MY Choice

There are stories about both candidates that people want to believe as true.

Some people are too lazy to fact check.

I've known Hillary for over 40 years (not personally, but thru public media).

Trump scares the fuck out of me: his "presidency" would legitimize hate crimes, crimes against: Women, Handicapped People, Mentally Challenged People, Blacks, Muslims, Jews, ANY kind of refugee, Hispanics, anyone not white and stupid, and more.

Here is an article explaining answers to 10 Claims against Hillary, with explanations. If you are an undecided, serious voter, please read this.

1. Hillary Clinton shared state secrets through her private email server.
In short, no, this isn’t true. But it is complicated.

One thing that sucks about being secretary of state (or president, for that matter) is that your job literally runs 24/7. Of course, you can’t be in the office around the clock. So every secretary of state since the smartphone became accessible has had one. Colin Powell had one. Condoleezza Rice had one. And they all used them to keep doing their job after the office was closed for the day. And all of them used unsecured servers, because all of them took their Blackberries home, in order to answer emails with state department employees and dignitaries abroad in different time zones.

What made Hillary Clinton’s different from her predecessors was that she knew it was insecure. In fact, she asked the NSA to give her a secure server, just to be on the safe side. And the NSA said no. They weren’t set up for things like that, and they didn’t want to take the time, so they told her it would be fine. Hillary Clinton wasn’t so sure, though. In a time when information hacks of the U.S. government by China, Russia, and other potential threats were becoming increasingly present threats, Hillary Clinton decided not to use the State Department server and decided instead to use the server the Secret Service set up for her husband after he left the White House. This is a secure server, it’s just not the same secure server. And while the State Department was hacked, Hillary’s private server wasn’t. So what the question boiled down to is “Was Hillary Clinton committing a crime?”

After millions and millions of our tax dollars were spent trying to answer this question, the answer was no. She didn’t commit a crime. But it was improper to unilaterally decide to use her own server when no other government agency signed off on it.

2. Hillary Clinton uses the Clinton Foundation to launder money for herself.

No again.

A lot of the allegations about the Clinton Foundation “scandal” come from a man named Peter Schweizer, who wrote a book called Clinton Cash in which he makes all kinds of claims about the Foundation. Mr. Schweizer was a senior editor for Breitbart News, the alt-right news site run by Donald Trump’s campaign CEO.

What’s amazing about these claims is how demonstrably false they are. The Clinton Foundation gets better ratings from non-profit watchdogs than the Red Cross, including ratings for being transparent — that’s for showing exactly where their money comes from and where it goes. People have accused the Clinton Foundation of wrongdoing because only 6% of their money goes to grants, but the Clinton Foundation isn’t in the business of funding grants. What they actually do is provide AIDS medication to rural African communities, combat climate change, and provide relief to areas affected by natural disasters.

We know Hillary Clinton isn’t gaining anything monetarily from the foundation, because she and Bill have released 30 years of their tax returns, showing the majority of their $3 million income comes from speaking engagements and book sales.


3. People could “buy” appointments with Secretary Clinton by donating to the Clinton Foundation.
Not really. But again, this is a little more complicated.

Many people wrote to Secretary Clinton, asking to get personal appointments with her, after making large donations to the Clinton Foundation. Most of them didn’t get what they wanted, but a few did.

However, those few who did were already likely to get a meeting with the State Department anyway. Foreign heads of state, members of royal families, these are people who the State Department regularly deals with. They made large donations to the Clinton Foundation, and some of them did see Clinton afterwords. But as she received none of the money from these donations, the argument that it in some way curried favor with Secretary Clinton is dubious. In reality, they made large donations to a cause they knew she supported in hope of increasing her interest in meeting with them, and in some cases, that may have worked. But even in those cases, it was not illegal.

4. Hillary Clinton approved a Russian uranium deal because of Clinton Foundation donations
Another of the bizarre claims in Schweizer’s Clinton Cash is that one of the alleged pay-for-play schemes run through the Clinton Foundation was that Hillary Clinton approved a uranium deal with the Russians after a massive donation.

Everything about this claim has been found to be false. So false that Schweizer had to publicly admit there was no truth to them.

Even if it were possible that Hillary Clinton had somehow gained financially from the deal, which she didn’t, nine other government agencies had to approve it — meaning the responsibility would have been far from hers alone.

And even further, none of the people Schweizer accused of donating to the Clinton Foundation worked for the company which the U.S. government arranged the uranium deal with.

5. Hillary Clinton is responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was not responsible for the deaths of anyone, American or otherwise, in Benghazi.

Yes, she was in charge of the State Department when the decision was made to reopen the embassy in Benghazi, but she did everything right. The reason people died in Benghazi is that sometimes terrorists succeed in killing people. In fact, fewer Americans were killed in embassy attacks than during either Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell’s tenures as secretary of state. During their administrations, there were 39 attacks on American embassies and consulate properties, resulting in 87 deaths.

Everyone who goes to work abroad for the State Department knows these risks, and Secretary Clinton demonstrated her understanding of the dangerous roles she asked her employees to fill, which resulted in one of the safest State Department administrations in decades.

6. Hillary Clinton is a conservative.
As senator for New York, Hillary Clinton was rated the 11th most liberal senator in the United States. While she did vote initially for the invasion of Iraq, she soon saw how she and other members of Congress had been misled by the Bush administration, and by 2007, she was one of the Senate’s most outspoken opponents of the war.

But well before her Senate career, she was known as a progressive. She spent her early career fighting against racism in education, working to eradicate poverty, and impeaching Richard Nixon. Then, as the first First Lady with a postgraduate degree, she led the fight for universal healthcare. After her healthcare plan failed, she managed to salvage part of the program as the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which still insures millions of American children today.


7. Hillary Clinton is owned by Wall Street.
While it is true that Hillary Clinton was paid by Wall Street banks to deliver some speeches, it is untrue that they have exerted any influence over her, politically or otherwise.

In fact, as a senator she voted in favor of tougher Wall Street regulations. Even Bernie Sanders, who built much of his support on the claim that Clinton was in the pocket of big banks, was unable to find any evidence whatsoever of this claim.

Regardless of whatever might have been said in those speeches, her platform is one of the most aggressive and progressive plans to curb Wall Street corruption by any candidate, ever.

The majority of her campaign donations come from individuals who work for, or used to work for prior to retirement, the four largest employers in the state she represented in the Senate (New York), and those four largest employers happen to be Wall Street banks.

8. Hillary Clinton is not a feminist.

Not even close.

During her early career, she worked to integrate segregated schools, to ensure equal access to all people, for the children of all mothers. As First Lady, she addressed the UN, asserting that, “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights, once and for all.” This was a statement against the crimes sanctioned by countries against women and girls worldwide, of all colors, creeds, and ethnicities.

She made it easier for women to sue against wage discrimination. She has the best rating on reproductive rights of any presidential candidate, ever. And she has promised to ensure that, if elected, 50% of her cabinet would be female — reflecting the content of our country rather than the content of our history.

9. Hillary Clinton is dishonest.

Not even close to true.

For the last 18 months, news watch-dog groups have been fact checking everything the candidates say, in written statements, on their websites, in debates, in speeches, and in political ads. What they’ve found is that of all the people who ran for a major party’s nomination this election cycle, Hillary Clinton was the most honest — more honest than Bernie Sanders, more honest than John Kasich, more honest than everybody.

The question of Hillary’s dishonesty actually comes down to a different issue — the sort of honesty we expect from “politicians” versus the type of honesty we expect from “women.” While we accept a politician boiling down a complex issue into a soundbite, when Hillary does it, she is often lambasted. Because Hillary speaks in complex statements, referring to the slow progress of governance instead of the speed of desired political change, it’s often seen as double-speak instead of metered realism. And people trust calculated caution in a woman’s speech less than they trust an overt lie from somebody like Donald Trump, whose supporters have said they don’t expect him to build a wall, despite it being his signature campaign promise.

10. Hillary Clinton defended a rapist and laughed about it.

One of the most untrue, horrible, despicable lies people still like to believe about Secretary Clinton is that she freed a child rapist, and laughed about it.

The truth is that when she was fresh out of law school, Hillary Clinton was a public defender. A judge ordered her to defend a man who raped a child, and Hillary Clinton tried to turn down the case. However, the judge told her he would not recuse her from the case, and she accepted that her job as a public defender included defending a man who was clearly guilty of this heinous crime. Rather than quit, she accepted that the Constitution declares that every person is entitled to a defense, and she did her job. In the end, she convinced him to plead guilty — ensuring that, unlike 97% of rapists, he did go to jail.

As for the laughter, during an interview some 40 years later, she laughed about how naive she had been to believe that technologies like a lie detector test would prove her client’s guilt. He passed the lie detector test, although Clinton knew he was guilty, and a much older Clinton laughed at the idea she could have once believed justice was as simple as putting an obviously guilty man behind bars. It had taken a great deal of work to convince him to plead guilty rather than going to trial, and she was proud of her work, as horrible as the job had been. The case went on to become a precedent for shield laws, which protect rape victims at the trials of their assailants.

On the other side of the spectrum, there’s Donald Trump. Rather than facing dubious claims that he freed a child rapist, he’s actually being sued in court right now by a woman who claims, with eye witnesses, that Donald Trump raped her when she was 13. This is the third time Trump has faced rape allegations. The first time, his ex-wife Ivanka stepped back from her statements that he raped her after their divorce was final. The second time, he paid off a former business associate to ensure her silence about his sexual misconduct. It’s become increasingly clear that the Donald J. Trump Foundation actually is a money laundering scheme, with Trump using donated funds to pay off his own legal fees, as well as to purchase paintings of himself, among other things. And then there are his ties to foreign countries that undermine U.S. interests — something that, if untrue, he could easily put to rest if he were willing to release his tax returns.
These myths reinforce the fact that Hillary Clinton is subjected to a double standard — one that we women are all too familiar with. In her 40-some years of public service, she has faced unprecedented scrutiny, and the result is that while her opponents have accused her of everything from money laundering to murder, nothing has ever been true. Her opponents claim, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” before lobbing a smoke bomb in her direction.

When looking for the source of that smoke, make sure to look at Donald Trump, a human dumpster fire if ever there was one, surrounded by the very people who have made unfounded accusations against Mrs. Clinton since the 1980s without facts to back up their claims.

Most importantly, vote based on facts, not feelings. Feelings change. Facts don’t.





I invite questions and comments, but if you post something ignorant and Trumpish, it will be deleted.

The Right Thing | Hillary Clinton

Monday Morning Smile

Sorry this is late, I watched the debate last night and my brain was all mushy after listening to that crazy, uneducated Drumph. I'm wondering WHY people STILL want him as president. This is scary. Let's get a flavor of these people

Anyway, this is a focus group of his supporters - bless their brainlessness

Monday Morning Smile

Turn on your volume, it's worth it.

Beautiful Voices

Monday Morning Smile

I have always been an occasional tongue-tied person and can relate to this. Have a blessed week

Please, let's all do this

I don't know about some of you out there, but I get A LOT of free Christmas cards out there from charities I support. This year, instead of giving them to goodwill, I am sending them all to the address at this site. These kids need to know they're loved. They are probably going through so many different emotions. I think an act of kindness in this situation is necessary. These kids didn't go get blown up because it sounded like fun, they did it to keep US safe. Thanks.

Mid Week Awww

Monday Morning Smile

A Veteran's Letter to Roger Badell

Commissioner,

I’ve been a season pass holder at Yankee Stadium, Yale Bowl and Giants Stadium.

I missed the ’90-’91 season because I was with a battalion of Marines in Desert Storm. 14 of my wonderful Marines returned home with the American Flag draped across their lifeless bodies. My last conversation with one of them, Sgt Garrett Mongrella, was about how our Giants were going to the Super Bowl. He never got to see it.

Many friends, Marines, and Special Forces Soldiers who worked with or for me through the years returned home with the American Flag draped over their coffins.

Now I watch multi-millionaire athletes who never did anything in their lives but play a game, disrespect what brave Americans fought and died for. They are essentially spitting in the faces and on the graves of real men, men who have actually done something for this country beside playing with a ball and believing they’re something special! They’re not! My Marines and Soldiers were!

You are complicit in this! You’ll fine players for large and small infractions but you lack the moral courage and respect for our nation and the fallen to put an immediate stop to this. Yes, I know, it’s their 1st Amendment right to behave in such a despicable manner.

What would happen if they came out and disrespected you or the refs publicly?

I observed a player getting a personal foul for twerking in the end zone after scoring. I guess that’s much worse than disrespecting the flag and our National Anthem. Hmmmmm, isn’t it his 1st Amendment right to express himself like an idiot in the end zone?

Why is taunting not allowed yet taunting America is OK? You fine players for wearing 9-11 commemorative shoes yet you allow scum on the sidelines to sit, kneel or pump their pathetic fist in the air. They are so deprived with their multi-million dollar contracts for playing a freaking game!

You condone it all by your refusal to act. You’re just as bad and disgusting as they are. I hope Americans boycott any sponsor who supports that rabble you call the NFL. I hope they turn off the TV when any team that allowed this disrespect to occur, without consequence, on the sidelines. I applaud those who have not.

Legends and heroes do NOT wear shoulder pads. They wear body armor and carry rifles.

They make minimum wage and spend months and years away from their families. They don’t do it for an hour on Sunday. They do it 24/7 often with lead, not footballs, coming in their direction. They watch their brothers carted off in pieces not on a gurney to get their knee iced. They don’t even have ice! Many don’t have legs or arms.

Some wear blue and risk their lives daily on the streets of America. They wear fire helmets and go upstairs into the fire rather than down to safety. On 9-11, hundreds vanished. They are the heroes.

I hope that your high paid protesting pretty boys and you look in that mirror when you shave tomorrow and see what you really are, legends in your own minds. You need to hit the road and take those worms with you!

Time to change the channel.

Col Jeffrey A Powers USMC (Ret)
Vista, California

Never Knew What Hit Him (Her)

donald trump sucks

Keith Olbermann tallies the most outrageous of Donald Trump's offenses in what is now his 15-month assault on American democracy. 

A Reason to Laugh

It's been a shitty few days.  On Saturday, my beloved cat Callie disappeared.

This home has been full of depression and tears since then.

After many prayers for strength, I feel that I can lighten up, but I'm still angry and hurt.

Anyway, today Walt Disney produced a video under the "Princess & the Frog" subject line about a recipe for Gumbo.

New Orleanians went ballistic!  It was great!   In this age of social media, things change like lightening storms.  Here is what that video has become.  Enjoy.  And if you're from Louisiana, laugh harder.

A big thanks to whomever introduced me to this album

Monday Morning Smile

Monday Morning Smile

REAL New Orleans Accents (pay attention TV show and movie makers)

RIP Gene Wiilder

How I feel about a lot of things these days

Monday Morning Smile

K + 11, remembering

Eleven years seems like a lifetime when you look back at where you were.

And in some ways, it seems like a long time since Katrina. And in some ways she never leaves our memory.

Back then, people communicated via text messages and forums. Since Katrina Facebook, Twitter and
a myriad of other social media have taken off. I'm so glad that we have these methods of communications now.

11 years ago was the birth of the Katrina blogosphere.

Throughout the past eleven years, the areas' blogs have marked August 29th each year by saying We Are Not Okay. That sad anniversary sometimes showed things not much better than the previous year.

I can speak only for myself in saying that I guess we're okay now. But not in a lot of ways. Our coasts are still vulnerable to just the right conditions of steering currents, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico and other things. Yet we stay. And people ask why. In the past 11 years we have seen a LOT of crazy weather, climate-change related or not. So I ask you people in tornado alley, the California coast where there are wildfires and mud slides, you guys up in the Great Lakes and Northeast with your insane winters WHY DO YOU LIVE THERE? Because you love it. That's why. So PLEASE try not to question our choice of homes.


What I'd like to do today is share - with whomever is interested - some of the most in-depth, well-written Katrina
blogs I discovered and read daily way back then and still visit them now and then.

I cyber met so many wonderful, smart, funny people thru reading their blogs. I cried, laughed, learned new words
like "fuckmook", "asshat" and the phrase "fuck you, you fucking fucks" .

Katrina was a mindfuck, and not only to the people in New Orleans. , In fact, post Katrina mental health issues may still linger in some poor souls.


Out of this group of fantastic writers was born Rising Tide, a conference about the future of New Orleans in the Post-K world. I never made it to any of the conferences (too shy, didn't feel I was "good enough" to be in the company of these people), but followed the proceedings via the NOLA Blogosphere.

Combing thru my list of Katrina related blogs created in 2006, I am making a list here of the blogs that are still available to read.

Toulouse Street , in my opinion the best Post Katrina blog. The writing, the feelings and pictures Mark Folse creates were addicting to me.

Michael Homan's account of going through the storm and the aftermath was riveting as well as heartwrenching.

Mosquito Coast, written by Swampwoman. You'll get a good feeling of how it was back in July of 2006.

After the Deluge, by Josh Newfeld . Josh remembers events via comics (not the funny kind), using real people's experiences after the flood.

Varg Vargas, an artist and reverend, recalls the haunting and hilarious after the storm in New Orleans.

NOLAblogger brings back those "great memories" from 2006.

Library Chronicles . Jeffrey - who acts like the grumpy old man he WILL BE in 40 or so years - will give you a great perspective of what was happening in his world back then.

Metroblogging New Orleans. Check out the list on the right side of the screen for the blog authors. The ones that begin with 'no_' are your post Katrina blog observations. Good reading here. Especially Craig.

Bayou Creole, written by a now Facebook friend.

And last, my blog posts beginning in 2006. I was new to blogging and wanted to get the truth out there, that's why I started: to tell the world out there the TRUTH.

If you read any of the links above, I hope you will come away with a bigger picture in your mind about the way this area has healed since Katrina the bitch visited us. Thanks to all.

Why I Love Cats

Obama and Babies

Monday Morning Smile

What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?

OMG, Did he really say this:

trump, claiming to win a majority of the black votes in November quote:

 "You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed -- what the hell do you have to lose?" Trump asked the audience in an unscripted moment from a speech in which he otherwise stuck to his teleprompter.

Later, when interviewed on CNN,   trump spokesperson Jack Kingston, was corrected hat trump was speaking to a mostly white audience in Wisconson replied:

KINGSTON: "I mean, maybe it would have been nice if he went and had a backdrop with a burning car........"


Here's the video

Regrets, NONE

 

The BEST Trump Evah

This is the only thing I like about Trump!!!! This is the best. Backstory (

NEW YORK (AP) — It's Donald Trump like you've never seen him before.

Life-size naked statues of the Republican presidential nominee greeted passers-by in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Cleveland on Thursday. They are the brainchild of an activist collective called INDECLINE, which has spoken out against Trump before.

In a statement, the collective said the hope is that Trump, the former host of "The Apprentice" reality TV series, "is never installed in the most powerful political and military position in the world."

The statues were created by an artist in Cleveland. They are of a stern-faced Trump with his hands folded over a bulging belly. Some parts of male genitalia are visible while others seemingly are missing.

"It is through these sculptures that we leave behind the physical and metaphorical embodiment of the ghastly soul of one of America's most infamous and reviled politicians," INDECLINE said in its statement.

Trump's campaign declined to comment on the statues.

A statue in New York's Union Square quickly drew the attention of people, many of whom posed for photographs with it, before it was removed by the city's parks department.



"NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small," parks spokesman Sam Biederman joked.


A video posted by DNAInfo showed onlookers booing and groaning as workers snapped the statue off its base, leaving the feet behind, and loaded it face-down into the back of a pickup truck. One woman yelled, "Take his nasty feet, too!"



Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, when asked about the naked Trump statue, said, "That is a frightening thought. When he's wearing clothes I don't like him."

INDECLINE said statues on the West Coast were still in place.

This wasn't the group's first anti-Trump endeavor. The collective also has spray-painted a U.S.-Mexico border fence in Tijuana, Mexico, with an image of a gagged Trump.

The group's other projects have included putting the names of African-Americans killed by police over the inlaid stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and painting the words "This Land Was Our Land" across an unused airstrip in the Mojave Desert.

When a leisurely stroll turns into an encounter with #NakedTrump. 😱😱😱https://t.co/whEacXbbPQ pic.twitter.com/HslpVNitGh

— GIPHY (@giphy) August 18, 2016