Doll Is Mine wrote:So French police literally go on to the beach and order women to remove their burkinis. Ugh.

mozartpc27 wrote:I haven't been following the race and am perfectly willing to believe that Evan Bayh is at best a flawed candidate (or a great candidate, or an outright terrible one, I have no idea), but screwing up "Court" versus "Square" - when, as I know from NJ, a lot streets with "court," square," and other less likely identifiers as to their type are actually accessed from, and thus intersect with, a feeder street of the same name (I can't tell you how often I see "X" street" intersecting with "X" court" - fill in whatever you like - in NJ) - seems like a rather trivial error to me and could happen to anyone. I am 99% certain my father couldn't tell you his phone number without looking at it and it is the same landline they have had for 40 years.

CalvinBall wrote:JH, does this help in the maybe he is using campaign funds to make a profit?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -book.html

On May 10, the Trump campaign paid Barnes & Noble $55,055, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission. That amounts to more than 3,500 copies of the hardcover version of Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, or just over 5,000 copies of the renamed paperback release, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America.

“It’s fine for a candidate’s book to be purchased by his committee, but it’s impermissible to receive royalties from the publisher,” Ryan said. “That amounts to an illegal conversion of campaign funds to personal use. There’s a well established precedent from the FEC that funds from the campaign account can’t end up in your own pocket.”

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

pacino wrote:

The most recent poll released Tuesday night has Clinton and Trump at 39%, with third party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein making up rest of the vote.

Trump leads Clinton 45 to 43 if the third party candidates are removed.

According to the Feldman Group Poll, Trump is leading 63 to 25 with Caucasians, while Clinton leads 91 to 1 with African Americans.

Getting pretty close to the white supremacist/alt right dream of taking 65% of the white vote, yet somehow he's losing badly in polls.

I don't think the alt right is very good at math.

jerseyhoya wrote:

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

pacino wrote:

The most recent poll released Tuesday night has Clinton and Trump at 39%, with third party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein making up rest of the vote.

Trump leads Clinton 45 to 43 if the third party candidates are removed.

According to the Feldman Group Poll, Trump is leading 63 to 25 with Caucasians, while Clinton leads 91 to 1 with African Americans.

Getting pretty close to the white supremacist/alt right dream of taking 65% of the white vote, yet somehow he's losing badly in polls.

I don't think the alt right is very good at math.

There's a much higher percentage of black people in South Carolina than there are in the country as a whole.

Doll Is Mine wrote:So French police literally go on to the beach and order women to remove their burkinis. Ugh.

PSUPhilliesPhan wrote:I took a week away from reading anything political. Muted all my twitter follows that would mention anything about the race. Highly recommend it. Also, this thread was great to catch up with.

pacino wrote:

PSUPhilliesPhan wrote:I took a week away from reading anything political. Muted all my twitter follows that would mention anything about the race. Highly recommend it. Also, this thread was great to catch up with.

when I was in London I only got bits and pieces of news via free newspapers on the train and disparate TVs in public areas. it was freeing. it also made our country look crazy as it was during the Republican National Convention. Chachi was a US ambassador to the world for a day.

JFLNYC wrote:Tbf not sure the modern Greeks are the best leader pickers. Used to be great at it a long time ago, though.

It’s a striking piece of reporting that made immediate waves in my social media feed, as political journalists of all stripes retweeted the story’s headline conclusions.

Except it turns out not to be true. The nut fact that the AP uses to lead its coverage is wrong, and Braun and Sullivan’s reporting reveals absolutely no unethical conduct. In fact, they found so little unethical conduct that an enormous amount of space is taken up by a detailed recounting of the time Clinton tried to help a former Nobel Peace Prize winner who’s also the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The stark fact highlighted in the AP’s tweet and social share card is, for starters, totally false.

If you read that and thought to yourself that it seems wrong for the secretary of state to be spending so much time in meetings with Clinton Foundation donors rather than talking to US government officials and representatives of foreign countries, then you are in luck. To generate the 154 figure, the AP excluded from the denominator all employees of any government, whether US or foreign. Then when designing social media collateral, it just left out that part, because the truth is less striking and shareable.

Even so, the number 154 is preposterously low, as Clinton would routinely meet dozens of civil society leaders, journalists, and others on any one of her many foreign trips as secretary of state. In the campaign’s official response to the AP, they argue that the data is "cherry picked" from a "limited subset" of her schedule.

But regardless of that, the AP’s social media claims are simply false — ignoring well over 1,000 official meetings with foreign leaders and an unknown number of meetings with domestic US officials.

Regardless of the denominator, there is still the fact that Clinton had meetings with more than 80 people who also directly or indirectly donated to the Clinton Foundation or related ventures.

As the AP puts it: "[T]he frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton."

With that lead-in, one is naturally primed to read some scandalous material — a case of someone with a legitimately crucial need to sit down with the secretary of state whose meeting is held up until he can produce cash, or a person with no business getting face time with the secretary nevertheless receiving privileged access in exchange for money. Instead, the most extensively discussed case the AP could come up with is this:

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest "microcredit" for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank's board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.

I have no particular knowledge of Yunus, Grameen Bank, or the general prospects of microcredit as a philanthropic venture. I can tell you, however, that Yunus not only won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize but has also been honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal. In 2008 he was No. 2 on Foreign Policy’s list of the "top 100 global thinkers," and Ted Turner put him on the board of the UN Foundation. He’s received the World Food Prize, the International Simon Bolivar Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord.

In other words, he’s a renowned and beloved figure throughout the West, not some moneybags getting help from the State Department in exchange for cash. On the level of pure politics, of course, this is exactly the problem with the Clinton Foundation. Its existence turns the banal into a potential conflict of interest, and shutting it down is the right call. But the fact remains that this is a fantastically banal anecdote.

Equally banal is this finding: "[I]n December that same year, Schwarzman's wife, Christine, sat at Clinton's table during the Kennedy Center Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Center, before he spoke."

Of course the secretary of state introduced the chair of the Kennedy Center when she attended the Kennedy Center Honors. More substantively, Braun and Sullivan also note that "the State Department was working on a visa issue at Schwarzman's request." One could imagine a scandal here, but the AP doesn’t produce one — was a visa wrongly issued? Or was the State Department simply doing its job and fixing a problem?

The State Department doing its job seems to clearly be the story of the time "Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder." Was the meeting about Mahon trying to swing a plumb internship for a family member? Nope! As the story concedes, "the meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance AIDS education and prevention."

Meeting with the head of a charity as part of an effort to raise charitable money is just the system working properly. Read the meat of the article, and the most shocking revelation is what’s not in it — a genuinely interesting example of influence peddling.

The State Department is a big operation. So is the Clinton Foundation. The AP put a lot of work into this project. And it couldn’t come up with anything that looks worse than helping a Nobel Prize winner, raising money to finance AIDS education, and doing an introduction for the chair of the Kennedy Center. It’s kind of surprising.

Journalists need to admit when we’ve struck out

jerseyhoya wrote:The neo-nazis are the third biggest party in the Greek parliament. That's not great.

Doll Is Mine wrote:
And by the way, let's not blow things out of proportion, they hold 18 seats out of 300 in parliament.

The Crimson Cyclone wrote:

Doll Is Mine wrote:And by the way, let's not blow things out of proportion, they hold 18 seats out of 300 in parliament.

42 out of 435 are in the freedom caucus so our neo-nazis have more power

jerseyhoya wrote:The neo-nazis are the third biggest party in the Greek parliament. That's not great.