The Republican civil war was supposed start this week.
Instead, a ferocious struggle has erupted on the left over the smoldering remains of the Democratic Party.
Liberals are seething over the election and talking about launching a Tea Party-style revolt. They say it’s the only way to keep Washington Democrats connected to the grassroots and to avoid a repeat of the 2016 electoral disaster, which blindsided party elites.
Progressives believe the Democratic establishment is responsible for inflicting Donald Trump upon the nation, blaming a staid corporate wing of the party for nominating Hillary Clinton and ignoring the Working Class voters that propelled Trump to victory.
Liberals interviewed by The Hill want to see establishment Democrats targeted in primaries, and the “Clinton-corporate wing” of the party rooted out for good.
Her reliance on Hollywood endorsements reflected a deeper problem in the Democratic Party: superficial progressivism packaged as real social justice.
BY SARAH JONES
November 10, 2016
Hillary Clinton will not be our first woman president, a symbolic blow made more painful by the fact that she lost to a raging misogynist and sexual predator. Donald Trump is now set to preside over a unified Republican government deeply antagonistic to abortion rights, marriage equality, and healthcare access. This will almost certainly be disastrous for women, but according to exit polls, 53 percent of white women voted for him anyway.
The shock and anger over Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House has triggered a flood of calls on Twitter and other social media outlets for the president-elect to be assassinated — and authorities will investigate all threats deemed to be credible, The Post has learned.
Trump met Thursday with President Obama in the Oval Office, with the Republican businessman calling the hour-plus session a “great honor.” Obama said they had an “excellent” and “wide-ranging” conversation while urging all people to “now come together.”
But that message of inclusion was apparently lost in social media circles, particularly Twitter, where a simple search can reveal dozens and dozens of calls to gun down the next leader of the free world. Some posts called for both Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence to be assassinated, and there’s even an #AssassinateTrump hashtag.
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
Candidate Donald Trump railed against what he calls the “dishonest media.” Now, President Trump will have to decide whether to do something about it.
Trump has already called for tougher libel laws and has threatened to sue newspapers. While it will be hard for President Trump to take direct action that makes it easier to sue or silence news outlets, his appointees will preside over federal agencies including the Federal Communications Commission that oversee media ownership. The Justice Department can block industry mergers, issue subpoenas to news organizations and obtain search warrants.
Perhaps more importantly, Trump is challenging the legitimacy of traditional media at a time of low public standing and great financial stress for the industry, especially newspapers. In September, a Gallup poll found that just 32 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media, the lowest level in the poll’s history.
NEWARK — State Democrats offered no evidence that a group listed by Homeland Security as among militia extremists planned to intimidate minority voters on Election Day, a federal court judge ruled Monday.
The New Jersey Democratic State Committee had sought to bar the New Jersey Oath Keepers from monitoring polling places, arguing that its true intent was to discourage people, particularly minorities, from voting.
World News Headlines Today
Ami on the Street: Are voter ID laws racist and suppress the black vote? Satirist Ami Horowtiz goes to UC Berkeley and Harlem to find out.
In this video released by Project Veritas Action, a top Democratic donor is caught on camera disparaging members of the African American community at a fundraiser for North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Deborah Ross. In the video, prominent Ross donor Benjamin Barber expresses his opinion about blacks who vote Republican by comparing them to Nazis.
The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
The story, as originally recounted by James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus of The Wall Street Journal, was, of itself, deeply troubling. In March 2009, after meeting with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on behalf of Switzerland’s most powerful banking institution, UBS. The IRS, which at that time was seeking the identity of wealthy Americans who had stashed some $20 billion in 52,000 tax evading UBS accounts, then agreed that the Swiss bank need only turn over information on 4,450 accounts. Afterwards, UBS increased its previous $60,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation ten-fold. By the end of 2014, UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation totaled $600,000. UBS also “paid former President Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”
Those facts, of themselves, raise disturbing questions. Did a bank that still ranks as “the world’s biggest wealth manager” and has at its disposal a bevy of economists and law firms have a legitimate reason for paying Bill Clinton $1.5 million in speaking fees? Or was the $1.5 million and the tenfold increase in Clinton Foundation donations a reward for the former secretary of State’s intervention? If the latter, that reward would have, under federal law (18 U.S.C. § 201(c)(1)(A)), amounted to an illicit bribe.
Project Veritas Action has released the third video in a multi-part series that is sending shockwaves through the DNC and the Clinton campaign. The first video explained the dark secrets and the hidden connections and organizations the Clinton campaign uses to incite violence at Trump rallies. The second video exposed a diabolical step-by-step voter fraud strategy discussed by top Democratic operatives and showed one key operative admitting that the Democrats have been rigging elections for fifty years. This latest video takes this investigation even further.
Part III of the undercover Project Veritas Action investigation dives further into the back room dealings of Democratic politics. It exposes prohibited communications between Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC and the non-profit organization Americans United for Change. And, it’s all disguised as a duck. In this video, several Project Veritas Action undercover journalists catch Democracy Partners founder directly.
Group linked to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe donated nearly half a million dollars to 2015 state Senate candidate
By
DEVLIN BARRETT
Updated Oct. 24, 2016 4:41 p.m. ET
The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.
Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.
The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 worth of support to Dr. McCabe’s campaign in the form of mailers, according to the records. That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe’s control or strongly influenced by him. The figure represents more than a third of all the campaign funds Dr. McCabe raised in the effort.
Earlier this morning we wrote about the obvious sampling bias in the latest ABC / Washington Post poll that showed a 12-point national advantage for Hillary. Like many of the recent polls from Reuters, ABC and The Washington Post, this latest poll included a9-point sampling bias toward registered democrats.
“METHODOLOGY – This ABC News poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone Oct. 20-22, 2016, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 874 likely voters. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 36-27-31 percent, Democrats – Republicans – Independents.”
Of course, while democrats may enjoy a slight registration advantage of a couple of points, it is nowhere near the 9 points reflected in this latest poll.
Meanwhile, we also pointed out that with huge variances in preference across demographics one can easily “rig” a poll by over indexing to one group vs. another. As a quick example, the ABC / WaPo poll found that Hillary enjoys a 79-point advantage over Trump with black voters. Therefore, even a small “oversample” of black voters of 5% could swing the overall poll by 3 full points. Moreover, the pollsters don’t provide data on the demographic mix of their polls which makes it impossible to “fact check” the bias…convenient.
James O’Keefe and Project Veritas are filing a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The decision comes amid increasing media coverage of the two videos released by O’Keefe, which expose apparently illicit actions by a group of political actors associated with the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the White House.
The establishment media was forced to cover O’Keefe’s videos after one subject, Robert Creamer, announced he would quit working for the DNC. This break came a day after the first video release prompted another subject, Scott Foval, to leave his job with another Democratic political group, Americans United for Change.
James O’Keefe told Breitbart News exclusively:
As the chairman of Project Veritas, our work is financially independent and beholden to nobody. Our work is funded by thousands of contributors, small, medium, and large. What I have learned about our media – and it’s frightening – is that almost everyone is compromised. Media companies are beholden to stockholders and I have sources that I am trying to get to go on the record to explain that these companies are afraid of reporting this story for fear of political retaliation. If the public knew the truth, I think it would change everything about American politics.
O’Keefe’s complaint states:
This criminal conspiracy involves the knowing and willful creation of coordinated expenditures from prohibited corporate sources. As is detailed numerous times in the Veritas transcript, attached as EXHIBIT A, the supposedly independent speech and actions of third-party groups were directed, controlled, or puppeteered by HFA or the DNC. Indeed, the record establishes not just simple violations of the FECA’s coordination provisions, but ongoing knowing and willful evasion of federal election law requirements through a complicated scheme. Because this conspiracy involves large numbers of employees, heightened travel, production, and distribution costs and because of the nationwide scale of the operation, upon information and belief, this triggers criminal penalties under 52 U.S.C. § 30109(d)(1)(A)(i).
By failing to abide by the law, these respondents misled the public about the true identity of speakers and funding sources for political protests and advocacy campaigns . This sort of evasion undermines the public’s trust in the electoral process and allows elite political operatives to operate above the law.
Note: This story has been updated with additional information
The following is a news media analysis and commentary
Regardless of who is your chosen – or least favorite – presidential candidate, independent minds should be concerned about the latest revelations in the news media’s unseemly relationships with government and political actors. While there are many responsible journalists working today, inside documents and leaks have exposed serious lapses constituting the most far-reaching scandal our industry has known. It’s our very own Newsgate.
Compromised reporting has always existed as a result of covert collaborations between reporters and political officials—Democrats and Republicans alike. For example, in my new book out next year, The Smear, I’ll report on instances of improper collusion that surfaced during the Bush administration. The most recent available evidence is heavy on Democrat-ties due to the nature of the available documents and leaks.
It can be argued that some individual accounts can be rationalized and are not serious breaches of ethics. But taken as a whole, it’s easy to see how we as journalists have done a poor job protecting ourselves from being co-opted by organized interests, often ones that are paid and politically-motivated. Whether we realize it or not, they’ve figured out how to exploit the media and use us to publish their propaganda. It implies a broad and growing trend that has seriously undermined the credibility of the news industry.
Opinion reporters and those who work for obviously ideological news groups are entitled to publish party propaganda. It’s one matter to provide viewpoint journalism. But it’s quite another for us to act as a tool of any interest, publishing narratives or talking points upon suggestion or demand, without disclosing we’ve done just that.
