pacino wrote:people will willingly have collective amnesia. gridlock continues. democrats won't vote in 2018. they'll get mad at clinton when she lets money get repatriated for something she wants.

i see a very easy path to re-relevance.

pacino wrote:i see a very easy path to re-relevance.

Doll Is Mine wrote:New Clinton ad.

pacino wrote:the PA House is trying to pass a bill that would ban any municipality from charging extra for plastic bags.

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

slugsrbad wrote:

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

Doll Is Mine wrote:

Ted Cruz @tedcruz
Cardinal Dolan calls on Hillary to apologize for insulting & ridiculing Catholics. Liberal religious bigotry not OK.

Does anyone know the background on this? I didn't see the Cardinal's comments, and I don't even know what he's talking about re: Hillary.

I think there was something in the wikileaks between Podesta and another staffer mocking Evangelicals or something.. don't remember.

Right, which Trump's goons seized on as evidence of her being anti-Catholic. But nothing from her directly, which is why the Cruz tweet confused me.

slugsrbad wrote:

JFLNYC wrote:

The usual suspects are already coalescing around an answer — namely, that she just got lucky. If only the Republicans hadn’t nominated Donald Trump, the story goes, she’d be losing badly.

But here’s a contrarian thought: Maybe Mrs. Clinton is winning because she possesses some fundamental political strengths — strengths that fall into many pundits’ blind spots.

First of all, who was this other, stronger candidate that the G.O.P. might have chosen? Remember, Mr. Trump won the nomination because he gave his party’s base what it wanted, channeling the racial antagonism that has been the driving force for Republican electoral success for decades. All he did was say out loud what his rivals were trying to convey with dog whistles, which explains why they were so ineffective in opposing him.

And those establishment candidates were much more Trumpian than those fantasizing about a different history — say, one in which the G.O.P. nominated Marco Rubio — acknowledge. Many people remember Mr. Rubio’s brain glitch: the canned lines about “let’s dispel with this fiction” that he kept repeating in a disastrous debate performance. Fewer seem aware that those lines actually enunciated a crazy conspiracy theory, essentially accusing President Obama of deliberately weakening America. Is that really much better than the things Mr. Trump says? Only if you imagine that Mr. Rubio didn’t believe what he was saying — yet his insincerity, the obvious way he was trying to play a part, was surely part of his weakness.

That is, in fact, a general problem for establishment Republicans. How many of them really believe that tax cuts have magical powers, that climate change is a giant hoax, that saying the words “Islamic terrorism” will somehow defeat ISIS? Yet pretending to believe these things is the price of admission to the club — and the falsity of that pretense shines through.

And one more point about Mr. Rubio: why imagine that a man who collapsed in the face of childish needling from Mr. Trump would have triumphed over the woman who kept her cool during 11 hours of grilling over Benghazi, and made her interrogators look like fools? Which brings us to the question of Mrs. Clinton’s strengths.

Yet the person tens of millions of viewers saw in this fall’s debates was hugely impressive all the same: self-possessed, almost preternaturally calm under pressure, deeply prepared, clearly in command of policy issues. And she was also working to a strategic plan: Each debate victory looked much bigger after a couple of days, once the implications had time to sink in, than it may have seemed on the night.

Oh, and the strengths she showed in the debates are also strengths that would serve her well as president. Just thought I should mention that. And maybe ordinary citizens noticed the same thing; maybe obvious competence and poise in stressful situations can add up to a kind of star quality, even if it doesn’t fit conventional notions of charisma.

So let’s dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton is only where she is through a random stroke of good luck. She’s a formidable figure, and has been all along.

Krugman

This, so much of this.

Bradd Jaffy ‏@BraddJaffy
Ex-aide says Chris Christie threw a water bottle at her and said "What do you think I am, a fucking game show host?"
http://nbcnews.to/2ePj1G3