Emails suggest aides were catering to Clinton foundation donors.
An April 2009 exchange between Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band and two of Clinton’s top State Department aides concerning a major foundation donor is the latest in a succession of emails suggesting Clinton staffers violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the ethics agreement Clinton had signed just months earlier.
.. Either way, the foundation was seeking special access for a donor — itself a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the pledge Clinton and top foundation officials had signed, according to several ethicists.
.. Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said that the actual language of the pledge is “not surprisingly, very lawyerly … [and] there is an argument to be made that Clinton herself has not violated what was in the pledge.”
.. “The Clinton Foundation was taking money from anybody who would give it, and the biggest contributions were from people who had business before the State Department,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen.
.. Clinton herself argued during her confirmation hearings that there was no real conflict, since neither she nor her husband had a financial interest in the foundation. And the campaign’s response to the latest email batch — emphasizing that Band was working in his role as an aide to Bill Clinton, not an employee of the foundation — similarly hinges on obscure legal reasoning.
.. “and of course many of the ambassadors are themselves contributors to the president’s political party.”
This campaign could get worse — a lot worse. Here’s why.
this election campaign is going to get worse — maybe a lot worse — before it gets better. By the time it’s done, the whole nation may feel like it needs a shower.
I base this depressing prediction on three assumptions: Polls showing the Obama coalition coming together behind Hillary Clinton are correct; Donald Trump does not want to be embarrassed as a massive loser; and the Republican Party cares more about keeping its majority in the House than about Trump’s tender feelings.
.. So I expect Trump to double down not just on his attacks against Clinton but also on the two issues that won him his white working-class following: immigration and trade. That means more bigotry, more xenophobia and more totally unrealistic promises about the miracles that he and his team of rich-guy economic advisers will magically perform.
.. Clinton campaign has bought time during the Olympics broadcasts for an ad in which Trump acknowledges that his Trump-branded shirts are made in Bangladesh and his neckties in China.
.. Some Republicans will be under increasing pressure, either from their constituents or their consciences, to distance themselves from Trump and perhaps even rescind their endorsements. How will Trump react to such betrayal? Surely by lashing out
The Science Behind Hating Hillary’s Voice
Commentators often criticize Hillary Clinton for having a loud, monotone, and shrill voice. In this video, The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan talks to voice experts to understand what makes Clinton’s voice allegedly more annoying than her competitors. The conclusions are complex: Clinton’s voice is actually average in pitch and loudness for her age and gender, but she does yell into microphones and speak in an overly enunciated voice—two factors that may make her seem abrasive. And then, of course, there’s another element at play: sexism.
Hillary Clinton has an anger problem
Hillary Clinton has an anger problem — she’s not angry enough at a time when 70 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track.
.. “Bernie thinks about it backwards — what is the outcome that he wants, right?” he said. “So if it was free tuition of public colleges and universities, that becomes the starting point and then you work backwards from there in terms of how you design the policy to fit the outcome that you want, as opposed to noodling around policy and then seeing what the outcome is.”
.. The best political operatives — even the ones who project buttoned-up efficiency — tend to be a little eccentric, combining aggressiveness and creativity in equal measure.
.. “OK … I’m sure to be standing there in front of the Democratic Convention with a sea of people with Bernie signs, really sort of validated what he has been talking about for the last 15 months in this campaign, but the last 40 years of his life, 50 years.”
.. History is as important to Weaver as it is to Sanders. And his beef, he told me, is less with Hillary Clinton, who has proved to be a progressive and accommodating partner, than with her husband. If anything, he’s committed to ensuring that the wife take a sledgehammer to her husband’s moth-eaten Clintonism, the centrist Third Way vision that spawned NAFTA, welfare reform and the dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s health-care crusade.
“I think we’re back now more into the historic trajectory of the Democratic Party, more towards sort of the social Democratic Party, and I think it’s heading in that direction,” Weaver added, before leaving to watch Clinton’s nomination speech.
“I think the ’90s were really an aberration.”