I Will No Longer Say That Bernie Would Have Beaten Trump

In the future, I will say that Michael Dukkakis would have beaten Trump.

That is all.

Kidney Stone of a Commute Today

A car accident on the Beltway, a truck fire on I-95, and as a result an hour and a half commute to travel 26 miles.

That's an average speed of around 18 mph.

The only time I smiled on the way to work, was when I saw this bumper sticker:



I did smile at that.

Some Perspective………

Alleged Russian government Facebook ads were marginally more than one-two thousandth of Clinton and Trump ads during the election.

Obviously, we can talk about how a butterfly flapping its wings in Malawi can create a hurricane, but the effects of this "massive" Russian interference

Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who could have spent even more than that on the campaigns’ behalf.

Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch revealed these figures today during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing with Facebook, Twitter and Google about Russian election interference.

Without counting PACs, the top campaigns spent 1,760X more on election ads than one group of Russian meddlers puts the situation into context. The IRA ad buy was small by comparison. This aligns with Stretch’s main talking point that Russian propaganda content was a tiny fraction of the content and ads seen on Facebook. This revelation could put more focus on organically posted propaganda.

The Democratic Party is focusing on this stuff, and avoiding a meaningful examination of how it failed and why.

I can understand why they are doing this:  Any search for incompetence will lead to a lot of folks working for the Democratic establishment getting VERY well deserved pink slips.

Absent a meaningful autopsy of the 2016 debacle though, the party will continue to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

PLONK!!!!!!!!!!*

The day before the California primary, Rachael Maddow, and the rest of the NBC news org, breathlessly and gleefully announcing that they had surveyed the "Super Delegates", and declared that Hillary Clinton had won the nomination.

I have not watched Maddow since, I saw that it was a descent into hackdom. (though I have referenced online video clips)

Her later non-reveal Trump tax return reveal, parodied by Stephen Colbert, confirmed my opinion.

Well, I just dropped Talking Points Memo from my blogroll, because its founder and editor-in-chief Josh Marshall, just confirmed his descent into hackdom with a truly laughable OP/ED condemning Donna Brazile's Politico article revealing of the Clinton Campaign's takeover of the DNC more than a year before the convention.

In order to do this, he had to ignore contemporaneous reports of some of the issues raised in the essay, including reports from Talking Points Memo at the time, as well as insisting that the DNC is moving left while TPM is reporting a purge of progressive members.

There are a number of news orgs whose OP/ED pages contradict what their news section reports, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are legion for this, but they have a wall between opinion and reporting, and Talking Points Memo does not.

Notwithstanding the work done by TPM employees, and the fact that Josh Marshall has assembled a top flight team, this site is, and will probably will always be, Josh Marshall at its core.

He's jumped the shark, so:  Plonk!!!

^*This is a term from the very early (Usenet) days of the internet. the term PLONK is a statement that you have added a user to your killfile, meaning that you will not see their posts.

When I Said that the Clinton Campaign had Strip Mined the Democratic Party, I Had No Idea

Donna Brazile, the consummate Democratic Party insider has detailed Hillary Clinton's takeover of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was complete before the Presidential primaries began.

What's more they then proceeded to steal everything that was not nailed down:

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

………

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s [Wasserman-Schultz] way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

………

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

………

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

………

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

When Donna Brazile describes the Clinton campaign as a, "Cancer," it means something.

What's more, she makes it clear that her campaign contributed to Democratic losses down ticket by starving those races, and the state and local party organizations, of resources.

Not a pretty picture.

Pass the Popcorn

I've generally been pretty dismissive of the "A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin," wing of the Democratic Party.

I've always observed that at worst, what we have is a violation of campaign finance laws, where, if the Russians explicitly coordinated with the Trump campaign, it was an illegal in-kind donation.

That's a lot of "ifs", and even if true, the penalties are minimal.

The real jeopardy only occurs if members of the Trump campaign engaged in obstruction of justice in an attempt to cover this up.

After all, it was obstruction of justice that took Nixon down.

I'm still not sure if there is any "There" there, but things is getting profoundly interesting:

CNN and the New York Times this evening published dueling scoops on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

As Jim Comey might put it: Lordy, there appear to be tapes.

First, CNN reported that U.S. government investigators wiretapped Paul Manafort, the onetime Trump campaign chairman, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. According to CNN, the court that provides judicial oversight for the administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized an FBI investigation into Manafort in 2014 focused on “work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine's former ruling party.” Manafort’s firm, among notable others, had failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian regime. This first investigation was reportedly halted in 2016 by Justice Department prosecutors because of lack of evidence, but a second warrant was later issued in service of the FBI’s investigation into Russian influence of the election and potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

CNN reported that interest in Manafort was “reignited” because of “intercepted communications between Manafort and suspected Russian operatives, and among the Russians themselves.” The FBI also conducted physical searches: one of a storage facility belonging to Manafort and a more widely reported search of his Alexandria home in late July. Manafort was not under surveillance when he became chairman of Trump’s campaign, CNN sources suggested, because of the gap between the two warrants.

………

Shortly after CNN’s story broke, the New York Times published its own scoop regarding Manafort. The story is largely a scene piece, but includes a number of highly significant facts. The Times catalogs what it describes as “aggressive tactics” that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has employed in his investigations of Trump associates, specifically Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. First, the Times reveals that after the July raid on Manafort’s residence, Mueller’s prosecutors warned Manafort that he would be indicted. The story also reports that Mueller’s team has subpoenaed several of Manafort’s associates, including Jason Maloni, a former Manafort spokesman; the heads of Mercury Public Affairs and the Podesta Group; and one of Manafort’s former lawyers (with Mueller’s team claiming an exception to attorney-client privilege). While White House officials have been given the opportunity to appear for “voluntary interviews” instead of before grand juries, Manafort’s associates have been subpoenaed, marking a less deferential approach to the Manafort investigation. The Times suggests that Mueller, leaving no rock unturned, is investigating Manafort for “possible violations of tax laws, money-laundering prohibitions and requirements to disclose foreign lobbying.”

I'm not sure where this is going, but it is getting interesting.

You Cannot Blame the Deplorables or the Russians for This

The Pew Research Center just did a study, and it showed that black voter's turnout fell in 2016.

A record 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall voter turnout – defined as the share of adult U.S. citizens who cast ballots – was 61.4% in 2016, a share similar to 2012 but below the 63.6% who say they voted in 2008.

This wasn't Russian hacking. This wasn't, as Lamberth Strether sarcastically noted, "Black voters are racist, sexist bros," this was an incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring candidate with a history of winking and nodding to racism. ("They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.")

This was a candidate who promulgated a Lord of the Flies management style in her campaign which created an incompetent, arrogant, and uninspiring campaign.

And the Democratic party establishment, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring DNC, and the legions of incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring consultants pulled out all the stops to fix the primary process for her.

Running against the most racist major Presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson, somehow, she, and the entire Democratic Party establishment, could not get black voters to turn out.

These are not the people who should be running the Democratic Party. 

These are not consultants who candidates should pay to run their campaigns. 

These are not people who should hold elective office.

They need to go away.

Headline of the Day

Kushner to Interns: Trump Team Too Disorganized to Collude With Russia

—Foreign Policy

You know, this is a pretty convincing argument.

Between Scaramucci and Flynn, these guys couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery

One of the Rules of Whacked Out Conspiracy Theorists

No matter where they start, all end up blaming the Jews, case in point, Russia conspiracy nutjob Louise Mensch:

You can say a lot of things about Louise Mensch, everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist and unhinged internet troll, but you can’t accuse her of not knowing how to spin a good yarn. The author of novels like Venus Envy and A Kept Woman—the titles give you a pretty good idea of what’s inside—is a natural storyteller, a gift she’s been using lately on Twitter to convince her hundreds of thousands of followers that she is, as my friend Jamie Kirchick wrote, “perpetually on the cusp of exposing a massive conspiracy on the part of Russia, dating back decades, to make Donald Trump president of the United States.” Yesterday, Mensch introduced an unexpected plot twist to her Twitter potboiler: America wasn’t hacked by the Russians alone; the Jews helped.

One Jew in particular: Bibi Netanyahu, dark lord and, apparently, apprentice to puppet-master Putin.

Because the pleasure of indulging in lunacy lies in the minute details, here goes. The saga began last night, when Mike Cernovich, himself a fan of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, tweeted to protest the firing of Derek Harvey, a National Security Council official sacked by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, suggesting that Harvey was let go because of his allegiance to Israel. Another Twitter user responded and accused Cernovich of being an agent of a Russian-sponsored coup d’etat. It was precisely the kind of language that summoned Mensch into the fray.

“Love you sir” she tweeted back, with all the subtlety of an oversexed British boarding school adolescent. And then, having warmed up to her subject, she continued: Obama, she tweeted, was right to despise Netanyahu. Oh, and Netanyahu was colluding with Russia to help Trump take an ax to the beating heart of American democracy.

………

What is Netanyahu, then? And where’s the proof of his subterfuge? What’s up with the RISSAD, which used to be called the Mossad but which Mensch has renamed Russian Israeli Trolls Loyal to Moscow Over Jerusalem, suggesting Israeli intelligence, too, is in Putin’s pocket? And why rehash, as Mensch did this morning, the ridiculous canard that Chabad is secretly a vessel for connecting the Kremlin and the Knesset?

Anyone who had two brain cells to rub together knew that Mensch was an addled conspiracy theorist, but because it fit a narrative, she got an OP/ED in the New York Times.

Even if Russia did everything that they have been accused of in exactly the manner accused, and the evidence is at best sparse, it is neither unusual nor unprecedented behavior.

US interventions in foreign elections, including Yeltsin's 1996 reelection in Russia was far more extensive, including tacit support of vote fraud, as was Winston Churchill's intervention by his intelligence agencies in the 1940 US Presidential election.

As I've said before, Donald Trump's election was a perfect storm of many factors, but the entire, "A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin," crap serves only to gloss over the very real institutional failures of the Democratic Party, and as such continues to set it up for electoral debacles.

A Big Deal, but Not a Huge Deal

Robert Mueller has empaneled a grand jury as a part of his investigation of the Trump campaign.

There have been a lot of people implying that an indictment is imminent, but it's not.

I would be surprised if to see any indictments before year's end.

What it does mean, however, is that Muller can now issue subpoenas to compel testimony and turn over evidence.

It's serious, but not, "Oh my God," serious.

Needless to say, for anyone contacted by Mueller's team, it's time to lawyer up.

Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster Joel Benenson - POLITICO

My first though upon hearing that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired former Clinton pollster and political advisor Joel Benenson, oh my God, this dirt-bag is going to run for President.

My second thought was that I didn't have to worry, because if he is going to be relying on the incompetents who managed to lose an election to an inverted traffic cone, then he has a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning anything:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant, according to a person familiar with the hire.

Benenson’s company, Benenson Strategy Group, will be conducting research for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropy. The organization — whose mission statement, according to its website, is “advancing human potential and promoting equality” — is endowed with the couple’s Facebook fortune.

Zuckerberg and Chan have vowed to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth an estimated $45 billion, to charity. Bringing on Benenson is the latest sign that they’re pushing their philanthropic work more heavily into the political and policy world.

In January, the couple hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. Plouffe had previously worked at Uber. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, also sits on the board.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is seriously considering a Presidential run, and he is availing himself of the most incompetent people available, so it's going to be a clown show.

There is nothing to worry about.

Then again, that's what they said about Donald Trump.

Consider the Source

It's nice to see Chuck Schumer finally threw Hillary Clinton and her Evil Minions^™ under the bus:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that Democrats, not Russia, are to blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss to President Trump.

“When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things — [James] Comey, Russia — you blame yourself,” Schumer said in an interview Saturday with The Washington Post.

“So what did we do wrong? People didn’t know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that.”Last year, much of the Democrats’ strategy hinged on criticism of Trump in hopes that the many controversies swirling around the GOP presidential candidate would damage down-ballot Republicans, a plan which largely failed.

In May, Clinton blamed former FBI Director Comey and Wikileaks for her election loss.

Hillary Clinton and her campaign apparatus never could ever explain why she was running for President, beyond that it was somehow her turn, which gave us ads where she wasn't mentioned, and Donald Trump as President.

Unfortunately, while Schumer has acknowledged that the election loss was the Democrats fault, the solution that he and Pelosi have put forward is a study in obtuseness, seeing it all as an issue with messaging, with no need to adjust policy:

“When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things — Comey, Russia — you blame yourself,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in an interview previewing the new plan. “So what did we do wrong? People didn’t know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) agreed, explaining in a separate interview that the new focus “is not a course correction, but it’s a presentation correction.”

But outside of Washington, some progressives worry that a focus on messaging has convinced Democrats that their policies were in no need of a rethink, while voters were crying out for more.

(emphasis mine)

Much like the Bourbon kings following Napoleon, "They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing," could be the motto of the Democratic Party establishment.

The idea that everything is just ducky and can be fixed through better advertising is a dangerous delusion.

It Ain't the Crime, It's the Coverup

While I am dubious of any major law breaking on the links between Russia and the Trump campaign, I have noted that the coverup may very well take down Trump and his Evil Minions^™.

It is, after all, how a "Third rate burglary" forced Nixon from office.

We now have evidence that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions lied to the Senate about the nature of his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Rather unsurprisingly, the US State Security Apparatus monitors the ambassador's communications, and they have what looks a lot like a smoking gun:

Russia’s ambassador to Washington told his superiors in Moscow that he discussed campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow, with Jeff Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, contrary to public assertions by the embattled attorney general, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s accounts of two conversations with Sessions — then a top foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump — were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, which monitor the communications of senior Russian officials in the United States and in Russia. Sessions initially failed to disclose his contacts with Kislyak and then said that the meetings were not about the Trump campaign.

One U.S. official said that Sessions — who testified that he had no recollection of an April encounter — has provided “misleading” statements that are “contradicted by other evidence.” A former official said that the intelligence indicates that Sessions and Kislyak had “substantive” discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for U.S.-Russia relations in a Trump administration.

Sessions has said repeatedly that he never discussed campaign-related issues with Russian officials and that it was only in his capacity as a U.S. senator that he met with Kislyak.

“I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” Sessions said in March when he announced that he would recuse himself from matters relating to the FBI probe of Russian interference in the election and any connections to the Trump campaign.

I am amused.

I Have Here in My Hand a List of 1,000 Names………*

Yep, in a speech the Code Conference, Hillary Clinton went the Joseph McCarthy route, and claimed that there were a thousand Russian agents sabotaging her campaign.

Let's be clear on this: There were any number reasons that Hillary Clinton lost, and if more than a few of them had been different, the outcome would have been different.

That being said, Clinton snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 2008 primaries and in the 2012 general election, and it's fairly clear that she was much, if not most, of the problem:

• She employed people on the basis of loyalty and not competence. (See Penn, Mark)
• Her campaigns, even more than most, were snake pits of people fighting for power because of a lack of clear lines of authority.
• Her response to problems was to stonewall, which made it worse.
• The concept of a simple honest apology is beyond her. (See her refusal to apologize for her Iraq war vote until it was way too late)
• There was absolutely no learning curve from 2008 to 2016, and she had been working on the 2^nd race for pretty much the whole 8 years.\

So, in her talk, she finds herself blameless

Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe she or her campaign made any significant mistakes in the 2016 election. But speaking at the Code Conference on Wednesday, she had a long list of others she blames for her defeat.

She points the finger at Russia, fake news, the sorry state of the Democratic Party, sexism, and the media that covered the email scandal “like Pearl Harbor,” among others.

………

“If you look at Facebook, the vast majority of the news items posted were fake,” Clinton told Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, editors of the Vox Media site Recode, which sponsors the conference. “They were connected to — as we now know — the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages. They were connected to the bots that are just out of control.”

It’s not actually clear that “we now know” any of this. There was a lot of fake news swirling around Facebook in the closing weeks of the campaign, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it was the “vast majority.” The claim that there were 1,000 Russian agents spreading fake news comes from a March statement by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), but he described these as unconfirmed reports, not proven facts.

(emphasis mine)

The similarities between what she said, and what Joe McCarthy said are striking.

BTW, at that same speech, she threw the DNC's data operations under the bus, despite her campaign ignoring advice to campaign in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan:

Irritated Democrats say Hillary Clinton is wrong to cast blame on the national party for her loss to Donald Trump.

Allies of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in particular were incensed by Clinton’s criticism of the party apparatus, saying she mischaracterized the committee’s work while needlessly stoking internal divisions.

………

Clinton surprised Democrats on Wednesday when she complained that she inherited "nothing" from a "bankrupt" DNC after becoming the nominee.

She faulted the committee, which some saw as favoring her during the tough primary fight against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as having “mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong” data operation. The remarks were also seen as a rebuke of President Obama, who chose the leaders of the DNC during his tenure.

………

Andrew Therriault, who served as the DNC's director of data science until last June, said Clinton’s claims were “f---ing bulls---” in a series of tweets that have since been deleted.

Therriault accused Clinton’s team of ignoring DNC data that warned of a close race in the three states that, by narrow margins, ultimately handed Trump his Electoral College victory: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“All that said, irony of her bashing DNC data: *our* models never had mi/wi/pa looking even close to safe. Her team thought they knew better,” Therriault wrote.

Paraphrasing what Tallyrand probably didn't originally say of the Bourbon kings Napoleon,^† "She has learned nothing, and she has forgotten nothing."

I think that she honestly believes that she can win if she runs again in 2020.

Maybe she should ask herself if she deserves to win if she runs again in 2020.

^*This is a reference to the following infamous Joseph McCarthy Quote:

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

^†It really is remarkable just how many quotes attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord that appear to have originated elsewhere.

Incompetent Preening Narcissist

A few days back, I noted news reports that said that Comey's rather unconventional behavior regarding Hillary's emails was driven by a document that was almost certainly a Russian forgery.

Clearly, this must have offended Comey and his Evil Minions^™ at the FBI, because now they are saying that, Comey knew that the documents were fake, and acted on them because he did not want people saying bad things about him:

Then-FBI Director James Comey knew that a critical piece of information relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email was fake -- created by Russian intelligence -- but he feared that if it became public it would undermine the probe and the Justice Department itself, according to multiple officials with knowledge of the process.

As a result, Comey acted unilaterally last summer to publicly declare the investigation over -- without consulting then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch -- while at the same time stating that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information. His press conference caused a firestorm of controversy and drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans.

Comey's actions based on what he knew was Russian disinformation offer a stark example of the way Russian interference impacted the decisions of the highest-level US officials during the 2016 campaign.

No, it is an example of how clueless self-importance had driven James Comey's behavior.

He wasn't concerned with the reputation of, "The probe and the Justice Department itself," he was concerned with HIS reputation.

In the long run, and by that I mean any period longer than the standard news cycle, "The probe and the Justice Department itself," would have been unaffected by any criticism coming from people quoting forged documents, because in short order, they would have been shown to have been forged.

What ……… A ………Tool.

Pass the Popcorn

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein just appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged coordination between Russia and the 2016 Trump Campaign.

There is basically no difference difference between a special counsel and special prosecutor. The former term came into use largely through the notoriety of the latter term during Watergate.

Both are appointed by, and can be removed by, the Attorney General or his designee, who also gives the special counsel/prosecutor his remit.

An independent counsel (IC) is a completely different kettle of fish: They are appointed by a 3 judge panel, cannot be removed by the Attorney General, and their remit is pretty much unlimited.

The law that enabled the appointment of an IC expired in 1999, following the excesses of Kenneth Starr in his pursuit of Bill Clinton's penis.  (Starr went on to become President of Baylor, where he covered up a rape culture among its athletes.)

This should be interesting.

Some Context for the Comey Firing

Click for full size graph pop up

The New York Times had a very interesting analysis of the effects of Comey's "October Surprise" on the elections. The takeaway is that if you look at when the poll was taken, rather than when it was released, there appears to be little if any effect:

On Friday, Oct. 28, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, sent a letter to Congress about new evidence in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Politicians, analysts and journalists are still debating whether the letter cost Mrs. Clinton the presidency. It’s certainly possible. But I am not at all sure, in part because of the final Upshot/Siena College poll in Florida.

I had learned the results of our survey that morning. It showed Donald J. Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton in the state by four percentage points, 46 percent to 42 percent.

………

But it’s now clear that Mrs. Clinton was weaker heading into Oct. 28 than was understood at the time. Several other polls were conducted over the same period that showed Mr. Trump gaining quickly on Mrs. Clinton in the days ahead of the Comey letter. And the timing of these polls — particularly the gap between when they were taken and when they were released — has probably helped to exaggerate the effect of Mr. Comey’s letter on the presidential race.

………

But the Upshot/Siena poll of Florida is one of several surveys that challenge this interpretation. That poll was completed the night before the Comey letter, but it was not released until Sunday, two days later — a longer lag than usual, since Sunday is seen as a better day for news media coverage than Saturday.

Some analysts have used poll aggregators or forecasting models to measure the effect of the Comey letter, and they have implicitly treated this Upshot poll, and others conducted before the news but released after, as evidence of a Comey effect. But it can’t be; for example, none of the people we polled for our survey knew about the letter.

………

In retrospect, there is virtually no evidence to support the view that Mrs. Clinton really had a six-point lead by Oct. 28, even if it was a very reasonable interpretation of the polls that had been released to that point. She didn’t have a six-point lead in any of the 16 (sometimes low-quality) national surveys that went into the field on or after Oct. 23 and were completed before the Comey letter, including her steadily shrinking lead in the ABC/Washington Post tracker.

A new report from the American Association of Public Opinion Research on 2016 polling reached a similar conclusion.

Of course, I don't expect this to change the narrative being being promulgated by the Democratic Party establishment and the Clinton camp.

As Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Make it Stop!!!

Hillary Clinton will be launching a political organization shortly.

Can you say 2020?

Once again I feel compelled to murder the genius of Dr. Seuss for political commentary.  (After the break)

"Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don't care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don't care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Hillary Rodham Clinton
I don't care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion's tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Don't you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Hillary C.!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don't care how you go.
Just get!
Hillary Rodham Clinton!
I don't care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Hillary WENT."

Headline of the Day

David Axelrod on Hillary Clinton: "It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump"

—CBS News

This is something that needs to be repeated.

Kill Me ……… Just Kill Me

Perhaps the only businessman sleazier than Donald Trump is Running for President.

Of course, I am referring to Mark Zuckerberg, and it's enough to make me vote for Chelsea Clinton:

It's happening pic.twitter.com/5vLhc4A5PC

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) May 1, 2017

Please Make It Stop

Just an ordinary non-candidate for office doing ordinary non-candidate for office things pic.twitter.com/IMGLyYsfdJ

— Will Rahn (@willrahn) April 27, 2017

It's enough to make me vote for Chelsea Clinton for President.