 |
| Do not throw rocks if you live in a glass house. |
Conservative Blogger
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Jon Voight defends Trump remarks, blasts Robert De Niro for 'ugly rant'
Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight took to social media Saturday to defend Republican candidate Donald Trump's controversial remarks about women and criticize fellow movie star Robert De Niro for making disparaging remarks about the real estate mogul.
"Midnight Cowboy" star Voight, who has supported several Republican politicians over the years, said on Twitter that Trump's remarks to "Access Hollywood" host Billy Bush in 2005 "were not as damaging as Robert DeNiro’s [sic] ugly rant. Trump’s words did not hurt anyone."
Voight also said of the recorded comments, which were first disclosed by The Washington Post Friday, "I don’t know of too many men who haven’t expressed some sort of similar sexual terms toward women, especially in their younger years."
De Niro lashed out at Trump in a video released Friday as part of a get-out-the-vote project. In it, the "Raging Bull" star said of Trump, "he's a punk, he's a dog, he's a pig, he's a con, a bulls--- artist, a mutt who doesn't know what he's talking about."
"It makes me so angry that this country has gotten to this point that this fool, this bozo, has wound up where he has," De Niro added. "He talks how he'd like to punch people in the face? Well, I'd like to punch him in the face."
Voight concluded his Twitter spurt by "calling for all Trump supporters to express their outrage and anger against DeNiro [sic] and all of the Republican turncoats against Trump. Let Donald Trump know we are completely behind him, and may God give him the strength to continue his calling.”
Voight narrated a biographical video of Trump that was used to introduce the GOP nominee at this summer's Republican National Convention. De Niro had no immediate response to Voight's tweets.
Residents debate Hispanic neighborhood changing street signs into Spanish
When Hispanic residents of downtown Allentown want to grab a bite, get their hair cut or shop for groceries, they often head to Seventh Street — but they don't call it that. To them, it's Calle Siete.
A councilman wants to honor the city's growing Hispanic population by installing decorative Spanish-language street signs on one of its main commercial thoroughfares, where a profusion of Latino-owned restaurants, barbershops and corner stores reflects the rapidly changing demographics of the state's third-largest city. Hispanics now represent nearly half the population of 120,000.
But where Democratic Councilman Julio Guridy and other residents and business owners on Seventh Street see the Calle Siete signs as a small but long overdue gesture of respect, others call the proposal unnecessary and divisive.
Critics also say the proposal for the signs is a distraction from issues of poverty, drugs, crime and lack of opportunity in Allentown's urban core.
"With all the problems this community has, please don't talk to me about signs," said John Rosario, 54, who moved to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic about four decades ago and owns a Seventh Street insurance, tax and real estate business. "If you really want to help somebody, roll up your sleeves, come down here and let's talk about it."
A city council committee tabled the sign proposal for more discussion after dozens of people showed up at a public meeting this week to voice support and opposition. Guridy hopes to bring it up for a vote in a month.
The debate in Allentown would have been unimaginable not so long ago, when Hispanics were a tiny minority. For much of its history, the city, an hour's drive north of Philadelphia, was a bustling industrial center populated largely by European immigrants and their descendants.
As manufacturing declined, so did the population. Then, drawn in part by cheap housing, Hispanics began swelling Allentown's numbers again. The Latino population has more than doubled since 2000.
Guridy said the Hispanic community has contributed to Allentown's efforts to remake its economy and deserves to be recognized.
"It is a good thing for Allentown because it provides a sense of pride, and a sense of belonging, to the Hispanic community, who have been working hard and contributing to this community, and who feel alienated because they are not recognized for their contributions," he said.
Inside Seventh Street's bustling Los Compadres Barber Shop, Steven Castillo, 27, views the Spanish-language signs as a good marketing tool, no different from cities that boast Chinatowns or Little Italys.
"When you want Spanish food in Allentown, where do you go? Calle Siete," he said.
Zack Alali, 48, a Syrian immigrant who moved to the United States about 25 years ago, opened Casa Dollar on Seventh Street to cater to the Hispanic population. He said Calle Siete simply reflects the reality of what the street has become.
"It's just a little appreciation for the people here," Alali said. "It's just a name."
But the controversy goes deeper than those two words.
For some, it's about language and culture. Shaniqua Andrews, 25, who lives a block from Seventh Street and works in a warehouse, said her co-workers mostly speak Spanish and her supervisor typically gives instructions in Spanish. She said she resents having to ask for them in English.
"It makes me upset," said Andrews, who's black. "They should come here with the mindset that it's America."
Nigel Farage: Trump 'Not Running to Be Pope--He's Running For President'
Former United Kingdom Independence Party chairman and leader of England's 'Brexit' campaign Nigel Farage discussed Donald Trump's lewd remarks about women, and what effect it would have on his campaign going forward, on the Cost of Freedom.
"It's going to be pretty ugly tomorrow," Farage said of Sunday evening's debate.
"The sad thing is the big policy stuff...goes down the agenda a bit," he told Neil Cavuto.
"This is alpha male boasting. It's the kind of thing --if we're honest--that men do [on occasion]," he said, adding that he found the remarks "ugly."
"There are going to be Republican candidates running for the hills, [putting their] own interest ahead of the good of the party," he said.
By midday Saturday, a number of GOP Senators had denounced and distanced themselves from Trump, including Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Michael Crapo (R-Idaho), as well as number of other high-profile Republicans, including former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R-N.J.) Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Carly Fiorina.
Farage said Trump should take time at the debate to publicly atone once more for his actions in the past: "I behaved in a...boorish way. I apologize...let's talk about real issues," the MEP suggested.
"At least theres an honesty about Trump...he is what he is...he's not running to be Pope, he's running for president of the United States," Farage added, noting criticisms of Hillary Clinton's perceived dishonesty.
After Trump tape, Clinton WikiLeaks dump here’s what’s next, America
With one month to go, I’ll make two predictions about the presidential race.
First, Donald Trump isn’t leaving the race, and indeed seems oblivious to the storm of criticism surrounding him.
“I haven’t heard from anyone saying I should drop out, and that would never happen, never happen,” Trump told the New York Times on Saturday. “That’s not the kind of person I am. I am in this until the end.”
Second, look for more October surprises in hairpin curves in the course of the race. The simultaneous leaks of Donald Trump’s lewd remarks and the publishing of excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches are only the beginning.
We’re going to see the biggest mud bath in American history. The problem for Donald Trump is that his problems will likely get more attention and do more damage to him than Hillary’s.
If the presidential race is decided by October surprises, sex almost certainly tops money. Look at how Trump’s sex tape has overshadowed the leaks of Hillary Clinton’s speech transcripts. "The human brain is hardwired to understand sex stories a lot better than stories involving numbers," says Los Angeles public relations specialist Michael Levine.
See the Fox News 2016 battleground prediction map and make your own election projections. See Predictions Map →
He also professed shock when Stern told him he was faithful to his wife: “You’re kidding. Really. What’s that all about?
Trump could also be buffeted by the leaking of more of his confidential tax-returns. After all, someone in the IRS did precisely that in 2012, illegally leaking tax information about Mitt Romney.
Trump himself criticized Romney for delaying release of his tax returns, saying he “was hurt very badly” by that.
Meanwhile, portions of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails that were deleted but recovered by the FBI were released on Friday. They indicate that top Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were involved in planning private speeches on foreign policy for Bill Clinton while they were on the State Department’s payroll -- a clear conflict of interest.
Excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s series of well-paid speeches to the investment firm Goldman Sachs are embarrassing.
She minimized the role of banks in the 2008 economic collapse, admited she’s out of touch with the middle class and said she has “both a public and a private position” on key economic issues.
She also told Brazilian bankers that “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future,” “Open borders” is a common term describing largely unrestrained immigration, something Hillary claims to oppose.
But Hillary could have more headaches. WikiLeaks has already released a slew of emails purloined from Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, hints that new revelations could involve more deleted emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server and could be related to the close ties between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
Peter Schweizer, the author of an expose on the Foundation called “Clinton Cash,” told me: “The activities of Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state intersect with the favor-seeking of the Clinton Foundation. It is strange that so few of her publicly released emails touch on the Clinton Foundation. Maybe the private ones do.”
Speculation about additional October surprises is rampant among political observers now. No one knows for sure how much impact other October surprises of leaked information could have. But clearly anything is possible in this cut-throat year of political surprises.
That’s why polls are only of so much use – they may be dramatically overcome by events on the ground.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Billy Bush
People might recognize Bush from his new gig on the "Today" show or "Access Hollywood." But there is, of course, another part of his bio that is thick with irony: He's a member of the Bush family. Yes, that Bush family.
Billy Bush is first cousins with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was favored to win the Republican nomination before Trump came along and started calling him "low-energy" and attacking him daily on the stump.
Email shows MSNBC producer gushing over Clinton in segment pitch
 |
| Email 'boxes' in Clinton case AWOL |
The April 2015 email, obtained by DC Leaks and reported by The Daily Caller, shows “All in with Chris Hayes” producer Sheara Braun pitching a “Hillary Clinton for Milennials” segment to the Clinton campaign in order to get an aide to appear. Braun presents the segment as one that would present Clinton controversies of the 90s in a positive light – referring to them as “crap and nonsense.”
"The point of the segment is basically to inform young people about all of the crap and nonsense that Sec. Clinton and President Clinton (but mostly Sec. Clinton) had to face back in the 90s when President Clinton was running for office," Braun says to Clinton campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod, "...everything from cookie-gate to stand-by-your-man-gate to Hillarycare."
The producer concludes the pitch for the show with a breathless expression of admiration for the Democratic nominee.
"The point isn’t to dwell on the past but the point is to talk about this amazing, intelligent woman who probably faced more nonsense back in the day because she is a woman...and she continues to have to face it," Braun says..
"She is smarter than most men and more qualified than most men to be president," she says.
It was not immediately clear if an aide did appear on the segment in question.
Clinton called for 'open trade and open borders' in private, paid speeches
 |
| WikiLeaks appears to reveal Clinton's Wall Street speeches |
WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton told bankers behind closed doors that she favored "open trade and open borders" and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help reform the U.S. financial sector, according to transcripts of her private, paid speeches leaked Friday.
The leaks were the result of another email hacking intended to influence the presidential election.
Excerpts of the speeches given in the years before her 2016 presidential campaign included some blunt and unguarded remarks to her private audiences, which collectively had paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees. Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The excerpts were included in emails exchanged among her political staff, including Campaign Chairman John Podesta, whose email account was hacked. The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of Podesta's emails. It wasn't immediately clear who had hacked Podesta's emails, though the breach appeared to cover years of messages, some sent as recently as last month.
Among the emails was a compilation of excerpts from Clinton's paid speeches in 2013 and 2014. It appeared campaign staff had read all Clinton's speeches and identified passages that could be potentially problematic for the candidate if they were to become public.
One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her "dream" is "a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders" and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America "would mean for everybody in this room."
See the Fox News 2016 battleground prediction map and make your own election projections. See Predictions Map →
Podesta posted a series of tweets Friday night, calling the disclosures a Russian hack and raising questions about whether some of the documents could have been altered.
"I'm not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump," Podesta wrote. "Don't have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked."
Podesta's comments came just hours after U.S. officials publicly accused the Russian government of directing cyberattacks on political organizations and American citizens in an attempt to interfere with U.S. elections.
The joint statement from the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department cited disclosures of "alleged hacked emails" on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks as being "consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."
The statement didn't refer by name to the affected political institutions, but federal authorities are investigating cyberattacks on the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement, "It's not hard to see why she fought so hard to keep her transcripts of speeches to Wall Street banks paying her millions of dollars secret."
The emails released Friday included exchanges between Podesta and other Clinton insiders, including campaign manager Robby Mook. Most were routine, including drafts of Clinton speeches, suggested talking points for campaign surrogates and suggested tweets to be sent out from Clinton's account.
The excerpts include quotes from an October 2013 speech at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which Clinton conceded that presidential candidates need the financial backing of Wall Street to mount a competitive national campaign.
"Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it," Clinton said. "New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it's also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy."
In the same speech, Clinton was also deferential to the New York finance industry, exhorting wealthy donors to use their political clout for patriotic rather than personal benefit. She also spoke of the need to include Wall Street perspectives in financial reform.
"The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry," Clinton said.
In an April 2013 speech to the National Multifamily Housing Council, Clinton said politicians must balance "both a public and a private position" while making deals. Clinton gave an example from the movie "Lincoln," and the deal-making that went into passage of the 13th Amendment, a process she compared to sausage-making.
"It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be," Clinton said. "But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."
Clinton's speeches often touched on technology and privacy. In an April 2014 speech to JPMorgan, she denounced National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for going abroad, saying, "if he really cared about raising some of these issues and stayed right here in the United States, there's a lot of whistleblower protections."
But she told her audience that her time in the public eye left her sympathetic to privacy concerns.
"As somebody who has had my privacy scrutinized and violated for decades, I'm all for privacy, believe me," she said.
Speaking on international affairs, Clinton's comments were largely in line with her positions as secretary of state, if sometimes more blunt.
"The Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on Earth over the course of the last 30 years," she told the Jewish United Fund at a 2013 dinner.
The speech transcripts were produced under an agreement Clinton routinely imposed on any organization that hired her to speak. The contracts, such as ones crafted by the Harry Walker Agency, required the organizations to hire, at their own expense, a stenographer who would provide the transcripts to Clinton and not keep copies for themselves.
In some cases, the contracts themselves were obtained by news organizations under public records laws because Clinton was being paid to speak by public universities or colleges.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
Tit for Tat ? ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — A statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass was ripped from its base in Rochester on the an...
-
NEW YORK (AP) — As New York City faced one of its darkest days with the death toll from the coronavirus surging past 4,000 — more th...
