After watching two viscerally divisive debates among the Republican presidential contenders, Americans are about to witness a confrontation by the Democrats that will most likely center on differences of degree, not direction, and on how hard they will push a liberal agenda, not where they hope to lead the nation.
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A new petition calling for an investigation into the House Republican Benghazi Select Committee has put Republicans back on their heels as the American people are demanding answers.
The Petition from The Agenda Project states:
The actions of Leader McCarthy should disgust every decent American. This is not a “gaffe,” it is a gross assault on the most basic structure and purpose of government. It has to stop. No citizen – Republican or Democrat, or Independent – wants a government official to use his or her constitutionally granted power (and taxpayer dollars) to attack political opponents.
Further, the Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi released a letter to the Chair, Trey Gowdy, which calls the committee “an unethical abuse of millions of taxpayer dollars and a crass assault on the memories of the four Americans who were killed in Benghazi.”
Americans deserve to know exactly what happened in the lead up to the Select Committee on Benghazi and who played a part in this contemptible misuse of government.
“Since launching our petition this morning, we quickly had several hundred people sign on to the petition in the first few hours and, with the rate of new signatures, expect that to grow exponentially throughout the day. We’ve already heard positively from several members of the House of Representatives who agree with our position and support launching an ethics investigation into this matter.” said Erik Altieri, Director of Communications for the Agenda Project, “No matter your political beliefs or party affiliation, this exploitation of government power stands out as an egregious abuse of taxpayer trust and dollars. It’s funny that the party who continually rails against ‘big government’ is more than happy to use the infrastructure of that government to pursue personal, political vendettas. The American people deserve to know where millions of their tax dollars have gone and who is responsible for these political witch-hunts.”
What House Republicans are doing is a misuse of the legislative branch of our government. The government belongs to the people, and the investigative powers Constitutionally granted to the legislative branch should not be abused for partisan political purposes.
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Rep. McCarthy admitted again today that the Benghazi Select Committee is based on a lie. You can add your voice to the growing chorus of those who are demanding that House Republicans be held accountable by signing the petition here.
One part of me wants to bash Carly Fiorina for her persistent dishonesty. The other part wants to defend her against Donald Trump’s persistent sexism. So here’s both.
Fiorina’s dishonesty is flagrant and unapologetic. Called on her misstatements, Fiorina doesn’t cede ground, she attacks critics. Exhibit A isher evocative description, at the most recent GOP debate, of a nonexistent Planned Parenthood video: “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ ”
Horrific, but untrue. The sting video, released by an anti-abortion group, features a former technician for a fetal tissue procurement company describing how a Planned Parenthood employee “taps the heart and it starts beating,” then instructs her to remove the brain.
As Factcheck.org concluded, “The video does contain images of what appear to be intact fetuses, but they don’t fit Fiorina’s description.” One clip, in which a fetus appears to move, is credited to a different anti-abortion group, and it’s unclear where it was filmed. Another shows a stillborn baby, it turns out, not an aborted fetus.
Fiorina’s comments could be chalked up to forgivable hyperbole, easily remedied. The audio from the technician is gruesome enough, and Fiorina could be excused for thinking, as the video’s producers presumably intended, that she was actually watching the scene being described.
But backing down is not the Fiorina way. Repeatedly challenged after the debate, she repeatedly asserted that she was correct and that any disagreement was lazy partisanship from critics who hadn’t bothered to watch.
“I didn’t misspeak,” Fiorina told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I have seen those images.” Fox News’s Chris Wallace asked her, “Do you acknowledge what every fact-checker has found . . . there is no actual footage of the incident that you just mentioned?”
Fiorina: “No, I don’t accept that at all. . . . I haven’t found a lot of people in the mainstream media who have ever watched these things.”
This dishonesty is part of a pattern. Fiorina’s up-by-the-bootstraps foundational story — from secretary to chief executive — is similarly misleading. In fact, Fiorina is the child of privilege. Her father was a Stanford law professor, Duke Law School dean, deputy attorney general and federal appeals court judge. Horatio Alger this is not.
At the same time, Trump manages to put me in Fiorina’s corner. In TrumpWorld, where women matter for their looks, there only two kinds: attractive, and therefore “bimbos” (see, e.g., Megyn Kelly), or “dogs.” Which is not quite what he said about Fiorina to Rolling Stone but close: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”
Even when he is backpedaling, Trump can only do it condescendingly, in terms of appearance. “I think she’s got a beautiful face, and I think she’s a beautiful woman,” Trump said at the debate. Dig, Donald, dig.
And even when he’s not commenting on appearance, Trump’s criticism of Fiorina is laced with not-so-subtle sexism. “She’s got a good pitter-patter,” Trump told Stephanopoulos, “but if you listen to her for more than five minutes straight, you get a headache.” He used the same dismissive line on “Fox & Friends” the next day.
Pitter-patter? Headache? The first is classic trivializing of what a woman has to say. The second is classic invocation of woman as nagging shrew. It’s easy to imagine Trump complaining to one of his ex-wives that she’s giving him a headache. It’s hard to imagine him using those words in connection with one of his male opponents. (They are, instead, “low-energy” — shades of, ahem, low-T.)
Not that Trump’s fellow candidates are paragons of gender-neutral virtue. How revealing that Mike Huckabee picked his wife and Ben Carson his mother as candidates for the $10 bill.
Really, women are only valued as wives and mothers? They can’t think of a woman — an American woman, Jeb Bush, not Margaret Thatcher — with accomplishments besides marriage and procreation? What if a female candidate selected her husband or father to be featured on the national currency?
Fiorina rejected the premise as mere “gesture,” arguing that “we ought to recognize that women are not a special interest group.” But currency is inherently symbolic; including a woman is about equal, not special, treatment.
Fiorina’s response lets her appear above the fray of gender politics, even as she benefits from being the only woman in the GOP race and touts her ability to take on Hillary Clinton.
Anyone else get the sense that the only woman Fiorina would be happy to see on the $10 bill is. . . Fiorina? {Washington Post Ruth Marcus}
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http://wapo.st/1YAO6e8 Washington Post Link
Reality has bitten Republicans in the backsides again as the Justice Department is saying that Hillary Clinton’s emails broke no laws.
Justice Department lawyers argued before a federal court that Hillary Clinton’s handling of her emails broke no laws.
The Conservative Washington Times Reported:
In the most complete legal defense of Mrs. Clinton, Justice Department lawyers insisted they not only have no obligation, but no power, to go back and demand the former top diplomat turn over any documents she hasn’t already given — and neither, they said, can the court order that.
The defense came as part of a legal filing telling a judge why the administration shouldn’t be required to order Mrs. Clinton and her top aides to preserve all of their emails.
“There is no question that Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server,” the administration lawyers argued. “Under policies issued by both the National Archives and Records Administration (‘NARA’) and the State Department, individual officers and employees are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record.”
Republicans like Donald Trump love to compare Hillary Clinton’s emails to the crimes that were committed by David Petraeus, but the difference is that Petraeus broke the law by giving classified material to his mistress.
The Republican email scandal is falling apart. If Clinton didn’t break any laws, why are Republicans wasting time and millions of taxpayer dollars investigating her emails? There is a reason Republicans would not allow Clinton’s aides to testify in public. Information is the enemy of the GOP’s bogus email scandal. The more information that is available to the public, the sooner the email scandal will fade away.
The email scandal is a media fueled time killer that only serves to distract attention from the real issues. Republicans don’t want to talk about their positions on the issues. They would rather try to distract the electorate with meaningless scandals.
Republicans can’t hide from the truth. There is nothing to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. [Politicususa]
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The Left Wing Conspiracy Against Hillary Clinton!
Look around at any popular left leaning reporter in almost any media format, and you won’t find one of them who are willing to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is leading the democratic primary by twenty-plus points in every national poll. Forget about whether they like her, they’re not even willing to acknowledge the most basic facts of the 2016 campaign when those facts just happen to make clear that she has a big lead. So, why the sudden left wing conspiracy against Hillary Clinton?
There are two factors at play, and you’ll have to decide for yourself whether one or both applies to any given liberal reporter and in whatever proportion. One factor is that these liberal reporters are simply trashing Hillary Clinton for street credibility among their left leaning audience. They know Bernie Sanders is trendy right now, and while they’re politically savvy enough to know that Bernie Sanders has no chance of winning this primary, they’re also aware that much of their audience doesn’t know that.
So they keep swiping at Hillary, score some cheap points with purist liberals, and they figure no harm done because Hillary is going to win anyway. The other factor is simply that no one watches a blowout, and in order to get their left leaning audience to keep tuning in, they have to paint this race as being much closer than it is. You can decide who’s doing what and why. But some of these otherwise respectable liberal leaning reporters are stomping all over their own credibility in the process.
Hillary Clinton once quipped back in the nineties that there was a “vast right wing conspiracy” against she and her husband, as those on the right invented one trumped up scandal about them after another. Now in 2015, Hillary faces something of the converse. Oh sure, the right wing is still after her, but by now their concoctions are predictable. Here’s what no one saw coming: from the liberal members of the media on down, there now appears to be a vast left wing conspiracy against her.
On the surface it seems an absurd notion. After the liberals have had control of the White House for the past six-plus years and has benefited from it greatly, Hillary Clinton represents the best chance to keep the left wing’s control intact. So the left leaning members of the media should be rubber-stamping her candidacy for President, right? Hardly!
Take a survey of the tenor of the relatively few openly left-leaning prominent members of the media. MSNBC should be thrilled at the idea of President Hillary Clinton but they just tried to bury her in a hostile interview this week which focused mostly on phony scandals. So perhaps Andrea Mitchell, who conducted the interview, it’s from the left wing. But her MSNBC counterpart Rachel Maddow is. And if anything, Maddow seems more cravenly out to sink Clinton’s chances than anyone. That’s a shocker considering that Maddow is generally considered one of the fairest liberal voices on television.
Is it that Rachel is so enthralled by a can’t-win protest candidate like Bernie Sanders that she’s willing to throw Hillary Clinton under a bus in the hopes of propping up her preferred candidate, or is it that MSNBC is merely shifting to hard to the right this year that Maddow has little choice but to go along with it? That’s not entirely clear. But what is more transparent is the manner in which liberal hero Bill Maher has essentially turned his weekly show into a pro-Sanders, anti-Hillary campaign stump.
When Maher had Sanders on as a guest at the start of his campaign, it was the most puff-piece interview possible. Since that time Maher has made a point of doing segments in which he specifically trashed Clinton for daring to take Hollywood money to fund her campaign – yes, this is the same Bill Maher who famously gives large sums of that same Hollywood money to democratic candidates whenever he feels like it. When Claire McCaskill went on Maher’s show recently, seemingly for the sole intention of talking up her recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Maher never let her get to it before moving on to the next segment. But Maher isn’t the only problem either.
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http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/the-vast-left-wing-conspiracy-against-hillary-clinton/22186/
Jeb Bush is blaming Iraq’s chaos, ISIS and the total broken Middle-East that his Brother George W Bush caused, on President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Right now Jeb is in trouble because of the man with the Dead Animal’s Bleached Hair On His Head. Jeb is chasing the “Hair” day and night and he is manufacturing untruths that are putting him in even worse of a situation because, people are not stupid as the Bush’s think they are.
[NYT] “In politics, the smallest things often turn out to be the most telling ones, and so it is with the man who was supposed to be the Republican front-runner, who once inspired such rapture among party elders and whose entrance into the presidential race they yearned and clamored for.
They not only got their wish, they got it with punctuation: Jeb! That’s Jeb Bush’s logo, and the exclamation point is the tell. None of the other Republican presidential candidates has anything like it. None of the Democrats either. It’s a declaration of passion that only someone worried about a deficit of it would issue. Methinks thou doth exclaim too much.
Before Bush announced his candidacy, talk of his vulnerabilities focused largely on certain positions — his defense of Common Core educational standards, his advocacy for immigration reform — that were anathema to many voters in the Republican primaries. He was sure to catch flak.
But catching fire is his bigger problem. He can’t do it. In a bloated field of bellicose candidates, he’s a whisper, a blur, starved of momentum, bereft of urgency and apt to make news because he stumbles, not because he soars. Can he soar? Or even sprint?
“I’m the tortoise in the race,” he told a group of voters in Florida not long ago. “But I’m a joyful tortoise.”
And Donald Trump’s a demented peacock and I’m a crotchety hippo. Reverse anthropomorphism is a fun game, but if you’re playing it in the service of selling yourself, best not to summon a sluggish creature with a muted affect and an impenetrable shell.
Republicans should have seen this turtle coming. In some sense they did. Bush’s fans and backers praised him as a thoughtful “policy wonk” and conceded that he wasn’t any dynamo at the lectern or on the trail.
But they downgraded the importance of dynamism, maybe because they didn’t expect so much competition, including Trump. (It’s “the race between the tortoise and the bad hair,” cracked Jay Leno last week.) They couldn’t envision the way in which 16 rivals would rob Bush of clear distinction and definition.
Sure, he speaks Spanish and has a Mexican-born wife, but Marco Rubio also speaks Spanish and has two Cuban-born parents. Sure, he was twice elected governor of a state that’s not reliably red, but so were Scott Walker, Chris Christie and John Kasich.
He’s not the most eloquent or the most inspiring, so his backers began to pitch him as the most adult. But at that first debate, Kasich stole even that superlative from him.
What’s left? He’s raised the most money, some of which he’ll use for television ads much sooner than anyone had anticipated. He’ll try to buy the oomph that he can’t organically generate.
Oomph is what that big speech last week — in which he blamed Hillary Clinton for the rise of the Islamic State — was largely about. He was flexing his audacity and independence, showing that his surname wouldn’t cow him from going after a Democratic rival on any matter, including Iraq. It took gall to edit his older brother out of the diatribe. It took guts to go with a diatribe in the first place.
Did it help? Polls suggest not. A CNN/ORC survey that was released on Tuesday showed that he doesn’t fare nearly as well as Trump when Republican voters are asked whom they trust most on the economy, on immigration and on battling Islamic extremists.
He runs afoul of the moment. Voters right now are more enamored of outsiders than usual, as the traction of not just Trump but also two other Republican candidates who have never held elective office — Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina — demonstrates.
Voters have had enough of protocol and pieties. Thus Trump thrives in a party that he constantly browbeats and shows no real loyalty toward, while Bernie Sanders flourishes among Democrats though he has repeatedly railed against them and doesn’t technically identify as one.
For some alienated voters, supporting either of these two insurgents is the same as raising a middle finger to establishment politicians and to politics as usual, and tactful, tasteful Bush can never be a middle finger. More like a pinkie.
he pinkie may prevail. In the Bush camp there’s a theory, or perhaps an anxiety-quelling fantasy, that the Trump mania and the related craziness will benefit Bush, who can methodically build support and incrementally lengthen his stride while the glare and heat are on others.
Trump burns out, the field eventually winnows, and Bush is saved by a superlative after all. He’s the most durable candidate.
It’s a plausible scenario. But it’s hardly a joyful one. And there’s only one way to punctuate it — with a question mark.”
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[NYT] In “Let the People Vote” (editorial, June 5), you are right to applaud Hillary Rodham Clinton in making voting reform a top priority. However, I firmly believe that this issue is not about Republican versus Democrat. I believe that all Americans want the same thing: a fraud-free election in which as many citizens vote as possible. It is a disgrace that turnout in America ranks 138th out of 172 democracies around the world.
It is common sense that if you want to fill voting booths: 1) you don’t hold elections on a single working day when many people with two jobs and single working parents can’t vote; and 2) you make it as easy as possible for all citizens to register, and today that means electronically.
I won’t accept the notion that any of the candidates, Democrat or Republican, who hold themselves out as capable of leading our nation think otherwise. For example, Senator Rand Paul has publicly asked, “Why don’t we be the party that’s for people voting, for voting rights?” and has introduced a bill to restore voting rights for nonviolent felons in federal elections.
So I call upon all candidates for president to follow in the steps of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Paul by speaking up on ways to increase voter turnout.
ANDREW YOUNG
Atlanta
The writer, a former member of Congress, mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United Nations, is currently chairman of Why Tuesday?, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing voter turnout.
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