Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump churns out strong opinions like McDonald's produces Big Macs. But save for the odd eruption—like declaring the supremacy of Trump Tower Grill's "taco bowls" or blaming the California drought on environmentalists to the delight of the state's agribusiness interests—he has been relatively quiet about food. At last month's Republican National Convention, the real estate developer and reality TV star took a step toward filling out his food and farm policy by tapping Nebraska agribusiness owner and cattleman Charles Herbster as the chairman of his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee. 

Like Trump, Herbster is an unconventional business titan with political ambitions.

He and his wife own Conklin, a Kansas City-based company with an odd mix of product lines: pesticide additives called adjuvents; fertilizers for farms and lawns; probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people; industrial roof coatings; and motor oils for "everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars." In addition, he owns a cattle-breeding company called Herbster Angus Farms as well as farmland in Nebraska and Colorado, for which he received a total of $196,757 $577,179 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to the Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database. (Note: After this piece went live Monday morning, an EWG press person emailed me to note that in addition to the $196,757 Herbster took in under his own name, Carico Farms, for which Herbster is listed as the owner, received $380,422 between 1995 and 2014.) That's still not a particularly high number—many Nebraska farm operators got much more over that time frame.

Before he took the reins of Trump's ag policy team, Herbster was best known for his aborted 2013 campaign for Nebraska's governorship, as Politico's Ian Kullgren recently noted. Soon after exiting the race, Herbster donated $860,000 to the campaign of another Republican gubernatorial candidate, Beau McCoy, a Nebraska state senator. Herbster ultimately donated a total of $2.7 million to McCoy's campaign, "nearly his entire war chest," the Omaha World-Herald reported. McCoy lost the race. Last year, Herbster hired McCoy to run marketing for Conklin's building-supply business. Another one-time Nebraska officeholder, former Gov. Dave Heineman, joined Conklin's board of directors last year.

Herbster's largesse to politicians hasn't been limited to McCoy's failed bid. Politico notes he "has given $336,000 to Republican candidates and ag-related PACs since 2012."

He is a major funder of Ag America, which describes itself as a "Federal Super PAC active in local, state, and federal elections." Herbster sits on the Ag America steering committee, and according to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants. 

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/07/meet-man-advising-donald-trump-ag-policy

Meanwhile, a Twitter storm erupted after the New York Post ran a front page featuring a nude photo of Donald Trump’s wife, Melania. An advisor for the Republican presidential nominee said it’s “nothing to be embarrassed about.”
The tabloid newspaper, which is owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, ran the image alongside the caption “The Ogle Office,” promising photos of Melania “like you’ve never seen her before.”

The photos were taken in 1995, when Melania was 25 years old, and published the next year in the French magazine Max, two years before she met The Donald.

Also included was an interview with the photographer, Jarl Alé Alexandre de Basseville, who says the potential First Lady was “super-great and a fantastic personality and she was very kind.”

The decision to run the front page left many quarters of the internet “appalled and outraged,” with many saying it was “extremely tasteless.”

The Trump camp seemed less concerned about the images, however.

Trump told the newspaper that the photos were taken prior to him knowing Melania, while noting that “in Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.”

Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior communications adviser, went one step further and defended the photos in an interview with CNN on Sunday, describing them as “a celebration of the human body as art.”

“There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Miller said. “She’s a beautiful woman.”

...

So, in conclusion, the religious conservative case for Trump comes down to gambling. That Hillary would be a disaster for religious conservatives is one of the safest bets you can make in American politics. Betting on Trump is a long-shot gamble, but as I tell myself when I buy lottery tickets, hey, you never know. Even if Trump were to come through on religious liberty protections, voting for him is still taking an incredible gamble on so many other things, both domestically and internationally.

Still, it might be worth it to some. If a religious conservative takes all of this into consideration and still chooses to vote for Trump, I won’t judge him. I suppose it is possible that I may be that man come November. I don’t see how, but maybe I will be. (I also might be the man who votes for Hillary Clinton, though it’s even more unlikely.) But I do not understand religious conservatives who enthusiastically support Trump, as opposed to supporting him in fear and trembling, knowing what a bad man he is. They are no better than the feminists who rallied to Bill Clinton’s side during the Lewinsky scandal because no matter how much Bill’s actions and character went against the things they believe in, it was more important to deny the Right a victory than to stand on principle. Similarly, many conservative Christians involved in politics this fall are not covering themselves with glory, to put it charitably.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-the-god-vote/

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32359#comment-35882

As David Moyes’ troubled time at Manchester United was coming to an end, a banner appeared at Anfield, home of arch rivals, Liverpool. It read "Agent Moyes: Mission Accomplished".

The idea was that the only way to destroy the dynasty built by Alex Ferguson, United’s legendary manager, was to do it from the inside.

I was reminded of the banner thinking about Donald Trump.

There are more than a few Republicans who believe his entire campaign is not geared at winning the White House but simply clearing a path for Hillary Clinton. A so-called "false flag" operation.

Remember, the Democratic nominee for president would be the least trusted candidate to run for the presidency if she wasn't topped by one other candidate. And that would be Donald Trump.

It’s just one of the incredible conspiracies that have circled around the businessman’s campaign.

It’s no surprise. Conspiracy theories tend to arise as people try to make sense of unusual events. In fact in the book American Conspiracy Theories two respected academics found that "inducing anxiety of loss of control triggers respondents to seen nonexistent patterns and evoke conspiratorial explanations".  And the rise of Trump has been unusual and unexpected.

read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/americas/2016/08/donald-trump-conspiracy-160804193712791.html

I would suggest here that despite pissing everywhere like an incontinent donkey, Trump has a method in the madness. It is likely that when faced by Hillary in final debates, all his unfortunate utterance to date will gel into a steel ball used to demolish buildings, including Hillary. The Donald is planting little bombs everywhere which could be seen as deluded and loony, but like in comedy, they have a killer punchline.

Wait for it. The toon at top of course was done tongue in cheek... His master of crap is no other than the master of crap himself, Uncle Rupe. Let's face it, Hillary would have made minced-meat of the Rubios and Cruzes... Here so far, Trump is so outrageously loony that Hillary cannot land a real hurting punch on him, while from time to time he lands a doozy in her face.

How do you lose the presidency to a man like Donald Trump? He was the most unpopular presidential candidate of all time, compounding blunder with blunder and heaping gaffe upon gaffe. Keeping him from the Oval Office should have been the single-minded mission of the Democratic party. And it should have been easy for them.

Instead they lost, and now their 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton comes before us to account for this monumental failure, to tell us What Happened. Unfortunately, her new book is less an effort to explain than it is to explain away.

No real blame ever settles anywhere near Clinton’s person. And while she wrestles gamely with the larger historical question of why the party of the people has withered as inequality grows, she never offers a satisfying answer. Instead, most of the blame is directed outward, at familiar suspects like James Comey, the Russians and the media.

Still, by exercising a little discernment, readers can find clues to the mystery of 2016 here and there among the clouds of blame-evasion and positive thinking.

Start at the beginning: why did Hillary Clinton run for president? “[B]ecause I thought I’d be good at the job,” she writes. Then, 13 pages later: “It was a chance to do the most good I would ever be able to do.”

A would-be do-gooder needs problems to solve, of course, and so Clinton says she turned next to the people who knew what was wrong. “I started calling policy experts,” she writes, “reading thick binders of memos, and making lists of problems that needed more thought.” Lists of problems and solutions are everywhere; reeling them off one after another is one of her favorite rhetorical devices, her way of checking the boxes and letting everyone know that she cares.

Proceeding in this rational, expert-sanctioned way, Hillary Clinton set out resolutely on the road to oblivion.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/12/hillary-clintons-b...

See toon at top...

Call it Clinton unbound and unguarded. What Happened is self-revelatory, and at times mordantly humorous. Although the candidate’s pain is plainly there for us to see, it does not elicit schadenfreude from the reader.

On one level, Clinton is understandably unapologetic for her loss. Whatever could go wrong, went wrong. There was Bernie Sanders and his “bros”; James Comey and his letters; Carlos Danger and his selfies; Julian Assange and his Wikileaks; and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, he who reigns in the Kremlin as Satan might rule in Hell. It is a tableau befitting Mardi Gras or a Boschian landscape, not an American presidential election

Yet, What Happened is not as politically insightful as it might have been. The book fails to demonstrate that Clinton absorbed Election Day’s biggest lessons: The white working class—nearly a third of the electorate—was still reeling from the Great Recession when it went to the polls, and the Trump Campaign was actually a movement of forgotten and neglected working Americans. The fact is that white Americans lost more than 700,000 jobs between November 2007 and late 2016.

First and foremost, Trump’s electoral win was about dyspeptic dad thundering, and the elites of both parties being forced to confront the reality that the American body politic was comprised of more than just coastal elites, the inner city, or both parties’ donor bases. Even the unfashionable had a right to vote, and this time they actually did.

While New York City and Silicon Valley had plenty to smile about as the economy recovered from the Great Recession, the stories from rural Ohio and Western Pennsylvania were markedly different. For the first time since 1993, American life expectancy had declined, driven by a jump in the mortality rates for middle-age and non-college graduate whites. Charles Murray’s imagined Fishtown from Coming Apart was no longer just an intellectual construct. It had become an opioid- and alcohol-fueled path to nowhere.

Unfortunately, What Happened makes no mention of how free trade created a whole population of left-behind Americans, Bill Clinton’s role in driving the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), or Hillary’s hand in crafting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). At best, Clinton chalks up working-class decline to globalization and automation. But as a savvy politician knows, that’s not enough.

In case anyone forgot, President Clinton made NAFTA Exhibit A in his successful bid to demonstrate that he was a New Democrat. As luck would have it, Hillary Clinton was forced to ingloriously abandon the stillborn TPP in the face of Democratic opposition. Calamities deserve empathy, and here Clinton came up short. As Clinton writes, “I do recognize that my campaign in 2016 lacked the urgency and passion that I remember from 1992.”

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-happened-hillary-ch...

See toon at top. Remember too that she said she would "kill" Wikileaks or words to this effect. Now she also blames Wikileaks for her demise... In fact, the major blunder was the miscalculation of the DNC about the "delegates" and the evangelicals... The Bernie supporters voted for her "reluctantly". They did not vote for Trump. The TPP and the TiPP was designed to benefit RICH companies and their lawyers, while skewering the little guys in most countries, including America...

Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer, journalist and media analyst who apart from this title made the best analysis of Clinton's book: What happened". What Happened? Well, contrary to what she writes in the book, Hillary sure knows why she lost: she mucked up long before being a candidate for the 2016 Presidential elections, but won't admit to it. Napoleon himself was so close to winning Waterloo. To a great extend we should be relieved that Hillary lost to the idiot Trump...

Under a Clinton presidency, one can assume that the US would have by now bombed Damascus, Iran and North Korea — and possibly Crimea. Her book is that written by a sociopath blaming everyone for her defeat — from Jill Stein to Bernie...

Yes, history is a bitch with no delete button... See toon at top... As I wrote in this line of comments on 5 August 2016:

Wait for it. The toon at top of course was done tongue in cheek... His master of crap is no other than the master of crap himself, Uncle Rupe. Let's face it, Hillary would have made minced-meat of the Rubios and Cruzes... Here so far, Trump is so outrageously loony that Hillary cannot land a real hurting punch on him, while from time to time he lands a doozy in her face.

Former FBI Director James Comey "forever changed history" by resuming the debate about Hillary Clinton's mishandling of her emails just 11 days before the 2016 presidential vote, the former Democratic presidential nominee told CNN's host, Anderson Cooper, prompting yet another sarcastic response from Donald Trump.

Although the US 2016 presidential campaign ended almost 10 months ago, former Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton continues to look for someone to blame for her resound defeat on November 8, 2016. It appears that eventually she has figured out who "forever changed history" last year.

"I think it's important to focus on what happened, cause lessons can be learned," Clinton told Anderson Cooper, the host of "Anderson Cooper 360," on Wednesday commenting on her newly published book with the eloquent title "What Happened."

"He [former FBI Director James Comey], I think, forever changed history," she stressed.

Clinton has long been blaming Comey for her defeat, but it is the first time that she has emphasized the former FBI director's role in the whole story in such terms. 
However, Hillary Clinton's main rival, the incumbent president of the United States, Donald Trump, swiftly responded.

Crooked Hillary Clinton blames everybody (and every thing) but herself for her election loss. She lost the debates and lost her direction!

The "deplorables" came back to haunt Hillary.They expressed their feelings loud and clear. She spent big money but, in the end, had no game!

Clinton's accusations toward James Comey are not that groundless: In his article published immediately after the elections Tim Fernholz of Quartz surmised that the announcement related to Hillary Clinton's email scandal made by the then-FBI director just 11 days before the presidential vote dealt a heavy blow to her presidential campaign.

Although Comey recommended in July 2016 that no criminal charges be filed against Clinton for her use of an unprotected email server, on October 28, 2016, he sent a letter to Congress writing about the disclosure of a portion of Clinton emails, which were likely sent or received by former Congressman Anthony Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, Clinton's personal aide.

The discovery came like a bolt out of the blue, resuming a heated debate in the media over Clinton's use of her private email server, as well as her chances to be charged for the misdeed. On November 6, 2016, Comey said in an official statement that a new batch of emails from Clinton's private server "have not changed [the FBI's] conclusion;" nevertheless, the damage was done.

While delivering her speech at a Women for Women International event in New York in May 2017 Hillary Clinton recollected the embarrassing episode and partly blamed Comey for the fiasco.

"If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president," Clinton told Christiane Amanpour, the moderator of the event. Clinton's phrase prompted an immediate response from Trump.

FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony…

…Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton's memoir "What Happened" came out. The book has prompted a lively debate on US mainstream media outlets with some reporters recommending the opus and others denouncing it as "dead-horse-beating." Many journalists, regardless of their political preferences, came to the conclusion that regardless of why Hillary Clinton lost the election it's time for her to move on.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201709141057402062-clinton-comey-changed-hist...

The truth is that Clinton COULD NOT come clean on her emails without disturbing the pond — showing she had been manipulative and warmongering. The emails popping up in other people computers showed she had been careless and though the text of these emails have been suppressed they showed enough manipulative crap for her to be charged. That Comey did not charge her and that the FBI did not charge her after the elections or that The Donald did not pursue the case is letting The Woman get away with blaming OTHERS than herself...

And of course the resignation of the DNC chief, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, did not help Hillary one bit... That was the real killer blow... No Russians to be seen either... Just bad management of the DNC which would have led to the emails being leaked from within the DNC.

Leaders of both major parties are wrong to think of the 2016 election as some kind of fluke. I believe a political realignment is underway, and those who fail to discern its outlines could end up powerless and irrelevant.

With all respect to Hillary Clinton, her newly published memoir, “What Happened,” doesn’t really tell what happened. It is perhaps inevitable that she would focus on the daily twists and turns of the campaign. It is understandable that she would blame James B. Comey, Vladimir Putin and the media for damaging her prospects — and that she would play down her own strategic and tactical missteps.

But take a step back and look at the election through a wider lens. Clinton, with all her vast experience and proven ability, was defeated by Donald Trump, a reality-television star who had never before run for office, displayed near-total ignorance of the issues, broke every rule of political rhetoric and was caught on videotape bragging of how he sexually assaulted random women by grabbing their crotches.

That’s not just unlikely, it’s impossible. At least it should have been, according to everything we knew — or thought we knew — about politics. Yes, Comey’s last-minute revival of Clinton’s email scandal robbed her of momentum. Yes, her neglect of the Rust Belt was a terrible mistake. Yes, the Russians were working hard to defeat her, with the blessing — and at least the attempted collusion — of the Trump campaign.

But the election never should have been close enough for relatively minor voting shifts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to elect the likes of Trump. The election never should have been close enough for Clinton to lose Florida and barely eke out a win in Virginia. 

In retrospect, the alarming possibility of an election-night surprise should have been apparent. Trump never should have won the Republican nomination over a field that included so many talented politicians. And Clinton never should have had to work so hard to win the Democratic nomination over Bernie Sanders, an aging socialist from Vermont who wasn’t even a Democrat until he entered the race.

None of what happened should have happened. And it is a mistake to blame Clinton’s character flaws, Trump’s mastery of Twitter or the media’s compulsion to chase every bright, shiny object. Something much bigger and deeper was going on.

My view is that the traditional left-to-right, progressive-to-conservative, Democratic-to-Republican political axis that we’re all so familiar with is no longer a valid schematic of American political opinion. And I believe neither party has the foggiest idea what the new diagram looks like.

I don’t think Trump can see the new spectrum either, as evidenced by the way his approval ratings have plunged since his inauguration. But both he and Sanders deserve credit for seeing that the old model has outlived its usefulness.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-2016-election-was-not-a-fluke/2017/09/18/b45a8a0e-9cb4-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.6a5a07176ead

See toon at top...