Friday 26th of April 2024

pulling the lever on candidates... a lever to a trap door would be good...

the red button...

Michael J. Morell was the acting director and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013.

He tells us:

 

During a 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I served presidents of both parties — three Republicans and three Democrats. I was at President George W. Bush’s side when we were attacked on Sept. 11; as deputy director of the agency, I was with President Obama when we killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.


I am neither a registered Democrat nor a registered Republican. In my 40 years of voting, I have pulled the lever for candidates of both parties. As a government official, I have always been silent about my preference for president.


No longer. On Nov. 8, I will vote for Hillary Clinton. Between now and then, I will do everything I can to ensure that she is elected as our 45th president.


Two strongly held beliefs have brought me to this decision. First, Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief. I trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president — keeping our nation safe. Second, Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.


I spent four years working with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, most often in the White House Situation Room. In these critically important meetings, I found her to be prepared, detail-oriented, thoughtful, inquisitive and willing to change her mind if presented with a compelling argument.

I also saw the secretary’s commitment to our nation’s security; her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding that diplomacy can be effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary; and, most important, her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all — whether to put young American women and men in harm’s way.


Mrs. Clinton was an early advocate of the raid that brought Bin Laden to justice, in opposition to some of her most important colleagues on the National Security Council. During the early debates about how we should respond to the Syrian civil war, she was a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach, one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold in Syria.


I never saw her bring politics into the Situation Room. In fact, I saw the opposite. When some wanted to delay the Bin Laden raid by one day because the White House Correspondents Dinner might be disrupted, she said, “Screw the White House Correspondents Dinner.”


In sharp contrast to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump has no experience on national security. Even more important, the character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief.


These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.


The dangers that flow from Mr. Trump’s character are not just risks that would emerge if he became president. It is already damaging our national security.


President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.


Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.


Mr. Trump has also undermined security with his call for barring Muslims from entering the country. This position, which so clearly contradicts the foundational values of our nation, plays into the hands of the jihadist narrative that our fight against terrorism is a war between religions.


In fact, many Muslim Americans play critical roles in protecting our country, including the man, whom I cannot identify, who ran the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center for nearly a decade and who I believe is most responsible for keeping America safe since the Sept. 11 attacks.


My training as an intelligence officer taught me to call it as I see it. This is what I did for the C.I.A. This is what I am doing now. Our nation will be much safer with Hillary Clinton as president.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

 

 

 

Unfortunately, Michael J Morell's rant isn't reassuring about either candidates. Saying that Putin has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, and has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin, is a bit like ignoring that the US has destroyed Libya, Iraq and is trying to destroy Syria FOR NO GOOD REASON THAN A WHIM — and forgetting that the US is helping Al Qaeda destroy Yemen, via the Sadist Saudis. And the Russian economy is doing fine, thank you — despite the US having imposed sanctions designed to sink the Russian economy, weakening the European economy at the same time. Morell is a double-speak spruiker.

There IS NO PROOF that Putin has killed journalists, and the "countries" that Putin has invaded were Russian Territories which were separated from Russia when the USSR was disbanded, namely Crimea and the Georgian Russian bit which demanded secession from Georgia, which Georgia was attacking. Beyond this, despite all the efforts of NATO to prod Russia, contrarily to promises made to Gorbachev by Reagan, Russia has not invaded anything, nor does it intend to. 

And having La Clinton say “Screw the White House Correspondents Dinner.” does not mean she is intelligent. It means that Bin laden location had been known for some time, but it was suitable POLITICALLY to go after him then, since he had ceased to be the boogey-man for the US public and had passed his used-by-date. Killing Osama was used as a rekindling of Obama's stars which were fading at the time... La Clinton destruction of Libya to suit the West's interest is one of the most despicable act of nastiness one can ever look at. La Clinton is a nasty piece of work. El Trumpo is a loony. None inspire confidence. If I was a betting man I would say that La Clinton offers 100 per cent odds of more wars and escalation of wars which will become UGLY, while with The Donald, the chances are 50/50. 

American exceptionalism, here we come. CRAP. Go away...

Morell, having been at the side of Bush when 9/11 happened, has A LOT OF EXPLANATION TO DO about the reactive delay in Dubya's blank stupid mind back then. 

a big little white lie from la clinton...

“Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” Clinton said in the interview.

Several fact checkers, including The Washington Post, have pointed out that Comey said only that her statements in a closed-door FBI interview were truthful. He also said he was not qualified to weigh in on her public statements, but several of his findings contradicted her public statements. In response to questions from lawmakers, Comey indicated that Clinton or another government official in her position “should have known that an unclassified system was no place" for a classified conversation.

Trump on Friday called Clinton a "dangerous liar” during a campaign event in Des Moines, pointing to Clinton's earlier characterization of Comey's comments.

"He came out and said, ‘She lied — lied, lied, lied," he said. "And then on Sunday she said, 'He never said that.'"

read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/05/clinton-acknowledges-misspeaking-about-fbi-directors-testimony/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_clintonfbi-325pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

a worry...

 

 

One presidential candidate says scientists who work on climate change are "practically calling it a hoax" and wants to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. The other calls climate change "an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time." And yet about four out of 10 millennials in battleground states think there is no difference between those candidates' views on the issue.

 

Tom Steyer's NextGen Climate group released polling at the Democratic National Convention last week focused on millennials in 11 battleground states, conducted by Global Strategy Group in June and early July.

According to the poll, 21 percent of millennials are Bernie Sanders supporters who are so disillusioned with Clinton that they wouldn't plan to vote for her in a general election if there are third-party candidates, as well.

Young voters are one of the more unpredictable factors in the 2016 election, because they're more likely than other age groups to support Sanders and less likely to vote in general. Democrats run the risk of losing Sanders holdouts to a third-party candidate. Nearly seven out of 10 Sanders supporters believe there's no daylight between Trump and Clinton on the issues they care about.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/millennials-clinton-trump-climate-energy

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The thing to worry about is a) one of the candidates, Trump or Hillary, is lying — and b) it's hard to know which one...

 

trump loves babies... the liberal media doesn't love trump...

 

 

“The press came out with headlines: ‘Trump throws baby out of arena.’ So dishonest. I mean these are dishonest people. I could give you 20 stories like that. Everyone’s having fun, we’re smiling, I’m waving. Everyone’s having fun, but they say Trump throws baby [out]. You know how terrible that is? It’s such a lie. And they know it’s a lie.”
—Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Green Bay, Wis., Aug. 5, 2016

Donald Trump is complaining that the media has spun a fable that he kicked a baby out of his rally in Ashburn, Va.

The New York Post, for instance, headlined its article: “Trump loves crying baby, then kicks the tot out of his rally.”

The New York Daily News, in its article on the incident, began: “What a baby. Donald Trump booted a fussy baby from a rally Tuesday because the tot was wailing over the businessman’s speech.”

The Guardian newspaper even used the incident to declare that this is a core problem with Trump — that he has “a total lack of empathy.”

...

 

In reality, this is a situation when the video can lie — and Trump’s odd sense of humor can backfire. Let’s roll the tape.

The Facts

There are two parts to the video. During his speech a baby starts to cry, and Trump says: “Don’t worry about that baby, I love babies. … I hear that baby crying. I like it. What a baby. What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around like — don’t worry about it, you know. It’s young and beautiful and healthy, and that’s what we want.”

But then about a minute later he says: “Actually, I was only kidding. You can get the baby out of here. … I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking.”

So, just from watching the video, Trump sounds rather cruel. But what’s missing is what the mother was doing. As it happens, Daniel Dale, a reporter from the Toronto Star, was sitting right behind her and wrote that the entire incident was mischaracterized.

The baby was one row in front of me, three or four rows from the stage, at Trump’s event at a high school in Ashburn, Va. When it began to cry, Trump said, “Don’t worry about that baby, I love babies. I love babies. I hear that baby crying, I like it. I like it. What a baby, what a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around — don’t worry about it.”

People applauded. One minute later, though, the baby began to cry again. This time, the mother quickly decided to take the baby out of the room. Trump, looking in our direction, appeared to notice that she was on her way to the exit.

And then he said, “Actually, I was only kidding. You can get the baby out of here. That’s all right. Don’t worry. I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking?” He cupped his hand over his eyes to watch her leave. “That’s okay, people don’t understand. That’s okay.”

A joke? Possibly. An insensitive, heartless, ordinary-person-embarrassing remark? Possibly. Trump’s tone is eternally hard to read. But, to my eyes, it certainly was not an ejection — it was an unusually barbed endorsement of the mother’s own decision to depart.

One other salient fact is missing from all the pieces on babygate. Mom and baby, very much not kicked out, came back to their seat a bit later.

The baby was sucking a pacifier, silent.

Dale had this perspective because he was not sitting in the news media corral. “I almost never request press credentials from the Trump campaign anymore — partly because I like being in the crowd rather than the pen,” he told The Fact Checker. “I was lucky, this time, that the usher people seated me very close to the stage, and one row behind the baby. There was one empty seat up there.”

Virtually no one in the media noticed Dale’s version of events. He said he did not seek to interview the mother himself, as he did not realize until later how much attention had been paid to this incident.

 

read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/06/trumps-right-he-didnt-kick-a-baby-out-of-a-campaign-rally/