https://pjmedia.com/election/2016/09/13/granny-vapors-to-return-to-campaign-trail-on-thursday/
Quick recovery from dehydrapneumoallergiitis. With a concomitant episode of chronic liaritis….rsk
The hits from retired General Colin Powell’s email account just keep coming.
The newly leaked trove of emails were published on DC Leaks, an anonymously run “anti-secrecy” site that is suspected of being linked to Russia. The leak contains more than two years of conversations between Powell and his former White House and State Department colleagues.
The emails show the Washington insider blasting Donald Trump for being a “national disgrace,” and haranguing Hillary Clinton for trying to pin the blame for her private, insecure email server on him. They also reveal that Washington insiders were concerned about Clinton’s health even before she declared her candidacy for president.
According to CBS News, the document batch includes emails from June of 2014 to August of 2016, and provide a revealing glimpse into the former secretary’s thoughts on the 2016 election.
In an exchange with Democratic donor Jeffrey Leeds in 2014, Powell’s striking distaste for the Clintons is revealed:
I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect. A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not [sic] transformational, with a husband still d**king bimbos at home.
In a March 14, 2015 email to Leeds, Powell noted her declining health:
On HD tv she doesn’t look good. She is working herself to death.
Leeds, a 2008 Clinton donor, replied by sharing an observation about Clinton’s health from Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse:
Sheldon Whitehouse, who is a huge Clinton supporter, said they were both giving speeches at the same event a few months back and she could barely climb the podium steps.
In another email to Leeds on Aug. 18, 2015, Powell used salty language to describe his use of private emails for State Department business. He complained that Hillary “screws up with hubris” everything she touches:
Agree, press has started asking Peggy and me about our use. We have answered 3 IG questionaire [sic] and are clean. A newsie asked today to interview me on my use. Told them to read my book, Chapter on “Brainware.” They are going to d**k up the legitimate and necessary use of emails with friggin record rules.
I saw email more like a telephone than a cable machine. As long as the stuff is unclassified. I had some secure State.gov machine. Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris. I told you about the gig I lost at a University because she so overcharged them they came under heat and couldn’t any fees for awhile. I should send her a bill.
In another email exchange, Leeds provided confirmation that the long-rumored bad blood between the Clintons and President Obama is indeed a fact:
Hillary HATES that the President…kicked her ass in 2008.
Leeds added that the Clintons refer to Obama derisively as “that man” behind his back.
Donald Trump has overtaken Hillary Clinton in Nevada and Ohio, two key swing states, in a pair of polls released on Wednesday.
In Ohio, which has voted for the winning presidential candidate in the last 10 elections, Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, leads Mrs. Clinton by 5 points among likely voters, 44% to 39%, in a Bloomberg Politics poll. Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein trail with 10% and 3%, respectively.
In Nevada, Mr. Trump leads Mrs. Clinton by 2 points among likely voters, 44% to 42%. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson has 8% and 3% chose “None of these candidates,” a ballot option in that state, according to a new poll by Monmouth University. In July, Monmouth reported a 4-point lead for Mrs. Clinton.
The polls were conducted as Mrs. Clinton dealt with criticism over her denigration on Friday of “half” of Mr. Trump’s supporters as falling into a “basket of deplorables.” On Sunday, she took ill at a Sept. 11 memorial ceremony, and her campaign subsequently revealed she had been diagnosed with pneumonia.
Mrs. Clinton had been leading in Ohio in the recent RealClearPolitics average of polls.
The Bloomberg Politics poll of 802 likely Ohio voters was conducted Sept. 9 – 12 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The Monmouth University poll of 406 likely Nevada voters was conducted Sept. 11- 13, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.89 points.
Mr. Kaufman, a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, is the author of “Dangerous Doctrine: How Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America” (University Press of Kentucky, 2016).
“A vote for Hillary Clinton is therefore a vote for Mr. Obama’s dangerous doctrine, which fears American power more than it fears our enemies. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton contributed enormously to lowering the barriers to aggression everywhere—with much worse to come unless we reverse course.The internationalist conservatives who oppose Mr. Trump on foreign-policy grounds have a point. But they shouldn’t fool themselves that they will get something better with Mrs. Clinton.Yet the internationalist conservatives who endorse Hillary Clinton delude themselves if they think things would be better with a President Clinton. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton served loyally as President Obama’s first mate on his foreign-policy Titanic. And unlike Mr. Trump, Mrs. Clinton has an actual record of mistakes and bad judgment in foreign policy.”
Consider:
Hillary Clinton named the ill-fated reset with Mr. Putin, subverting Ukraine’s independence and imperiling America’s Eastern European NATO allies fearful of becoming Mr. Putin’s next target. She also blocked efforts to place the murderous Boko Haram on the State Department’s list of international sponsors of terrorism, fostering the Obama administration’s fictitious narrative that killing Osama bin Laden had ended the war on terror.
Mrs. Clinton—emblematic of the administration’s unwillingness to acknowledge radical Islam as a danger—blamed the attack on the Libyan Embassy on a Coptic Christian video denigrating Islam rather than on the obvious culprits and their Islamist motivations timed for the anniversary of 9/11. She fatuously called Syria’s Bashar Assad a reformer with whom we could do business, and she touted the absurd notion that American “smart power” could substitute for American resolve, moral clarity and military might.
Mrs. Clinton remained silent, too, on President Obama’s systematic, unwise and dishonorable obsession with putting distance between the U.S. and a democratic Israel while conciliating the worst and most anti-American regimes in international politics. Candidate Clinton still defends an indefensible Iran deal she advocated as secretary of state that puts Iran on the autobahn to crossing the nuclear threshold while tranquilizing Americans to the gathering danger.
Her choice of running mate, Tim Kaine, has the dubious distinction of being in the vanguard of the apologists for an untenable agreement subsidizing a virulently aggressive anti-American Iran while likely triggering a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.
Even after the June terrorist attack in Orlando, Mrs. Clinton could barely utter the words Islamic radicalism, intimating that the weapons rather than the motivations of those wielding them deserved primary blame. That’s the equivalent of blaming Pearl Harbor on military aviation rather than the Imperial Japanese regime.
As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for the debacle in Libya. She was the administration’s leading proponent for American intervention under the auspices of the United Nations, NATO and the Arab League, bypassing the Congress. Libya has become a breeding ground of Islamist terrorism because America’s mission was ill-defined and its withdrawal premature. CONTINUE AT SITE
Donald Trump is no one’s idea of a traditional Republican, but his speech Tuesday showed the rank-and-file a better way to help workers at the bottom. Democrats pound the need to raise the minimum wage, which is a tricky political issue for the GOP. “Fight for $15” fits well on a protest sign, and it’s easy to paint opponents of a higher minimum wage as heartless, even though their economic reasoning is sound.
Speaking in a Philadelphia suburb, Mr. Trump proposed a new benefit: allowing families to deduct child-care expenses on their income taxes. For a single-parent household with no income-tax liability—the families that Democrats target with their minimum-wage message—this wouldn’t do much good. So Mr. Trump offered an alternative: an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to offset child-care expenses.
The EITC, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975, has for decades been championed by Republican and Democratic presidents alike. The word “credit” is a misnomer; the policy is better described as a wage supplement for low-income employees, topping up their income on a sliding scale.
To be eligible for the EITC a person must hold a job and earn income. The size of the annual payment depends not on tax liability, but on how much the employee earns and how many children he or she has. Payments phase out gradually as income rises, to avoid the counterproductive “cliff” effect that characterizes other social-welfare programs.
Economists have found much to like about the policy: A 2008 study, supported in part by my organization and published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, found that when the credit has been expanded in the past, employment of single mothers rose. So did their wages. Mr. Trump would build on this success by further expanding the credit to help cover eligible child-care expenses. The maximum supplement under his plan would be one-half the amount of the employee’s payroll taxes (i.e. FICA and Medicare). For married couples, the maximum would be calculated from the lower-earning spouse. CONTINUE AT SITE
Hillary Clinton’s comment that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”—a heck of a lot of phobia for anyone to lug around all day—puts back in play what will be seen as one of the 2016 campaign’s defining forces: the revolt of the politically incorrect.
They may not live at the level of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” but it was only a matter of time before les déplorables—our own writhing mass of unheard Americans—rebelled against the intellectual elites’ ancien régime of political correctness.
It remains to be seen what effect Hillary’s five phobias will have on the race, which tightened even before these remarks and Pneumonia-gate. The two events produced one of Mrs. Clinton’s worst weeks in opposite ways.
As with the irrepressible email server, Mrs. Clinton’s handling of her infirmity—“I feel great,” the pneumonia-infected candidate said while hugging a little girl—deepened the hole of distrust she lives in. At the same time, her dismissal, at Barbra Streisand’s LGBT fundraiser, of uncounted millions of Americans as deplorables had the ring of genuine belief.
Perhaps sensing that public knowledge of what she really thinks could be a political liability, Mrs. Clinton went on to describe “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them . . . and they’re just desperate for change.”
She is of course describing the people in Charles Murray’s recent and compelling book on cultural disintegration among the working class, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” This is indeed the bedrock of the broader Trump base.
One of the most amusing spectacles of this election season has been the whipsawing of the loyalists. Repeatedly, spinners for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been sent out to hammer this or that talking point, only to be left holding the bag when the candidate goes another way.
So far, Trump has been narrowly ahead in this important competition. But after Sunday, Clinton may have taken the lead.
For weeks, the official position of the chattering classes was that any inquiry into Clinton’s health was “sexist.”
As Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on September 2, “I have seen her personally. You’ve seen her personally, Andrea. She is in shape. She is strong. She just has a ton of energy. And I find this actually quite sexist when these guys are saying this. I think that that is not an issue at all and the American voters know that.”
Glamour magazine ran an item headlined, “Yes, It’s Sexist to Speculate about Hillary Clinton’s Health.”
Last week, Clinton herself was asked if discussion of her health was sexist. She replied with a long, ironic “hmmmmmm” that typified her gift for political subtlety and nuance.
The same day, the headline for Chris Cillizza’s Washington Post column captured the prevailing attitude: “Can We Just Stop Talking about Hillary Clinton’s Health Now?”
Five days later, after Clinton’s near-collapse at Ground Zero, another Cillizza column carried this headline: “Hillary Clinton’s Health Just Became a Real Issue in the Presidential Campaign.”
According to the Clinton campaign, Hillary is currently ill with pneumonia. That much we finally learned on Sunday, hours after she suddenly left the 9/11 memorial ceremony she was attending at Ground Zero. She had to be escorted away to her daughter Chelsea’s Manhattan apartment to recover from what her campaign spokesperson first described as an “overheated” condition. At the time of the incident, the temperature outside was approximately 80 degrees, with relatively low humidity.
The press traveling with Hillary was first kept in the dark. Had not a video captured her nearly stumbling and being held up to prevent her from falling as she was helped into a van, Hillary’s campaign might not have admitted that anything was wrong at all. Only towards the end of the day did her doctor disclose that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia last Friday.
Health is normally a private matter. If Bill or Chelsea Clinton had taken ill, for example, it would be none of our business what was wrong. But Hillary Clinton is running to become the next president and commander-in-chief of the United States. Physical and mental fitness for performance of the duties of the highest and most demanding job in the land is a legitimate public concern. When one runs for the presidency of the United States, the public has a right to know, before they vote, whether the candidates asking for their votes are likely to be capable of performing under intense stress for at least the next four years.
Doubts about Hillary Clinton’s health were already making the rounds on the Internet and cable TV before this latest episode. Such doubts have been fueled by her prolonged coughing fits, stumbles, fainting spells, a concussion and self-proclaimed memory lapses regarding briefings on the handling of classified information while she was Secretary of State. The Clinton campaign and her supporters have tried to label those who have raised legitimate questions regarding Hillary’s health as conspiracists. Clinton aides had gone so far as to belittle a reporter for saying that Hillary looked “low energy” and sounded “absolutely exhausted” at her press conference last Friday and even issued a veiled threat that the reporter’s job was in jeopardy. The reporter had the temerity to tweet: “I half expect her to slump over and collapse any second now.” Nick Merrill, Clinton’s traveling press secretary, tweeted the reporter the message: “delete your account.”
Bill Clinton said during a CBS interview with Charlies Rose on Monday that Hillary Clinton “frequently” faints because of dehydration, but quickly corrected himself to use more Clintonian phrasing: “rarely, but on more than one occasion over the last many, many years.”
Whether the former president made a very revealing Freudian slip or a just a clumsy verbal gaffe is a question those who watched the broadcast last night wouldn’t know to ask because CBS edited out the word “frequently.” In a longer version of the interview that was broadcast on CBS This Morning Tuesday, the word “frequently” was not removed.
Via the Washington Free Beacon:
Rose got straight to the point with the former president during the interview, asking how Hillary was doing after she fainted Sunday at a 9/11 memorial event and confessed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. Clinton said that his wife was doing fine but added that she frequently faints because of dehydration.
“When you look at the collapse, that video that was taken, you wonder if it’s not more serious than dehydration,” Rose said to Clinton.
“No, no. She’s been—well, if it is, it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors. ‘Cause frequently—not frequently, that’s not—rarely, but on more than on occasion over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing has happened to her when she just got severely dehydrated,” Clinton said.
In the edited version of the interview that initially aired, Clinton is only heard saying: “Well, if it is, it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors. Rarely, but on more than one occasion over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing has happened to her when she just got severely dehydrated.”
Watch the video on the next page. CONTINUE AT SITE
The Clinton entourage is known for their faulty memories under oath, but Bryan Pagliano is setting a new standard. The former Clinton aide chose Tuesday to ignore a congressional subpoena.
The House Oversight Committee held a hearing to dig into some of the issues surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Mr. Pagliano, who worked as an IT specialist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign and set up the private server in her New York residence in 2009, was issued a subpoena compelling attendance.
Mr. Pagliano’s lawyers replied in a letter to the committee that their client couldn’t be bothered. They said that since he’d previously appeared before a different House committee and asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, any effort to make him appear again “furthers no legislative purpose and is a transparent effort to publicly harass and humiliate our client for unvarnished political purposes.”
Two other witnesses who helped maintain Mrs. Clinton’s server— Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton of Platte River Networks—did show up. But then they took the Fifth as well.
Mr. Pagliano might think his presence serves no purpose, but that’s not his call. Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz is conducting a legitimate inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s failure to preserve federal records while Secretary of State. He’s entitled to put questions to those involved with the server that allowed her to take government work off-grid. Mr. Chaffetz says he is considering what action he will take against the subpoena-dodger, but he says that “if anybody is under any illusion that I’m going to let go of this and just let it sail off into the sunset, they are very ill-advised.”
