US Presidential Contenders

[Bearu]

I avoid the political debates because the people tend to ask asinine questions that appear never to reflect the realistic questions of a country. A hypothetical example: Interviewer: What do you believe remains the most significant challenges the country faces in the near future?
Candidates: The economy remains in shambles and the president must spur the congress to make realistic reforms for the betterment of the whole country.
What does the answer even mean? Why do a few businesses control the majority of our economic might?

[Rusty Edge]

Obviously I do Google searches on candidates every day. Today's [Sleezebag] headlines are too unusual to withhold. To be fair, the articles aren't nearly as interesting as the list.

*Donald [Sleezebag]'s poll watching talk spurs call for international monitors of US elections.

*Donald [Sleezebag] is abandoning every network but FOX.

* Melania [Sleezebag] threatens to sue news outlets.

* [Sleezebag]'s History undermines [Sleezebag]'s new outreach to Black voters.

* [Sleezebag] cancels Nevada, Colorado, Oregon events.

* 12-year old running [Sleezebag] campaign in Colorado.

* It sure sounds like Donald [Sleezebag] is considering his biggest flip-flop yet

[Rusty Edge]

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/24/the-government-needs-to-stop-stifling-economic-growth-gary-johnson-commentary.html

The government needs to stop stifling economic growth

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate for president
2 Hours Ago

The sharing economy has captivated the attention of so many users and participants because services like Uber and Lyft enable more efficiency and convenience than hailing a cab. Have a spare room to rent out? That's done simply and easily with Airbnb or HomeAway.


Technology is making it easier for all of us to be entrepreneurs — and that's a good thing.


What should be the government's role in looking at such services as new opportunity generators? It's simple: Government should stay out of the way, limiting its involvement to the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm."

But instead we're seeing established politicians team up with special interests in an effort to strangle new forms of enterprise and innovation from gaining traction — and threatening those special interests.

Politicians like Hillary Clinton look at sharing services like travel, ride-sharing, finance, staffing, and music and video streaming and see a problem. These "problems" are expected to grow from $15 billion to $335 billion in less than a decade, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It appears consumers and the marketplace view them more favorably.

Too many politicians pretend to believe companies are luring people to drive cars without giving them real jobs. She's decried this "gig economy" as "raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future."

I've got news for those politicians, including Hillary Clinton: The future is already here. It's a future of entrepreneurship.


As an entrepreneur who started a one-man handyman business in 1974, which I grew to be a more-than-1,000-person construction firm, I understand the power of working for yourself. I also shared the profits with my company, creating entrepreneurial opportunity for my own employees.

Millennials understand this mindset better than others. They've grown up in an on-demand world. Is it any surprise that two-thirds of them say that they want to be entrepreneurs at some point in their lives?


Entrepreneurship may be celebrated in the abstract — but too many politicians have no hesitation in using government power to stop innovation. The challenge has become so obstructive that one technology trade group, the Consumer Technology Association, has had to put together a "Disruptive Innovation Council" to specifically fight governments and established companies from strangling new businesses in the cradle.


Sometimes these politicians say they are protecting workers. They use words and phrases like "the hollowness of the Uber economy," in one critique in the Baltimore Sun, or "the Sharing Economy is Not Your Friend," from a piece in Vice.


But Uber has enabled hundreds of thousands of drivers to share rides. With its rival Lyft, they've finally brought competition to the regulation-bound taxicab market, where medallion owners enjoy monopoly profit from monopoly rents bound up in a crony-capitalist arrangement that barred people from simply connecting as willing buyers and sellers of a basic service.

And drivers don't necessarily want to be employees. Indeed, the flexibility of the sharing economy is one of the very keys to its success. In fact, more than half of drivers valued that freedom as the most important reason for doing it. About 8 in 10 Lyft drivers choose to drive 15 hours a week or less, and half of Uber drivers are on the road fewer than 10 hours a week.


Here's the dirty little secret: The establishment isn't really interested in making our lives easier or more convenient. To the contrary, their self- interests are best served by protecting us to death. Indeed, the Obama administration's Labor Department is so intent on tightening the classifications of independent contractors that soon there won't be any.


City after city is regulating and outright banning Airbnb — prohibiting homeowners from earning extra cash, much of which, ironically, would be spent in those same communities, providing jobs and, yes, tax revenues.


The same kind of special interest assault on entrepreneurship is happening under the name of occupational licensing. In the 1970s, only 10 percent of workers were subject to such licensing, a number that now totals 30 percent, according to a Morris M. Kleiner report. Lifting restrictions on occupational licensing is one of four keys to unlocking U.S. economic growth, according to the Cato Institute.

The entrepreneurial economy exemplified by companies like Uber and Airbnb is really only beginning. Besides the expected growth in nontraditional approaches to services like travel, ride-sharing and staffing, technology and entrepreneurs will soon take us to places where other services, such as health care, will be similarly transformed — if only government and the politicians will get out of the way.


Being ever an optimist, I am confident that even the government cannot forever stand in the way of an entrepreneurial transformation that consumers and the marketplace are so clearly demanding. And the result of that revolution will be really good for all of us, with the possible exception of recalcitrant politicians and their special interest patrons.

Commentary by Gary Johnson, a two-term governor of New Mexico and the Libertarian Party candidate for president. His running mate is former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld. Read more about their campaign at www.johnsonweld.com. Follow him on Twitter @GovGaryJohnson.

[Rusty Edge]

This page is proving a challenge to cut and paste. You might want to see the graphics if you care about Stein. I've said before that I think she is tap dancing and parsing some medical science to please her party. Or sounding alarmist to draw attention to herself and her issues. That said, I think she is being mischaracterized in the media because she makes Hillary look bad, and cuts into her support.

http://www.inquisitr.com/3444426/jill-stein-is-not-anti-science/

Opinion
August 23, 2016

Jill Stein is Not Anti-Science, People!

Caitlin Johnstone


The following article is entirely the opinion of Caitlin Johnstone and does not reflect the views of the Inquisitr.


Another email leak from the neoliberal think tank has revealed a calculated agenda to slander Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein with rumors that they know to be entirely unfounded, further illustrating just how terrified the Democratic party is of a progressive takeover. Professional neoliberal Robert Naiman circulated a list of attack editorials against Stein among his drooling lackeys, prefaced by the following statement.


“
“If you have a lot of Facebook friends, you may have recently noticed a high level of activity on your Facebook feed by Jill Stein acolytes.

If so, you may find the following links useful to throw them off their game. No warranty, express or implied. You don’t have to prove that Jill Stein is an anti-science conspiracy theorist. You just have to say, ‘There are unanswered questions about whether Jill Stein is an anti-science conspiracy theorist.'”

In other words, “Deliberately cast baseless suspicion on her.”

So I hope that clarifies what’s happening here a bit. If you’re one of the people going around flinging the term “anti-science” around in connection with Jill Stein’s name, those may feel like your own thoughts, and you may even labor under the delusion that you came up with them yourself, but in actuality they are a pre-packaged mind-virus cooked up by professional slander experts like Robert Naiman. A little critical thinking is all it takes to inoculate yourself, though.

Here’s a video of Dr. Stein clearly putting to bed the baseless accusation that she might be anti-vaccination in some way at her CNN town hall last week:

*****

There are 8 or ten more paragraphs getting into the details, but this laptop isn't gonna make it happen today.

[Rusty Edge]

Gleanings-

* Johnson confirmed on Ohio ballot as an independent.

* Speaking of independents, Evan McMullin is having a rough go of it. I mentioned before that he's not getting a lot of media coverage. He won't be on a lot of ballots, either. Oh sure he had some money and volunteers, and amazingly he has already made the ballot on 5 states. The trouble is that Tennessee, with the low, low hurdle of 275 names won't let him on the ballot. Why? Because he has no declared VP running mate. I overlooked that. It kinda tells me that he's not very serious. He's blown a lot of filing deadlines, and is talking about getting on the ballots through write-in campaigns, court fights, and fringe party endorsements. I can tell you that that is not a cost-effective approach.
Me,  I kinda want my elected execs to be cost conscious long term planners.

*“Well, I’m going to announce something over the next two weeks, but it’s going to be a very firm policy,” [Sleezebag] told WPEC.

“We’re very, very firm on immigration,” he added. “We’re going to build a wall, it’s got to be a very powerful wall. But we want people to come into our country, but we want them to come in legally, but we’re going to be very, very strong on immigration.”

*

[Buster's Uncle]

 

[Rusty Edge]

From the Washington Post, which is rather pro Hillary and DNC

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/23/now-hillary-has-a-big-clinton-foundation-problem-too/

The Fix
Now Hillary has a big Clinton Foundation problem, too

Hillary Clinton has never been great at understanding that, in politics, perception almost always equals reality. Witness this story that just broke from the Associated Press:


More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

So, er, okay.

Let's stipulate two things here before I go any further:

1. Correlation is not causation.

2. Quid pro quos are very, very, very hard to prove.

But, COME ON, MAN. It is literally impossible to look at those two paragraphs and not raise your eyebrows. Half of all of the nongovernmental people Clinton either met with or spoke to on the phone during her four years at the State Department were donors to the Clinton Foundation! HALF.

And those 85 people donated $156 million, which, according to my calculator, breaks down to an average contribution just north of $1.8 million. (Yes, I know that not everyone gave the same amount.)

No one is alleging that the Clinton Foundation didn't (and doesn't) do enormous amounts of good around the world. It does. (That's for you, my dearest Twitter haters.) But what the Clinton Foundation does with the money it receives isn't the point here. At issue is whether there was a too-fuzzy line between Clinton's work at the State Department and the contributions being made to the foundation. And while nothing in the AP story is proof of any wrongdoing, it is proof of bad judgment.

There's no planet on which this sentence could ever be good for a politician running for office -- much less the presidency: "More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation."

What's remarkable to me is that no one -- not Clinton, not her most loyal lieutenant, Huma Abedin, not Bill Clinton -- saw the possible appearance of a conflict of interest inherent in this setup.  Especially because Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions were never not a thing when she was at the State Department. It was always a possibility that she would run again for president. And yet, this.

The argument from Clinton's campaign and her loyalists to this latest news will go something like this: She met with these people because they had legitimate business before the State Department. Whether or not they donated to the Clinton Foundation was not part of her calculations for deciding whether to take a meeting or a phone call. The donations are purely coincidental.

Simplify that line of defense and you get this: Trust us. Trust us that donations to the Clinton Foundation were totally isolated from Clinton's official business at State. It's impossible to prove us right. But trust us.

That's exactly the argument that Clinton is making when it comes to the 30,000-plus emails that were permanently deleted from her private email server because her team of lawyers deemed them entirely personal in nature. Even though those lawyers didn't read the emails and we know from FBI Director James B. Comey that several thousand work-related emails that Clinton didn't turn over were found in other places, we need to simply trust Clinton that this was all done on the up and up.

[ there was a graphic showing that 50 percent of the Clinton e-mails were withheld as personal and private, 44 percent released to state dept., including  state.gov addresses, and 5 percent released to state department with other addresses. ]

To be clear: I have no evidence -- none -- that Clinton broke any law or did anything intentionally shady. But, man oh man, does this latest news about the Clinton Foundation cloud her campaign's attempts to paint the charity group and her State Department as totally separate and unconnected entities.

If you are Donald [Sleezebag] -- or any Republican -- trying to sell the idea that the Clintons are and always have operated on a "pay to play" model, you just got a gift more amazing than you could have ever hoped to get.  [Sleezebag] has to date looked any number of gift horses in the mouth. Will he do it again?
*****
Rusty Commentary- When I dug into the e-mail thing months ago, I figured that the Clinton Foundation was going to be the real issue, maybe even the real reason she had her private server in the first place... well that and 1/4 million dollar speaking gigs. But I didn't anticipate this hitting the fan until after the election, but before inauguration day.

I think it's a mischaracterization that nobody foresaw a problem with conflict of interest and the Clinton Foundation. In fact Obama did. Hillary promised complete transparency. I think she only delivered a report to Obama the first year, didn't have independent audits, and revised multiple years of tax returns as soon as questions were raised about the Foundation's sources. This coupled with the claim of a Saudi Prince ( suddenly pulled from the internet ) that the Saudi royal family had funded 20% of Clinton's presidential campaign formed my opinion that the Foundation was a slush fund.

But as I readily admit, I am biased against her, and don't believe much of anything she says.

[E_T]

I don't think I have seen anyone (here) supporting the Greens, so...

[Bearu]

What kind of satanic shenanigans would occur with a romantic relationship between the Hildabeast and the pig? What kind of salacious imagery comes into the mind of a demented person? Every time I hear the two politicians from a media source I think about the following songs  (I think of the whole matter in a facetious manner):

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7aLyFgYPaY" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7aLyFgYPaY</a>

[Rusty Edge]

I don't think I have seen anyone (here) supporting the Greens, so...

No. But it is an international forum, and I'm trying to be respectful.

Well, frankly, the Greens are lefty extremists by my standards, and I wish they would go away. I don't want their party established and if they were entirely out of the picture Johnson might be at the critical 15% by now.   However, on Isidewith Jill is a distant second for me, probably because she's not the authoritarian warmongering crony capitalist drug warrior that ClinTrump is.

So sometimes I think she deserves to be heard, and I always take issue when somebody's being mis-represented in the press. It's hard enough to get your positions out there so that the voters can make informed choices as it is.

[Bearu]

I think we should give the green environmentalists some credit because the party wants to reduce the number of environmental disasters that result from an industrialized economy (Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill anyone?).

[E_T]

Gary Johnson's Interview on the Five FNC 8/23/16

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k566Xb7Jb_E" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k566Xb7Jb_E</a>

[E_T]

I don't think I have seen anyone (here) supporting the Greens, so...

No. But it is an international forum, and I'm trying to be respectful.

Well, frankly, the Greens are lefty extremists by my standards, and I wish they would go away. I don't want their party established and if they were entirely out of the picture Johnson might be at the critical 15% by now.   However, on Isidewith Jill is a distant second for me, probably because she's not the authoritarian warmongering crony capitalist drug warrior that ClinTrump is.

So sometimes I think she deserves to be heard, and I always take issue when somebody's being mis-represented in the press. It's hard enough to get your positions out there so that the voters can make informed choices as it is.

Ditto

[Rusty Edge]

Johnson actually got some props from Salon for that encounter on "The Five"

Due to hardware issues, I won't attempt to cut and paste any articles today.

GLEANINGS-

* Johnson has adapted his position on vaccines to fit the science, coming down on the public health side and alienating personal choice Libertarians and anti-vaxers.

* Rather than open the books on the Clinton Foundation to prove that Hillary's State Department was never for sale, she has instead gone on the counter-offensive against [Sleezebag].

* [Sleezebag] is sounding like Jeb Bush on immigration, which [Sleezebag] at the time described as "Weak on immigration".

*[Sleezebag] got a negative re-action on the policy change , and in something that reminds me of his abortion interview with Chris Matthews, has stated other positions since so that in reality.... I have no idea where he stands on immigration

* John McCain leads his Trumpian challenger in the polls 56-32, with the primary on Tuesday. The challenger is getting ugly, suggesting that McCain is close to death because he is 80, even though his 104 year old mother is still alive.

* Bernie has rolled out his advocacy group "Our Revolution". Surprisingly, it is a 501(c)4 ... a dark money PAC designed to accept large amounts of money anonymously. Also he has hired his former campaign manager, who was accused of wasting money and creating a hostile work environment. Whichever the reason - 8 staffers quit before it even launched.

*A Quinnipiac poll says that 62% want Johnson included in the debates

[E_T]

The newsies won't be posting that poll result anytime soon...