Imagine How I Felt When I Found Myself In One Of Hillary's E-Mails! I Hope I Don't Have To Testify

Friday night there was a news-dump of more Hillary e-mails. For reasons that will be obvious in a moment, one particularly interested me. Longtime Clinton Family retainer Sidney Blumenthal is a really good writer and a very strategic thinker. In September, 2010, in the run-up to the disastrous midterms he sent Secretary Clinton a memo about how the elections could be less disastrous. One of his proposals included turning John Boehner into a piñata. And he included a chunk of a DownWithTyranny post on Boehner's corruption as an example, along with this link for the Secretary. He didn't include any of my signature attacks on the DCCC but he did suggest Hillary read this and the linked post from Digby's blog:

By the end of the day, Boehner was hysterical and backing away-- full throttle-- from his cavalier remarks about letting the taxpayers pick up the tab. Digby thinks he must be drunk on Man Tan and nicotine. "Boehner," she wrote, "is walking back his comments about having the government pay for the BP spill, but let's face facts. He was just on autopilot, echoing the Chamber of Commerce line verbatim and then got caught... Boehner is so out of touch and servile to Big Business that he's making mistakes.

One feisty Member of Congress who read the e-mail, called me last night and told me if Hillary had paid attention to Blumenthal and had shaken up Obama, Pelosi and the inept DCCC Chair, Chris Van Hollen, perhaps the Democrats wouldn't have suffered a net loss of 63 seats, elevating Boehner to the Speakership.

But that was hardly the only e-mail released Friday worth mentioning. There were some that demonstrate-- once again-- why no one trusts her as she lobbies senators on anti-worker trade bills she was pretending to oppose. (No, she didn't evolve on everything since her days as president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans.)

Other emails show Clinton seeming to personally lobby her former Democratic colleagues in the Senate to support free trade agreements (FTAs) with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. She had previously told voters she would work to block the Colombian and South Korean pacts.

An email Oct. 8, 2011, to Clinton from her aide Huma Abedin gave notes about the state of play in Congress on the proposed trade pacts. The notes provided Clinton “some background before you make the calls” to legislators.

Two days later in an email titled “FTA calls,” Clinton wrote to aides indicating she had spoken to Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Jim Webb of Virginia, both Democrats. She told the aides she had talked with “Webb who is strong in favor of all 3” trade agreements, and then asked, “So why did I call him?”-- indicating she was otherwise phoning  to try to convince wavering lawmakers to support the deals.

Only three years earlier, Clinton wooed organized labor during her presidential campaign with promises to oppose those same deals. She called the South Korea agreement “inherently unfair.” She also said, “I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.” Clinton has lately courted organized labor’s support for her current presidential bid by pledging to oppose the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a deal she repeatedly touted while secretary of state.

Saturday, the most progressive member of the Colorado state legislature, Joe Salazar, made the courageous (and dangerous) decision to break free of the Machine and endorse Bernie, saying "I think (Sanders) has a better vision, and he's been talking about it the past 40 or 50 years. He's not the politician who accepts campaign contributions from the wealthiest of America. I have a high degree of respect for Secretary (Hillary) Clinton, but I think Sanders best represents what is needed in Colorado... We have to dream big because America is built off big dreams," he added. "I'm not hearing that from Secretary Clinton. What I hear from her is typically what I hear from the other side of the aisle: 'You may have big dreams, but they're not realistic.'"

And that brings us to our favorite ex-Reagan/ex-George W. Bush advisor, historian Bruce Bartlett. Over the weekend he penned a kind of open e-mail to Hillary via The Atlantic, Jack Kemp's Power Lesson for Hillary Clinton. "Lately," he wrote, "Hillary Clinton and her supporters have been criticizing Bernie Sanders’s proposals not so much because they are wrongheaded, but because they are too utopian to pass Congress. I find this to be a curious line of attack because, in effect, Clinton is playing by Republican rules-- saying that Democrats should only propose things that could be enacted by a Republican Congress. Economists would call this an example of static analysis, assuming that circumstances will not change or that leadership is incapable of altering political possibilities. If Republicans had held this same point of view, Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut never would have been enacted and, very likely, they would never have gained control of Congress. The 1981 tax cut fundamentally altered political dynamics. This was not a result that anyone would have predicted when the Reagan tax cut was first conceived by Representative Jack Kemp of New York in 1977. At the time, he was a junior congressman much better known for his career in professional football than for his legislative accomplishments, which were modest." When Kemp proposed it, it was opposed by every member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, on both sides of the aisle. "Even those who thought Kemp’s plan was a good idea in principle thought it was pie-in-the-sky that would never be enacted by a Congress in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and Senate." You see where this is going by now. Four years later, Kemp's big impossible dream was signed into law.

The relevance to today’s policy debates is that what may at first appear to be politically impossible can quickly become possible with the right leadership, changing circumstances, and a little luck. I’m not saying that Sanders’s ideas are necessarily good or politically doable. But I am saying that it’s wrong to oppose them simply because they could not pass Congress today. If Republicans had taken that view in the late 1970s, the world today would look very different, both politically and economically. Sometimes it’s necessary to throw the bomb and see what happens.

Perhaps you agree with Hillary and think Bartlett lacks understanding of the situation and that Bernie's big dreams aren't going anywhere, ever. If you don't feel that way, though, please consider contributing to Bernie's campaign and, perhaps, to the campaigns of some of the congressional candidates who share his dreams. Just tap on the thermometer below:

Paul Ryan Is Campaigning For President

Marco Rubio can't cut it. He's 2016's awkwardly fully-scripted candidate, an imperfect vessel for the Republican Establishment. His focus-tested, sanitized message is confusing and sometimes incoherent, and he is hopelessly torn between his original Tea Party backers and the billionaires and party establishment types who hope he can save them and their racket from the clutches of fascist-oriented Trumpf and/or Cruz. He's a crabby old fossil trapped in the body of an out-of-his-depth younger man. And now the other Republicans are implying he's a maricón. Not only does Rubio come across as the least authentic of any of the Republican candidates, ironically he comes across as the most similar to Hillary in the way he relates to voters. And that's not a good thing.

As of this week's Fox polling, Rubio's support has grown in Iowa-- from 13% to 15% and he's now 3rd after Cruz (27%) and Herr Trumpf (23%, ominously down 3 points) and far ahead of the other establishment lane candidates, Jeb (7%), Christie (4%), Kasich (1%). New Hampshire looks even rosier-- relatively speaking-- for Rubio. Fox's polling shows him up two points with 15%, running behind Herr Trumpf (33%, up an astonishing 6 points), but ahead of Cruz with 12% (up 1 point) and Jeb, steady at 9%. Kasich is in 5th place with 7% and says he'll quit the race if he doesn't win New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Christie as the great-white-whale hope seems to have fizzled as he clocks in with 5% (down 1 point) in 6th place. It's worth noting that a new NH1 News poll shows pretty different results in that state. Trumpf still leads with 31.7% but Rubio is out of contention, down in 6th place with 8.9% and the other establishment lane candidates are all beating him, Jeb with 11.9%, Kasich with 11.8% and Christie with 11.0%.

The billionaire-funded SuperPACs were still cautious about who to bet the big bucks on as of the Oct. 16 filing but their 5 big picks-- indicating which potential president they would most likely be able to control-- were not a surprise:

• Jeb- $103,222,384
• Cruz- $38,655,257
• Clinton- $20,291,679
• Rubio- $17,315,782
• Christie- $14,315,782

Those figures are SuperPAC money only, not campaign money and, the figures don't include tens of millions of dollars that have come into Cruz's, Jeb's and Rubio's campaigns since Oct. 16. There is still a lot of GOP money on the sidelines-- most of it--and it is earmarked for Paul Ryan in the hopes that a deadlocked convention-- none of the candidates with enough votes to win-- results in the Ryan nomination GOP insiders are now pushing for.

Meanwhile, Ryan was rolled out at yesterday's Republican "poverty summit" in South Carolina as the new Jack Kemp, trying to imply that despite his draconian, now infamous Ryan austerity budget, he really, really, really cares about all you poor folk and he's oh, so optimistic.

Seven Republican presidential candidates are detouring from their other campaign business to attend the event. That turnout is testimony to both the ongoing power of the Kemp name, and to the current power of the Paul Ryan one. But it also raises the question of whether there is anyone in the party, other than Mr. Ryan himself, capable of carrying to a national audience the sunny Kemp message of what he called bleeding-heart conservatism.

Oh, it's a presidential year; we'd better role out another version of "comapssionate conservatism." Trumpf, smart enough to see this was a set-up for Ryan, didn't bother showing up. And Cruz knew the whole context would be absurdly inauthentic for him. But the rest of the boobs were eager to find an audience, even just as props in the Paul Ryan Show. As Jodi Jacobson pointed out at RH Reality Check over the weekend, "no summit can fix what ails the GOP when it comes to concern for people struggling to make ends meet, or who no longer have any means whatsoever... The rhetoric and the summit feel reminiscent of Ryan’s 2012 staged photo op, when as a vice presidential candidate he 'ramrodded' his way into an empty soup kitchen to wash clean dishes for the cameras but stayed far away from the actual people being served." One of the highlights yesterday was Lindsey Graham calling for cuts to Social Security. Even many Republican voters will probably be able to figure out that's not the way to end poverty.

Did the summit address the Republican Party's stand not just on refusing to allow an increase in the minimum wage, but their intent to abolish it altogether? How about the role of medical debt in creating abject poverty and the GOP role in blocking health insurance for poor people? Educational debt? Family leave? Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that Ryan's proposals are more likely to increase poverty than reduce it. "History shows," he wrote, "that when federal policymakers merge programs into a broad block grant, federal funding typically declines over time, often dramatically. Our analysis of all 13 of the major housing, health, and social services block grant programs created in recent decades found that all but one have shrunk in inflation-adjusted terms since their inception. Between 2000 and 2015, combined funding for the 13 block grants fell by 27 percent, or $14 billion in 2015 dollars. When a broad array of programs is merged into a block grant, policymakers generally find it nearly impossible to identify a specific level of federal funding that’s needed-- or, for that matter, to identify the likely human impact of cutting funding. As a result, broad block grants have been easy to squeeze in the competition for federal dollars."

Ryan wants to be president and he's sweet-talking voters with his line of polished bullshit but remember, this is the guy whining about how terrible it is that we treat the symptoms of poverty and not the root causes, while he's writing a budget that cuts $145 billion from education. His proposed budget would have given $10 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America, while slashing funds for Medicare, Medicaid, Food Assistance, and Pell Grants. After his 2014 "poverty tour," he also proposed cutting between $135 billion and $150 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamps program. In 2012, our friends at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities dubbed Ryan's budget "Robin Hood in reverse-- on steroids... Despite warning that the nation faces the ‘perils of debt,’ House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan introduced a budget on March 20 whose tax proposals would be extremely costly and would disproportionately favor the nation’s highest-income households and large corporations. His budget would cut the top marginal income tax rate, now 35 percent but scheduled to rise next year to 39.6 percent, to 25 percent. It would cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent and eliminate taxes on the foreign profits of U.S.-based multinationals. It would eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), designed to ensure that high-income people pay at least a minimum level of tax. And it would eliminate health reform’s increase in the Medicare tax for high-income individuals." And, since getting into Congress, Ryan has voted against raising the minimum wage 10 times. But he wants to be seen talking about ideas that will alleviate the suffering of the poor... as long as they don't cost the political campaign donor class anything.

Paul Ryan Admits He Wants To Be Speaker

Finally, last night, Paul Ryan agreed to accept the post-Boehner Speakership. He offered the extremists in the so-called Freedom Caucus a bone, a delay in deciding what to do about the procedural motion-- a motion to vacate-- used, at least in theory, to remove a House Speaker. Should be interesting to see how many of the mental midgets fall for it.

Ryan even said he was "ready and eager" and that the House Republicans are "ready to move forward as one, united team." The Party vote will be Wednesday (Ryan vs Daniel Webster, presumably) and then they have the official vote on Thursday, where the Democrats are allowed to vote too. In the letter he wrote to his GOP colleagues he noted that "Working families continue to fall behind, and they are losing faith in the American Idea: the belief that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead," he wrote in the letter. "At the same time, a weaker America has led to a more dangerous world. Our friends and rivals alike wonder whether we will pull ourselves out of this stupor."

And that's where Republican harridan Ann Coulter comes in. She remembers Jack Kemp, who Ryan is as infatuated with as he is with Ayn Rand-- or almost. Kemp, who, as a young man, sold his booty to wealthy Reagan donors when Reagan was running for governor of California, is another Coulter bête noire.

After Paul Ryan helped Mitt Romney lose the 2012 election by doing the impossible-- losing a debate to Joe Biden-- he went on an intimate tour of poverty. It was a journey so personal, Ryan brought reporters, writers and documentary producers with him.

So far, he's gotten one book and one documentary out of The Paul Ryan Intimate Poverty Tour-- we're still waiting for the tote bags-- and is currently promoting a major poverty-fighting initiative that he brainstormed during private moments of reflection, somehow captured by the press: "The Kemp Forum on Expanding Opportunity."

Appropriately for an event named after Ryan's mentor, Jack Kemp, the forum will allow Ryan to showcase his deep concern for the poor without doing a thing to help them. This is the hallmark of the "empowerment" crowd. What matters is their own self-regard and favorable press notices, not accomplishing anything useful.

In the 1996 vice presidential debate, Al Gore repeatedly praised Kemp for not being a racist-- unlike the rest of his party. After Gore called Kemp a "lonely voice" in the GOP, "who says we ought to be one nation," Kemp did not say:

MY PARTY? YOUR PARTY HAS A FORMER KLAN MEMBER IN THE SENATE! YOUR FATHER VOTED AGAINST THE 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT! YOUR PARTY DESTROYED THE BLACK FAMILY!

No, Kemp's response was: "Well, I thank you, Al. I mean that very, very sincerely."

For all Kemp's claims to being black America's truest friend, he didn't actually help any minorities. His famed "enterprise zones" were a renowned flop.

By now there have been approximately 1 million studies on the effect of "enterprise zones," "empowerment zones" and-- Obama's version-- "promise zones." The conclusion: Every single penny has been wasted. Businesses game the system, relocate shops from just outside the zone to just within it, or take tax credits for doing nothing that they weren't already planning to do.

The principal result of Kemp's enterprise zones was to double HUD's budget.

But Kemp, like his protege Ryan, was everything big corporations and Wall Street love in a Republican: He'd give them tax cuts, cheap labor and moral self-righteousness. Washington is full of these Kemparatchiks, churning out documents and admiring quotes about one another to willing reporters.

The Kemp boys think they're a big hit with poor minorities-- especially Hispanics. Ryan, for example, is a huge supporter of driving down Hispanic wages by endlessly dumping low-wage workers on the country. Empowerment!

Two years ago, Ryan bragged to a Catholic radio station: "I actually campaigned with Jack Kemp against a thing called Prop 187."

That "thing" was an overwhelmingly popular initiative to prevent illegal aliens from collecting government benefits. It gave Republicans their biggest victory in California in the last 30 years, was supported by a majority of blacks, a majority of whites, a majority of Asians and 31 percent of Hispanics.

Two years later, the Dole-Kemp ticket got only 21 percent of the Hispanic vote. That's worse than Romney! (These empowerment types really have their finger on the pulse of ethnic America!)

Like Kemp, Ryan acts as if he's the tribune of blacks and Hispanics, chastising Republicans for "preaching to the choir." He prefers to preach to the mariachi band-- one of which serenaded him on his visit to an immigrant rights group in Chicago, a few months after his failed vice presidential bid.

How about Ryan run for mayor of Los Angeles? After he wins, he can lecture us about how his Jack Kemp message resonates with Hispanics.

Ryan's big idea on poverty is indistinguishable from Kemp's: "Get money and capital and credit into the inner cities of America and the barrios and ghettos of America." This will "empower people"!

The best thing I ever heard about Dick Cheney is that, after listening to Ryan drone on about how Republicans needed to create "a real ownership society" at a meeting with members of Congress, Cheney said, "Yeah, we're not going to do that," and then turned to a different representative.

Imagining a photo of himself on the mantle of every black household in America, Ryan touts his forum on poverty, saying, "There are few challenges tougher than the fight against poverty, and we need all hands on deck."

Wow. What a caring person. No one's ever talked about poverty before! (Have they?)

About a decade ago, I met an actor, the hot new thing, at an agent's party. He excitedly told me his big idea: A war on poverty! I told him to look up "LBJ," but he earnestly persisted, saying, yeah, sure, maybe LBJ talked about poverty, but no one had ever called for "a war on poverty." See, that was the key-- the war part.

That was a mentally impaired actor. Now a decade later, I'm hearing the same thing from the man House Republicans want to make their speaker.

All of human experience has already taught us how to fight poverty, and it doesn't involve the words "opportunity," "empowerment" or "zone."

Effective: Don't pay people not to work. The 1996 welfare reform act, with its time limits and work requirements, reduced welfare caseloads by an astronomical 65 percent, as former recipients entered the workforce.

Ineffective: Self-flattering politicians jabbering about how much they care about poverty, then creating behemoth government programs that give corporations tax breaks for pretending to help the poor.

Effective: Stop dumping millions of low-wage workers on the country to drive down wages. America's booming, prosperous middle class arose in the 40-year period after immigration was virtually shut down in 1924-- until Teddy Kennedy opened the floodgates to the Third World in 1965.

Ineffective: Demanding an endless supply of cheap immigrant labor favored by your corporate donors, subsidized by the long-suffering middle class, while strutting around like you're Martin Luther King.

Yes, yes, she's mentally ill, but that isn't the point. The point is: poor Paul Ryan... the lunatic fringe isn't done with him, not by a long shot. Not even when he does the kind of right-wing crazy things the thrive on... like this:

And... just in from the crackpots at the Madison Project. Yes, Coulter has company. Meet Jim Ryun, even more dangerous to American values than Paul Ryan, but with nothing but... the Madison Project. Last year his group invested in 6 Senate races and won just 1, the Ben Sasse contest in Nebraska. They helped elect lunatic fringe House members like David Brat (VA), James Bridenstine (OK), Ron DeSantis (FL), Glenn Grothman (WI), Jody Hice (GA), Barry Loudermilk (GA) and Ted Yoho (FL), each one crazier than the last. So here's their line on Ryan, who you can stop from becoming Speaker for just a $10 contribution:

How do you feel about Speaker Paul Ryan?

I'll tell you how I feel: disappointed.

After being the "conservative" half of the Presidential ticket in 2012, Paul Ryan went back to Washington and voted for numerous debt ceiling raises, the Amtrack Reauthorization, and a Continuing Resolution that fund Planned Parenthood.

My name is Jim Ryun.  Perhaps you already know me as a former three-time Olympian and Congressman from Kansas.

However, today I am reaching out to you on behalf of Madison Project, the nation's premier PAC dedicated to electing the next generation of true conservative leadership.

We want a TRUE conservative holding the Speaker's gavel. Will you join us in our search

Since elected to Congress in 1998, Paul Ryan has talked about his conservative policies, but the reality is much different:

1 His tax plans have been crafted to balance the budget-- but not until 2024.
2 He voted for The Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008.
3 Voted to raise the Debt Ceiling numerous times
4 Voted for No Child Left Behind in 2001
5 Voted to Reauthorize Amtrak (with a price tag of $7.2 billion) 6 Voted for a Continuing Resolution that funds Planned Parenthood-- after the videos were released proving that Planned Parenthood is selling aborted baby parts for profit

These are NOT the actions of a true conservative with a vision to bring America back to its roots. These are the actions of middle of the road Republican content with being in power and never using it to achieve anything of merit.

Will you donate $10 and tell us who YOU want to see as Speaker of the House?

Outside of Washington, DC, our words don't define us, our actions do. Tell me, are these the actions of a TRUE conservative?

A Republican, yes. A conservative, no.

So if Paul Ryan won't be Speaker, who will be? Donate $10 and tell us who YOU think should be the next Speaker of the House here.