, why show up? Why spend a night in the spin zone over Podesta’s creamy risotto, knowing the campaign is trying to co-opt you? If reporters can document with outrage the ways in which lobbyists fete elected officials, why is the practice okay when reporters are on the receiving end?

       ………

       Before I go on, let me say that I have not always practiced what I’m preaching here. For two years, I was a member of the New York City Hall press corps and attended several off-the-record parties at Gracie Mansion, the lavish mayoral residence on the Upper East Side. I went because, in addition to thinking the visit would be good for building sources, it felt nice to amble around a mansion with a buzz. Important people were around me, so I felt important. I regret going now and I don’t intend to show up again. No knock against Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hors d’oeuvres, all reimbursed by my former employers at the New York Observer, but it makes far more sense for the mayor to host one of these soirees than for me to show up. I can—and should—do my job despite them.

       ………

       As Caro understood, the best reporting is done on the margins, away from the siren charms of power and prestige. “It is more difficult to challenge a man’s facts over cocktails than over a conference table,” Caro wrote. “More difficult to flatly give the lie to a statement over a gleaming white tablecloth, filet mignon, and fine wine than it would have been to do so over a hard-polished board-room and legal pads.”

      BTW, apparently John McCain ‘s political operation was well known for keeping the alcohol flowing, which might explain that whole “Straight Talk Express” myth tat the press ran with for such a long time.

      Linkage

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      H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

      How Finance is Killing Us, Part MCMLVII

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      It turns out that much of what we see in terms of pharmaceutical price gouging is an artifact of the pernicious effects of our modern finance system:

      The ravenous price increases that pharmaceutical companies slap on their medicines are part of the reason the US health care system is eating an ever larger slice of consumer, corporate, and government spending, and why the rest of the economy has trouble moving forward. Some of the price increases have turned into scandals with plenty of mouth-wagging by politicians.

      ………

      Private equity firms have figured this out. You can make a ton of money with a basic formula: Fund a newly created outfit that buys the rights to a prescription drug with little or no competition and with stagnant or declining sales, jack up the price of the drug, then flip the company at an enormous profit.

      This has become the latest way of wringing out the American economy without contributing anything to it, and at the expense of everyone else. So Bloomberg dug into the role private equity firms play in these schemes.

      ………

      Companies will do whatever they can to build, use, and abuse monopolies, dysfunctional markets, patent laws, and other government protections in order to maximize profits while cannibalizing the entire economy.

      They don’t care. And they’re not required to care.

      The fault lies with Congress and regulators that have been “captured” by the industry. They’ve allowed and encouraged this form of price gouging. They’ve recklessly and willfully shuffled off the responsibility of keeping prices under control to market forces and competition, knowing perfectly well that there are no market forces and competition for many drugs, and nothing else to keep prices in check.

      This worst part about this is not that this is legal, but that it is in fact the direction that our ruling elites believe that our society should continue further down this path.

      One need only look at the current IP regimes, and the associated “free trade” deals,  to see that increasing parasitic monopoly rents is seen by the “establishment” as an independent good.

      It needs to end.

      Now I Want to Live in Montana

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      The Montana Supreme Court has ruled that jury trials are required in all cases of civil asset forfeiture:

      The Montana Supreme Court says citizens have a right to trial by jury before the state can take private property in civil forfeiture cases, a ruling that bolsters a law that state legislators passed last year to limit police seizures.

      Tuesday’s unanimous ruling by the high court puts Montana in line with most other states that have upheld jury trials in civil forfeiture proceedings.

      “After consideration of both American and English common law, federal jurisprudence and decisions from our sister states … we join the majority of states and federal courts and conclude that there is a right to trial by jury,” Justice Laurie McKinnon wrote in the opinion.

      Nice to see sanity in one of the big square states.

      These are Dishonest People Who Knowingly Break the Law

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      When talking about Bernie Madoff Eric Falkenstein made the following observation:

      People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend’s bar mitzvah.

      Now we see what appears to be a rather anodyne article about how many of the movers and shakers on Wall Street meticulously avoid email as well:

      In an age when most bankers use keyboards to communicate with each other, a small group of the Wall Street elite refuses to say anything substantive in an email, text or chat, and some will not communicate digitally at all.

       This group, which includes top bankers like JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and powerful investors like Carl Icahn and Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s Warren Buffett, were eschewing electronic communications long before the probe of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails and the recent hacks of her campaign manager’s account made headlines.

       Some on Wall Street are nostalgic for a time when in-person conversations or phone calls were the norm, but others believe the words they type and send can come back to haunt them. Prosecutors have built insider trading, mortgage fraud and rate-rigging cases on embarrassing emails over the past several years, and they are often the most memorable part.

      You really do not want to trust these guys with your money.

      Bridgegate verdict: Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly guilty on all counts | NJ.com

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      Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly have been been found guilty on all counts related to the Bridgegate scandal

      Two former Christie administration insiders charged in a bizarre scheme of political retaliation against a mayor who refused to endorse the governor for re-election were found guilty Friday on all counts in the long-running Bridgegate saga.

      In a seven-week trial that saw their own words used against them, Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly were convicted of helping orchestrate massive traffic tie-ups at the George Washington Bridge in September 2013. The plot was hatched to send a pointed message to Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, after he stepped back from his earlier public support of Gov. Chris Christie.

      The jury began reading its findings just before 11:30 a.m. and delivered the guilty decisions in rapid fire. Baroni stared at the jury stoically as the verdicts were read. Kelly cried and continued to sob as she heard the word guilty repeated again and again.

      Afterward, Kelly hugged her attorney and her mother. Baroni was embraced by his attorney and then went to his parents in the first row of the courtroom.

      Kelly and Baroni were charged on nine counts, and faced five of them together. The other four charges were split evenly, two each for the defendants.

      U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton set the sentencing date for Feb. 21. Baroni and Kelly face a maximum of 20 years in prison, but are likely to serve far less under federal sentencing guidelines.

      I do agree with Baroni’s defense counsel though, when he said:

      “Baroni’s attorney, Michael Baldassare, said “it was a disgrace” that the U.S. Attorney’s office did not charge “powerful people.”

      “In keeping with the disgrace that was this trial, one of the things the U.S. Attorney’s Office should be ashamed of is where it decided to draw the line on who to charge and who not to charge,” Baldassare said. “… They should have had belief in their own case to charge powerful people, and they did not.”

      Christie was clearly aware of what went on, and he clearly approved it, what’s more, there is a lot of evidence that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo aided in the cover-up.

      Throw the book at them all.

      Kitten Go Bye Bye

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      We could not keep the little tyke, we have too many cats, and one of them was having a nervous breakdown about the presence of the kitten. (Meatball has abandonment issues)

      So after 10 days, the malnourished, feverish, goopy eyed, and dehydrated kitten has finished the drug regime, and it’s going to a friend.

      It was just under 1½ pounds when we took it to the vet, and now it might top 2 pounds,

      Good journey, fuzzball.

      The FBI Needs Adult Supervision

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      I’ve generally stayed away the never-ending saga of Hillary Clinton and her emails, because I’ve never seen any “there” there.

      Yes, Hillary should not have done it, and yes it was a byproduct of her Nixonian attitude towards transparency, but I never saw it as likely to produce anything like the “smoking gun tapes.

      Basically, the emails that have been revealed are an episode of entitled white people acting badly, but there is no criminality that I can see, and the revelations, that they hate labor unions, working stiffs, and Bernie Sanders have merely been confirmation of the DLC-type politics that is the Clintons.

      Even the revelation that there “might” be some previously undiscovered emails on Anthony “My last name is unbelievably appropriate” Weiner’s laptop (Because his now-estranged wife Huma Abedin briefly used it at some point, and installed software kept sucking up emails) is to me a nothing burger, but for the fact that James Comey decided to leave this turd in the punch bowl less than 2 weeks before the election, which reflects poorly on him, and on the Bureau, because it appears that his fear that some investigators would leak this to the press led him to make the announcement.

      That being said, the recent Twitter episode, in which an FBI account after being moribund for over a year, and then posted links to documents about Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, is highly problematic.

      In fact, it is so problematic, that the FBI is investigating itself over who did this and why:

      The FBI has launched an internal investigation into one of its Twitter accounts, according to ThinkProgress.

      The account, @FBIRecordsVault, had been dormant for more than a year, but at 4 a.m. on Oct. 30., the account sent out documents related to the candidates in the US presidential election, starting with info on Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump. Two days later the account followed up with a release of files from an investigation into President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a case that has been closed since 2005.

      In a statement after the receiving criticism about the posts, the FBI said the documents were in response to the Freedom of Information Act. “Per the standard procedure for FOIA, these materials became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures,” the FBI said in a statement.

      I don’t know who did this, but I know why, because the FBI as an institution has never shaken off the cancerous legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, and so behave as if it were a watered down version of the East German Stasi.

      Someone did not like Hillary Clinton, and they decided to use their official powers to put their thumb on the scales.

      I don’t like Hillary Clinton, and I did not vote for her (I wrote in Bernie Sanders), but the FBI is clearly a rogue organization, and it needs to be put back under civilian control, and perhaps broken up into its constituent parts:

      Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
      Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

      “The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

      This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
      The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

      The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.

      The FBI remains the fetid spawn of Hoover, and I think it needs to be taken out behind the barn.

      Tweet of the Day

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      Here’s the updated list of all Podesta docs published by @WikiLeaks that have been proven, or claimed, to be fake https://t.co/3QAb3LLxn0

      — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 2, 2016

      Since Greenwald did not actually post the pic, just the link, I’ve attached the picbelow

      It is important to remind folks that while plenty of representatives of the Clinton campaign and the DNC have commented on the provenance of the hacked email, Not One has disputed the authenticity of the emails.

      Cold Feet and the End of the World

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      On Tuesday, I did early voting, and I had cold feet.  ……… Literally.

      It was a long line, about half an hour long , with the first 20 minutes being outside, and my feet got cold.

      All things considered, the line actually went fairly quickly.

      One interesting thing:  when I signed it, the volunteer asked how long it took, and I checked on my phone to get the elapsed time.

      I then dropped my phone, which landed on the table with a loud bang, and Everyone in the room jumped.

      Poll workers are on edge this year.

      As an FYI, since I live in Maryland, so my vote doesn’t count, I wrote in Bernie Sanders for President.

      As to the end of the world, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, but the fact that the Cubs have won the World Series for the first time in 107 years.

      Congratulations to the new champs.