Hilly's best chance ...

Well, boys and girls (pilgrims), I do believe that unless there is a yuuge hidden vote out there for him and/or against her, she will receive the post inaugural oath salute of all the armed forces in the traditional march past behind the capitol.  A saluting battery will be there and the US Army Band,  "Ruffles and Flourishes" will sound across capitol Hill, and there will be 21 guns for the Commander in Chief.  The troops will grit their teeth and do eyes left as they and the 3rd Infantry Regiment's colors pass her.  For those who do not know, this regiment is colloquially known as "The Old Guard" and is the ceremonial regiment of the Army.  As he watched this regiment march into Mexico City, Winfield Scott told his staff "Hats off, gentlemen, this is the Old Guard of the United States."  They have the singular privilege granted by Congress to pass in review with fixed bayonets.  They had swept the field at Cerro Gordo and Churubusco with the bayonet.

This symbolic march past will go down hard for many.  I remember that little Chelsea when required to accept a ride in General McCaffery's staff car stared at him and said "in my family we don't like the military."  That's what McCaffery said afterward and who am I to doubt the story?  He must have been shocked.  C in C Hilly will have the power to send these deplorable deployables whom she despises out to some god awful place to fight other poor dumb bastards.

IMO her best chance in office will be a continued retention of control of both houses of Congress by the GOP. 

The country is in a state in which the level of alienation between the coastals and the rest is as bad as any state of alienation seen since the 1850s. 

Bahzad wrote here that France is protected from the scourge of internal strife (French on French) by the emotional and political safety valve offered by Marine Le Pen and the Front National.  In this country civil strife can be avoided if Hilly has the ability to say to her sans culottes (including the coastal smarties) that she would have accomplished their Jacobin dreams if the nasty constitution and the GOP Congress had only let her. 

Her actual backers in finance do not give a s--t at all about the sans culottes but as long as the money rolls in ...

Therefore she needs to win without much in the way of coattails.  pl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3rd_U.S._Infantry_Regiment_(The_Old_Guard)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Four_ruffles_and_flourishes,_hail_to_the_chief_(long_version).ogg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War

http://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/Marines%20in%20the%20Mexican%20War%20%20PCN%2019000412200.pdf

"The Marine Battalion assigned to Scott's army numbered less than 400, but when it was employed in battle or used for other duties the Marines would earn the praise of the Army's highest officers."  That's for you, Mike.  pl

 

Comments

[turcopolier]

eakens

He is just a troll. pl

[turcopolier]

walker

Ah! Another troll! I had never heard of O'Keefe until yesterday. So, you too think he faked the tapes. Wonderful. pl

[Jay]

@Walker The O'Keefe videos are nothing compared to the Wikileaks emails. Clinton should be doing what General Cartwright is doing right now. Praying...

[Patrick Armstrong]

So, dear friends, is the USA finished?

[turcopolier]

Patrick Armstrong

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more or close the wall up with our English dead." Harry at Harfleur. pl

[Outrage Beyond]

I think with either candidate, impeachment is a near certainty.

With Hillary, I think the odds are close to 100% that it would happen within her first year or two in office. The Constitution says the President can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, however, it doesn't specify that only crimes committed while in office are impeachable offenses. GOP congressmen are baying for indictment; it seems obvious they will immediately press for impeachment. For what? At this point, take your pick among dozens of possible criminal acts.

With Trump, it would more likely be for a self-inflicted wound, which it seems likely he will commit in abundance.

The only thing that might prevent such scenarios is the idea that Pence or Kaine might be far worse alternatives.

[kooshy]

I think Trump has is absolutely correct on the taxes and use of legally earned write offs " you question and don't want me to use my earned legal $970 mill tax write off, then you should have changed it when you were in congress" he is absolutely right a business person must be out of his mind not to use his absolutely legal earned write off.

[eakens]

Some credence to theory that Wikileaks source is not Russian ....

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/10/really-really-upset-foreign-office-security-services/

[TonyL]

FYI, government is not a business, and should never be run as a business.

[different clue]

jerseycityjoan,

The Clinton-Left ( if it even is a Left) may be panicking at Clinton's not-yet-putting-this away. But the Bernie-Left is, I think, torn between panicking and gloating. Many Bernie-Lefters are still working through in their minds whether Trump is something to panic about or not. And many other Bernie-Lefters stopped panicking about Trump some time ago. They already consider Clinton the more effective evil. What they don't know is what to do next. Vote for Trump ( eeeww! ick!) or Stein ( we are so pure.)?
The Greenie-Weenies lean towards Stein. Some of the Bitter Berners are edging towards thinking about Trump maybe. Their ultimate decision will be driven by just how deadly a threat and a menace they do or don't consider a President Clinton to be.

[different clue]

Outrage Beyond,

I think the Establishment would try keeping a President Clinton unimpeached until she had served her Establishment purpose. I believe that purpose being to get TTP, TTIP, TISA, etc. ratified, voted for and signed into law. Also to get Social Security put on a stealth slow-death-path to future abolition and total privatization of all the money therein. Also to get Medicare stealth-privatised and set up for voucherization and subsequent flushing down the ObamaCare toilet. Once she and Ryan and McConnell and the "Coffee Club" ( opposite of "Tea Party" ) Republicans and all the Wall Street/ Cat Food Democrats have conspired together to achieve the Goldman-Sachs-Blackstone agenda, only then will Clinton be allowed to pursue her cultural-political agenda. Then she will be allowed to knock herself out and get nowhere.

If Trump wins, the Establishment will try to remove Trump absolutely soonest and turn the Presidency over to Pence. Because Pence supports Free Trade Agreements. (I don't know how Pence feels about the various Catfood Plans for Social Security and Medicare)

[eakens]

I'm not in disagreement that everybody should take every legal deduction available to them, even if that means they can carry a NOL forward for 15 years.

My point is that you take the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15% and eliminate loopholes (i.e. simplify the tax code) so that large Fortune 500 companies don't spend $600M with Ernst & Young to account their way around a $2B tax liability. Instead, they pay $850M in taxes and reduce the need to hire an army of lawyers and accounts to exploit the laws.

I think the same thing should be done with personal taxes. I also think state income tax processes should be simplified. Everybody files a 1040, why do I need to do a separate CA tax return. Just take the 1040 income and multiply by 10% and be done with it for CA. It's all bureaucracy and red tape.

[eakens]

Government should be limited to providing for core functionality. Our current government has gone way beyond that, so either those non-essential functions need to be run efficiently, or not run at all.

[mike allen]

We Marines, like many others in this country, are sometimes full of ourselves. But we never said we were the only heroes there.

Lee, Grant, Jackson Thomas, Hill and many other Civil War generals made their bones in the Mexican War. Zach Taylor ended up as President for his role.

[Bill H]

I have never understood the shortsightedness of this argument of "borrow now while interest rates are low." The interest will be low only until it is time for the debt to be rolled over, and rates will inevitably be higher when that happens. The debt, then, is no longer cheap. The alternative is to redeem the notes and not replace them, thereby paying down the debt, which is vastly more costly. "Eat drink and be merry, because the future will never come."

[kooshy]

Mike Allen-

FYI, look who is warning the Turks for bombing syrian Kurds, It's Assad' Syria and not the supposed best friends of Kurds US.

"The Syrian military has warned to intercept and bring down any Turkish fighter jets entering the country’s airspace, nearly a day after Turkish warplanes bombarded 18 positions of the People's Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria, and killed up to 200 Kurdish fighters."
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/10/21/489981/Syria-target-Turkey-jets-airstrike-YPG-positions-Aleppo

[ked]

Impeachment is a political action of one branch vs another. It is not a judicial function in the formal sense, only in its appearance. A high crime &/or misdomeanor is whatever a House majority wishes to believe. An out-of-power Party with a House majority can rig an impeachment... no big deal. Given how functional Congress has been in recent years, I suppose one could view impeachment as dynamism.

[LondonBob]

The media are deliberately trying to depress turnout for Trump because they believe that some of his low propensity voters are discourageable, Trump has a slight lead, let us hope turnout and undecideds go his way as he needs a fraud proof margin.

[Old Microbiologist]

You are making the assumption that there are actually two parties. The evidence speaks differently. She has enjoyed the support of both parties, the administration, the executive branch and the judicial branch. Add in the complete corporate and media onslaught so it is not an exaggeration when Trump says it is him against the world.

Also keep in mind the tit for tat support from Wall Street and media moguls to include Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. It is a grand conspiracy to control everything in the US all the while trying to convince us we actually have a functioning democracy and they care for the common citizen. My prediction is now we will start new wars in Asia beginning with the Philippines who cannot be permitted to betray us. The ME mess will continue and we will now begin to focus on new assaults against Russia via Central Asia. Then we have Africa and a few resistant nations in South America that need to be taught a lesson on who is in control. Those in the military are going to be exhausted.

[LeaNder]

eakens, thanks, looks interesting.

I followed the back and forth argument concerning "the Russians are behind the leaks". Wondering a bit about TTG's support of the claim. Thus I followed his links more carefully than other's.

There was one that alluded to German services in connection with, to the extend I recall, Russia targeting the Ukrainian energy structure. The link to the German document did not work, but once you reduced it to the linked pdf file it did. A very, very short document relying on experts in the security field and a 2015 Trend Micro analysis. There was indeed an allusion to the energy market. It said that 0,3% suggested a targeting of the energy "info-structure"/market. If you looked at the Trend Micro report/analysis of the tool used, these 0,3% may have resulted from an attack on a Polish website connected to their energy distribution network, as I recall it. I could go into this from a German perspective related to EU laws, but I don't think that is necessary. At least that's what I associated. I am also too lazy to go back and give you more precise information.

*****
But who are the 17 secret service agents/officers Clinton referred to that were targeted "by the bear" in this context?

[LeaNder]

as foreign outsider I wondered what turnout and numbers the respective third party candidates would get, had they been on stage in all three debates.

My more personal and never seriously studied impression is, it doesn't matter if one or the other party "reigns" for too long on a communal level as far as corruption is concerned. Both traditional dominating parties are heavily losing voters over here. But we have a different setting.

On the other hand we have one party that doesn't fit the earlier patterns of slowly getting more votes, or occasionally loosing them too, concerning a newcomer an "upstart crow" that gets lots of votes that don't fit into earlier patterns.

[LeaNder]

Nitwit comment: As far as I am concerned, Tyler, and please don't misunderstand. He feels like an empty shell that can be filled easily by special interests.

[jonst]

open borders, to start (and finish?) with.

[jonst]

I don't think we have anything to worry about in that direction Tony.

[jonst]

I, for one, would like--at long last--and accurate assessment on what "cheap borrowing" actually 'costs'. Me thinks it cost a 'lot'. The word "Ponzi" keeps appearing in my mind.