News: November 2016 Archives
- Good victory speech. I'm looking forward to hearing from Hillary today. (Update: Hillary's concession speech was gracious.)
- Republicans will now hold the Presidency, 52/53 Senate seats, ~239 House seats, ~34 Governorships, and ~67 out of 98 partisan state legislature chambers. That's a lot of power and responsibility.
- The New York Times' Upshot statistical dashboard was fantastic. Bravo!
- Why don't people trust the media? Because they're so often wrong, and when they're wrong it's always in a way that favors the Left.
- This election was a good demonstration of the value of the Electoral College. Just imagine all the recounting and legal wrangling that would have to be done for weeks and months in every county in the country if the winner were chosen by direct election. Trump's electoral vote victory is so solid that there's no point in lawsuits or recounts.
- Politico has lots of quotes from the past month from Clinton insiders who knew the campaign wasn't going well for her. Why weren't these quotes newsworthy in October?
- The elites of both flavors created Trump by continually ignoring the needs of common Americans. They reviled the polite, Constitutionalist Tea Party and squandered the congressional mandate the Tea Party delivered in 2010 and 2014.
- Polling is hard -- especially in such unusual circumstances. Remember Brexit?
- Remember Brexit? Well, the stock market will recover quickly. Buy as much as you can.
- How many times did people call on Trump to quit? He didn't, and now he's going to be President.
- Trump did better with non-whites than McCain or Romney -- including more Latino voters. Alternate spin: Clinton did worse with those groups than Obama.
- Obama views the election as a personal repudiation, and the value of political money and data analytics has been called into question.
- All the Republicans who lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan over and over again for decades need to spend some time in reflection.
- Obama's accomplishments are all vulnerable because all of them -- except Obamacare -- were imposed by executive order instead of laws passed by Congress.
- Obama's statement this morning was gracious and hopeful.
- Get ready for the media to rediscover a host of problems, now that they can be laid at a Republican's feet.
- Trump spend 63% less than Clinton for each of his electoral votes.
- Reince Priebus deserves a lot of credit. Unlike the corrupt party officials at the DNC, Priebus ran the RNC straight. He build a get-out-the-vote operation when Trump didn't. He and his team did a tremendous amount of work to make Trump's victory possible.
I'll update this with more thoughts as I process today's news.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether or not felons who have served their sentences should having their voting rights restored. I can see reasonable arguments in both directions. However, Terry McAuliffe's naked politicizing of what should be a solemn responsibility is appalling.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has granted voting rights to as many as 60,000 convicted felons just in time for them to register to vote, nearly five times more than previously reported and enough to win the state for his long-time friend, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.The Virginia chief executive claimed to have "no idea" how felons would vote and said he had never thought about it. Clinton's staff emailed him after the 200,000-voters move to call it a "great announcement" and set up a call about it.
McAuliffe also did a major favor for the wife of a senior FBI executive who was running for a Virginia legislative seat at the same time the bureau was investigating Clinton's use of private email addresses and a home-brew server to conduct the official diplomatic business of the U.S.
Well this video is fun:
Is this real or paranoia? Considering how the year as gone so far, maybe it's both!
There's also a lot of chatter from right-wing conspiracy sites about the contents of Weiner's laptop -- including claims by unnamed NYPD officials that they're prepared to push the investigation into Hillary themselves.
NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department's highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices."What's in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach," the NYPD Chief said. "There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that."
The NYPD Chief said once Comey saw the alarming contents of the emails he was forced to reopen a criminal probe against Clinton.
"People are going to prison," he said.
Stay tuned... I think things are going to get weirder.
Well this video is fun:
Is this real or paranoia? Considering how the year as gone so far, maybe it's both!
One of the reasons that cybersecurity and information security are so important is that a breach leads to never-ending complications. Hillary Clinton's decision to use a poorly-secured email server in her house, compounded with her "extremely careless" handling of classified information, will bedevil her for the rest of her life -- and cause harm to America for far longer.
There's no way for anyone to know if or when the last shoe has dropped. Hillary could be blackmailed at any time -- with real or fake email dumps. America's allies and enemies can be manipulated or threatened. Information that leads to "exceptionally grave damage" to national security can be exploited secretly by our enemies without our knowledge.
The fallout of Hillary's "extremely careless" decisions will continue to harm her and America for decades.
In all likelihood, there are many foreign governments and perhaps many private parties who were able to gain access to the Clinton homebrew server. Any one of them at any time could dump more information that will be impossible to ignore. No one knows what that information will be, but it is certain to embarrass both Clinton and the United States, and perhaps compromise our allies as well.
