Hilary Clinton : Making sense of her collosal defeat to @realDonaldTrump And still #AmericaHangsItsHeadInShame

Hillary Clinton, still sorting through the wreckage of her 2016 presidential campaign, recently had former aides on her campaign team meet with outside strategists and consultants to look at what went wrong.

For months, Clinton and her top aides have blamed their devastating loss on FBI Director James Comey and Russia’s interference in the presidential election. While their outlook hasn’t changed, Clinton still wanted a thorough, detailed post-mortem of the campaign.

The meeting — an echo of similar efforts done after Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic primary to Barack Obama — “was an attempt to dot all the i's and cross all the t’s," said one source familiar with the fact-finding mission. “But I don’t think anyone learned all that much.”

Another ally added, “It wasn’t fun for the people who had to sit through it.”

Behind the scenes, the former Democratic nominee has spent the last few months reaching out to donors, associates and friends, many of whom have given their own two cents on the loss.

“She has tried her best to get a full account of what went wrong and where she could have done better,” one longtime friend said.

The finger pointing began the day after the election and has continued inside Clinton’s orbit.

Late last month, Lynn de Rothschild, a donor and friend of Clinton’s, took to Twitter to blast campaign chairman John Podesta for the defeat.

“HRC lost because you ran an arrogant out of touch campaign,” she wrote before calling him a loser.

In the days and weeks following her surprise loss, allies say it was difficult for Clinton to read the headlines. Instead, she went on long walks in and around her home Chappaqua, N.Y. and out to dinner with her husband. She caught The Color Purple and Sunset Boulevard on Broadway and went grocery shopping for the first time in months.

But those who have spoken to her since then say she’s trying her best to move on from the bruising campaign.

“She’s in a much better place than she was in two months ago,” said one confidant who has spoken to her in the last few weeks. “I think she’s very much forward-thinking and -looking than people think she is right now.

“I don’t think she’s obsessing about the past but she’s focused on a ‘country-first’ type thing,” the confidant added.

To that point, those around her say Clinton has taken it upon herself to not let Trump go unanswered. And in a string of posts on Twitter, she has been criticizing the president on a variety of issues, from the rise in domestic hate crimes to the travel ban.

After a federal appeals court refused to reinstate Trump’s travel bad, the president took to Twitter: “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” he wrote.

Clinton had her own reply: “3-0” she taunted, referring to the three judge panel on the US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that ruled against him.

Her daughter, Chelsea, has also been hitting Trump on Twitter, a pivot from her past use of social media (and leading some to believe that she has her sites set on her own political career.)

“It’s as if the administration doesn’t understand the H, the B, the C, or the U (or understand why HBCUs were started & remain vital),” the former first daughter tweeted earlier this week about Trump, referring to Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Lately, though, the biggest I-told-you-so from the Clintons and their allies is the continuing story about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

For months, in private conversations, Clinton has griped about Trump’s connection to Russian President Vladimir Putin and suggested that no one seemed to care about it during the election.

At a gathering with donors in December, she was blunt. “Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people … that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” Clinton said, according to audio obtained by the New York Times.

Months later, the former secretary of State is still plotting her next moves. It’s unclear if she will continue the work she started at the Clinton Foundation prior to launching her presidential campaign or if she’ll take on other work, those around her say. And while some have suggested a run for mayor of New York is possible, those close to her say she isn’t interested.

In the meantime, she has made several appearances on the speaking circuit, including one this week at Wellesley College, her alma mater.

And even all these months later, she can’t escape questions about what went wrong.

Asked at Wellesley what she’d change about her campaign, Clinton replied: “I’d win.”

#ImWithHer #VoteClintonKaine Labor Day and the final Sprint to be the 45th President of the USA . Go Hillary

On Labor Day, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Begin a Final Sprint by Ashley Parker ( republished with permission of the author and the NY Times)






Hillary Clinton greeted members of the news media on Monday on her new charter plane on her way to Cleveland. CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times




CLEVELAND — Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump ran virtually parallel campaigns on Monday as they geared up for the final stretch of the presidential race. She made nice with the news media by opening up her campaign plane and chatting with reporters. He followed suit, inviting a smaller group of reporters onto his plane and answering questions during the 30-minute flight.

She took along her running mate, and so did he, as both focused on Ohio and nearly crossed paths in Cleveland. Their motorcades all but passed each other, and all four candidates’ planes ended up on the tarmac at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport at the same time.

Mrs. Clinton moved on several fronts on Monday to confront nagging doubts about her candidacy, despite her very comfortable lead in all of  swing-state polls. Courting labor supporters, she met with union leaders in Cleveland while her husband, Bill Clinton, appeared at a Labor Day parade in Detroit. Seeking the backing of progressive voters, she enlisted her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who made his first solo appearance on Mrs. Clinton’s behalf at a rally in New Hampshire and has indicated to the Clinton Campaign  that this will be the first of many .

And her outreach to reporters included her most extensive question-and-answer session with them in months. She expressed alarm “about the credible reports about Russian government interference in our elections” through hacking, saying, “We’ve never had a foreign adversarial power be already involved in our electoral process.”



Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, greeted diners on Monday at Goody’s Family Restaurant near Cleveland. CreditTy Wright for The New York Times


Not to be outdone, Mr. Trump used his airborne meeting with reporters to clarify his views on immigration, saying he opposed any path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. But he again did not explicitly rule out a long-term path to legal status if the nation’s immigration system is overhauled.

“We’re going to make that decision into the future,” Mr. Trump said. But, he added, “to become a citizen, you are going to have to go out and come back in through the process. You’re going to have to go out and get in line. This isn’t touchback. You have to get in line.”

On the plane, Mr. Trump also told reporters that, “as of this moment,” he planned to attend all three debates, and that only a “natural disaster” could make him change his mind. He added that, while he was preparing, he was not holding mock debate sessions.

Labor Day is traditionally the beginning of a two-month sprint to Election Day, in which candidates try to seize voters’ attention as summer fades and debates loom. Monday was no exception. The visits to Ohio by Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton — along with their respective running mates, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia — highlighted the importance of a state that Republicans believe Mr. Trump must win to have any shot of reaching the White House.





Hillary Clinton on Monday at a Labor Day rally in Cleveland. CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

“Labor Day comes, and it’s kind of like a recalibration,” said Beth Myers, who managed Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign and served as his senior adviser in 2012. “You see the finish line, you see that there’s not too many game-changing events left, and most campaigns take a measure of where you are on Labor Day.”

This cycle, however, both candidates have eschewed traditional campaigning, albeit in divergent ways. Normally, they would already have been circling each other in swing states.

But Mrs. Clinton has spent most of the summer away from the campaign trail, focusing on fund-raising in places like the Hamptons and Beverly Hills with celebrities like Jimmy Buffett and Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Trump has also kept a languid pace, favoring large rallies, often in the evening, over several daily stops.

Mr. Trump, a political novice, and Mrs. Clinton, a veteran politician, are confronting historically low approval ratings among voters for whom they are well-known commodities.




Donald J. Trump, right, with his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, spoke to reporters on his plane on Monday. CreditTy Wright for The New York Times




“Labor Day used to be this big, important marker in the campaign season,” said Amy Walter, the national editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “A kickoff, if you will. Today, it feels like the start of the third quarter instead of the kickoff.”

“The candidates are well-defined, the ads have been running for months and TVs have been saturated with talking heads,” she added.

Mr. Trump tried to burnish his image as a statesman last week with a hastily arranged trip to Mexico City. He has also tried to increase his outreach to minorities, from a promised “softening” on immigration that concluded with a fiery, nativist speech in Phoenix, to a stop at a black church in Detroit.

That approach was also on display on Monday. At a diner in Cleveland, Mr. Trump met Maria Hernandez, a Mexican-American who said she was supporting him. “Mexican-American supports Trump,” he said. “It’s so nice.” Then he turned to the nearby reporters to emphasize his focus group of one: “Make a note of it, guys,” he said.

Aboard Hillary Clinton’s New Plane

Earlier, speaking to a dozen white men and a lone white woman at an American Legion post here, Mr. Trump criticized China’s treatment of President Obama: When the president landed in Hangzhou for the Group of 20 summit meeting, the host country forced him to disembark from the plane’s belly. Mr. Trump said he would not have gotten off the plane, but instead would have urged his crew to “get out of here.”

Mrs. Clinton’s appearance in Cleveland was meant as a show of labor support during a campaign in which many rank-and-file union members were drawn to Mr. Sanders’s promise to take on income inequality. At a Labor Day festival here, she and Mr. Kaine were joined by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, Richard L. Trumka; Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the first unions to endorse Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton’s surrogates were also out in force. In Pittsburgh, Mr. Kaine and the man he hopes to succeed, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., spoke at a rally before the city’s Labor Day parade. Mr. Kaine assailed Mr. Trump for refusing to release his tax returns, then turned the stage over to Mr. Biden.

“My name is Joe Biden, and I work for Hillary Clinton and whatever the hell this guy’s name is,” he said jokingly with Tim Kaine standing next to him.

Tim Kaine’s Labor Day, via Snapchat

Mr. Sanders, at a rally in Lebanon, N.H., praised Mrs. Clinton for supporting a host of progressive positions.


“I would hope and ask you all, very much, that we have got to do everything we can to make sure that Hillary Clinton is elected president,” he said. “But two days after the election, we have got to continue the pressure.”


Addressing an issue that has dogged the campaign, Mr. Clinton defended the Clinton Foundation. And he criticized Mr. Trump over his own foundation, referring to aWashington Post report that found that his charitable organization paid the Internal Revenue Service a $2,500 penalty this year after improperly giving a political contribution to a campaign group with ties to the attorney general of Florida, Pam Bondi.


Mr. Trump discussed the issue in his talk with reporters aboard his plane. He denied any impropriety on either his part or Ms. Bondi’s concerning the $25,000 donation.


At the time of the donation in 2013, Ms. Bondi was considering whether to investigate Trump University for fraud. In the end, she did not do so.


“I never spoke to her, first of all, she’s a fine person beyond reproach,” he said when asked about the controversy. “I never even spoke to her about it at all. She’s a fine person. Never spoken to her about it. Never.”


Many attorneys general besides Ms. Bondi, he said, decided against pursuing any action regarding Trump University. “I’ll win that case in court,” he said. “Many turned that down.”


“I never spoke to her,” he added, again referring to Ms. Bondi.


When asked what he expected to get out of the donation, he would only say: “I’ve just known Pam Bondi for years. I have a lot of respect for her. Never spoke to her about that at all. I just have a lot of respect for her, and she’s very popular.”


Amy Chozick contributed reporting from Cleveland, Thomas Kaplan from Pittsburgh, and Yamiche Alcindor from Lebanon, N.H.

For the sake iof Zion: 10,000 reasons why never to vote for Bernie Sanders

He is a long-serving US senator, who seeks the Democratic nomination for president and whose words influence the public and certainly his own supporters.

Democratic US presidential candidate and US Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at the NBC News - YouTube Democratic presidential candidates debate. (photo credit:REUTERS)

As his white hair and demeanor let on, Bernie Sanders is no youngster or political novice.

He is a long-serving US senator, who seeks the Democratic nomination for president and whose words influence the public and certainly his own supporters.

But there are some who would write off his dangerous and shocking statements in that interview with the New York Daily News – in which he claimed among other things that Israel killed 10,000 innocent Palestinians in the summer of 2014. Sanders later said he’d merely made a mistake about the figure, that should be forgiven, as a mistake made by a child or an amateur would be.

The Anti-Defamation League, the primary Jewish organization which publicly demanded that Sanders issue a correction, appears to have taken this approach. It “welcomed” Sanders’ statement that he accepted the much lower number of deaths in Gaza mentioned by one of the Daily News interviewers later on in the interview.

The ADL’s attitude is essentially this: Sanders confused some numbers and then accepted he was wrong. It could happen to anyone.

It is true that much of the outrage focused on the grossly inaccurate “10,000” number Sanders gave for civilian deaths in Gaza. The ADL’s initial statement, for example, mentioned that Sander’s said Israel’s use of force was “disproportionate,” but was primarily dedicated to the highly exaggerated number of civilian deaths. David Horovitz’s attention-grabbing headline was, “Seven Times Worse than Hamas: Bernie Sanders by the Numbers,” and his article focused mostly on the claim of 10,000 killed.

Indeed, if it were just a question of getting a number right, then the indignation of Jewish organizations and Israeli politicians would be partially misplaced, as Jerusalem Post op-ed editor Seth Frantzman suggested in his recent column. It would also follow that having publicly accepted that 10,000 Palestinian civilians were not killed, those dedicated to countering the defamation of Israel should drop the matter, as the ADL has.

But Sanders’ did not just confuse numbers.

His accusation against Israel was more damning than any number could be. Sanders claimed that Israel indiscriminately killed 10,000 civilians.

“I think most international observers would say that the attacks against Gaza were indiscriminate,” Sanders said. With the technology available, “they could have been more discriminate in terms of taking out weapons that were threatening them,” he argued.

Then he gave the 10,000 number. Then he again said, “I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.”

So more than merely inflating the number of those killed by a factor of seven, Sanders essentially accused Israel of mass murder.

As to his numerical error, this too cannot be so easily written off.

Even considering how many have been slaughtered in Syria just next door, killing 10,000 people is no less of a slaughter, especially if done in the span of a few weeks, as Sanders believed.

What seems to have confused some people about whether Sanders is responsible for his statements were the myriad disclaimers Sanders tacked on to his many accusations to give himself cover, just like the politician he pretends not to be.

“My recollection is”; “Does that sound right?”; “I don’t have... [an exact] number but I think it’s over 10,000”; “My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled”; “Hospitals, I think, were bombed”; “So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing....”

But by going on record and repeating, exaggerating, and basing a political position on an accusation of wrongdoing, Sanders essentially endorsed that accusation, regardless of the disclaimers. If Sanders was as unsure as he made himself out to be, he ought not to have repeated such outrageous accusations at all.

At best Sanders readily accepted a claim that Israel committed mass murder. Had he any sympathy for Israel, the 10,000 number would not have left his mouth.

He might also have been aware that accusations like the one he repeated and embellished are constantly hurled at Israel to demonize it and would not have added to the anti-Semitic mob’s cry.

This was not just a misfired synapse or a lack of precise information. It was a presumption about who is terrorizing who in the conflict between democratic Israel and Palestinian terrorists.

This is not something that a little education can fix, as Sanders’ appointment of new Jewish outreach director, Simone Zimmerman, has confirmed. (In a recent op-ed in Haaretz, she wrote, “No public relations trick can save Israel’s image. The problem isn’t with the hasbara [public diplomacy]”). Sanders himself is no ignoramus. He’s a political veteran and like Zimmerman, an idealist with a definite world view. Israel just does not figure too highly in that world view.

In the Daily News interview, Sanders said he thought Israel should be recognized as a Jewish state.

But when asked why, he didn’t say, as even President Barack Obama has said, that the Jewish people need a state of their own or that Israel is their ancestral homeland.

Instead, Sanders replied, “that’s the status quo.”

The flip side of such reasoning being that if it were not the status quo, Sanders would not necessarily support the existence of a Jewish state.

Sanders’ answer to a bigoted question about “Zionist Jews” a few days later at the Apollo in Harlem, New York, seems to confirm this. Sanders responded that he was “proud to be Jewish,” but he added the proviso that “you’re not going to find any candidate running for president, for example, to talk about Zionism” – which is the rationale for the existence of a Jewish state in the land of Zion.

Sanders has also made clear how, as president, he would relate to Israel.

“[T]o the degree that they want us to have a positive relationship,” Sanders said of Israel in his discussion with the Daily News, “I think they’re going to have to improve their relationship with the Palestinians.”

According to Sanders, support for Israel should depend on how it gets along with the people who refuse to recognize its right to exist and constantly wage terrorism campaigns against it.

Under president Bernie Sanders all Palestinian terrorist groups will have to do to destroy Israel’s relationship with the United States is wage war on Israel, hide among their own civilian population to create a high level of civilian casualties and claim Israel is firing indiscriminately.

President Sanders will not doubt such claims and may even parrot them in a press conference. Palestinian spokesmen like Saeb Erekat won’t even have to falsify the casualty numbers. President Sanders might make up a number for them.

Believing, publicly repeating, exaggerating and essentially endorsing blood libels against Israel, as Bernie Sanders did and as he may do as president, is no mere error of arithmetic or memory to be quickly forgiven and forgotten.