New Ted Cruz ad spoofs "Office Space"in Clinton Server Attack

The ad will air during Saturday Night Live the week before the South Carolina primary.

The timing is very interesting. What motivates Cruz? I'm sure HRC boosters would argue Cruz attacks Clinton because he would rather run against Bernie in the general. But I suggest that Cruz understands that a well-timed, nationally televised attack of Hillary will boost his standing among the masses of voraciously rabid GOP Clinton-haters and motivate them, boosting turnout to the South Carolina polls to vote for him and not his Republican opponents.

And if this works in So. Carolina, we can expect the other GOP candidates to follow suit in subsequent primaries by outdoing each other in attacks on Hillary Clinton. We Sanders supporters have been warning that HRC as the primary candidate will depress voter turnout of younger voters, progressives and independents, and boost turnout of the accurately named Clinton-haters in the GOP. This move by Cruz will test that hypothesis.

The video of the ad and lyrics are available at the link.

An ad popped up on my Comcast email page

Big head and shoulders photo of Hillary in bright red jacket -

Morehouse Students Perform Electrifying Dance Routine at Sanders Rally

Video at link
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/morehouse-college-bernie-sanders-rally_us_56c43a0ee4b08ffac1270dc8?utm_hp_ref=politics

The Bernie Sanders rally at Morehouse College on Tuesday evening was electric.

Almost 5,000 people attended the event at the historically black, all-male school in Atlanta, and many chanted “Feel the Bern, feel the Bern” as the Democratic presidential candidate addressed the crowd.

However, before the rally even began, a group of students raised the roof with a choreographed dance routine.

“Best pre-show entertainment ever,” wrote WXIA reporter Blayne Alexander on Twitter.

Her video of the performance has since gone viral on social media.

According to Juana Summers, politics editor at Mashable, the rally was an energetic affair, with the young, diverse crowd roaring with cheers when both Sanders and rapper Killer Mike, who has been campaigning for the Vermont senator, took the stage.

What? You have a problem with cluster-bombing little brown kids!

(Sarcasm, of course.)Don't hold that against Abuela Hillary! (More sarcasm!)

Here is the bill: the “Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act.”

This was a single purpose amendment to a larger defense bill so was not part of an omnibus bill where she could have had mixed goals. This was an act to limit the use and transfer of cluster munitions to those munitions that have a 99% or higher reliability rate, would prohibit use of cluster munitions in areas where civilians are known to be present and would require a cleanup plan of cluster munition remnants if the US used cluster munitions.

Historically, cluster munitions are particularly troubling because they are left in place and affect civilians ... including those women and children that Hillary expresses she is a fighter for. It is a world wide issue and is the subject of numerous diplomatic attempts to take these munitions that affect civilians off the table.

Of all her warlike votes, this may be the worst. There was no progressive or liberal reason for anyone to vote against this amendment. Her vote was either because she is a defense hawk or because she wanted to look like one and not look soft. It is one of the worst weapons in the world. Hillary joined 15 other democrats and EVERY REPUBLICAN iN voting this way. Her democratic company included most of the conservative war democrats in the senate: lieberman, nelson, landrieu, pryor, shumer. Surprisingly it was a Feinstein introduced Amendment which shows that such munitions even concern people who generally are defense hawks.

And for you Clinton lovers who want to associate her fully with Obama. Of course he voted for the Ban because he does not have the war baggage she has. Hillary voted against banning these munitions and there really is no excuse for this vote.

Author of "Undergroound Girls of Kabul" in PGH on Feb.23rd

An outstanding investigative journalist will be giving the annual Raizman Lecture at Chatham University. It's free - even free parking! Try to attend if you can. But pre-register at the link below. Seating is limited to 500 and she is nationally renowned.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
The Women’s Institute at Chatham presents The Raizman Lecture featuring Jenny Nordberg, award-winning author of The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan.

An award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent, columnist and television producer, Jenny Nordberg has worked all over the world, investigating topics such as the global financial crisis, nuclear proliferation, foreign aid, human trafficking, and aspects of “the war on terror,” as well as many human rights issues. Based on her extensive research and reporting inside a war zone, The Underground Girls of Kabul has been published in more than 10 countries and won numerous awards.

In presenting her with the 2015 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and The Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University explained that Nordberg’s work “is much more than a hard-won investigation populated with diverse characters and potent scenes. It’s also a careful surrender of assumptions about gender and patriarchy and the Western lens on a troubled country—a book through which readers emerge both challenged and changed.”
PRAISE FOR THE UNDERGROUND GIRLS OF KABUL

“Five years of intensive reporting have yielded this gritty, poignant, and provocative collage of intimate portraits… Nordberg conveys captivating nuance and complexity; just when you feel some kind of judgment or conclusive opinion is within reach, she deftly turns the tables, leaving us to reexamine our own prejudices and societal norms as we struggle with questions that are perhaps unanswerable." ~Elle

"As affecting as the stories of these women are, Nordberg's conclusion—that women's rights are essential to "building peaceful civilizations"—is the most powerful message of this compelling book. An intelligent and timely exploration into contemporary Afghanistan." ~Kirkus Reviews

"Jenny Nordberg has given us a fascinating look into a hidden phenomenon of extreme patriarchal societies: a form of gender-bending far riskier and more rewarding than Western academia's trendy, abstract gender categories. Nordberg's reporting is thorough and sensitive, her writing vivid and insightful. You will not forget this book; it will haunt you." ~Robin Morgan, author and founder of Ms. magazine

Winner of the 2015 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
A Salon 2014 Authors’ Favorite Book
One of Buzzfeed’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
A Business Insider Best Book of 2014
A Columbus Dispatch Best Book of 2014
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2014
A PopMatters Best Book of 2014
An FP Interrupted Best Book of 2014

http://www.chatham.edu/newsevents/events/details.cfm?eventID=15076
Registration and Directions

Register Online

Fee : Free and open to the public
Location : Campbell Memorial Chapel
Parking is free in the Library Parking Lot which you can only enter off of Murray Hill Avenue (not to be confused with Murray Avenue).

Murray Hill Avenue can be reached from both Wilkins and Fifth Avenue and is a cobblestone street. From Fifth Ave, it is located between Maryland Ave and S. Negley Ave. From Wilkins, it is located between Murray Ave and S. Negley Ave.

Hill'$ Wall Street/banker BFFs jone$ing to privatize social security

This will be Job One for a Hillary Clinton administration. The penultimate quid for those millions in pro quos they have paid to her as a candidate, paid her as a not-yet declared private citizen for her speeches, and paid the Clinton crime family, oops, I mean Clinton Family Foundation. Have no doubt in your minds - the necessary legislation has already been drafted and co-sponsors lined up by banking/Wall Street lobbyists, awaiting the possibility of a Clinton administration, i.e., a president who will not veto it.

It's the most lucrative remaining venue for transferring wealth upward. Wall Street goes orgasmic at the prospect of privatizing tens of millions of individual social security accounts!
As one banker explained it to me, every time an adjustment/change would be made to how the funds are invested - say increasing the percentage invested in one kind of bond versus another, a fee would be charged to every single social security recipient.

With over 50 million collecting SS and SSI, not to mention the tens of millions of accounts of those actively contributing to SS, at a dollar each (for the sake of argument) per investment tweak, times several tweaks/adjustments/changes per month? My god how the money rolls upward! It will be the last great tsunami of wealth transfer to the One Percent. And it will profit them as long as social security exists. We've already achieved permanent war status; social security privatization means permanent rip-off of workers status.

Because what do we average folks have? Like so very many, I lost nearly all of my retirement savings in the 2008 debacle. We were left with our mortgages on our homes and our social security accounts.
Along came CDOs and the mortgage bubble, and having been bailed out once, Wall Street is now pushing "bespoke tranch opportunities." (See the film, The Big Short) Now the only low-hanging fruits left are our social security savings.

Social Security updates its statistics every month in the Monthly Statistical Snapshot, although the updated figures are not as precise as the numbers published in the Annual Statistical Supplement. As of December 2012, according to the Snapshot, the retirement rolls had reached approximately 39,613,000, with an average benefit of $1,193.94. Disability beneficiaries had reached approximately 10,889,000, with an average benefit of $1,130.34.

Please rec this thread on cluster bombs

Her abused childhood has cast a long, wide and lethal shadow

Her father was a bitter man who constantly ridiculed and demeaned his wife and children. According to statements by Bill, Hugh Rodham also physically abused his children.

http://www.today.com/id/18984501/ns/today-today_books/t/bernstein-hillary-clintons-ambition/#.VrHGOkCnaDE

Who is Hillary Rodham Clinton? In his biography, “A Woman in Charge,” Carl Bernstein, who shared a Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward for their coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post, tries to answer that question. He follows her life from her childhood in the Midwest to her college days at Wellesley to Yale Law School, where she meets Bill Clinton, to Arkansas to the White House and to New York as a U.S. Senator. With Hillary Clinton running for president, Bernstein gives readers another perspective on her personal and public life. In Chapter One, he writes about her family.

Hillary Rodham’s childhood was not the suburban idyll suggested by the shaded front porch and gently sloping lawn of what was once the family home at 235 Wisner Street in Park Ridge, Illinois. In this leafy environment of postwar promise and prosperity, the Rodhams were distinctly a family of odd ducks, isolated from their neighbors by the difficult character of her father, Hugh Rodham, a sour, unfulfilled man whose children suffered his relentless, demeaning sarcasm and misanthropic inclination, endured his embarrassing parsimony, and silently accepted his humiliation and verbal abuse of their mother.

Hugh Rodham, the son of Welsh immigrants, was sullen, tight-fisted, contrarian, and given to exaggeration about his own accomplishments. Appearances of a sort were important to him: he always drove a new Lincoln or Cadillac. But he wouldn’t hesitate to spit tobacco juice through an open window. He chewed his cud habitually, voted a straight Republican ticket, and was infuriatingly slow to praise his children. “He was rougher than a corncob and gruff as could be,” an acquaintance once said. Nurturance and praise were left largely to his wife, whose intelligence and abilities he mocked and whose gentler nature he often trampled. “Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out,” he frequently said at the dinner table when she’d get angry and threaten to leave. She never left, but some friends and relatives were perplexed at Dorothy’s decision to stay married when her husband’s abuse seemed so unbearable.

“She would never say, That’s it. I’ve had it,” said Betsy Ebeling,* Hillary’s closest childhood friend, who witnessed many contentious scenes at the Rodham dinner table. Sometimes the doorknob remark would break the tension and everybody would laugh. But not always.

By the time Hillary had reached her teens, her father seemed defined by his mean edges — he had almost no recognizable enthusiasms or pretense to lightness as he descended into continuous bullying, ill-humor, complaint, and dejection. (*Ebeling is Betsy’s married name. Her maiden name was Johnson.)In fact, depression seemed to haunt the Rodham men. Hugh’s younger brother, Russell, a physician, was the “golden boy” of the three children of Hannah and Hugh Rodham Sr. of Scranton, Pennsylvania. When Russell sank into depression in 1948, his parents asked Hugh to return to Scranton to help. Only hours after his arrival, Russell tried to hang himself in the attic, and Hugh had to cut him down. Afterward, Russell went to Chicago to stay with Hugh, Dorothy, and their baby daughter in their already overcrowded one-bedroom apartment. For months, Russell received psychiatric treatment at the local Veterans Administration hospital. Eventually he moved to a dilapidated walk-up in downtown Chicago, worked as a bartender, and declined into alcoholism and deeper depression until he died, in 1962, in a fire that was caused by a lit cigarette.

Military Service: Army, 1943-46; U.S.P.H.S., 1949-50, 1953-55
B.S. 1945, Northwestern University
M. D. 1949, State University of Iowa
M. Sc. 1953, State University of Iowa
Internship 1949-50, U. S. Marine Hospital. Staten Island, N. Y.
Psychiatric Residency 1950-1953, Department of Psychiatry, State University of Iowa
Diplomate, Psychiatry 1956, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
Instructor, Psychiatry 1953-55, Tulane University, New Orleans
Deputy Chief, Psychiatry l953-55, U. S. Marine Hospital, New Orleans
Associate Professor, Psychiatry 1955-1974, Wayne State University, Detroit
Chief, Adult Outpatient Service 1955-1970, Lafayette Clinic, Detroit
Chief, Psychiatry 1959-1970, Detroit Memorial Hospital
Medical Director l970-1974, Detroit Model Neighborhood Drug Abuse Program
Clinical Professor 1975- 1994, Psychiatry and Community Medicine,
University of California, San Francisco
Lecturer 1983, School of Public Health. University of California, Berkeley
Instructor 1976, Continuing Education, University of California, Santa Cruz
Medical Administrator, Prisoners' Health Project 1974-76, San Francisco
General Hospital
Director, Psychiatric Residency Training 1976-78, Highland General Hospital
Chief, Psychiatry 1982, Merrithew General Hospital, Martinez and Staff,
Community Mental Health, Richmond, CA 1978-1985
Full Time Private Practice, 1985-1992
Retired, 1992

Revealing, and somewhat disturbing: Hillary Clinton Draws Scrappy Determination From a Tough, Combative Father
"As a little girl, if Hillary Rodham forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste, her father would toss the tube out the bathroom window. She’d scurry around in the snow-covered evergreen bushes outside their suburban Chicago home to find it and return inside to brush her teeth, reminded, once again, of one of Hugh E. Rodham’s many rules.

When she lagged behind in Miss Metzger’s fourth-grade math class, Mr. Rodham would wake his daughter at dawn to grill her on multiplication tables. When she brought home an A, he would sneer: 'You must go to a pretty easy school.'

Mrs. Clinton has made the struggles of her mother, Dorothy Rodham, a central part of her 2016 campaign’s message, and has repeatedly described Mrs. Rodham’s life story to crowds around the country. But her father, whom Mrs. Clinton rarely talks about publicly, exerted an equally powerful, if sometimes bruising, influence on the woman who wants to become the first female president.

The brusque son of an English immigrant and a coal miner’s daughter in Scranton, Pa., Mr. Rodham, for most of his life, harbored prejudices against blacks, Catholics and anyone else not like him. He hurled biting sarcasm at his wife and only daughter and spanked, at times excessively, his three children to keep them in line, according to interviews with friends and a review of documents, Mrs. Clinton’s writings and former President Bill Clinton’s memoir."

Chamber of Commerce Pres.: Clinton will support TPP after election

Chamber of Commerce Lobbyist Tom Donohue: Clinton Will Support TPP After Election
By Robert Naiman
Truthout | Sunday, 31 January 2016

In an interview from Davos with Bloomberg TV on January 20, Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue - a top lobbyist for the pro-corporate-power Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement - assured viewers that if Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election, she will support the TPP, even though she opposes it now.

Reporting on the interview, Inside U.S. Trade noted:
The Chamber president said he expected Hillary Clinton would ultimately support the TPP if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president and is elected. He argued that she has publicly opposed the deal chiefly because her main challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has also done so. "If she were to get nominated, if she were to be elected, I have a hunch that what runs in the family is you get a little practical if you ever get the job," he said.

Donohue also said TPP will not be voted on prior to the election because Senate Republicans do not want to do anything that could jeopardize Republican Senators in close races. But he said he believed there was a 75 percent chance that TPP would get done in the lame-duck session after the election.
CONTINUED...

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34629-chamber-of-commerce-lobbyist-tom-donohue-clinton-will-support-tpp-after-election

Accu-weather survey: 30% wouldn't travel through wintry weather to vote.

Would inclement weather deter you from voting?
The Iowa Caucuses will begin the Presidential Election season on Feb.1, but a snowstorm moving across the central and northern Plains could impact travel for voters heading home.(AP Photo/ Dave Weaver, File)

Yes - I would not want to travel through wintry weather.
30%

No - Nothing would stop me from voting.
70%

Total votes: 2518