Archive for the ‘Washington DC’ Tag
It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
Editor, The Amazing Democrats.
Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing
“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard.
By Wesley Lowery (Washington Post)
Days after the launch of two newspaper database projects aimed at tracking killing by police officers, two Democratic senators announced Tuesday that they will introduce legislation that would require all states to report to the Justice Department anytime a police officer is involved in a shooting or any other use of force that results in death.
The legislation, introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), would require reporting of all shootings by police officers — including non-fatal ones — which is a step further than the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which was approved by Congress last year. Each state would be required details including age, gender, race and whether the person was armed for any police shooting.
“Too many members of the public and police officers are being killed, and we don’t have reliable statistics to track these tragic incidents,” Boxer said in a statement. “This bill will ensure that we know the full extent of the problem so we can save lives on all sides.”
(Post analysis: 385 people shot and killed by police during first five months of 2015).
The nation has faced months of at-times tense discussions around issues of race and law enforcement following a series of deaths of black men and boys at the hands of police officers that became national stories — including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., and Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
Those incidents have renewed calls, which have been made for years by some civil rights groups, for more standardized reporting of police use-of-force incidents. To date, there is no accurate, comprehensive data available about how many people are killed by American police officers each year.
In a release announcing the bill, Boxer and Booker specifically cite The Post’s reporting — which on Sunday revealed that at least 385 people have been shot and killed by police since January, putting the nation on pace to have more than double the number of fatal police shootings tallied on average by the federal government.
That piece is the latest in a yearlong effort by The Post to report on police accountability, which includes the creation of a database that will chronicle every fatal shooting by police officers in country this year.
On Monday, the Guardian unveiled a similar reporting project, The Counted, which aims to tally every person killed by a police officer — by shooting, Taser or other death in custody — in 2015.
(Post analysis: Thousands dead, few officers prosecuted).
“The first step in fixing a problem is understanding the extent of the problem you have. Justice and accountability go hand in hand — but without reliable data it’s difficult to hold people accountable or create effective policies that change the status quo,” Booker said in a statement. “Our legislation is vital to ensuring we have the data required to make good decisions and implement reform measures that are balanced, objective, and protect the lives of police officers and the public.”
Some civil rights leaders have criticized Congress of passing little legislation in response to the unrest in Ferguson. Many activists who have led protests in the past year would consider the passage of legislation requiring detailed death in custody reporting to DOJ to be a major victory.
However, with Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate, Democratic legislative proposals face an uphill march toward passage.
“This is a step in the right direction. I’d have to read the bill to understand the details but the fact that there seems to be political will to establish a federal database is a very good sign,” said David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri who has been fighting for more than a decade for better reporting on police use of force incidents.
– Kimberly Kindy contributed to this report.
by NOAM SCHEIBER (New York Times)
WASHINGTON — Early this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms. Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed an aggressive mailing campaign against her.
But Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for it, the more people seemed to rally around me.”
During the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform proposals in gestation.
But amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are struggling to adapt.
“There was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is mostly gone.”
In Baltimore, the local police union president accused protesters angry at the death of Freddie Gray of participating in a “lynch mob.” In South Carolina, the head of the police union where an officer had shot and killed an unarmed black man who was fleeing fulminated against “professional race agitators.” In New York, Patrick Lynch, a local police union chief, accused Mayor Bill de Blasio of having blood on his hands after the shooting death of two police officers last December.
If voters’ reactions to Mr. Lynch’s statements are any indication, the provocative language has largely served to alienate the public and isolate the police politically. According to a Quinnipiac University poll in January, 77 percent of New York City voters disapproved of Mr. Lynch’s comments. Sixty-nine percent disapproved of police officers turning their backs on Mr. de Blasio at funerals for the two slain officers, a protest seen as orchestrated by the union.
In Baltimore, too, the police union has been less than sure-footed in navigating the more hostile political terrain of the past few years. The union, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, has responded with open resistance to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s proposals to make it easier to remove misbehaving police officers, and to give the city’s police civilian review board a “more impactful” role in disciplining officers.
The union also opposed the decision by Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts to invite the Justice Department in to help overhaul the city’s Police Department after an investigation by The Baltimore Sun produced numerous allegations of police brutality.
Union officials say they have been fulfilling their mandate to protect their members, airing legitimate concerns about overreach on the part of their civilian overseers. And sympathetic observers have questioned the political motivations of the mayor.
“She seems to suggest that the blame lies elsewhere, when the buck should stop with the mayor, always,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “She’s been there five years. The thing is an institutional disaster. It’s your institution.”
A spokesman for the mayor said that some of her efforts, like disbanding a plainclothes unit linked to an unusual number of excessive-force complaints, began shortly after she took office.
In some cases, the union’s hostility to scrutiny has been self-defeating. In 2014, the Fraternal Order of Police declined to endorse Gregg Bernstein, then the state’s attorney for Baltimore, after members of the union’s endorsement committee complained that Mr. Bernstein had been too aggressive in prosecuting police misconduct, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
Mr. Bernstein, who suffered from diminishing support in districts where the union has long been influential, lost his re-election bid to the current state’s attorney, Marilyn J. Mosby, who has made prosecuting police misconduct a priority. Ms. Mosby recently charged six Baltimore police officers in the death of Mr. Gray, the resident whose death last month set off tumultuous protests around the city.
St. Louis offers a particularly vivid example of the inability of police unions to update their tactics amid widespread frustration with policing. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen first passed a measure creating a civilian oversight board back in 2006. Mayor Francis G. Slay, a Democrat, vetoed the bill at the time, citing its “inflammatory antipolice” language and questioning whether it would survive a legal challenge given that the State of Missouri still formally controlled the local Police Department.
But, in December, after months of outrage following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Mr. Slay agreed to support a bill similar to the one he vetoed a decade ago. A spokeswoman for the mayor said that local control of the Police Department now made the bill legally defensible.
The St. Louis Fraternal Order of Police, one of two prominent local unions, was not persuaded. Although the alderman involved in drafting the legislation met with union officials around the same time and asked them for input, the union offered suggestions in writing only on April 13, two days before the board was set to vote on the bill, and far too late to incorporate any of its changes.
“When we met with them in December, I was honestly interested in their thoughts,” said Alderman Terry Kennedy, who sponsored the legislation. “I would have tried to incorporate as much as I could have.” But, Mr. Kennedy said, the union’s objections proved to be a “constantly moving target.”
Jeff Roorda, a spokesman for the union, said that once it became clear that the Board of Aldermen was determined to give the oversight board investigative authority, rather than simply review powers, the union felt it was better to save its reservations for a future legal challenge.
“It put us in a tough spot, to tip our hand about what our legal objections were, telling them how to write legislation within the legal parameters,” Mr. Roorda said. The measure will become law this week.
In contrast to the unions’ hard-line public stance, many can be pragmatic behind the scenes when dealing with prosecutors over individual allegations of misconduct. In Baltimore, for example, there have been several recent instances when the police union declined to fund the legal defense of an officer whose behavior it had concluded was beyond the pale.
“People have the impression, when it comes to police unions, that there’s never an unwarranted case of police abuse,” said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois. “The public would be surprised by the level of rational behavior on the part of union grievance officers.”
But when it comes to what the unions perceive as larger, institutional threats, they are characteristically unrelenting, even when a more nuanced response might better serve their long-term interests.
There may be no better example than the creation of New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board two decades ago. In September 1992, after a monthslong standoff between the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins and the city’s police over his proposal for an independent review agency, a union-organized protest degenerated into what the news media called a “riot,” as thousands of police officers overwhelmed barricades blocking the steps of City Hall.
“It was a very bad inning for the unions,” Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union said. “Most people view that as being the incident that pushed civilian oversight over the line.”
By Philip Rucker (The Washington Post)
Former president Bill Clinton veered into the orbit of his wife’s presidential race Monday — and caused some problems for her in the process.
In an interview with NBC News, a sometimes defensive Clinton said that his family and its foundation have never done anything “knowingly inappropriate” when accepting donations from foreign governments.
He also said he would continue to deliver speeches for which he is paid six figures during his wife’s presidential campaign because “I gotta pay our bills.” Clinton asserted that he had “taken almost no capital gains” over the past 15 years — a claim that does not jibe with public tax returns.
These and other remarks during the interview with NBC’s Cynthia McFadden raised concerns among Clinton associates from New York to Little Rock, who fear that the former president did his wife no favors with the performance. At some points in the interview, he came off sounding churlish and angry, while his remarks on the family’s finances risked making the Clintons seem out of touch, said these friends, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.
In a statement Monday, the Republican National Committee said Clinton provided “deceptive responses” to questions about the foundation.
When asked whether the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation created perception problems by accepting large sums from foreign companies and governments, Clinton suggested his family was the victim of a double standard. “People should draw their own conclusions. I’m not in politics,” he said. “All I’m saying is the idea that there’s one set of rules for us and another set for everybody else is true.”
He added later, “There has been a very deliberate attempt to take the foundation down.”
Clinton said that no entity gave the foundation money to try to influence his wife while she served as secretary of state. “There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy,” he said. “That just hasn’t happened.”
He said his wife has told him, “No one has ever tried to influence me by helping you.”
The foundation’s finances, and particularly its practice of accepting donations from foreign governments, have drawn considerable scrutiny in recent weeks from The Washington Post and other news organizations and in a new book, “Clinton Cash.”
With Hillary Rodham Clinton beginning her campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, the foundation has become fodder for attacks from her opponents, both Democratic and Republican. The Clinton Foundation recently bowed to pressure and announced it would accept foreign donations from only six Western nations and increase transparency by disclosing its donors four times a year instead of annually.
Bill Clinton spoke with NBC from Kenya during his and daughter Chelsea’s annual tour of Africa to visit Clinton Foundation projects that focus on such issues as climate change, public health, conservation, economic growth and empowering women and girls.
“I don’t think there’s anything sinister in trying to get wealthy people in countries that are seriously involved in development to spend their money wisely in a way that helps poor people and lifts them up,” Clinton said.
But he left open the possibility that he would step down from the foundation if his wife is elected president. “I might if I were asked to do something in the public interest that I had an obligation to do,” Clinton told NBC. “Or I might take less of an executive role. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Clinton has earned more than $100 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House, much of it from foreign entities. Asked about his paid speeches, some of which come with a fee of $500,000 or higher, Clinton said, “People like to hear me speak.”
Clinton said it was “laughable” for people to assume that Hillary Clinton couldn’t “relate to the currents of middle-class America because now we have money.”
“I’m grateful for our success,” he said. “But let me remind you: When we moved into the White House, we had the lowest net worth of any family since Harry Truman.”
Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.
by Erik Wemple (The Washington Post)
Fox News chief Roger Ailes is a quote factory, a golden interviewee for any media journalist. “I don’t give a rat’s a[–] what the world thinks,” he said in an early April interview with the Hollywood Reporter.
This cavalier attitude enables Ailes, one of TV’s inestimable talents, to say stuff that makes no sense. Like this: “[I]t looks like Hillary is going to do whatever she wants and the press is going to vote for her.”
Problem No. 1: Ailes, as head of cable TV’s dominant news channel, can’t refer to “the press” as some kind of Otherworld. Fox News is the press, too. As the Hollywood Reporter piece notes, Fox News will generate $2.18 billion in revenues this year. That kind of money can fund all kinds of journalism on Hillary Clinton, and surely it will.
Problem No. 2: Has Ailes been following the news? Did he miss the March 2 New York Times story on Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account during her tenure as secretary of state? And the utter and overwhelming media pile-on that followed? Around the time that the interview came out, the Times also reported that three media outlets — the Times itself, the Washington Post and Fox News — had reached arrangements with author Peter Schweizer to rifle through early copies of his book “Clinton Cash” to vet his claims that “foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return,” as the Times summed up the book.
Which is to say, the “press” is actually scrambling to hold Hillary Clinton to account.
Though Ailes may be guilty of some imprecision on the Clinton front, he distinguishes himself in diagnosing the shortcomings of the competition. Of cratering MSNBC, Ailes told the Hollywood Reporter, “They have to decide what they are. I don’t think they even view it as television. They view it as a place to express their views, which happen to be all the same view. And so you’ve got one topic and 12 people [with the same opinion], and it’s just boring.” Yes, must-agree TV.
by Anne Gearan (The Washington Post)
KEENE, N.H. — Hillary Rodham Clinton struck a more partisan tone here Monday at the start of her second week as a presidential hopeful, warning Republicans against seeking to “undermine” Social Security and suggesting GOP candidates were fixated on her candidacy.
“It is, I think, worth noting that the Republicans seem to be talking only about me,” Clinton told reporters with a grin. “I don’t know what they’d talk about if I wasn’t in the race. But I am in the race, and hopefully we can get on to the issues.”
Returning to the state that has twice rescued her family’s political fortunes, Clinton seemed to exhale and relax a bit after her first, high-stakes campaign trip to Iowa last week. She hugged supporters, expertly bounced a baby and got in her dig at Republicans, who had focused on her as much as the rest of the GOP field during a weekend conference in the state.
Clinton did not address the substance of claims in a forthcoming book that she had helped foreign entities that donated to her family foundation while she was secretary of state.
“We’re back into the political season and, therefore we will be subjected to all kinds of distractions and attacks, and I’m ready for that,” she said following a tour of a small, family-owned plant that makes children’s furniture.
Clinton peppered her remarks with several policy goals for her emerging campaign, including an emphasis on the “quiet epidemic” of rural and small-town drug abuse and the need for better technical and trade education. She also predicted a political battle over Social Security, which she characterized as a necessity.
“There’s a lot of loose talk about Social Security,” Clinton said during an exchange with a worker in his 50s who told her he is worried about having enough money in retirement. “It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
“Everybody who thinks we can privatize Social Security or undermine it in some way” is overlooking workers in a similar situation, she added. “What’s going to happen to people like you? It’s just wrong.”
The remarks were an obvious swipe at Republicans, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who have signaled an interest in revisiting the issue.
Clinton did not offer specific policy plans on Social Security or other issues, however, and did not hint at whether she would seek to expand the program, as many in her party’s liberal wing have proposed.
“Let’s just take a deep breath here as a country and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to have a retirement issue, and people who’ve worked hard deserve to have enough security when they retire so they can have a good quality of life,” Clinton said. “I’m a hundred percent committed to that.”
Her two days in New Hampshire are meant to emphasize her economic agenda — very little of which has been fleshed out — and to showcase her efforts to support the middle and working classes. Calling businesses like Whitney Brothers, the company whose factory she visited, the “backbone” of the economy, she said too many larger corporations shortchange worker salaries.
The former senator, secretary of state and failed 2008 presidential candidate also spoke at length about vocational and technical education, calling it a mistake to have let shop classes and other affordable job-training programs atrophy. Clinton will visit a technical college in Concord on Tuesday.
She called substance abuse, particularly prescription drug abuse, a “perfect storm” and said treatment and insurance options for substance abuse and mental-health issues will be a “big part” of her campaign. She applauded mental health coverage guarantees “on paper” through the Affordable Care Act but suggested the system doesn’t go far enough.
When the discussion ended, Clinton warmly hugged and kissed former Keene mayor Patricia Russell, seated at the edge of the crowd in a wheelchair.
“Oh! How are you?” Clinton said, rushing to throw her arms around Russell.
The two first met in 1991, Russell said, when she escorted the wife of a little-known Arkansas governor on a tour of a local Head Start center. Bill Clinton’s better-than-expected finish in New Hampshire in 1992 made him the “comeback kid.”
Long relationships like that one are part of the bond between the Clintons and New Hampshire, which in 2008 became the symbol of her rebound after coming in third in Iowa. In an emotional appearance at a diner after her victory, she told New Hampshire voters they had helped her “find my voice.”
Later Monday, Clinton attended the first “house party” of the new campaign, in Claremont. The intimate meet-and-greet parties are staples of the campaign season in states with early caucuses or primaries.
Clinton struck a more conciliatory note in her remarks there.
“I am tired of the mean-
spiritedness in politics,” she said. “I am tired of people running to electtheir fellow citizens by being nasty to each other. That doesn’t solve a problem.”
But he should go away and be quiet because if he and George W. Bush weren’t in the special President’s club (where they all look out for each other) then Dark Vader and George W. would be facing some real jail time if they were prosecuted (which they should be) but we know they won’t. Reminds us what lays ahead in 2017 if Jeb Bush runs and wins for the Republicans. War again, the CIA back torturing the wrong people and we can say goodbye to the Affordable Care Act. And will anything be done under J. concerning Immigration and Social Security reform in 2017?
Nope, just like his brother W, J will do nothing but talk and talk until we kick the Republicans out of the House and Senate in 2018. All fun and games in Washington and would be funny if it wasn’t our lives they were all playing with.
By Scott Shane (New York Times)
As vice president, Dick Cheney was the most enthusiastic sponsor for the brutal C.I.A.interrogation program used on Al Qaeda suspects, protesting when President George W. Bush scaled it back in his second term. Now that a Senate Intelligence Committee report has declared that the C.I.A.’s methods, later prohibited, violated American values and produced little or no useful intelligence, Mr. Cheney is fiercely defending not just the agency’s record, but his own as well.
“I would do it again in a minute,” Mr. Cheney said in a spirited, emotional appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He denied that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the last four attorneys general have agreed with his view.
The NBC host, Chuck Todd, pressed Mr. Cheney on what might constitute torture, reading actual episodes from the Senate report: Holding a prisoner in a coffin-sized box for 11 days? Handcuffing a prisoner’s wrists to an overhead bar for 22 hours a day? But Mr. Cheney gave no ground.
“I can’t tell from that specifically whether it was or not,” he replied.
He even declined to criticize C.I.A. practices used on prisoners called “rectal feeding” and “rectal rehydration,” though he noted that “it was not one of the techniques approved” by the Justice Department. “I believe it was done for medical reasons,” he said. The Senate report suggests that it was largely used without medical orders to punish prisoners who refused water or food.
At 73, nearly three years after a heart transplant, Mr. Cheney clearly feels his own legacy is at stake.
In the early months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush delegated the detailed oversight of the campaign against Al Qaeda to his vice president, who embraced the task and urged the harshest measures. Mr. Cheney had long believed that restrictions placed on the intelligence agencies after scandals in the late 1970s were ill-advised, and he relished the chance to take the restraints off the C.I.A.
Mr. Cheney may be running some political risk. For some viewers, his gloves-off comments on “Meet the Press” may recall his many appearances being interviewed on Sunday morning television shows in late 2002 and early 2003 before the invasion of Iraq.
At that time, he repeatedly asserted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, claims that turned out to be false. He also made a famously inaccurate prediction on the same show, “Meet the Press,” on March 16, 2003, that American troops would be “greeted as liberators.”
Continue reading the main storyBut that experience has not deterred him. In the wake of the Senate report, he has only stepped up his defense of the C.I.A., deciding that the best defense is a relentless offense.
Mr. Cheney was also asked on Sunday to answer questions about detainees who had faced lengthy incarceration, and sometimes harsh treatment, even though the C.I.A. concluded they posed no terrorist threat or had been imprisoned by mistake. The Senate report counts at least 26 such “wrongfully detained” prisoners among the 119 detainees who passed through the C.I.A. secret overseas jails.
The former vice president responded that, in his mind, the greater problem was “with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield.”
Asked again whether he was satisfied with a program that erroneously locked up detainees, he replied, “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”
The Senate committee’s report makes the case that the wrongful detentions and use of torture were actually counterproductive, citing C.I.A. officers’ own views that harsh tactics had “poisoned the well” in questioning some prisoners.
The 6,000-page Senate study, based on a review of more than six million pages of C.I.A. records, is by far the most ambitious look at the program to date. Its damning conclusions are based strictly on what C.I.A. officers were themselves reporting inside the agency at the time.
The portrait it paints of a program that was not just brutal but incompetent has drawn global comment, most of it highly critical of the C.I.A.’s former tactics. The report has been hailed by the United Nations and human rights groups as a long-delayed step toward accountability, though they say the people who approved and conducted the program must be held responsible for grave violations of law and morality.
The report’s conclusions might have been expected to offer vindication to another Republican stalwart, Senator John McCain, who has long been the leading voice denouncing torture and countering Mr. Cheney on the interrogation question.
But the torture issue has split Congress and the country largely on partisan lines, and Mr. McCain’s commentary on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, where he was asked about Mr. Cheney’s remarks, underscored how lonely his position has become in the Republican Party.
The Senate report was produced solely by the intelligence committee’s Democratic staff members, after the Republicans decided to stop participating, and Republicans have almost universally panned it as a biased and flawed study, noting that its authors relied exclusively on documents and did not interview C.I.A. officials.
Unlike nearly every other politician in the debate, Mr. McCain has personal experience with the topic: as a downed Navy pilot, he was tortured by his North Vietnamese captors as a prisoner of war, an experience that left him with the deep conviction that the United States should never use such tactics. Mr. Cheney, by contrast, received four deferments as a student and a fifth as a new father and never served.
Mr. McCain said some defenders of the C.I.A. program are engaging in a “rewriting of history” and are whitewashing torture. “You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture,” he said. He noted that waterboarding had a gruesome pre-C.I.A. history dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, and that the United States “tried and hung Japanese war criminals for waterboarding Americans in World War II.”
“What we need to do is come clean, we move forward and we vow never to do it again,” Mr. McCain said. “I urge everyone to just read the report.”
Mr. Cheney said he had read “parts” of the report. But the former vice president responded to Mr. Todd, “Go read what the directors of the agency said about the report.”
Indeed, Mr. Cheney’s latest remarks were part of a barrage of commentary attempting to undercut the Senate’s blistering report on the C.I.A. program. Defenders of the program, including a former C.I.A. director, Michael V. Hayden, and the official who actually ran the program, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., outnumbered those criticizing its methods on Sunday morning’s political shows.
Waterboarding was never used, at least with official approval, after 2003. In 2006, against the vice president’s advice, Mr. Bush moved the accused 9/11 conspirators to an American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The secret prisons housed only a handful of additional prisoners before President Obama ordered them closed on his first full day in office in 2009.
The Amazing Democrats 