Presumptuous Politics : Oct 15, 2016

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Chelsea Clinton Cartoons

Why Clinton's Emails are not being Covered by CBS,ABC, CNN?

Voters who have relied on the network evening newscasts for information about the 2016 presidential candidates saw four times more airtime devoted to controversies involving presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump than to the scandals surrounding his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Indeed, the only Clinton scandal to receive more than a minimal amount of attention from the networks during the primaries was the ongoing investigation of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server and her mishandling of classified information while serving as Secretary of State. The networks paid little or no attention to a host of other Clinton controversies that likely would have been big news if they had been associated with her GOP opponent.
MRC analysts reviewed all 1,099 stories on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts which talked about the presidential campaign between January 1 through June 7, including weekends. This tally includes 950 full reports and interview segments; 66 short items read by the anchor; plus 83 stories on other topics that included some discussion of one or more of the candidates.
The overall amount of campaign airtime is extraordinary: 2,137 minutes of coverage, or more than one-fourth (26.1%) of all evening news airtime during this period, excluding commercials and teases.
Nearly half of that airtime (1,068 minutes) was spent talking about Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, compared to 583 minutes of coverage for Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, came in third, with 366 minutes of coverage, more than any of Trump’s GOP rivals.
Compared to Clinton, a much higher percentage of Trump’s airtime (40 percent, or 432 minutes) was spent discussing the controversies surrounding the Republican’s candidacy. Only 18 percent of Clinton’s coverage (105 minutes) was spent discussing similar controversies, as network reporters paid scant attention to stories that would have garnered far more airtime had Trump been involved.

For example, the lingering questions about Clinton’s handling of the 2012 Benghazi attack drew only 77 seconds of evening news airtime from January 1 through June 7. Clinton’s participation in a racially-charged comedy skit with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (about running on CP time — “cautious politician time”) was skipped by ABC and NBC’s evening broadcasts, getting just 51 seconds of airtime on the April 12 edition of the CBS Evening News.
The potential conflict-of-interest scandal surrounding the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State was given a paltry 44 seconds of coverage — half of which came when her socialist rival Bernie Sanders brought it up during the waning days of the Democratic primaries.
“Do I have a problem when a sitting Secretary of State and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments?” Sanders asked in a soundbite re-played on the June 6 Nightly News. “Do I have a problem with that? Yeah, I do.”
Neither ABC nor CBS mentioned Sanders complaint that night, nor did any follow up in the days that followed.
Clinton’s e-mail server scandal was the most-covered candidate controversy of the primary season, with more than 47 minutes of airtime. The only other Clinton controversy to crack the Top 20 was discussion of Bill Clinton’s past adultery and alleged mistreatment of women — a topic only covered because it was brought up by Trump.
And, most of the network coverage was framed not around the controversy of Clinton’s actual conduct, but the notion that Trump was going too far by raising the issue of the former President’s infidelity. On the May 19 Evening News, for example, CBS’s Nancy Cordes labeled it “harsh” of Trump to bring up the case of Juanita Broaddrick, who in 1999 accused Clinton of raping her in 1978. That same night, ABC’s David Muir said Trump was “proving nothing is off limits,” while NBC’s Andrea Mitchell accused Trump of engaging in “aggressive personal attacks.”

The other 18 controversies on the Top 20 list were all related to the GOP candidate: violence at some of Trump’s rallies (31 minutes); his racially-charged criticism of the judge in the Trump University fraud case (27 minutes); his history of liberal policy positions and shift to the left on some issues after his last GOP rival dropped out of the race (24 minutes); and history of sexist rhetoric and charges of crude behavior with women (22 minutes).
These are obviously valid topics for news coverage, but contrast the amount of network airtime Trump’s problems received with the same statistics for key controversies surrounding Hillary Clinton: her big money speeches to Wall Street banks, and her refusal to release transcripts of those speeches (7 minutes, 35 seconds); and her reliance on massive campaign contributions from the wealthy (6 minutes, 50 seconds).
When cameras caught Clinton angrily yelling at a Sanders supporter over the issue of contributions from those in the fossil fuel industry (“I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me!”) the flap drew just 72 seconds of coverage on the NBC Nightly News, 40 seconds of coverage on ABC’s World News Tonight, and a mere 16 seconds on the CBS Evening News.
When in May Clinton suggested on a radio show that she believed in space aliens (“There are enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting, you know, in their kitchen making them up”), only ABC’s World News Tonight bothered to tell viewers, with a light-hearted one minute, 43 second story on a Sunday night broadcast.
“Clinton’s enthusiasm is winning over one part of the electorate,” ABC correspondent David Wright wryly noted. “‘Finally,’ tweeted one sci-fi fan, ‘she has my vote!’”
If Donald Trump had suggested little green men had visited Earth, his comments likely would have been highlighted as evidence that the Republican candidate is unsuitable for the presidency.
The networks have left no stone unturned in their vetting of Trump. But this is a race between two candidates, and they have an equal obligation to report on the scandals, controversies and gaffes surrounding Hillary Clinton.

Ryan's High-Wire Act: Speaker struggling to navigate GOP tensions on Trump

Did Speaker Ryan misplay his dealing with Donald Trump?

When Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin initially balked at accepting the House speakership last fall, it was widely understood that his biggest headaches would come from the staunchly conservative members of the Republican conference, such as the lawmakers in the Freedom Caucus, who had routinely made life miserable for Ryan’s predecessor, John Boehner.
Instead, as Ryan closes out his first year as the top elected Republican in Congress, he finds himself at odds with the Republican Party’s controversial nominee for president, and struggling to navigate intra-party tensions that make what Boehner endured seem quaint by contrast.
“Paul Ryan is my friend,” GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence said on “Fox and Friends.” “But honestly, I'd like to see Republican leaders supporting the Republican nominee for president of the United States.”
Pence’s comments came shortly before Ryan addressed a group of College Republicans in Madison, Wisconsin, the speaker’s home state and the latest setting for Ryan’s high-wire act, which sees him balancing obligations to down-ballot candidates with the traditional support a speaker offers to his party’s nominee.
Facing growing discontent among his own conference for his recent treatment of Trump – whom the speaker effectively abandoned on Monday, following the release of an old audio tape on which Trump could be heard making lewd comments about kissing and groping women – Ryan lashed out at Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, calling her agenda for America “arrogant” and “condescending.”
In the America Clinton will refashion in her image, Ryan added, “There is no room to run, no chance to grow, or to fail for that matter. People are not needed, they are counted and sorted. This is how you can so casually classify whole groups of people as ‘baskets of deplorables.’”
In the same set of remarks, however, Ryan brandished the six-point policy plan that he and the GOP conference have developed over the course of the year and declared, “This is our party's vision for America” – a subtle but unmistakable assertion that Trump is not the face of today’s Republican Party.
And during the question-and-answer session, Ryan again appeared to keep his distance from the nominee: “I know many people are still making their choice. I know some people are avoiding making any choice at all. And I don't begrudge anybody for that.”
Trump, for his part, has alternated between vowing to work “arm in arm” with Ryan to defeat the “Obama-Clinton disaster" and blasting the speaker last Tuesday, in a Twitter post, as “weak,” “ineffective” and “disloyal.”
“If you sneeze, [Ryan] calls up and announces, 'Isn't that a terrible thing?'” Trump told Bill O’Reilly on “The O’Reilly Factor” that evening. “So look, I don't want his support, I don't care about his support.”
Ryan’s difficulties since taking office – manifest, for example, in the Republicans’ failure to bring a budget to the floor, an acute embarrassment for a speaker who formerly served as chairman of the budget committee – underscore the growing rift between GOP leaders and the GOP base. That rift was only magnified by the Republican electorate’s embrace of Trump in the primary season, when the real estate billionaire, a recent convert to conservatism, drew some 14 million votes, a record.
Republican leaders, however, have bristled at Trump’s mercurial style and ideological heresies, and have downright recoiled from his occasional use of vulgar language and the latest controversy to hit his campaign: the flood of allegations this week by women claiming Trump made unwanted sexual advances on them over the years, allegations the candidate has dismissed as lies.
Some have suggested that Ryan could have handled the difficult situation better; his disavowal of Trump on Monday, in response to the lewd audio recording, came on the day after Trump turned in a strong debate performance against Clinton and appeared, to many eyes, to have recovered from the controversy, or at least to have made up some lost ground.
“Paul Ryan didn't need to do that,” said Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, in an interview for “On the Record” with Brit Hume on October 10. “You know who doesn't do that and I think probably has the same generally low opinion of Trump as Paul Ryan does? And that's Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader.”
Most analysts, however, see Ryan – whose speakership has also included some successes, such as resolution of the so-called “doc fix” hole in Medicare funding and a bipartisan measure addressing Puerto Rico’s debt – contending with singular challenges that even Boehner, toppled by opponents from within his own conference, did not have to confront.
“Ryan is having a terrible time in this Trump chokehold,” said A.B. Stoddard, associate editor and columnist at RealClearPolitics. “If he distances himself permanently and completely from Trump, he fears – and his members fear – Trump voters will not turn out. They'll come and only vote for the top of the ticket, they won't support down-ballot Republicans, and that could imperil the majorities in the House and the Senate.
“If he embraces him,” Stoddard added, “in a way to try to enthuse those voters – as more and more allegations of groping and other sort of scandalous revelations come to the fore – it makes it more likely there is a Democratic wave in the House, and Ryan could lose his majority that way. So he really is in an untenable position.”

Former 'Black Men for Bernie' leader now backing Trump

While many analysts dismiss Donald Trump’s chances of winning over black voters, the Republican nominee has an unlikely ally making his case -- the founder of a group that once rallied black voters for Bernie Sanders.
Bruce Carter, who led "Black Men for Bernie," told FoxNews.com he had a change of heart after he traveled to urban communities and saw the levels of poverty in Democrat-controlled areas of the country.
“Once I got involved, I realized that the Democratic Party was operating as if they own the country, and that was a major turn off for me,” Carter said. “I didn’t want to represent a party that saw its people in that way.”
Carter, from Texas, has since formed “Trump for Urban Communities” – a grassroots organization he says is reaching out to black voters in big cities from Jacksonville, Fla., to Philadelphia, to Charlotte, N.C., seeking to convince first-time voters, working families and others to vote Republican in November.
“Donald Trump is the best presidential candidate, who I believe has the experience and the wherewithal to give urban communities economic and educational opportunities,” he said.
The task is a steep climb for Republicans. President Obama won 90 percent of the black vote in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton likewise is expected to sweep among the same group. Expectations among some analysts that black voters might abandon her in the primaries in favor of Sanders did not materialize -- her so-called "firewall" held.
Trump nevertheless has tried to make inroads, promising jobs, attacking Hillary Clinton for once referring to some young black criminals as “superpredators” and asking voters: “What do you have to lose?”
Even this outreach has been peppered with controversy. In the first presidential debate, he took heat for saying African-Americans and Hispanics are “living in hell.” Meanwhile, critics say his call for the return of controversial stop-and-frisk policies are also hurting his outreach to black voters who believe such policies disproportionately target them.
President Obama on Friday also mocked Trump's overall attempt to cast himself as a "populist." Noting Trump's billionaire status, Obama repeatedly said at a rally in Cleveland, "Come on, man."
Carter said while Trump's law-and-order rhetoric doesn't exactly help Trump in that area, he suggested the backlash may be exaggerated. Further, he said the Clintons are not as popular as they're made out to be.
However, Carter said Republicans need to do better, get on the ground and talk to people in those communities – something he says the Trump campaign, and Republicans in general, have been woeful at doing, and something he says "Trump for Urban Communities" is doing right now.
"I talk about poverty, unemployment rates and then I show them who they’ve been voting for, and I give them history," he said.
He says much of it depends on Republican willingness to engage directly in those communtiies.
“To use Donald Trump’s language -- What do the Republicans have to lose by investing in urban communities?”

Clinton campaign plotted to withhold Obama emails

Judicial Watch: Clinton endangered US and now lying about it

Hillary Clinton's campaign considered asking the White House to withhold any of her emails to or from President Obama on the same day Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, issued a subpoena for her records.
The revelation emerged in the seventh batch of emails obtained illegally from the inbox of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chair, and published Friday by WikiLeaks.
"Think we should hold emails to and from potus [sic]?" Podesta wrote to Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff, on March 4, 2015.
"That's the heart of his exec privilege," Podesta said. "We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I seems [sic] like they will."
Gowdy issued a subpoena for Clinton's Libya-related record on that same day.
Notes from the Fbi's closed investigative file, which were made public by the bureau last month, showed Obama had used a pseudonym when communicating with Clinton on her private server.
Huma Abedin, Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, expressed shock when she was shown copies of emails between Obama and Clinton during her Fbi interview. To date, emails between Clinton and Obama have not been made public.
In July, the White House exerted executive privilege over an undisclosed number of Benghazi-related documents and refused to provide them to Gowdy's committee. The move came four months after Clinton's campaign weighed whether to ask the White House to pursue such a strategy.

Emails show calculations behind Clinton trade deal waffling

Trump and Clinton spar over trade, NAFTA and TPP

Newly leaked emails show the political calculations that went into Hillary Clinton's decision to back away from supporting the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal aides privately conceded she would "ultimately" support.
The deliberations were revealed in hacked emails purportedly from Campaign Chairman John Podesta's account that WikiLeaks has published.
In one March 25, 2015, message shortly before Clinton entered the race, senior speechwriter Dan Schwerin sent senior staff, including Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri, a draft letter on trade.
“This draft assumes that she's ultimately going to support both TPA and TPP. It focuses on what needs to happen to produce a positive result with TPP, and casts support for [Trade Promotion Authority] as one of those steps,” he wrote.
At the time of the emails, Congress was preparing for a heated debate on what's known as trade promotion authority (TPA), which would give the White House power to fast-track deals like the TPP. However, Clinton primary foe Bernie Sanders was an ardent opponent of the Pacific nation trade pact, arguing it's bad for workers.
At the time, Clinton found herself in an awkward spot, having been a past supporter, as some union figures spoke out against the deal. In a November 2012 speech in Australia, Clinton infamously proclaimed that TPP “sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade.” The statement dogged Clinton throughout the primary campaign, and Republican Donald Trump since has repeatedly used it in debates and on the campaign trail.
Clinton would eventually back off her support, saying in an interview with PBS in October 2015, "I am not in favor of what I have learned about it. ... I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set." (According to her current website, Clinton would “reject trade agreements, like the TPP, that don’t meet high standards.”)
In an email right before Clinton's reversal, Schwerin acknowledged the difficult line the campaign was trying to walk.
“This is indeed a hard balance to strike, since we don’t want to invite mockery for being too enthusiastically opposed to a deal she once championed, or overclaiming how bad it is, since it’s a very close call on merits,” he wrote on Oct. 6, 2015.
This followed months of internal debate over the problems the TPP issue was causing with unions and voters.
In an April 13 email, pollster John Anzalone advised against “making this decision in a policy vacuum or just because we are concerned about a story of her changing her mind or taking on Obama.”
He went on to note the political peril of “getting on the wrong side of Labor on the only issue they care about has ramifications on the ground” in early primary states.
“I say we suck it up and be as definitive as possible from the beginning that we don’t like these deals. We will be right with voters and right with labor. We get no integrity gold star for staying pure on this issue because of one line if friggin [Hillary Clinton’s book] Hard Choices or because this is a key issue for a lame duck president,” he wrote.
Campaign Manager Robby Mook replied that “the boss won't be comfortable putting her foot down.”
Anzalone continued to press the political danger of angering labor. He said he's concerned the issue is “eating us alive for being on the wrong side and giving Progressives a real reason to try and push someone more weighty into the primary.”
As late as June 2015, Clinton was making the case internally for TPP, circulating a column by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in The Washington Post arguing that rejecting TPP would damage American leadership.
“Damning w[sic] faint praise but good arguments,” she told senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan. Podesta disagreed, saying the deal ran counter to the concerns of average Americans, while Sullivan stressed the importance to American power. In response, Clinton said Sullivan’s arguments would work with “more sophisticated audiences or interviews.”
The issue of TPP was the primary reason that the AFL-CIO executive committee recommended in July 2015 to delay its endorsement of Clinton until she had moved closer to their position on trade issues.
The Trump campaign seized Thursday on the email revelations, pointing to the March email acknowledging Clinton's continued support as evidence she "lied."
"Today’s email release reveals what we already knew, that Hillary Clinton supports TPP and TPA and she lied about it to the American people at the debate," Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement.

Clinton campaign persuaded Bill to cancel Wall Street speech over Hillary's opposition

Clinton attorneys answer questions in email lawsuit

WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton's campaign asked former President Bill Clinton to cancel a speech to a Wall Street investment firm last year because of concerns that the Clintons might appear to be too cozy with Wall Street just as the former secretary of state was about to announce her White House bid, newly released emails show.
Clinton aides say in hacked emails released Friday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks that Hillary Clinton did not want her husband to cancel the speech, but after a "cool down period" was eventually convinced that canceling was the right step.
Campaign manager Robby Mook said he realized canceling the lucrative speech would disappoint both Clintons but "it's a very consequential unforced error and could plague us in stories for months."
The Clintons' paid speeches have been an issue throughout the campaign, particularly Hillary Clinton's private speeches to Wall Street firms. Hillary Clinton earned about $1.5 million in speaking fees before launching her presidential campaign, while Bill Clinton reaped more than $5 million from banking, tech and other corporate interests, according to financial documents filed by Hillary Clinton.
The campaign has never released transcripts of Hillary Clinton's speeches, but the hacked emails did reveal excerpts flagged by her advisers as potentially concerning.
In the excerpts, Clinton talked about dreaming of "open trade and open borders" in the Western Hemisphere. She also says politicians sometimes need to have "both a public and a private position" on issues.
Bill Clinton was scheduled to speak to Morgan Stanley executives in April 2015, a few days after his wife was set to launch her bid for president.
"That's begging for a bad rollout," Mook wrote in a March 11, 2015, email.
In a later email, Mook says he feels "very strongly that doing the speech is a mistake" with serious potential consequences for Hillary Clinton's campaign. "People would (rightfully) ask how we let it happen."
Hillary Clinton was scheduled to campaign in Iowa, "where caucus goers have a sharply more negative view of Wall Street than the rest of the electorate," Mook wrote. "Wall Street ranks first for Iowans among a list of institutions that 'take advantage of every day Americans,' scoring twice as high as the general election electorate. ... This is a very big deal in my view."
Clinton's longtime aide, Huma Abedin, assured Mook the next day that Clinton was fine with canceling the speech, especially if Bill Clinton agreed. The candidate "just needed a cool down period," Abedin wrote.
The emails were among thousands published this week by WikiLeaks, which has been releasing a series of emails hacked from the accounts of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
U.S. intelligence officials last week blamed the Russian government for a series of breaches intended to influence the presidential election. The Russians deny involvement.
Podesta's hacked messages offer insight into the various strategies and responses considered by those close to Clinton as they grappled with pitfalls in her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, including the 2009 decision to use a private email server while serving as secretary of state.
In a separate email, Clinton aides discussed how to explain her 2001 support for an overhaul of the nation's bankruptcy system. Sanders was citing past criticism by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as evidence of Clinton's favoritism to Wall Street.
Clinton defended the vote in a TV interview earlier this year, saying she pursued language to ensure women received child support if a spouse went into bankruptcy. In a Feb. 7 email, adviser Ann O'Leary noted that Clinton had overstated her case: "She said women groups were all pressuring her to vote for it. Evidence does not support that statement."
Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri said Friday that the campaign has taken unspecified precautions to secure its emails. Asked whether officials were considering releasing all of Podesta's emails at once, Palmieri said, "That is what the Russians would like us to do and we are not going to do that."
Emails released Friday also show that Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, used a second alias to communicate with her mother's campaign: Anna James. Chelsea Clinton also used the alias Diane Reynolds, according to emails previously made public.