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Saturday, June 3, 2017
The following is for the birds…
Fwd: Don't just sit in the house; go outside and enjoy nature!
WOW ! I THINK SHE'S TEED OFF???
You have to love this lady
Alan Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming, calls senior citizens 'the Greediest Generation' as he compared Social Security to a milk cow with 310 million teats.
Here's a response in a letter from PATTY MYERS in Montana ... I think she is a little ticked off but she also tells it like it is!
"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight !!!!
1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole (tit) for FIFTY YEARS.
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS
(since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).
3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and "your ilk" pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age, 67. NOW, you and your "shill commission" are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN!
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now "you morons" propose to change the rules of the game. Why?Because "you idiots" mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal our money from Medicare to pay the bills.
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again.
Why? Because you "incompetent bastards" spent our money soprofligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt. To add insult to injury, you label us"greedy" for calling "bullbleep" to your incompetence.
Well, Captain Bullbleep, I have a few questions for YOU:
1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?
It is you, Captain Bullshit, and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the "greedy"ones. It is you and your fellow nutcase thieves who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers.
And for what? Votes and your job and retirement security at our expense, you lunk-headed leech.
That's right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic political careers.
You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.
And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bleep.
NO, I did not stutter!
P.S. And stop calling Social Security benefits "entitlements." WHAT AN INSULT!! I have been paying into the SS system for 52 years! "It's my money" - give it back to me the way the system was originally designed and stop patting yourself on the back like you are being generous by doling out these monthly checks!
EVERYONE!!!
If you like the way things are in America delete this.
If you agree with what Patty Myers says, please PASS IT ON!!!!
You have to love this lady
Alan Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming, calls senior citizens 'the Greediest Generation' as he compared Social Security to a milk cow with 310 million teats.
Here's a response in a letter from PATTY MYERS in Montana ... I think she is a little ticked off but she also tells it like it is!
"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight !!!!
1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole (tit) for FIFTY YEARS.
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS
(since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).
3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and "your ilk" pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age, 67. NOW, you and your "shill commission" are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN!
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now "you morons" propose to change the rules of the game. Why?Because "you idiots" mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal our money from Medicare to pay the bills.
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again.
Why? Because you "incompetent bastards" spent our money soprofligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt. To add insult to injury, you label us"greedy" for calling "bullbleep" to your incompetence.
Well, Captain Bullbleep, I have a few questions for YOU:
1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?
It is you, Captain Bullshit, and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the "greedy"ones. It is you and your fellow nutcase thieves who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers.
And for what? Votes and your job and retirement security at our expense, you lunk-headed leech.
That's right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic political careers.
You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.
And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bleep.
NO, I did not stutter!
P.S. And stop calling Social Security benefits "entitlements." WHAT AN INSULT!! I have been paying into the SS system for 52 years! "It's my money" - give it back to me the way the system was originally designed and stop patting yourself on the back like you are being generous by doling out these monthly checks!
EVERYONE!!!
If you like the way things are in America delete this.
If you agree with what Patty Myers says, please PASS IT ON!!!!
Trump: U.S. Will Withdraw from Paris Climate Accord
13
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced from the White House Rose Garden on Thursday afternoon that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord.
The President had informed reporters on Wednesday that an announcement was coming soon regarding the accord. In response to questions as to whether he was hearing from CEOs attempting to persuade him, Trump replied, “I’m hearing from a lot of people, both ways. Both ways.” Later that night he confirmed in a tweet that he would hold an event at 3:00 p.m. Thursday to make the announcement.
Pres. Trump: US Will Withdraw From Climate Pact
Vice President Pence opened the program stating several campaign promises that President Trump made and has kept thus far. “Thanks to president Trump, America is back,” said Pence. Our President is putting American jobs first, he added, “Putting the forgotten men and women of America first.”
After taking the podium and remarking on the recent terror attack in Manilla, Trump noted America’s “tremendous economic progress since election day.” He added that accomplishments from his first trip overseas include deals to give Americans a level playing field against other nations. Trump also talked about contributions in the fight against terror made during the trip and work toward peace in the Middle East.
Trump’s most prevalent message was in line with his “America First” directive — policies that look out for the American economy, American jobs, and American workers.
The President spoke of following through on his commitments to the American people.
“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord,” Trump declared.
He then added that the Administration will however “begin negotiations to re enter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.”
“We will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine,” he added. Trump cited putting the “well being” of Americans first as a motivating factor behind his decision. He said, “This includes ending the implementation of the nationally determined contribution and, very importantly, the Green Climate Fund, which is costing the United States a vast fortune.”
President Trump said that the U.S. will immediately “cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.”
Compliance with the accord could have cost the U.S. “as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025 according to the National Economic Research Associates,” said Trump. “This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs — not what we need…”
Trump further cited the National Economic Research Associates study:
…by 2040, compliance with the commitments put into place by the previous administration would cut production for the following sectors: paper down 12 percent; cement down 23 percent; iron and steel down 38 percent; coal — and I happen to love the coal miners — down 86 percent; natural gas down 31 percent. The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that.
He said the deal fails to live up to America’s environmental ideals as well.
Leaving the Paris Climate agreement was a key part of Trump’s message as he campaigned for the presidency last year.
Former President Barack Obama unofficially entered the United States into the accord, which was adopted in December 2015 as the United Nations Climate Change Conference came to a close.
During Trump’s recent attendance at the G7 summit in Italy, some of the other G7 leaders pressured Trump to ratify the Paris Climate Accord; however, he declined to do so. Last Friday White House economic advisor Gary Cohn characterized the President’s position on climate change as “evolving,” though it was not clear in what way.
In early March AFP reported that the Trump team was divided over whether the U.S. should remain in or exit the climate agreement.
Last week reports began surfacing that Trump would remove the U.S. from the Paris Accord. Meanwhile Trump announced that he would make a final decision on the matter in the coming week.
Spotted in the audience at Trump’s Paris Climate announcement were Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, U.S. National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster, White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Also spotted was President and Founder of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Nordquist.
Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana
Duterte Fires Back at Chelsea Clinton: ‘Did You Slam Your Father’ over Lewinsky Affair?
5
by JOHN HAYWARD
The mainstream media loves to milk easy coverage from Twitter comments, and some outlets seem to have a sweet tooth for treating everything Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea says as major news, so let us join the craze by examining Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s exasperated response to Chelsea Clinton tweeting criticism of his rape comments.
The “joke” was delivered in a speech Duterte gave on Friday concerning the imposition of martial law to quell an uprising by Islamic State militants on the island of Mindanao. He was addressing a brigade of soldiers scheduled for deployment to the battle zone around Marawi City.
“For this martial law, and the consequences of martial law, and the ramifications of martial law, I and I alone would be responsible. Just work, I’ll take care of it. I will be the one to imprison you. If you have committed rape three times, I’ll take responsibility for it. If you marry four, son of a bitch, you’ll get beaten up,” Duterte said to the troops.
Chelsea Clinton’s critical tweet was terse:
Not funny. Ever. https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/868153983482855426 …
In a subsequent message, she called the Philippine president a “murderous thug with no regard for human rights.”
Duterte’s response was decidedly less terse.
Duterte’s response was decidedly less terse.
“In an expletive-laden speech at a navy event on Wednesday, Duterte also denounced Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton after she criticized him on Twitter. He asked Chelsea Clinton if she also criticized her father when he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky in the White House when he was president of the United States,” Fox News reports, delicately paraphrasing Duterte’s remarks.
These whores, they hear “rape.” Like, like Chelsea, she slammed me. I was not joking, I was being sarcastic. Listen to the speech. I do not laugh at my own jokes. I will tell her, when your father, the president of the United States, was f***ing Lewinsky and the girls in the White House, how did you feel? Did you slam your father?
Looking past the profanity, a common feature of Duterte speeches, his point that he was “not joking” but “being sarcastic” might seem like a very fine distinction.
Some of the responses to Clinton’s tweet from people familiar with Filipino culture and Tagalog, which he was speaking when he made the rape comment, argued that “jokes” trivialize an issue, while “sarcasm” means saying something outrageous to convey the opposite point. In other words, apologists claim Duterte was telling his soldiers not to do anything improper during the Marawi operation and reminding them he would be held responsible for their actions.
Duterte – who evidently loves sarcasm and has very little interest in ingratiating himself to foreign critics, or foreign allies for that matter – took a moment to make this point during his response to Clinton.
He said rape was “a crime actually committed by soldiers, mostly Americans in Okinawa, but we never heard of a Filipino [rapist soldier].”
“I am just warning them that anything they do, I have to answer for it,” he said of his remarks to his troops. “I take full responsibility for your foolishness. I speak sarcastically.”
“You Americans, like Chelsea, be careful because you live in a glass house. I repeat, when President Clinton was f***ing Lewinsky, what was your statement or your reaction?” he reiterated, without making it clear whether the question was intended as sarcasm.
OJ Simpson May Be Given Parole This Summer
O.J. Simpson could be freed from prison on parole this summer as Nevada’s parole board hears his case along with 672 other inmates with hearings that month, officials said Monday.
David Smith, spokesman for the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners, said the exact hearing date for Simpson will be determined next month.
Simpson, who turned 70 in July, was convicted for organizing an armed robbery at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas in 2007. The target was souvenir collectors who had Simpson-related memorabilia the former NFL star wanted back. Although Simpson was tried in 1995 for the murder of his wife and Ronald Goldman, he was acquitted of those charges.
Many think Simpson will be freed this summer.
“I’ve known people that have served time with him up there and he has a good reputation for getting along and doing what’s right,” said Gregory Knapp, a former prosecutor in Las Vegas who is now a criminal defense attorney.
“I can’t imagine any possibility of him being denied parole.”
Simpson fits the profile of a state prison inmate who receives parole at the first opportunity, said Nevada defense attorney Dan Hill.
“Simpson’s age, the fact that he was given parole on the first sentencing batch, weigh in his favor,” Hill said. “So does the fact that he was by all accounts a model prisoner, as does any acceptance of responsibility for his actions.”
Members of the parole board “work with the old-fashioned principal of wanting to hear the inmate is remorseful for their crime,” said Gabe Grasso, a Nevada defense attorney who was on the team that represented Simpson when he was convicted.
Bruce Fromong, the memorabilia dealer who was robbed, has indicated he does not oppose parole for Simpson.
“I told the district attorney at the time (of his conviction) that I only thought that O.J. Simpson deserved one to three years in state prison,” Fromong said.
“O.J.’s done his time, he’s been a model inmate,” he said.
If Simpson is not paroled, his sentence would end in 2020.
David Smith, spokesman for the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners, said the exact hearing date for Simpson will be determined next month.
Simpson, who turned 70 in July, was convicted for organizing an armed robbery at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas in 2007. The target was souvenir collectors who had Simpson-related memorabilia the former NFL star wanted back. Although Simpson was tried in 1995 for the murder of his wife and Ronald Goldman, he was acquitted of those charges.
Many think Simpson will be freed this summer.
“I’ve known people that have served time with him up there and he has a good reputation for getting along and doing what’s right,” said Gregory Knapp, a former prosecutor in Las Vegas who is now a criminal defense attorney.
“I can’t imagine any possibility of him being denied parole.”
Simpson fits the profile of a state prison inmate who receives parole at the first opportunity, said Nevada defense attorney Dan Hill.
“Simpson’s age, the fact that he was given parole on the first sentencing batch, weigh in his favor,” Hill said. “So does the fact that he was by all accounts a model prisoner, as does any acceptance of responsibility for his actions.”
Members of the parole board “work with the old-fashioned principal of wanting to hear the inmate is remorseful for their crime,” said Gabe Grasso, a Nevada defense attorney who was on the team that represented Simpson when he was convicted.
Bruce Fromong, the memorabilia dealer who was robbed, has indicated he does not oppose parole for Simpson.
“I told the district attorney at the time (of his conviction) that I only thought that O.J. Simpson deserved one to three years in state prison,” Fromong said.
“O.J.’s done his time, he’s been a model inmate,” he said.
If Simpson is not paroled, his sentence would end in 2020.
Trump takes travel ban appeal to Supreme Court
BY ANDREW MALCOLM
This should be good.
The Trump Administration late Thursday appealed the ban of its travel ban to the Supreme Court. The outlook there to overturn the Fourth Circuit ruling and hear oral arguments is uncertain. But it’s certain to be closely-watched as an early case involving Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch and the newly-reconstituted nine-justice bench.
This is actually the administration’s second controversial attempt to impose a temporary travel ban on citizens from seven majority Muslim countries — Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and Iraq. The first was struck down by the Ninth Circuit.
A revised executive order, excluding Iraq, substituted national security reasons for religious ones. But it was struck down, 10-3, last week by Fourth Circuit judges. Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote the president’s national security claims were mere pretext for unlawful animosity toward Muslims and discarded Trump’s argument as an effort to deliver on campaign promises to bar Muslims from entering the United States.
Gregory went back to Trump statements made in the 2016 campaign and while signing the executive order, claiming courts must look beyond an order’s seemingly neutral language. Gregory charged Trump’s order “speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.”
In dissent, Judge Paul Niemeyer predicted, “The Supreme Court surely will shudder at the majority’s adoption of this new rule that has no limits or bounds, one that transforms the majority’s criticisms of a candidate’s various campaign statements into a constitutional violation.”
Administration attorneys maintain the president has broad constitutional authority to control immigration and national security, adding those circuit judges should consider only the executive order’s language, not second-guess presidential motivations.
The Supreme Court, Justice Department lawyers wrote, “has never invalidated religion-neutral government action based on speculation about officials’ subjective motivations drawn from campaign-trail statements by a political candidate.”
Five of the newly-restored nine justice Supreme Court roster must agree to hear the case, which normally would take months of preparation for oral argument. The Court is scheduled to recess at the end of June.
One other wrinkle: These past 120-plus days of legal wrangling actually concern a travel ban that is scheduled to last only 90 days if ever implemented, allowing the government time to devise stricter vetting procedures for travelers.
The Trump Administration late Thursday appealed the ban of its travel ban to the Supreme Court. The outlook there to overturn the Fourth Circuit ruling and hear oral arguments is uncertain. But it’s certain to be closely-watched as an early case involving Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch and the newly-reconstituted nine-justice bench.
This is actually the administration’s second controversial attempt to impose a temporary travel ban on citizens from seven majority Muslim countries — Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and Iraq. The first was struck down by the Ninth Circuit.
A revised executive order, excluding Iraq, substituted national security reasons for religious ones. But it was struck down, 10-3, last week by Fourth Circuit judges. Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote the president’s national security claims were mere pretext for unlawful animosity toward Muslims and discarded Trump’s argument as an effort to deliver on campaign promises to bar Muslims from entering the United States.
Gregory went back to Trump statements made in the 2016 campaign and while signing the executive order, claiming courts must look beyond an order’s seemingly neutral language. Gregory charged Trump’s order “speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.”
In dissent, Judge Paul Niemeyer predicted, “The Supreme Court surely will shudder at the majority’s adoption of this new rule that has no limits or bounds, one that transforms the majority’s criticisms of a candidate’s various campaign statements into a constitutional violation.”
Administration attorneys maintain the president has broad constitutional authority to control immigration and national security, adding those circuit judges should consider only the executive order’s language, not second-guess presidential motivations.
The Supreme Court, Justice Department lawyers wrote, “has never invalidated religion-neutral government action based on speculation about officials’ subjective motivations drawn from campaign-trail statements by a political candidate.”
Five of the newly-restored nine justice Supreme Court roster must agree to hear the case, which normally would take months of preparation for oral argument. The Court is scheduled to recess at the end of June.
One other wrinkle: These past 120-plus days of legal wrangling actually concern a travel ban that is scheduled to last only 90 days if ever implemented, allowing the government time to devise stricter vetting procedures for travelers.
Wilbur Ross: Europeans Angry About Losing ‘Free Ride’ from Climate Accord That Was ‘Terrible Deal’ for America
1
by JOHN HAYWARD
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross was a special guest on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily, where he defended President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords and discussed its economic ramifications.
“I think the economic case is quite clear,” said Secretary Ross. “This was a terrible business deal that was engineered, not on behalf of the U.S.’s best interests.”
“This was a deal that would have cost the economy $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would have lost six-and-a-half million industrial sector jobs – almost half of which, 3.1 million, were in the manufacturing sector. That doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said.
“It also doesn’t make sense that we were scheduled to put out a lot of money up front, but meanwhile, China would be able to increase its emissions every year for the next 13 years,” he continued. “That’s not a balanced arrangement. India made their participation contingent on receiving billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries. That’s not a balanced thing, either.”
“It makes no sense as an economic deal. This is sloganeering in its worst fashion,” he declared.
SiriusXM host Joel Pollak brought up the argument from critics of Trump’s decision, such as California Gov. Jerry Brown, that withdrawing from the Paris accords will eliminate a large number of “green” jobs.
Ross responded by noting the figures on job losses due to the Paris accords “are net of whatever gains there might have been in green power.”
“The reality is, in a lot of green power, particularly the solar, a lot of those jobs are, in fact, being created in China, not here,” he said. “It’s really a question of where are you creating jobs, not so much of are you creating them.”
“The fact is, our CO2 emissions have declined by 12 percent since 2006 – not so much to do with anything that the Obama administration did, but simply due to the development of liquefied natural gas, which is a relatively low-pollution, relatively low-cost solution to generating energy,” he noted.
Ross said it was predictable Europeans would be upset that the United States withdrew from an agreement that placed such a lopsided burden on America.
“It doesn’t surprise me that they’re angry that we pulled out because they were getting a relatively free ride out of the U.S.,” he said. “If someone was getting a free ride and now he no longer is, naturally, he’s going to be angry about that. So that doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Whiplash: Dems, Media Claim Russians Needed Trump Data
Critics who mocked shoestring campaign now allege it could have guided interference
Democrats and the media mocked then-candidate Donald Trump’s data analytics team throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. But that was then.
Now a new assessment is emerging — that Trump’s crackerjack campaign was indispensable to Russian agents who meddled in the election.
“Our campaign had trouble putting the correct addresses and phone numbers on mailings, let alone running some Tom Clancy-style espionage ring.”
Defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton made the charge at a conference Wednesday when she said the Russians could not successfully have interfered unless they were “guided by Americans.” She later made clear she was “leaning toward Trump” as a suspect.
Nick Ackerman, who was an assistant Watergate prosecutor, picked up on the theme in an interview with CNN on Thursday.
“The allegation that we’re looking at here is whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government with this data-mining and micro-targeting to voters across the country,” he said. “I mean there are a lot of experts who are saying that there is no way that this could have been done by the Russians alone without some cooperation from within the Trump campaign.”
Neither Clinton nor Ackerman explained how Russian agents could be so sophisticated that they managed to hack into Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s iPhone and the Democratic National Committee computers but could not figure out on their own how to give what they took to WikiLeaks.
Beyond that, it is whiplash-inducing correction to now proclaim the deftness of the Trump team’s data-analytics ability. Veterans of the Trump campaign laughed at the suggestion that its data operations knowledge would have been an assistance to Russian spies.
“With the exception of our online operations and Facebook operations, there was very little sophistication in any part of the Trump campaign at any time,” one former campaign staffer told LifeZette. “Our campaign had trouble putting the correct addresses and phone numbers on mailings, let alone running some Tom Clancy-style espionage ring.”
Clinton operatives and independent experts dismissed Trump’s campaign in real-time as hopelessly amateurish.
The Associated Press reported in May of last year: “Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by months, even years, in using fast-evolving digital campaigning to win over voters, data specialists working with the GOP say.”
As late as the week of the November election, the experts judged that Trump had not caught up. Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer doubted that the Trump campaign could match Clinton’s.
“If it does end up that way, there are going to be a lot of political science departments canceling their campaigns and elections classes,” he told LifeZette at the time. “And we’d be one of them.”
Democratic operative James Carville said in June that “there is no Trump campaign,” referring to the candidate’s failure to assemble the kind of staff necessary to win a modern campaign.
National Public Radio reporter Scott Detrow said on May 30, “There’s no question that Donald Trump is a little leery of technology.”
Trump himself confirmed that in a separate AP interview that month. He downplayed the significance of having a large team of numbers-crunchers and computer whizzes who could identify possible supporters and feed them customized messages.
“I’ve always felt it was overrated,” he said. “[Then-President Barack] Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”
A May 2016 story in Politico reported that Clinton had a “massive head start over Trump when it came to analytics, polling and building models of likely voters and turnout plans.” The story noted that Trump only recently had even hired a pollster and had yet to spend any money on polling, while Clinton had spent $896,000 in April alone.
Clinton campaign officials made no secret of the fact that they believed they enjoyed a massive advantage over Trump. Elan Kriegel, Clinton’s analytics director, who held a similar position with Obama’s 2012 campaign, suggested in May 2016 that it was too late for Trump to close the gap.
“If you weren’t doing it several months ago, then you really are starting from scratch,” she told the AP.
The same story quoted anonymous sources on the Trump campaign that campaign Rick Wiley — who had been brought aboard to upgrade data harvesting — left amid internal disputes.
In September, Eric Siegel wrote in Scientific American that Clinton's campaign was "leveraging predictive analytics" while Trump was lagging.
"Hillary for America is leveraging data science in a very particular way," he wrote. "The undertaking predicts each individual voter's response to campaign contact in order to drive millions of decisions as to which voter receives a knock on the door or a phone call. It's an innovative, data-driven process that has changed the game for political campaigns."
All of that 2016 conventional wisdom has been replaced by a 2017 conventional wisdom that it was Trump's campaign that had a unique ability to target voters and that the Russians would have needed instructions about how to spread anti-Clinton information.
Karoun Demirjian, a Washington Post freelance reporter previously based in Moscow, disputed the premise that Russia could not have acted unilaterally.
"When you're living overseas, it is shocking how many people understand the importance of Iowa, and New Hampshire and the intricacies of the parties and where they don't match up," she said on CNN. "People pay attention to the United States in ways that we don't pay attention to anybody else … The idea that people, you know, overseas have no idea how American politics works is just false."
The Irreplaceable William F. Buckley Jr.
Column: His conservatism—and his America—no longer exists
William F Buckley Jr. / Getty Images
In 2008 I applied for a journalism fellowship from the Phillips Foundation. The process included an in-person interview with a panel of judges. One of them was the original "Prince of Darkness," Robert D. Novak. The great reporter examined my resume and noticed I had graduated from Columbia University. He looked at me quizzically.
"Who's the greatest conservative to have graduated from Columbia?" he asked.
I thought for a moment and replied, "Norman Podhoretz."
Novak grimaced. "Not Whittaker Chambers?"
Oops.
I hurriedly acknowledged Chambers's importance to the conservative movement, and to American history in general. In 1948, Chambers admitted he had been a Communist spy whose co-conspirators included high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss sued him for libel. But Chambers, working with a freshman congressman named Richard M. Nixon, was vindicated when he produced memoranda Hiss had forwarded to the Soviet Union.
In 1952, Chambers published a memoir, Witness, in which he recounted the controversy and said America was engaged in a spiritual war with materialistic communism. It was a war he thought America would lose. Published around the time of Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944), William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at Yale (1951), and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953), Witness became a canonical text of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. Among its admirers were two Democrats: Ronald Reagan, and Bob Novak. (Novak's autobiography, by the way, is required for anyone interested in politics and journalism.)
I thought of this episode after reading a George F. Will column on Buckley and conservatism. The morning email I receive from the Washington Post billed the piece as a call for another William F. Buckley Jr. "Conservatism," the headline read, "is soiled by scowling primitives."
Will says, "America needs a reminder of conservatism before vulgarians hijacked it, and a hint of how it became susceptible to hijacking." The reminder comes in the form of A Man and His Presidents, a new biography of the founder of National Review. While praising Buckley's "ebullience, decency, and enthusiasm for learning," Will blames none other than Chambers and Witness for injecting into conservatism "a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism." The "cloying sentimentality and curdled resentment" in which Chambers "wallowed" is, Will says, "the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing Buckley's legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture."
Well. The constraints of newsprint no doubt limit Will's ability to go into detail. But I hope he does, because his sudden jab at Chambers makes little sense. Chambers may have been sentimental and melancholic and pessimistic, his prose may have been tinged with purple, but he was if anything a moderating force on Buckley. Throughout their correspondence, collected in Odyssey of a Friend (1968), Chambers urged Buckley to accept the political reality of the New Deal, to be wary of Joe McCarthy, and to drop his criticisms of Eisenhower and Nixon. He resisted joining National Review because he viewed it as too ideological. He abjured the label conservative and preferred to be described as a "man of the right." He appeared on the NR masthead for just two years, leaving in 1959 because of editorial differences. (Chambers died in 1961.) His conservatism, such as it was, was adaptive. "That is what conservatives must decide," he wrote, "how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up basic principles."
If any of Buckley's mentors was responsible for the populist strain in postwar American conservatism, it was his Yale professor Willmoore Kendall. This brilliant and difficult philosopher, himself a former Trotskyist and supporter of the New Deal, formulated a majoritarian politics that sided with "the people" over social, economic, and political minorities. A community, said Kendall, not only had the ability but also the duty to enforce conformity to certain values, and to limit freedoms that might threaten the community's existence. It was Kendall who assisted Buckley and L. Brent Bozell in the draft of McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), who put forth the idea of a liberal establishment against which conservatives waged war, whose belief in the sanctity of majorities was the background to Buckley's quip in 1960 that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University. Still, Kendall was no lowbrow. He was an expert on John Locke. He translated Rousseau. God only knows how he'd react to Breitbart.com.
I bring all this up because it is important to get this history right. The reason it's important is simple: The conservative movement is fracturing. Many conservatives are looking to the past to provide an anchor, for something to hold onto in the midst of the storm. "Today, conservatism is soiled by scowling primitives whose irritable gestures lack mental ingredients," says Will. "The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased," writes Michael Gerson. Buckley is held up as someone to mirror, the ideal to pursue. A slew of recent books examine his life and writing. The founder of American Affairs "noted wryly" to Politico that he is "‘coincidentally'" the same age as Buckley when he founded National Review. "Two eras in conservative journalism in this country: The Buckley era and the Ailes era," Ross Douthat tweeted. "May the next one be more like the first."
But nostalgia, including for conservative intellectuals, carries dangers. There is the risk of simplifying the past to condemn the present, the risk of pretending our problems are no different than those of a bygone era. Who wouldn't prefer a conservatism of wit, erudition, eloquence, and panache? Nevertheless, there won't be another William F. Buckley Jr. His conservatism, and his America, no longer exists.
"Perhaps the most important fact to assimilate about modern American conservatism," writes George H. Nash in Reappraising the Right (2009), "is that it is not, and has never been, univocal. It is a coalition with many points of origin and diverse tendencies, not always easy to reconcile: a river of thought and activism fed by many tributaries." Buckley is more responsible than anyone for assembling that coalition, for determining who would be a part of it, and who would not. He let classical liberals, traditionalists, and anti-Communists into the pages of National Review, but kept out anti-Semites, the John Birch Society, Objectivists, and the followers of anarcho-libertarian Murray Rothbard. He was an editorial gatekeeper, the enforcer of political standards as well as intellectual and grammatical ones. He was not perfect, and he came to regret his opposition to World War II and to civil rights. But he was an ingenious publicist, using his newspaper column, 1965 mayoral campaign, and television show to model for young people a highbrow conservatism that was free market, Catholic, and committed to the defeat of the Soviet Union.
Buckley could be ecumenical because the coalition he represented was small. Over time, as new groups joined his movement, and as earlier groups split apart or disappeared altogether, it became impossible for one man to appeal to every faction. First the neoconservatives arrived, then the New Right, then the theocons, and then the paleos. The Leocons, or followers of Leo Strauss, broke into Claremonsters on one hand and East Coasters on the other. The traditionalists died off, and the anti-Communists fell with the Berlin Wall. Some enmities never wavered. "By far the most persistent source of discontent on the right," says Nash, "has been the status within its ranks of neoconservatives." In the last decade alone there have been crunchy conservatives, Sam's Club Republicans, constitutional conservatives, and nation-state populists. There is even an alt-right, which despises the other groups as sellouts and traitors and cucks. Not even William F. Buckley Jr. could embody the ideas and goals of these clashing sects. Nor would he want to.
It is important to remember that, when National Review was founded, Buckley was the leader of a fringe movement. He made conservatism respectable again after the Great Depression and Second World War had delegitimized it. His prominence was due not only to his energy, diligence, and charisma, but also to his novelty, his impudence. For many years people wanted to hear what he had to say because no one else was saying it. In the world of I Like Ike, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, no similarly situated member of the New York elite held his then-outlandish views on the role of government, academic freedom, the place of religion in public life, and confrontation with the Soviet Empire. His courage shifted the intellectual and political landscape.
So drastically has that landscape changed, however, that a young Buckley would find it unrecognizable. Global communism has disappeared. The Republican Party, dominant at all levels of government, is more conservative than ever. Instead of three networks repeating the New York Times every night, we have so many cable channels that subscribers are unbundling them. There is a conservative media universe of cable, talk radio, and periodicals. The newspaper industry has imploded, and been replaced with an uncountable number of websites hawking every conceivable political persuasion, as well as social media that allow individuals to express themselves directly.
It is difficult to crusade against dominant and stultifying opinion when the range of opinions is so broad. And because technology has lowered the barriers to entry, made every smartphone a printing press, and eliminated the role of the editor, the gatekeeping function of Buckley and National Review is obsolete. Last year Buckley's inheritors emulated him by declaring Donald Trump outside the bounds of the conservative movement. But Trump did not need National Review. He had Twitter.
As he grew older Buckley seems to have become disillusioned, bored with politics. He wrote fiction, reveled in honors. There was a long and public unwinding of his professional commitments. He retired as editor in chief of NR in 1990, Firing Line went off the air in 1999, he officially left the public speaking circuit in 2000, and he divested himself of NR shares in 2004. His last syndicated column appeared in February 2008, a few weeks before he died. By then he had become somewhat estranged from his political party, from the very political tendency he had helped to form. He opposed the surge of troops to Iraq, criticized George W. Bush for fiscal and diplomatic irresponsibility. "Viewed as a straight political trajectory," he told an interviewer in 2007, the conservative movement "peaked in 1980." Those are dispiriting words to read for a conservative born the following year.
"Who's the greatest conservative to have graduated from Columbia?" he asked.
I thought for a moment and replied, "Norman Podhoretz."
Novak grimaced. "Not Whittaker Chambers?"
Oops.
I hurriedly acknowledged Chambers's importance to the conservative movement, and to American history in general. In 1948, Chambers admitted he had been a Communist spy whose co-conspirators included high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss sued him for libel. But Chambers, working with a freshman congressman named Richard M. Nixon, was vindicated when he produced memoranda Hiss had forwarded to the Soviet Union.
In 1952, Chambers published a memoir, Witness, in which he recounted the controversy and said America was engaged in a spiritual war with materialistic communism. It was a war he thought America would lose. Published around the time of Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944), William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at Yale (1951), and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953), Witness became a canonical text of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. Among its admirers were two Democrats: Ronald Reagan, and Bob Novak. (Novak's autobiography, by the way, is required for anyone interested in politics and journalism.)
I thought of this episode after reading a George F. Will column on Buckley and conservatism. The morning email I receive from the Washington Post billed the piece as a call for another William F. Buckley Jr. "Conservatism," the headline read, "is soiled by scowling primitives."
Will says, "America needs a reminder of conservatism before vulgarians hijacked it, and a hint of how it became susceptible to hijacking." The reminder comes in the form of A Man and His Presidents, a new biography of the founder of National Review. While praising Buckley's "ebullience, decency, and enthusiasm for learning," Will blames none other than Chambers and Witness for injecting into conservatism "a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism." The "cloying sentimentality and curdled resentment" in which Chambers "wallowed" is, Will says, "the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing Buckley's legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture."
Well. The constraints of newsprint no doubt limit Will's ability to go into detail. But I hope he does, because his sudden jab at Chambers makes little sense. Chambers may have been sentimental and melancholic and pessimistic, his prose may have been tinged with purple, but he was if anything a moderating force on Buckley. Throughout their correspondence, collected in Odyssey of a Friend (1968), Chambers urged Buckley to accept the political reality of the New Deal, to be wary of Joe McCarthy, and to drop his criticisms of Eisenhower and Nixon. He resisted joining National Review because he viewed it as too ideological. He abjured the label conservative and preferred to be described as a "man of the right." He appeared on the NR masthead for just two years, leaving in 1959 because of editorial differences. (Chambers died in 1961.) His conservatism, such as it was, was adaptive. "That is what conservatives must decide," he wrote, "how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up basic principles."
If any of Buckley's mentors was responsible for the populist strain in postwar American conservatism, it was his Yale professor Willmoore Kendall. This brilliant and difficult philosopher, himself a former Trotskyist and supporter of the New Deal, formulated a majoritarian politics that sided with "the people" over social, economic, and political minorities. A community, said Kendall, not only had the ability but also the duty to enforce conformity to certain values, and to limit freedoms that might threaten the community's existence. It was Kendall who assisted Buckley and L. Brent Bozell in the draft of McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), who put forth the idea of a liberal establishment against which conservatives waged war, whose belief in the sanctity of majorities was the background to Buckley's quip in 1960 that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University. Still, Kendall was no lowbrow. He was an expert on John Locke. He translated Rousseau. God only knows how he'd react to Breitbart.com.
I bring all this up because it is important to get this history right. The reason it's important is simple: The conservative movement is fracturing. Many conservatives are looking to the past to provide an anchor, for something to hold onto in the midst of the storm. "Today, conservatism is soiled by scowling primitives whose irritable gestures lack mental ingredients," says Will. "The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased," writes Michael Gerson. Buckley is held up as someone to mirror, the ideal to pursue. A slew of recent books examine his life and writing. The founder of American Affairs "noted wryly" to Politico that he is "‘coincidentally'" the same age as Buckley when he founded National Review. "Two eras in conservative journalism in this country: The Buckley era and the Ailes era," Ross Douthat tweeted. "May the next one be more like the first."
But nostalgia, including for conservative intellectuals, carries dangers. There is the risk of simplifying the past to condemn the present, the risk of pretending our problems are no different than those of a bygone era. Who wouldn't prefer a conservatism of wit, erudition, eloquence, and panache? Nevertheless, there won't be another William F. Buckley Jr. His conservatism, and his America, no longer exists.
"Perhaps the most important fact to assimilate about modern American conservatism," writes George H. Nash in Reappraising the Right (2009), "is that it is not, and has never been, univocal. It is a coalition with many points of origin and diverse tendencies, not always easy to reconcile: a river of thought and activism fed by many tributaries." Buckley is more responsible than anyone for assembling that coalition, for determining who would be a part of it, and who would not. He let classical liberals, traditionalists, and anti-Communists into the pages of National Review, but kept out anti-Semites, the John Birch Society, Objectivists, and the followers of anarcho-libertarian Murray Rothbard. He was an editorial gatekeeper, the enforcer of political standards as well as intellectual and grammatical ones. He was not perfect, and he came to regret his opposition to World War II and to civil rights. But he was an ingenious publicist, using his newspaper column, 1965 mayoral campaign, and television show to model for young people a highbrow conservatism that was free market, Catholic, and committed to the defeat of the Soviet Union.
Buckley could be ecumenical because the coalition he represented was small. Over time, as new groups joined his movement, and as earlier groups split apart or disappeared altogether, it became impossible for one man to appeal to every faction. First the neoconservatives arrived, then the New Right, then the theocons, and then the paleos. The Leocons, or followers of Leo Strauss, broke into Claremonsters on one hand and East Coasters on the other. The traditionalists died off, and the anti-Communists fell with the Berlin Wall. Some enmities never wavered. "By far the most persistent source of discontent on the right," says Nash, "has been the status within its ranks of neoconservatives." In the last decade alone there have been crunchy conservatives, Sam's Club Republicans, constitutional conservatives, and nation-state populists. There is even an alt-right, which despises the other groups as sellouts and traitors and cucks. Not even William F. Buckley Jr. could embody the ideas and goals of these clashing sects. Nor would he want to.
It is important to remember that, when National Review was founded, Buckley was the leader of a fringe movement. He made conservatism respectable again after the Great Depression and Second World War had delegitimized it. His prominence was due not only to his energy, diligence, and charisma, but also to his novelty, his impudence. For many years people wanted to hear what he had to say because no one else was saying it. In the world of I Like Ike, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, no similarly situated member of the New York elite held his then-outlandish views on the role of government, academic freedom, the place of religion in public life, and confrontation with the Soviet Empire. His courage shifted the intellectual and political landscape.
So drastically has that landscape changed, however, that a young Buckley would find it unrecognizable. Global communism has disappeared. The Republican Party, dominant at all levels of government, is more conservative than ever. Instead of three networks repeating the New York Times every night, we have so many cable channels that subscribers are unbundling them. There is a conservative media universe of cable, talk radio, and periodicals. The newspaper industry has imploded, and been replaced with an uncountable number of websites hawking every conceivable political persuasion, as well as social media that allow individuals to express themselves directly.
It is difficult to crusade against dominant and stultifying opinion when the range of opinions is so broad. And because technology has lowered the barriers to entry, made every smartphone a printing press, and eliminated the role of the editor, the gatekeeping function of Buckley and National Review is obsolete. Last year Buckley's inheritors emulated him by declaring Donald Trump outside the bounds of the conservative movement. But Trump did not need National Review. He had Twitter.
As he grew older Buckley seems to have become disillusioned, bored with politics. He wrote fiction, reveled in honors. There was a long and public unwinding of his professional commitments. He retired as editor in chief of NR in 1990, Firing Line went off the air in 1999, he officially left the public speaking circuit in 2000, and he divested himself of NR shares in 2004. His last syndicated column appeared in February 2008, a few weeks before he died. By then he had become somewhat estranged from his political party, from the very political tendency he had helped to form. He opposed the surge of troops to Iraq, criticized George W. Bush for fiscal and diplomatic irresponsibility. "Viewed as a straight political trajectory," he told an interviewer in 2007, the conservative movement "peaked in 1980." Those are dispiriting words to read for a conservative born the following year.
What Buckley did was prove that intellectual conservatism could be popular. He was a celebrity, his column ran in hundreds of papers, his books were bestsellers, the circulation of National Review grew to six figures, his presence on campuses was in demand. He reached the height of his fame at a moment when middlebrow culture still existed, and public discourse was more elevated than it is today. As media became more deregulated and decentralized, it also became more demotic, more vulgar.
The possibility for an intellectual conservatism still exists, even if the social and political conditions that would enable such conservatism to reach a popular audience do not. This intellectual conservatism might adopt Buckley's élan, his belief in the importance of ideas, his verbal dexterity, quick wittedness, and talent for ridicule, as well as his loathing of moral equivalence, "policy misfits," and "welfare populists" whose politics are cover for the further centralization of power.
This intellectual conservatism might also remember its longstanding commitment to what one longtime subscriber to National Review called "the maximum in individual freedom consistent with law and order." Many years later, in a speech celebrating NR's thirtieth anniversary, that same man put it this way: "NR taught several generations of conservatives that it is this recognition of a higher order that enables the individual to stand against the massed power of the modern state and say: No, there is more to life than your budget and bureaus, your camps and constraints." Or as Buckley said in a 1997 speech: "The proper challenge of conservatives is to tame the state, and the question we most appropriately ask is, What is the proper tempo for such an enterprise?" Note that Buckley did not use the words abolish or reduce. He used the word tame. He had moved quite a ways from his youthful, outright opposition to the New Deal.
It is appropriate to ask Buckley's question once more, in light of the problems facing America today. Uncontrolled borders, millions out of the work force, transnational gangs and terrorist groups, political Islam, rampant drug addiction, suppression of free speech and religious liberty, the collapse of liberal education, and judges and bureaucrats operating beyond their constitutional authority—how do we address these issues while preserving the dignity and freedom of individual Americans? There is no William F. Buckley Jr. to help us, but that is the way of things. "Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning," Whittaker Chambers once wrote. Now it is our turn.
It is appropriate to ask Buckley's question once more, in light of the problems facing America today. Uncontrolled borders, millions out of the work force, transnational gangs and terrorist groups, political Islam, rampant drug addiction, suppression of free speech and religious liberty, the collapse of liberal education, and judges and bureaucrats operating beyond their constitutional authority—how do we address these issues while preserving the dignity and freedom of individual Americans? There is no William F. Buckley Jr. to help us, but that is the way of things. "Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning," Whittaker Chambers once wrote. Now it is our turn.
Helen and Moe Lauzier
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