In your honest opinion, who do you think has the best chance of becoming POTUS?

[Cassandra LeMay]

So Trump can gin up the base by saying literally anything he wants about what might be in them because there's no chance he can be proven wrong. He has absolutely nothing to lose by making it the centerpoint of everything he talks about for the next ten days.

He doesn't have much to gain by it either, unless he gets some widely shown TV appearances to make those statements. At his rallies (and in his Twitter feed) he's preaching to people who already think Clinton should be locked up, regardless the latest news.

Also I am not entirely certain he has nothing to lose by making it the focus of all his talk till election day. The more the topic stays in the headline without any really substantial new developments, the sooner both the media and the people at large will get tired of it. He would also run the risk of repeating what a great guy Comey is so much that the focus shifts from what might be in the emails to Comey's intentions in releasing his statement so close to the election. That could actually help Clinton.

There's also the fact that in this weird election there seems to be a negative correlation between the attention the candidates get and their poll numbers. Both candidates are so disliked by a lot of people, that the more people see of them, the more they are reminded of their dislike. If Trump manages to make a major media circus out of this latest email thing, some undecideds could actually swing to HRC, or just stay at home. But Trump needs those people, if he wants to win.

[Beguile's Mistress]

The whole thing is crazy though. I don't really think Comey is in bed with Trump, but he's running scared after the thrashing he took on the first report. And he gave Donald an early Christmas gift for it.

I don't think Comey is in bed with Trump but I do thing the senior Republicans are threatening him because appears to have let Secretary Clinton of the hook several months ago.  The Attorney General and the Justice Department both warned Comey about his letter and interfering in the election.  Also, the Republicans are threatening an investigation of the FBI actions whether Clinton is elected or not. 

It's like reading a political thriller, just without a murder.

[gaggedLouise]

I don't think Comey is in bed with Trump but I do thing the senior Republicans are threatening him because appears to have let Secretary Clinton of the hook several months ago.  The Attorney General and the Justice Department both warned Comey about his letter and interfering in the election.  Also, the Republicans are threatening an investigation of the FBI actions whether Clinton is elected or not. 

It's like reading a political thriller, just without a murder.

I'm hoping enough people will realize that it's far from clear just how incriminating this new cache of e-mails or whatever really is, what's in it...For one thing it's not at all clear how many of them, if any, are Hillary's own e-mails, and for another, Abedin had several functions within her entourage - for some time when HRC was secretary of state, Abedin had four different employed jobs running side by side and interlacing, in and outside of the State Dept., and with most of her work relating to the Clintons and Hillary's position as SecofState. So these new materials could be relating to any of those positions. There's nothing saying they have to be linked to the e-mail server.

On the other hand, it doesn't look very good to have had key aides mixing state-related work and Clinton-personally-related work in such a fast and loose way.  :-(


The whole setup for the last ten days is making me think of these two aphorisms concerning a certain Frenchman,. by a writer from here a hundred years ago (and in the wake of the Russian revolution):

   What we now need is the bluntest and most dastardly man*, he who was once called Napoleon.

   He who is not a man of action would say that the masses smell, but Napoleon has no nose and the waves will carry him.

:P


*In the original, "man" is non-gendered in both lines ("human being, person") so the longing for a strong person to set things right could be aimed at both a male and a female...



Edit: corrected the name of the suspected Clinton aide

[ReijiTabibito]

There's also to consider the more recent events regarding the MidEast.  Clinton has stated repeatedly that she wants a no-fly zone over Syria, which interviewees of the Armed Forces Committee (flag-rank officers, one general in particular) have said would undoubtedly cause a war with Russia.  Contrast with Trump, who has stated that he thinks it would be great if the country got along with Russia and worked together to fight terrorism abroad.

It's kind of...I'm not really even sure what word to use for it here, but it was clear that from the 'reset' done by Obama's administration that they wanted to improve relations with Russia, but now the supposed heir of those policies is strongly advocating an action that would not just strain but quite possibly break them in a way that hasn't happened since the fall of the USSR.

This is, of course, because Trump and HRC have two entirely different goals when it comes to Syria.  Trump wants to fight ISIS, fight terrorism, that's his #1 priority.

Clinton, on the other hand, isn't as much concerned about dealing with ISIS as she is with removing Assad.  That's why the conflict over Aleppo ( :P JOHNSON!) is big, because the city is one of the last pockets of anti-Assad resistance.

Honestly, you'd have thought we'd have learned by now that this strategy we've been employing since really the 50s of replacing governments we don't like by supporting the resistances against those governments has a horrible track record:

Didn't work in Iraq.
Didn't work in Nicaragua.
Didn't work in Libya.  (And there we DEFINITELY had no reason to be involved!)
Didn't work in Cuba.

KIND OF worked in Iran, but that only lasted about 25 years and we've been eating it in the nose ever since.

It worked in Afghanistan, but that's because we were TECHNICALLY propping up the legit government against a foreign invader, but that still came to bite us in the ass.

Vietnam?  I'm not even sure where to put it on the success/failure meter.  All I know is that there is no more Republic of Vietnam and that about 50,000 Americans died over there.

[Oniya]

Vietnam?  I'm not even sure where to put it on the success/failure meter.  All I know is that there is no more Republic of Vietnam and that about 50,000 Americans died over there.

They won every battle they fought
But the one that raged at home
And now the only words that count
Are the names carved out in stone.

[ReijiTabibito]

Nice poem.  Who was it?

(And to a lesser extent, I meant more the US efforts done in Vietnam BEFORE 1965.  The US assassinated the first leader of the Republic of Vietnam - despite having been allies.)

[TheGlyphstone]

We apparently get along really well with Vietnam now, if the US-Vietnam Relations wiki page is to be trusted.

Despite the infamous history of the Vietnam War, Vietnam today is one of the most pro-American countries in Southeast Asia,[1][2][3] with 78% of Vietnamese people viewing the U.S. favorably in 2015.[4] Vietnamese Americans, making up roughly 1.8 million people, are mostly immigrants who moved to the United States after the Vietnam War and comprise nearly half of all overseas Vietnamese, and as of 2012, Vietnamese students form the 8th largest group of international students studying in the United States, representing 2% of all foreigners pursuing higher education in the United States.[5]

[gaggedLouise]

*nods at Reiji* It's very hard to "export democracy" and make it work. Especially if there is no real tradition of living functioning democracy in the target country - and if democracy isn't the real objective.

They won every battle they fought
But the one that raged at home
And now the only words that count
Are the names carved out in stone.

Even de Gaulle told JFK in the early sixties something like, "It's an impossible war to win, don't get stuck in those jungles". And he if anyone would have known, with the war against the French army ten years earlier. I think de Gaulle also understood that the Saigon regime had become too corrupt to stand on its own two legs and really win over the entire nation.

[Oniya]

Nice poem.  Who was it?

It's a few lines from the song 'Black Wall' by Dennis DeYoung.  As the daughter of a vet, it never fails to hit me right in the chest.

[Orval Wintermute]

The reports about these "new" e-mails are becoming more bizarre by the minute.

The FBI have known about them for a month.
The FBI didn't have a warrant to look at the e-mails in question when Comey wrote to Congress, so nobody has a clue what is in them.
None of the e-mails are from or to HRC.

At this point Trump contesting the election so that it ends up going to joint session in January where Evan McMullin gets voted in as the next President doesn't such a long shot anymore

[Cassandra LeMay]

At this point Trump contesting the election so that it ends up going to joint session in January where Evan McMullin gets voted in as the next President doesn't such a long shot anymore

I don't think anyone can contest the election as a whole. My understanding is that, given that the whole process is made up of 50 different state elections, he would have to contest individual state elections. And each state probably has different rules for that, which would make it difficult, time consuming, and probably costly. Unless by "the election" you mean the electoral college vote, and I have no clue if that can actually be contested, and if so, under what conditions.

Or am I overlooking something here?

[Beguile's Mistress]

In today's episode of "All Trumped Up."

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-daughter-in-law-trump-forced-fbis-hand/ar-AAjxEYl

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-what-we-know-and-what-we-dont/ar-AAjDy76?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=AVRES007

[Oniya]

I don't think anyone can contest the election as a whole. My understanding is that, given that the whole process is made up of 50 different state elections, he would have to contest individual state elections. And each state probably has different rules for that, which would make it difficult, time consuming, and probably costly. Unless by "the election" you mean the electoral college vote, and I have no clue if that can actually be contested, and if so, under what conditions.

Or am I overlooking something here?

There's some precedent in Bush v. Gore, which resulted in a lot of people learning that 'chad' was not just a country near Egypt, or the guy who hung out with Biff and Muffy.

Trump joke I heard at a party

What do Jane Austen and Donald Trump have in common?

answer

Pride and Prejudice.

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Come on - you didn't think it was 'Sense and Sensibility', did you?

[gaggedLouise]

The reports about these "new" e-mails are becoming more bizarre by the minute.

The FBI have known about them for a month.
The FBI didn't have a warrant to look at the e-mails in question when Comey wrote to Congress, so nobody has a clue what is in them.
None of the e-mails are from or to HRC.

At this point Trump contesting the election so that it ends up going to joint session in January where Evan McMullin gets voted in as the next President doesn't such a long shot anymore

Exactly, it's a "scandal twist" where there's almost no real hard content to argue about in an intelligent way. There's not going to be a clear picture before Election day of what those e-mails really contain or even how many of them are new and how many are just duplicates of mails the FBI has already seen. It's not even likely that most of them were sent to or from Hillary Clinton personally - but Trump's supporters are saying: well, Abedin was a key aide and she also had an account on that e-mail server so communicating with her was almost like talking with Hillary Clinton herself (this might be true during the election campaign but it was hardly true during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State).

In the New Republic, news editor Alex Shephard pointed out that this is the perfect "postmodern scandal" - anyone can read into it what they want and imagine cartloads of e-mails where Mrs. Clinton is rubberstamping money-laundering operations to help ISIS cohorts, helping Bill find underage girls, accepting bribes from Mexican druglords (yes!) or discussing top secret US operations in plain text so it could get overheard. Hey, the now estranged husband of the Clinton aide was caught in paedophile surfing and what do you think Bill Clinton is doing in his free time in the Clinton presidential library? The plot thickens...  ::) I've seen most of the allegations mentioned, popping up and repeated at online forums and on twitter: many of Trump's supporters are clearly hoping that Hillary will be arrested and led away handcuffed a few days before the election to answer some shocking accusations.

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/138252/latest-hillary-clinton-email-scandal-perfect-postmodern-election

With only eight days until the election, the FBI’s intervention is a very big deal indeed.

But as Variety’s Sonia Saraiya noted in a very sharp piece, no one really knows what the investigation is really about. Are the emails new? Maybe! Maybe not! Are these the near-mythical 30,000 emails that have gone missing? Doesn’t seem like it. Did Hillary Clinton do anything at all that deserves blame here? Again, it doesn’t seem like it, though Clinton really should learn how to print her own emails. Could any or all of these things become true, over the course of the FBI’s investigation? Yes, but none of them appear to be true now.

To an extent, the “email scandal” has always been something of a cipher—it was more a stand-in for Clinton’s issues with secrecy and trust. But the latest developments in this story have turned it into something suitably postmodern, a twist whose significance is so obvious even Umberto Eco would think twice before using it. It has become a pseudo-scandal with no real merit or electoral impact that nevertheless will eat up hundreds of hours of media coverage. There is no there there, making it the perfect scandal for our era of unending spin. Maybe at the end we’ll come to realize that the real email story was inside of us all along.

[Cassandra LeMay]

There's some precedent in Bush v. Gore, which resulted in a lot of people learning that 'chad' was not just a country near Egypt, or the guy who hung out with Biff and Muffy.

It's a rather imperfect precedent, as it was (a) a decision about the election in a single state. Hardly a precedent for contesting the whole, nationwide process. And (b) SCOTUS didn't even technically decide what the result of the Florida election should be. They decided that the counting and recounting problems could not be fixed before the "safe harbor" deadline. I am not sure if there is anything in the decision that establishs a precedent for allegations that the election may have been "rigged" from the start.

Not that I expect Trump to give a flying sh** about such small details. Interesting question is, if Trump really decides to contest a bunch of state elections, will the GOP pay the bill for all the lawyer fees? Quite a few of them have already stated that they would accept the election results, even if Clinton wins, and Trump isn't know for paying for things with his own money when he can find someone else to shoulder the burden.

[Oniya]

It's a rather imperfect precedent, as it was (a) a decision about the election in a single state. Hardly a precedent for contesting the whole, nationwide process. And (b) SCOTUS didn't even technically decide what the result of the Florida election should be. They decided that the counting and recounting problems could not be fixed before the "safe harbor" deadline. I am not sure if there is anything in the decision that establishs a precedent for allegations that the election may have been "rigged" from the start.

Not that I expect Trump to give a flying sh** about such small details. Interesting question is, if Trump really decides to contest a bunch of state elections, will the GOP pay the bill for all the lawyer fees? Quite a few of them have already stated that they would accept the election results, even if Clinton wins, and Trump isn't know for paying for things with his own money when he can find someone else to shoulder the burden.

I agree (on all points) - it's more of a 'camel's nose' precedent of 'someone has previously contested election results for the Presidential election'.  At the time, the election was close enough that the one state would have made a difference - I don't have any reason to expect that this year.

[Orval Wintermute]

Unless by "the election" you mean the electoral college vote, and I have no clue if that can actually be contested, and if so, under what conditions.

Or am I overlooking something here?

Maybe I didn't explain it properly, you've got the three stages of the Presidential election; the public vote in November, the State Electors vote in December and the the Joint Session in January. The political convention is that any candidate who doesn't have the electoral college votes drops out of the race as soon it becomes clear they can't win rendering the second and third votes moot, even Gore eventually conceded. But can see The Donald hanging on for grim death until January in the hope that this latest e-mail thing, or something else, forces HRC out of the race. Now if HRC is forced out and McMullin wins in Utah, it'd get kicked to the House to decided between McMullin and Trump.

[gaggedLouise]

Maybe I didn't explain it properly, you've got the three stages of the Presidential election; the public vote in November, the State Electors vote in December and the the Joint Session in January. The political convention is that any candidate who doesn't have the electoral college votes drops out of the race as soon it becomes clear they can't win rendering the second and third votes moot, even Gore eventually conceded. But can see The Donald hanging on for grim death until January in the hope that this latest e-mail thing, or something else, forces HRC out of the race. Now if HRC is forced out and McMullin wins in Utah, it'd get kicked to the House to decided between McMullin and Trump.

Interestng scenario...Supposing that McMullin were elected in Joint Session after having won only Utah (or perhaps one more state) wouldn't Trump dub it a "Mormon coup d'état"?  :D

[Cassandra LeMay]

Interestng scenario...Supposing that McMullin were elected in Joint Session after having won only Utah (or perhaps one more state) wouldn't Trump dub it a "Mormon coup d'état"?  :D

He might call it that, but he will have a bigger target to fire on than the Mormons, if that scenario actually became true - namely his own party.  ;D

Even if the Senate majority goes to the Democrats this election, the GOP is extremely likely to hold on to a solid House majority. I don't think McMullin could be elected without at least some Republicans voting for him.

[Orval Wintermute]

Even if the Senate majority goes to the Democrats this election, the GOP is extremely likely to hold on to a solid House majority. I don't think McMullin could be elected without at least some Republicans voting for him.

In this unlikely scenario, the House elects the President and the Senate elects the VP (although the election for President can go to the Senate if there is a tie in the House) so McMullin would need GOP support but there are a few reasons why they might line up behind McMullin.

• He's a social conservative.
• He wants to overturn Roe v Wade
• He'd appoint conservative judges to the Supreme court.
• He's all for tax cuts and welfare cuts.

And of course the big one - He's not Donald Trump.

Think of all the Republicans who ditched Trump, if Trump gets in you just know there will be political pay-back, so why wouldn't you back the other guy who's now going to owe you bigly?

[Beguile's Mistress]

There's some precedent in Bush v. Gore, which resulted in a lot of people learning that 'chad' was not just a country near Egypt, or the guy who hung out with Biff and Muffy.

Trump joke I heard at a party

What do Jane Austen and Donald Trump have in common?

answer

Pride and Prejudice.

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Come on - you didn't think it was 'Sense and Sensibility', did you?

Totally imagined a bland by pointed riposte delivered by Jane at being compared to Trump.

[Cassandra LeMay]

...
And of course the big one - He's not Donald Trump.

Think of all the Republicans who ditched Trump, if Trump gets in you just know there will be political pay-back, so why wouldn't you back the other guy who's now going to owe you bigly?

That he is not Donald Trump is, in my opinion, the very reason McMullin wouldn't make it, even if this unlikely situation were to happen. The GOP needs the people who voted for Trump. Pissing them off by voting in McMullin in the House could cost the GOP whatever chance they have of winning elections for years.  That is, if those voters just decide to turn their back on the GOP. The other possibility is that there will be a tea party-like movement winning some elections. It wouldn't take many Trump supporters in high offices to completely derail the GOP in Congress. It might not happen today or tomorrow, but it would be a nightmare for the GOP establishment (or what's left of it) and an "establishment republican" President.

[Valerian]

Well, despite Trump's continual denials and what the FBI is saying (and I don't think I trust anything the FBI is saying anymore), there seems to be a pretty clear connection between Trump's servers and a Russian bank run by some of Putin's cronies, as detailed here.  I can't speak personally as to the technical details, but they seem to have done some pretty thorough research, and what they've put together seems solid.  Now the question is whether or not this will get enough widespread coverage for it to influence any votes, since the mainstream outlets seem to be sticking with the FBI party line.

[Beguile's Mistress]

Rumors abound.  One is that Russia is grooming Trump to be their puppet and anther is that the FBI is try to influence the election because of pressure from the GOP.

The ironic thing is that Trump is a guilty of obfuscation regarding his own emails as he say Secretary Clinton is.  Plus, he and his cohorts have done their purging of records for decades when it comes to legal situations.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-missing-emails/ar-AAjDm2V?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=AVRES007

Comey and the FBI are standing around with egg on their faces and people (voters) are getting tired of what they are seeing as an underhanded attack on Secretary Clinton.  The GOP is looking pretty desperate right now.

[gaggedLouise]

That he is not Donald Trump is, in my opinion, the very reason McMullin wouldn't make it, even if this unlikely situation were to happen. The GOP needs the people who voted for Trump. Pissing them off by voting in McMullin in the House could cost the GOP whatever chance they have of winning elections for years.  That is, if those voters just decide to turn their back on the GOP. The other possibility is that there will be a tea party-like movement winning some elections. It wouldn't take many Trump supporters in high offices to completely derail the GOP in Congress. It might not happen today or tomorrow, but it would be a nightmare for the GOP establishment (or what's left of it) and an "establishment republican" President.

The logical thing would be for the hardcore Trump supporters to join up with the Tea Party, and break out of the GOP to run their own.