Tag: Hillary Clinton

Negative, Positively

Negative space, positive space, election, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump

In art class, students learn about “negative space,” how positively one can react to artistic representations and indications of absence, of the space between objects, “blank” space. This land of shadow and reified Absence can have a powerful impact on our perceptions.

Well, behold, the piece of work that is major-party politics in America, 2016.

Usually we pretend that our elections are about what we approve of, about who and what we are for. But this year, with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the likely nominees of their respective parties (Ted Cruz having pulled out after being trounced, Tuesday, in the Hoosier State, and John Kasich, likewise, yesterday morning), the positive spin on negativity will ramp up to new levels. As Anthony L. Fisher observed primary night on reason.com, Trump and Clinton are the most- and second-most hated major party politicians ever, polling the negatives “even higher than 2004-era George W. Bush.” (Who won.)

With the negatives of both candidates looming so large, is it too obvious to take note of the high likelihood of an extremely negative campaign coming up?

Maybe we should gamble on the terms of opprobrium that will be let loose:

Traitor, incompetent, corrupt crony-pushing insider, harpy of modish feminism.…

Buffoon, racist, corrupt crony capitalist, chauvinist of the vulgar tongue.…

Into this negative space we can expect a rush of interest in minor-party challengers, Libertarians and Greens. Protest votes could hit new heights. And they might make a difference.

But can anyone really profit from such negative space? Color me dubious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, negative space, positive space, Presidential campaign 2016

Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

You’re Fired! Hillary-style

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 4, 2016
2 Comments on You’re Fired! Hillary-style

“I’m the only candidate,” Hillary Clinton boasted at a town hall back in March, with “a policy about how to bring economic opportunity — using clean renewable energy as the key — into coal country. Because we’re going put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right Tim?”

First, who is this “Tim” fellow? Aren’t you curious? The news media, typically unhelpful, provides no context.

Clearly, Mrs. Clinton supports the Obama Administration polices that have been disastrous for the coal industry. “Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels,” she explained.

Monday, in West Virginia, Clinton met unemployed coal worker Bo Copley, who teared-up talking about his family and being out of work. He asked Hillary, “I just want to know how you could say you are going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?”

Mrs. Clinton told Copley that it was “a misstatement.” And that what she said was “totally out of context” from what she meant … whatever that means.

“[T]he way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs,” she explained. “I didn’t mean that we were going to do it. What I said was, that is going to happen unless we take action to try to and help and prevent it.”

Yes, Hillary has a plan — not to “prevent” losing coal jobs, but, instead, to spend $30 billion in tax dollars to help those her policies hurt.

As one West Virginian passionately put it: “We don’t want your handouts; we want work.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, coal, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016, renewable energy

Accountability moral hazard national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

Obscene Amounts

George Clooney, Campaign finance, money, big money, election, Hillary Clinton

Actor George Clooney, star of the current Coen brothers picture, Hail Caesar!, is a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. When asked on NBC’s Meet the Press if the $353,000 per couple dinner he organized last Friday constituted an “obscene amount of money,” he answered, simply, “yes.”

Clooney went on to explain, “It’s ridiculous that we should have this amount of money in politics.”

He’s an advocate for campaign finance reform. He is, specifically, “against” Citizens United, though he doesn’t know that it isn’t a law but a Supreme Court case that overturned previously passed legislation that regulated what people and corporations could do to support or oppose (or mention) candidates in elections. The government, authorized by the campaign finance legislation, had suppressed a movie.

Interestingly, that movie was a polemical documentary against … Hillary Clinton.

Campaign finance regulation has been shown to help incumbents. Not unexpectedly, since the regulations are written by sitting legislators against their competitors.

But “getting money out of politics” would advantage other groups, too. For example, one consequence of limiting political donations would be to nudge challengers to (a) be rich and mostly self-funding (like Trump is said to be), and (b) be more demagogic, leveraging the “free” publicity from major media.

More demagogues aren’t needed.

But then, the whole issue is demagogic, appealing to the knee-jerk reaction of everyday people who are, indeed, often nonplused by how others spend their money.

As for Clooney, he’d like not to have to spend money for his candidate.

We’d all like the important things in life to just happen. But it turns out we have to work for what we want.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags campaign finance reform, campaign finance regulation, George Clooney, Hillary Clinton

Accountability folly government transparency ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies

Money Means Nothing to Her

Post author By CS Admin
Post date April 18, 2016
2 Comments on Money Means Nothing to Her

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, campaign finance reform, big money, illustration, angel, Saint Hillary

Campaign finance reform is surely dead … if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

Which would be good.

Not Clinton being elected, mind you. What would be good is the death of so-called campaign finance reform — the kind supported by Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. They insist on a constitutional amendment to partially repeal the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protection and give Congress awesome new powers to regulate their own and their opponents’ campaigns.

But wait — if Mrs. Clinton supports campaign finance reform, why would her election kill this seriously bad proposal?

Well, Hillary Clinton made it abundantly clear at last week’s Democratic presidential debate, as I explained this weekend at Townhall: large campaign contributions do not influence her in any way. Even a fat $15 million from Wall Street interests to her super PAC — or $225,000 a pop speeches paid by Goldman Sachs and their ilk — registers no corrupting effect whatsoever.

And those millions deposited in Clinton Foundation accounts from foreign governments?

They couldn’t possibly sway the steady former Secretary of State. Not even the smallest smidgen.

Just like there has never been corruption at the IRS.

Don’t believe Hillary? Then trust President Obama, who also gobbled up major Wall Street funding when he ran in 2008 and 2012. But again, according to her, “President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year.”

Not. At. All.

So the solution to government corruption is simply to elect trustworthy, incorruptible candidates … like Hillary Clinton.

Well, call her half right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, campaign finance reform, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016

Accountability free trade & free markets general freedom government transparency moral hazard national politics & policies

Banking on Clinton

Hillary Clinton, Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, corruption, crony, presidential race, two-faced, 2 faced, illustration, Common Sense

I’ve been tough on Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont Senator and Democratic Party presidential candidate. Why? Because socialism is — to quote a current GOP candidate — “a disaster.”

But I appreciate his campaign for showing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for what she is, the ultimate establishment insider.

Even while, as SNL parodied, she seeks to co-opt Sanders’s progressivism.

Nowhere is Hillary’s have-it-both-ways mode of operation more obvious than in regard to Big Finance. She attacks the big banks, promoting her “very aggressive plan to rein in Wall Street.” Yet, she is supported politically and has been enriched personally by Wall Street firms. In 2014 and 2015 alone, Mrs. Clinton was paid $11 million dollars for speeches to various groups, including these financial interests.

On the campaign trail, Bernie has been calling on Mrs. Clinton to release transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms:

She gets paid $225,000 for a speech. Now you know that is a lot of money for an hour speech.… It must be mind-blowing speech, it must be a Shakespearean speech, it must be a speech that could educate and enlighten the entire world.

An anonymous attendee of Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs has characterized her remarks as “far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.” Another said making the transcript public “would bury her against Sanders.”

Understandably, Hillary refuses … until every other living person who has ever spoken a word to anyone on Wall Street does so first.

At his rallies, Bernie now throws his empty hands up into the air to release his non-existent speech transcripts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, banks, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016, Wall Street

Accountability general freedom ideological culture insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility

The Age of Clinton

Hillary Clinton, email, scandal, investigation, teflon

We could call our time The Age of Teflon, but that conjures up memory of Ronald Reagan — “the Teflon President” is what Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D‑Colo.) called the 40th Commander in Chief — and, please recall, Reagan had nothing on Bill Clinton.

Nicknamed “Slick Willie,” Clinton was the politician who really demonstrated what slipperiness is all about. Prez 42 had what it takes to get out of any scandal whatsoever, even criminal:

Bluster (never admit anything);
Lexical tomfoolery (convolve the epistemics with feints to metaphysics, say, about the meaning of “is”);
Distraction (bomb a foreign country to deflect attention):
Ad hominem (deny the charges because of the nefarious conspiracy of opponents); and
Relying upon followers, especially in the media, to deny all substance outright.

We have lived in the Age of Clinton ever since. Even the grossest enormities fail to fall heavily upon a politician who is, somehow (usually because of partisanship, but not always), impervious to the blemish of a crime. The accusations (even charges) don’t stick.

Now that American voters have the chance to anoint another Clinton to office, making a dynasty out of a done deal, we sort of just assume — by political inertia — that the Age of Clinton will continue, with invulnerability the only thing adhering to the most corrupt politician of our time, the Mrs. of the Age.

Yet, the FBI is investigating former Secretary of State Hillary “Smart Power” Clinton’s email server scandal. One of her subordinates, a tech guy, has been given immunity after extensive pleadings of the Fifth Amendment.

Could the Age of Clinton end with her prosecution?

Unlikely, given how partisanship now routinely trumps the rule of law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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