Trump: Disaster

Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.

His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.

Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office

Trump Wins Big Among People Who Never Moved Away - The Atlantic

Pakistan

In Washington DC, unlike Islamabad, there is clarity. You cannot have your left hand tinker with the HQN, LeT, JuD, JeM, and have your right hand shake Ash Carter’s or Susan Rice’s or anyone else’s. 

Clinton Up

Poll: Clinton up 10 on Trump nationally | TheHill

UN makes power play against Trump | TheHill

 a summer study concluding that Trump would be the only head of state in the world to doubt the science behind climate change. 

Momentum shifts in battle for Senate | TheHill 

Single Payer System?

market-based solutions would not solve the country's problems with insurance costs and coverage

Bill Clinton calls Obamacare 'the craziest thing in the world' - CNNPolitics.com

The media likes drama. They want a fight. So they focus on just the phrase.

Bill Clinton could not have taken the Republican position that the whole thing needs to be dismantled, should never have happened.

Perhaps the ACA was an expensive way to educate the country to tell them what you really need is single payer.

Bill Clinton goes way off message on ObamaCare | TheHill

Hillary Clinton and the White House struggled on Tuesday to explain Bill Clinton’s blistering critique of ­ObamaCare, which exposed divisions in the Democratic Party over the healthcare law.

The blunt criticism of ­ObamaCare comes in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s careful embrace of the law throughout the campaign. She describedthe Affordable Care Act earlier this year as “one of the greatest accomplishments” in the nation’s history, and frequently touts the law’s coverage gains in her stump speeches.

Bill Clinton’s calls for Medicare for all, also known as a “single-payer” system, echo some of the former first lady’s own comments, after she stepped to the left on healthcare during this year’s Democratic primaries. 

She has proposed big changes like a government-run public option as well as the power for Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. Democrats in Congress have also signaled a new push for the public option, with 33 senators signing on to legislation to create one.

“The change we need is not to wreck this thing and repeal it. It’s done too much good,” Clinton said. “The change we need is to create an affordable option for the small-business people and the working people who are not covered — that’s what the public option is about.”

Bill Clinton: 'I strongly supported' ObamaCare | TheHill

Trump And American Journalists

 “I wonder how I would have behaved if I had been a correspondent in Germany during the early rise to power of Adolf Hitler. Would I first have tried to report his side of the story? How long would it have taken me to realize that he was all bad and that any sympathy or even-handedness would have been misplaced? The short answer is I don’t know.”

Trump Brand Anti Semitism

“This feels like the closest thing to the type of anti-Semitism that my grandparents talk about experiencing in Poland.”

Kushner’s extended family fired back, launching an internecine war of words: “Please don't invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night,” seethed one Kushner cousin. “It is self-serving and disgusting.”

“When you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law,” she wrote to her boss, “you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.”

“Donald Trump,” Reizes says, “has put the Jewish community in a turmoil that I don’t really think we’ve experienced in a long time.”

31-year-old Andrew Aglin, founder of the Daily Stormer—a bigot and racist who refers to his presidential candidate by nom de guerre, “Glorious Leader.” College undergraduates from California, leisurely attending white nationalist conferences, have also shown up; and 25-year-old Matthew Heimbach, dubbed the “next David Duke.” (“Hail, Emperor Trump and hail victory.”) Trump has opted to wink and nod at such “deplorables” (as Hillary Clinton has called them) when given the chance.

“What’s most shocking is...how silent the Jewish establishment has been in calling out Trump’s behavior,” Kaplan said. She later added, “The same people who told me that anti-Semitism was everywhere are now conspicuously silent on Trump. In some cases, they’re supporting Trump.”

“Donald Trump is not a distraction. He is the thing our tradition teaches us to resist,” Beinart wrote. “In this season of national decision and Jewish self-reflection, please reflect on your silence.”

“It’s a moment when both you and your grandma get to be right about this,” Harpo Jaeger, 25, tells me, an experienced campus activist in Jewish politics and a faith-based organizer. “She gets to be right that anti-Semitism is alive and well, and Jews should be worried about it,” he adds. “And the left gets to be correct, in that the anti-Israel or anti-Zionist left doesn’t have a monopoly on anti-Semitism. These people really are everywhere.”

“Why the Jews? I don’t know,” says Zach Reizes. “It’s a very scary thought, that maybe all those horror stories we’ve been told about Jewish persecution are right.” The nineteen-year-old adds, “Maybe they’re still foreshadowing a future that we thought had died.”

The BO Presidency

Barack Obama on 5 Days That Shaped His Presidency 

I haven’t lost my preference for good old-fashioned debate, bills, and the democratic process. If there’s one wish that I have for future presidents, it’s not an imperial presidency, it is a functional, sensible majority-and-opposition being able to make decisions based on facts and policy and compromise. That would have been my preference for the majority of my presidency. It was an option that wasn’t always available. But I hope the American people continue to understand that that’s how the system should work.