In Trump, Israel’s mainstream distrusts

Times of Israel

Israel values stability, consistency, and reliability from its most important ally. Which is why, while they may have reservations about Hillary Clinton, many Israeli policymakers and much of the public are wary of the unpredictable Trump

For Yossi Klein Halevi, an American-born Israeli author and speaker, the 2016 presidential election wasn’t supposed to be like this. After eight years of President Barack Obama, Halevi, a centrist who has been highly critical of the outgoing president’s Middle East posture and in particular of last year’s nuclear deal with Iran, was prepared to go all in against the Democrats.

But from Halevi’s perspective, this election season saw the emergence of a far more dangerous menace from an unexpected source: the putatively pro-Israel Republican Party’s nominee for president, Donald Trump.

“I was so looking forward to 2016 as an opportunity to punish the Democrats,” says Halevi. “But given the way that this election has turned out, my far greater fear is a Trump victory.”

When it comes to mainstream public opinion in Israel, Halevi is far from alone. A poll released Sunday by the Peace Index, conducted jointly by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), shows that the Israeli public prefers a Hillary Clinton administration over a Donald Trump ticket by an overwhelming tally of 42% to 24%. At a political moment when Republicans are attempting to persuade American Jews that they, and not the Democrats, are to be trusted on Israel, it is the Republican Party’s appointed standard-bearer whom far more Israelis appear not to trust with the US-Israel relationship.

Itamar Rabinovich, who presided over some of the warmest years of the US-Israel relationship as Israel’s ambassador to the United States under prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and during the early years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, is unsurprised that Republican efforts have been unpersuasive to Israelis. For an Israel that, he says, above all values stability, consistency, and reliability from its most important ally and the leader of the most powerful country in the world, Trump is perceived as anything but.

“The general perception is that Trump is totally unpredictable,” says Rabinovich, who now serves as president of the Israel Institute. “In a crucial relationship like the one between the US and Israel, that is perceived very negatively.”

For the Israeli public, says Rabinovich, it appears that “Trump is someone who is not really interested in and knowledgeable” about matters of foreign policy. “[Trump] has changed his mind and contradicted himself a number of times, which doesn’t help.”

When asked if he shares the concerns of the public when it comes to Trump, Rabinovich answers simply, “Yes, I do.”

These concerns appear to transcend political eras. Dan Arbell, former acting head of the North America division at the Foreign Ministry from 2005 to 2009 before serving for three years as deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC and ambassador Michael Oren’s second-in-command (during the early years of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current premiership), sounds a similar note of alarm.

“There are a lot of unknowns [about Trump] which makes me as an Israeli pretty anxious,” says Arbell, now a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a lecturer at American University in Washington, DC.

Trump’s inconsistency from one day to the next is disconcerting, says Arbell, particularly in the wake of the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding that will see the United States give $38 billion in military assistance to Israel over the next 10 years.

“While Trump declares he is pro-Israel and supports Israeli security,” Arbell says, when it comes to “the different statements he has made on foreign aid, including foreign aid to Israel, it becomes somewhat hard to square the circle.”

Ditto his policies vis-à-vis the peace process. “The policies on the Palestinian-Israeli front are also a big question mark,” Arbell says. “He said he would be ‘neutral’ during the Republican primary. Then he said he would have Israel’s back.

“It’s unclear what his philosophy is and what his policies will be.”

Arbell, who still maintains contacts with several of his former colleagues in the Foreign Ministry, believes that Trump’s unknowns could become a real issue among Israel’s current diplomatic corps charged with guiding the Jewish state’s relationship with the United States. “The official position is that [the ministry] does not interfere” in the election, says Arbell. “But if I have to read in between the lines, I think that people share the opinion that Trump is an unknown.”

For Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Trump’s unknowns “can work in your favor or it can work against you,” says Arbell, but “the unpredictability is very hard on those who are policymakers.”[...]

What Exactly Is ‘Locker-Room Talk’? Let an Expert Explain

NY Times

My father was a coach and the manager of a sporting goods store that installed and maintained equipment at athletic facilities. By the time I was in third grade, I had already spent countless days and nights in locker rooms — at colleges, high schools, prep schools, private adult clubs, you name it.

Then I became a football player and track athlete, something that continued into my college years. Until I was 20 years old, it felt as if half my life took place inside a locker room.

Not long after I stopped competing seriously, I became a sportswriter. What was my job day after day?

Hanging out in a locker room.

I’ve been paid to be there — and listen to what is said there — for the better part of 30 years.

Thanks to Donald Trump, the term “locker-room talk” suddenly is widely discussed. It is a pretty broad term; I’ve heard athletes in locker rooms deeply engrossed in conversations on their municipal bond portfolios and what to feed their cats and, of course, traffic.

Trump was recorded talking about forcibly kissing and groping women, and after an uproar, he chalked it up to “locker-room talk.”

The episode raised the question of how common such extreme talk is in locker rooms.

Yet I would say that while I have heard distasteful boasting and crude talk about the attributes of a recent date or a new girlfriend — wives never seem to come up — I’ve never heard anything that could be described as an assault, or any crime. Not even close.

This is not the same as saying those acts do not happen. I’m just saying it is not any kind of locker-room talk I have heard in my decades working and functioning in that space. Granted, the professional athletes have hours to themselves when the news media is not present. But reporters’ access to teams throughout a long season is considerable, especially in a sport like baseball where you’re part of the traveling circus crisscrossing North America for as long as nine months. You are together with the players far more than any other group of people in your life.[...]

But after Trump uttered his “locker-room talk” line over and over in the debate with Hillary Clinton on Sunday night, athletes everywhere — and anyone who frequents gyms — might have taken offense. Several professional athletes lashed out on Twitter.

“Have I been in every locker room?” Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Chris Conley wrote on his Twitter account. “No. But the guys I know and respect don’t talk like that. They talk about girls but not like that. Period.”

Oakland A’s pitcher Sean Doolittle said on Twitter, “As an athlete, I’ve been in locker rooms my entire adult life and uh, that’s not locker-room talk.”

But Atlanta Falcons tight end Jacob Tamme may have had the last word, and spoke for many.

Having just left the locker room after his team’s victory over the Broncos in Denver on Sunday night, Tamme wrote: “I showered after our game but I feel like I need another one after watching the debate.”

He added: “The attempt to normalize it as any type of ‘talk’ is wrong. I refuse to let my son think that this is ‘just how men speak.’”

Washington Post: Hillary Clinton for president

Washington Post

IN THE gloom and ugliness of this political season, one encouraging truth is often overlooked: There is a well-qualified, well-prepared candidate on the ballot. Hillary Clinton has the potential to be an excellent president of the United States, and we endorse her without hesitation.

In a moment, we will explain our confidence. But first, allow us to anticipate a likely question: No, we are not making this endorsement simply because Ms. Clinton’s chief opponent is dreadful.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump. But we would also tell you that was our judgment.

Fortunately, it is not.

We recognize that many Americans distrust and dislike Ms. Clinton. The negative feelings reflect in part the bitter partisanship of the nation’s politics today; in part the dishonest attacks she has been subjected to for decades; and in part her genuine flaws, missteps and weaknesses.

We are not blind to those. Ms. Clinton is inclined to circle the wagons and withhold information, from the closed meetings of her health-care panel in 1993 to the Whitewater affair, from the ostensibly personal emails she destroyed on her own say-so after leaving the State Department to her reluctance to disclose her pneumonia last month. Further, she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, are not the first to cash in on the speech circuit, but they have done so on an unprecedented and unseemly scale. And no one will accuse Ms. Clinton of an excess of charisma: She has neither the eloquence of President Obama nor the folksy charm of former president George W. Bush or, for that matter, her husband.

But maybe, at this moment in history, that last weakness is also a strength. If Ms. Clinton is elected, she will attempt to govern an angrily divided nation, working with legislators who in many cases are determined to thwart her, while her defeated opponent quite possibly will pretend her victory is fraudulent.

What hope is there for progress in such an environment — for a way out of the gridlock that frustrates so many Americans? The temptation is to summon a “revolution,” as her chief primary opponent imagined, or promise to blow up the system, as Mr. Trump posits. Both temptations are dead ends, as Ms. Clinton understands. If progress is possible, it will be incremental and achieved with input from members of both parties. Eloquence and charm may matter less than policy chops and persistence.[...]

Ms. Clinton, in other words, is dogged, resilient, purposeful and smart. Unlike Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush when they ascended, she knows Washington; unlike Mr. Obama when he ascended, she has executive experience. She does not let her feelings get in the way of the job at hand. She is well positioned to get something done.[...]

No election is without risk. The biggest worry about a Clinton presidency, in our view, is in the sphere where she does not seem to have learned the right lessons, namely openness and accountability. Her use of a private email server as secretary was a mistake, not a high crime; but her slow, grudging explanations of it worsened the damage and insulted the voters. Her long periods of self-insulation from press questioning during the campaign do not bode well.

The Clinton Foundation has done a lot of good in the world, but Ms. Clinton was disturbingly cavalier in allowing a close aide to go on its payroll while still at State, and in failing to erect the promised impenetrable wall between the foundation and the government. She would have to do better in the White House.

Even here, however, Mr. Trump makes her look good. She has released years of tax returns. She has voluntarily identified her campaign bundlers. The Clinton Foundation actually is a charitable foundation, not a vehicle for purchasing portraits of herself. She is a paragon of transparency relative to her opponent.

Inside Donald Trump’s Total Meltdown

Time

The call to gather went out Sunday morning, arriving on cell phones before many of the pastors had left their congregations. These 23 men and three women, all members of Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council, had long ago signed on to pray for his vision for the nation. But now a scandalous recording from Access Hollywood was threatening to blow up the prayer circle.

From California to Florida, members of the group joined a late-afternoon emergency conference call on Oct. 9 to ponder the ugly spectacle of a 59-year-old man boasting about trying to seduce a married woman, forcing himself on others and getting away with it all because he was “a star.” It had to be an awkward moment for the faithful: Trump was bragging about sexual assault. “Grab them by the ...,” the Republican nominee for President, now 70, was heard saying. “You can do anything.”

Seeking guidance in Scripture, they found a Bible abounding in useful scoundrels. One participant on the call noted that Jesus had befriended tax collectors and sinners. Another invoked the Old Testament figure Nehemiah, who served a pagan king, Cyrus of Persia, but leveraged the relationship to accomplish the holy mission of rebuilding the ancient walls of Jerusalem. Even an imperfect ruler might be the means to a righteous end.

And so the panel overwhelmingly stuck with the sinner, according to four people on the call. It was Hillary Clinton, not Trump, who worried them. “Can anybody say she is morally superior to Donald Trump? I don’t think so,” said Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, days later. “This election is not about Donald Trump’s past, it is about America’s future.”

This cold calculation induced cringes among many of their fellow church leaders. The editors of Christianity Today, a leading voice of evangelicals founded by Billy Graham, weighed whether it would profit the movement to gain the world at the cost of its soul. “Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater,” the magazine intoned, “and a singularly unrepentant one.”

As the 2016 campaign moved into its final weeks, Trump had put the whole country on the rack alongside the Christian conservatives, stretching the sinews of American politics to the breaking point. While some voters were tugged toward the wincing sophistry of the conference call, a larger number pulled disgustedly into the ranks of #nevertrump. The candidate himself was consumed by petty grudges. The furor over the leaked recording seemed to liberate him. Free of the “shackles”–his own tweeted word–Trump reduced his campaign to a primal grunt.

It sounded, at times, like the last gasp of the angry white man. Trump threatened to throw his opponent in jail, bragged of avoiding income taxes and peddled an empty conspiracy theory about undocumented immigrants’ being given voter-registration cards. He insisted he was right to stoke the racial tensions of New York City during the Central Park jogger drama in the 1990s, refusing to accept the DNA proof that he had the case wrong. He promoted a fiction that Muslim friends of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists knew their plans but failed to alert authorities, and he injected a crude Russian propaganda effort into one of his rallies without a care about its inaccuracy. Another tape (it wasn’t easy keeping track) caught him agreeing as a radio shock jock labeled his daughter Ivanka “a piece of ...” Having congratulated himself for keeping the first presidential debate slightly above the muck, in Round 2 he plunged into the wallow, deflecting attention from his own vulgarity by saddling Clinton with the alleged sexual sins of her husband and trying to seat Bill Clinton’s accusers in the front row.

Trump once said on the campaign trail that he would approve of torture as President, “even if it doesn’t work.” With four weeks left to Election Day, he seemed to be testing the proposition on the public. Unshackled, he flirted with unhinged and erased the emollient line between a campaign aimed at the base and one intended to debase.

But others could no longer stay silent. “Enough!” insisted former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, calling on Trump to withdraw. “Offensive and despicable,” declared Utah Governor Gary Herbert. “I cannot and will not vote for Donald Trump,” said Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama.

The Trump campaign, party insiders admit, could do irreparable damage to a generation of prospects by rendering them enablers. Rivals for the nomination, like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, had cozied up to him until they realized it was too late. Elected officials had hesitated to oppose him lest they rouse his army of pitchfork populists. Many of the leaders of the religious right repeatedly blessed a candidate who bats 0 for 3 on the biblical injunction to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly. Barring a last-minute surprise, Trump is on track to lose his race. The question now is whether he’ll destroy the party’s congressional majorities as well.

“It’s us against the world,” declared a digital ad from the Trump campaign on the morning after the debate. But it wasn’t clear whether his main foe in the final month would be Clinton or Republican officials. After his incendiary debate performance, he turned on Ryan and company with a gas can and lighter in hand. “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary,” Trump tweeted of the fleeing Republicans. “They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win–I will teach them!” Almost immediately, his fans took up the chorus: Trump loyalists circulated a rumor that Establishment Republicans were behind the leak to the Washington Post of the disastrous tape. [...]

A veteran party official who has watched the party go from conservative to crazy during Trump’s rise says the saddest part of the conflict is how predictable it was. “We have been warning the party that this was the likely outcome. You can’t fix what is at the core of a person’s character,” says the official, who opposed Trump from the beginning. “This is who he is. And now it’s who we as Republicans are, because we went along with it.”

The day after the nastiest presidential debate in modern memory, Trump traveled to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for one of his trademark rallies. At events like this, Trump’s excesses are celebrated or forgiven, and his provocations are championed as bravery. In the year of the first female major-party nominee, T-shirts are emblazoned with vulgar words for the female anatomy. Vendors hawk Hillary for Prison buttons. The rhetoric is even more acidic. “She’s a murderer, she’s a liar. You name it, she’s done it,” says Neil McNamara, who drove from New York to join the thousands thronging the arena. Trump is happy to indulge their fever. “‘Lock her up’ is right!” Trump hollered from his podium as the crowd chanted a favorite refrain.[...]

He hid nothing of himself as he stormed through the primaries; the man on the Access tape was entirely consistent with the crude and bullying Trump of last autumn and spring. He had long been a proud womanizer whose affairs have often made tabloid headlines–he frequently leaked the details himself–and he had no problem boasting about his manhood at a presidential debate. Could anyone truly be surprised that he privately bragged about groping strangers and trying to bed married women, and explained it away as “locker-room talk”?

Which is why the statements of outrage from fleeing Republicans struck Trump allies as entirely disingenuous. The tape was catalytic not because it showed a new Trump but because it made clear that the old Trump is the only Trump this election is going to see. (Trump’s initial response to the tape’s release was not a full-throated apology but a hedged “I apologize if anyone was offended.”) The Access tape snuffed the wan but cherished hopes of GOP mainstreamers that a more sober and responsible version of the candidate would emerge in the final act of the tragedy.

In this gerrymandered age, most elected Republicans hail from districts where victory is possible without the support of Muslims or Mexicans or African Americans or any of the other ethnic and cultural groups named by Trump as part of the nation’s problem. But the GOP cannot survive without white married women, who are reliable members of their coalition. Tagged by Democrats with waging a “war on women,” endangered Republicans heard in Trump’s lewd rhetoric an existential threat. Of all the candidate’s combustible comments, “clearly this one crossed a certain kind of a line,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “It smacked of a predatory aggressiveness.”[...]

For the Clinton campaign, the danger was premature gloating. The former Secretary of State, Senator and First Lady remains a wooden candidate whom many Americans say they don’t trust. Hackers, believed by U.S. intelligence experts to be linked to Vladimir Putin, have tapped the email accounts of top Clinton aides, and there’s no telling when the flow of stolen documents and embarrassing revelations will dry up. Indeed, were it not for the Trump meltdown, Clinton would have endured a rough week of her own. As the nation gawked at Trump’s crass words, Clinton’s own private admissions were laid bare by WikiLeaks’ release of a top adviser’s correspondence. Among the disclosures were partial transcripts of past paid speeches, which suggested that her public agenda deviated from her private opinions and revealed her dream of “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” Her senior advisers have no choice but to bet that more–and maybe worse–is on its way.[...]

Religious conservatives, who for decades defined themselves as “values voters,” will now have to explain why they lined up behind a thrice-married playboy who once said he had never asked God for forgiveness. Samuel Rodriguez Jr., president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, says Trump has exposed the disconnect between evangelicals’ words and their political deeds. Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm, says church leaders lost credibility when they cast their lot with Trump. “This has been traumatic for the Republic, and traumatic for the church,” says Moore, one of the top evangelicals to oppose Trump from the beginning. “It is going to take years and years and years to recover and rebuild.”[...]

Suspect in Dan Markel Murder Confesses His Involvement on Camera

update:

Tallahassee Democrat

Wendi Adelson's attorney questions Rivera's credibility

Wendi Adelson’s attorney is questioning the credibility of a statement prosecutors say could implicate her in the murder-for-hire plot of her ex-husband Dan Markel.

In a statement to police, Luis Rivera – one of two men charged in Markel’s July 2014 shooting – said he and Sigfredo Garcia drove by Adelson near Markel’s Trescott Drive home the day before the murder.

On Tuesday, Assistant State Attorney Georgia Cappleman said the chance sighting could implicate Adelson as a player in the plot.

However, her attorney, John Lauro said Rivera’s statement was based on information he had no way to corroborate.

“Rivera is hardly a credible witness, and as everyone in this investigation recognizes, he has no personal knowledge about the statements he made concerning Wendi,” Lauro said. “All of his alleged information is second or third hand and none of it has been corroborated during the investigation.”
==================================

ABC News

One of the accused in the slaying of FSU professor Dan Markel in 2014 admitted on Monday that he was part of the "hit for hire" scheme surrounding the professor's death.

After Luis Rivera reached a plea agreement in court last week that sentenced him to 7 years in prison, he admitted to investigators on Monday that he was part of the operation to kill Markel.

In a newly released video, Rivera detailed the car ride between he and Sigfredo Garcia, the other man accused in Marke's murder.

He mentioned to investigators how during their first trip to Tallahassee, they drove by Wendi Adelson, Markel's ex-wife, while she was with her children.

Rivera told investigators that he noticed Garcia and Adelson making eye contact and said he began to wonder she was. That's when he said he began suspecting that Garcia was displaying to Adelson that they had arrived.

Rivera also admitted that he strongly believed Katherine Magbanua, a woman with ties both to the Adelson family and one of the alleged shooters in his death, had a hand in everything from the beginning.

He said he heard Garcia having several phone conversations with her throughout their trip.

Rivera also added that he did not know who Markel was before Garcia let him in on the plan.

Rivera's confession comes after a long, complex investigation into the law professor's murder.

Beginning with a messy divorce in 2013, Markel's wife Wendi Adelson was denied a request to move her children to South Florida. In July of 2014, Markel was shot multiple times and died from his injuries.[...]

Glenn Beck Says Opposing Trump Is ‘Moral, Ethical’ Even if It Means Clinton Wins - but he won't vote for Clinton either

NY Times

Glenn Beck, the fiery conservative media personality and former Fox News host, says that he briefly considered voting for Hillary Clinton and called opposing Donald J. Trump the “moral, ethical choice” — even if doing so leads to Mrs. Clinton winning the presidential election.

His comments were made after the release on Friday of a 2005 recording of Mr. Trump boasting about sexual assault that set off a war between the presidential nominee and a broad swath of the Republican establishment, including Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker.

Reacting to the recording, Mr. Beck wrote over the weekend that each person “must decide what is a bridge too far” and said he supported calls for Mr. Trump to withdraw from the presidential race.

“It is not acceptable to ask a moral, dignified man to cast his vote to help elect an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity,” Mr. Beck wrote on Facebook. “If the consequence of standing against Trump and for principles is indeed the election of Hillary Clinton, so be it. At least it is a moral, ethical choice.” [,,,]

Mr. Beck has spoken at length over the years about his dislike for Mrs. Clinton and was an ardent Trump opponent during the Republican primary campaign, likening him to Adolf Hitler and advocating on behalf of Senator Ted Cruz. With Mr. Trump in the general election, though, Mr. Beck said in an interview on Sunday with Vice News that he had considered voting for Mrs. Clinton.

I will tell you that it has crossed my mind to vote for Hillary,” he said in the interview, which aired Monday night. “It has crossed my mind. I think Donald Trump is so unstable, so dangerous, that it has crossed my mind.”

In the end, though, Mr. Beck said that he decided against voting for Mrs. Clinton. He said that he would instead back a little-known third-party candidate, Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party. “I reject the notion of a binary choice,” he wrote on Tuesday on his personal website. “I will not vote for the ‘lesser of two evils.’ ”

On Facebook, Mr. Beck said he wanted his fans to know that “the world does not end” if Ms. Clinton wins the election. He said pushing back against a Clinton White House through protests, the media or “political and procedural maneuvering” would be a worthy effort, but warned conservatives that they would be morally tainted by a vote for Trump.

“If one helps to elect an immoral man to the highest office, then one is merely validating his immorality, lewdness, and depravity,” he wrote.

More than Trump, the Republican Party was the biggest loser in last night’s debate

Washington Post

Donald Trump showed during last night’s second presidential debate in St. Louis that he is willing to go down in flames, and he is happy to take down-ballot Republicans with him.

Blood is the metaphor of the morning. There is an incredible amount of talk about “bleeding” in the post-debate conversation. Literally dozens of news stories ponder whether The Donald slowed or stopped the bleeding. The emerging conventional wisdom seems to be that Trump but did not cauterize the wound.

Indeed, the GOP nominee threw just enough red meat to convince hardcore loyalists to stick with him and thwarted efforts to push him off the ticket.

With dozens of high-profile defections over the weekend, it now feels inevitable that he will lose the election. The short-term question is how badly. The long-term question is how much damage Trump does to the brand of his adopted party.

The previous chairman of the Republican National Committee tweeted this half an hour into the debate:

 Follow

Michael Steele 

✔

@MichaelSteele

GOP at this moment. #debate

4:26 AM - 10 Oct 2016

 
•  18,92718,927 Retweets
  

 24,609
• 24,609 likes

-- Conservative Washington Examiner columnist Byron York argues that “Trump's performance will shut down Republican defections from his struggling campaign, at least for now”: “Say you were a Republican lawmaker contemplating breaking with Trump. You didn't do it Saturday, when several GOP officials jumped, because you wanted to see how Trump would do in the debate Sunday night. Now you've seen it — a more aggressive, hard-hitting, and focused effort than Trump's losing performance in Debate One — and you're probably not going to abandon Trump now.”

Weekly Standard Executive Editor Bill Kristol concurs but describes this as a fatal mistake: “Here's the problem: Some Republican leaders could well make the mistake of thinking that because Trump wasn't destroyed at the debate, there isn't now a dire need to act. They could decide that because Trump didn't dissolve into a puddle in the center of the town hall, the situation has stabilized, and the status quo is sustainable. That would be a fatal mistake. The Declaration of Independence identified the problem: ‘All experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.’ Republicans may be disposed to suffer, rather than take bold action, contrary to the forms to which they are accustomed, to shove Trump aside. Republican leaders may think, or hope, that Trump is a sufferable evil. They will be cruelly disappointed in that judgment.” [....]

-- The result of all this is that the GOP is in a state of total paralysis: “One member of the House Republican leadership, conceding its majority was now in jeopardy, compared the situation to the 2006 scandal involving a Florida congressman’s inappropriate conduct with congressional pages. If that scandal was a house fire, this lawmaker said, Mr. Trump had brought on the political equivalent of a nuclear attack,” Alex Burns, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times. As Steven Law, a longtime confidant of Mitch McConnell who runs the main GOP super PAC focused on saving the Senate, put it: “The Republican Party is caught in a theater fire; people are just running to different exits as fast as they can."

-- Last night was proof point number 4,358: Trump cannot change. Even if he tried. Even if he wanted to. And he does not want to…

-- Wavering party leaders said they needed to see Trump show real contrition for the crude and predatory comments he made about women in 2005. Trump showed none. Instead, he went on the attack. “I’m very embarrassed by it,” Trump said in a classic non-apology (being embarrassed something appeared in the newspaper is different than being embarrassed about the substance of what was said.) “I hate it. But it’s locker-room talk. It’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS. If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse. Mine were words and his was action. What he did to women, there’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation who’s been so abusive to women. . . . Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”[...]

-- His scorched-earth tactics were the worst-case scenario that many GOP leaders had feared. Most chillingly, he promised he would try to send Clinton to jail if elected by appointing a special prosecutor to go after her. He called his opponent “the Devil.” And, as she spoke, he got in her personal space and lurked around the stage – making Rick Lazio look polite. He also repeatedly clashed with the moderators, insisting that he was not getting as much time as her (even though, by the final tally, he got more.)

Desperate, he threw the kitchen sink. He falsely accused HRC of “laughing” at a 12-year-old rape victim. He blamed her for her husband’s infidelity. “Trump even seemed to blame Clinton for the death of Capt. Humayun Khan — a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq in 2004 whose parents spoke at the Democratic convention — because as a senator she voted in favor of the Iraq War, which he himself also once supported,” Jenna Johnson notes. “He repeatedly accused Clinton of lying, being an ‘ineffective’ senator and making money off her political position. He said she had hate in her heart and didn’t care about those living in inner-city poverty.” [...]

-- Trump’s collapse has already ruined many political careers, and it will probably ruin more… The ambitious Republicans who submitted and capitulated to Trump after he personally insulted them and their families continue to be personally humiliated. Philip Rucker looks at some of the Republican leaders who stood by him and excused his behavior after attacks against women, the disabled, Latino immigrants, Muslim Americans, Syrian refugees, prisoners of war, Gold Star parents and others. Two examples from Rucker’s story:[...]

“Everything Trump touches dies,” said Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who is advising independent candidate Evan McMullin. “This is going to last forever,” he told Phil. For years now, Democrats will be able to roll out TV ads and say, ‘When John Smith says today he’s for a brighter future, remember who he stood by: Donald Trump. He stood by Donald Trump’s misogyny, racism, sexism and stupidity.’”

“The Republican Party will look like Berlin circa 1945,” added GOP operative Steve Schmidt. “The wreckage will take a substantial amount of time to pick up. There will be a restoration, but it is going to require a monumental feat of leadership by someone who has not yet revealed themselves to the American people.” [...]

Second Debate: Trump once again relied on many dubious and false claims that have been repeatedly refuted

It is important to note that some of the commentators to this blog have repeatedly used the same inaccurate allegations that Trump has - often repeating it word for word

Washington Post

In the second presidential debate, Donald Trump once again relied on many dubious and false claims that have been repeatedly been debunked. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, on occasion made a factual misstep, but it didn’t even compare to Trump’s long list of exaggerations.

“One of the women, who is a wonderful woman, at 12 years old, was raped at 12. Her client she represented got him off, and she’s seen laughing on two separate occasions, laughing at the girl who was raped.”

— Donald Trump

Trump mixes up a story about a long-ago criminal case. Clinton did not laugh at a rape victim.

In 1975, Clinton — then Hillary Rodham — was a 27-year-old law professor running a legal aid clinic in the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. After a 41-year-old factory worker was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, he asked the judge to replace his male court-appointed attorney with a female one. The judge went through the list of a half-dozen women practicing law in the county and picked Clinton.

In her autobiography, “Living History,” Clinton wrote, “I told [prosecutor] Mahlon [Gibson] I really don’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but Mahlon gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.” Gibson has confirmed that account in interviews with Newsday and CNN, saying Clinton told him: “I don’t want to represent this guy. I just can’t stand this. I don’t want to get involved. Can you get me off?”

Ultimately, the prosecution’s case fell apart for a number of reasons, including investigators mishandling evidence of bloody underwear, so in a plea agreement the charges were reduced from first-degree rape to unlawful fondling of a minor under the age of 14. Not until 2008 did the victim, Kathy Shelton, realize that Clinton had been the lawyer on the other side. She has since attacked Clinton for putting “me through hell” and she appeared at a news event with Trump before the debate.

The rape case re-emerged when Washington Free Beacon in 2014 discovered unpublished audio recordings from the mid-1980s of Clinton being interviewed by Arkansas reporter Roy Reed for an article that was never published.

In the recorded interview, Clinton is heard laughing or giggling four times when discussing the case with unusual candor; the reporter is also heard laughing, and sometimes Clinton is responding to him.

Here are the four instances:

“Of course he [the defendant] claimed he didn’t [rape]. All this stuff. He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” (Both Clinton and the reporter laugh.)

“So I got an order to see the evidence and the prosecutor didn’t want me to see the evidence. I had to go to Maupin Cummings [the judge] and convince Maupin that yes indeed I had a right to see the evidence before it was presented. (Clinton laughs lightly between “evidence” and “before.”)

“I handed it [a biography of her expert witness] to Mahlon Gibson, and I said, ‘Well this guy’s ready to come up from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice.’” (Clinton laughs, as does the reporter.)

“So [Judge] Maupin had to, you know, under law he was supposed to determine whether the plea was factually supported. Maupin asked me to leave the room while he examined my client so that he could find out if it was factually supported. I said ‘Judge I can’t leave the room I’m his lawyer!’ he said ‘I know but I don’t want to talk about this in front of you.’” (Reporter says, “Oh God, really?” And they both laugh.) [...]

“Hillary Clinton attacked those same women, attacked them viciously.”

— Donald Trump

Trump has used this line of attack throughout the campaign, sometimes saying Hillary Clinton was an “enabler” of her husband’s affairs, saying she would “go after these women and destroy their lives.”

One of the interviews that Clinton’s critics have pointed to is a Jan. 27, 1998 interview on the Today Show, saying it showed Clinton was discrediting allegations by then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This interview took place a week after her husband was accused of having an affair with Lewinsky, and Clinton blamed Republican foes for making false attacks against her husband.

Specifically, critics have pointed to this quote by Clinton:

“I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings,” Clinton told Matt Lauer. “This is the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

This interview, by many accounts, was certainly pivotal to saving Bill Clinton’s presidency, as his wife forcefully backed him. But by Hillary Clinton’s account at the time her husband had not yet admitted the Lewinsky affair to her. That did not happen until Aug. 15, 1998, according to her memoir.

Moreover, at the time of the interview, Lewinsky also denied there had been a relationship. Her lawyer had submitted an affidavit on Jan. 12 from her saying she “never had a sexual relationship with the president.” Lewinsky did not begin to testify before the independent prosecutor about the full extent of the relationship until July 27, six months after the Today Show interview. Lewinsky testified for 15 days, after which the president finally confessed to his wife.

See our in-depth fact-checks on this here and here.

“Bill Clinton was abusive to those women.”

— Trump

While Trump has ramped up the attacks on the Clintons and the sex allegations against Bill Clinton, the record shows that Trump dismissed or minimized these very allegations for many years. Trump dismissed the women involved as losers and not attractive. Trump even suggested that Americans would have been more forgiving if Clinton had slept with more beautiful women.

Here are some examples (see more here):

In 1998, Trump attacked Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton, alleging sexual harassment: “Paula Jones is a loser, but the fact is that she may be responsible for bringing down a president indirectly.”

In 1999, Trump faulted Bill Clinton for the way he handled the Lewinsky scandal, and complained about his choice in women: “He handled the Monica situation disgracefully. It’s sad because he would go down as a great President if he had not had this scandal. People would have been more forgiving if he’d had an affair with a really beautiful woman of sophistication. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were on a different level. Now Clinton can’t get into golf clubs in Westchester. A former President begging to get in a golf club. It’s unthinkable.”

During a 2001 interview, Trump again expressed sympathy for Bill Clinton, arguing that the former president’s biggest mistake was answering questions about his sex life. Trump said he likes Clinton, and finds it all too easy to understand why the then president found it hard to answer the question: “Did you f… Monica?” “What he should have done is fought for years not to answer it,” Trump said in the interview. “I mean, isn’t it amazing and terrible that a guy — a president — is put in that position? He could have gone down as truly great and, instead, you know, he’ll be viewed somewhat differently, which is really a shame.” [...]

“In San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment.”

— Trump

There is no evidence this was the case in the 2015 terrorist attack that killed 14 people. There have been unconfirmed second- or third-hand reports — a friend of a friend of a neighbor — that a neighbor claimed to have noticed suspicious activity but did not report anything for fear of doing racial profiling. The religion of this supposed neighbor is unknown, but presumably a fear of racial profiling would suggest the neighbor was not Muslim.

“You [Clinton] get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 e-mails, and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say, very expensive process.”

— Trump

Trump is technically correct on the timeline, but Clinton’s staff had requested the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena, according to the FBI’s August 2016 report. Moreover, there’s no evidence Clinton deleted the emails in anticipation of the subpoena, and FBI director James Comey has said his agency’s investigation found no evidence any work-related emails were “intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

PolitiFact compiled a helpful timeline of events relating to Clinton’s release of her emails, based on the FBI report. From their timeline:

On July 23, 2014, the State Department agreed to produce records pertaining to the 2012 attack in Libya, for the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation. In December 2014, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills told an employee of the company that managed her server to delete emails on her server unrelated to government work that were older than 60 days.

On March 4, 2015, the Benghazi Committee issued a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over her emails relating to Libya. Three weeks later, between March 25 and March 31, the employee had an “oh s—” moment and realized he did not delete the emails that Mills requested in December 2014, he told the FBI. The employee then deleted the emails and used a program called BleachBit to delete the files. [...]

Rewriting the History of Jerusalem For Unesco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Israel’s capital is anything but Jewish.

Wall Street Journal

This week in Paris, the executive board of Unesco, the United Nations entity charged with looking after matters related to education, science and culture, will vote on a resolution called “Occupied Palestine,” which attempts to redefine the capital of Israel as a supranational city to which Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal claim.

Perhaps not coincidentally, an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes the same case. For the sake of Jerusalem, both need to be exposed as the attempts at historical revisionism that they are.

Jerusalem has been a busy patch of earth over the course of its history and a magnet for people of many faiths—first Jews, then Christians, then Muslims—becoming over the millennia a location of cultural fascination. The “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” exhibition at the Met is a case in point. The show highlights the spectacular objects produced in and around the medieval city that continue to inform its modern aesthetic. It is in many ways a curatorial tour de force and must have entailed all manner of diplomatic wrangling to garner so many loans of such delicate, irreplaceable objects.

But there is an elephant in this tastefully curated gallery. At its heart, this is a show about the identity of Jerusalem, as contentious a topic a thousand years ago as it is today, as is evidenced by the Unesco resolution. The exhibition’s premise, as is encapsulated in its title, is that during the medieval period, all claims to the city were equal and inhabitants were uniformly defined by their participation in this unique community.

This interpretation is implicitly projected onto the modern Jerusalem as photographs of the contemporary city appear on the gallery walls next to the explanatory texts. The visitor is encouraged to conclude that if only adherents of the three major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—would understand themselves as citizens of Jerusalem, a city transcending national boundaries, this utopia could be recaptured. The organizers are careful to mix up the order of the three religions as listed in written materials to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment.

An uneasy subtext to “Every People Under Heaven” is that during the exhibition’s time frame Jerusalem was completely dominated by Christians and Muslims, successively. These four centuries spanned one of the sparsest Jewish presences in Jerusalem’s history, beginning as they did with the wholesale slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Crusaders in 1099, after which their population dwindled to as few as 200. The Mamluk conquest of 1260 marginally improved conditions, but a significant increase in the Jewish population would have to wait for the 18th century.

This reality is apparent in the show’s makeup, with Jewish objects being largely confined to books and jewelry, and Jewish issues to their longing for the “absent” Temple of Solomon, a longing that is treated as a somewhat quaint anachronism not as an expression of the enduring spiritual connection of Jews to Jerusalem. Jews, we are told, prayed outside the old city walls. Occasionally a Jew appears in the labels for the Christian or Islamic objects, as when one “Stella” reportedly declared that the Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque are “as radiant and pure as the very heavens,” as if to give the Jewish stamp of legitimization to the structures built on the Temple Mount.

Again, visitors may well ask themselves from this evidence, why can’t we all just get along today as well as we seem to have done in 1000-1400?

And that is where “Every People Under Heaven” does a disservice to its beautiful contents by making them pawns to a contemporary political agenda to delegitimize Israel. Medieval Jerusalem was not a harmonious, multicultural melting pot that inspired great art. It is in fact quite remarkable that great art was created there in the midst of the endemic violence and religious bigotry that characterized the period. What is different now is the composition of modern Jerusalem, which, as the capital of Israel, has a Jewish majority—but it also, somewhat remarkably, has growing numbers of Christians and Muslims. There are challenges inherent in this dynamic, but they are not the same as the circumstances of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages.

Ultimately, “Every People Under Heaven” functions as a highbrow gloss on the movement to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish, and so to undermine Israel’s sovereignty. A more aggressive approach will be on display at Unesco on Thursday during the vote on the resolution defining Jerusalem as a global city with a universal rather than a national identity. [...]

Juanita Broaddrick’s Rape Allegation Is A Story About Bill Clinton, Not Hillary

Huffington Post

Republican nominee Donald Trump told the world he would make former President Bill Clinton’s sexual history an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. On Sunday, he did it.

Less than two hours before his debate with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, Trump held a press conference with several women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of various forms of sexual misconduct.

The most famous of these women is Paula Jones, whose sexual harassment lawsuit led eventually to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. But the most serious allegation against Clinton comes from another woman who was at Trump’s side on Sunday.

That woman is Juanita Broaddrick, a retired Arkansas nursing home operator who says Clinton raped her nearly 40 years ago ― a charge that the former president has said is untrue. On Sunday night, Broaddrick and the other accusers sat in the debate hall in St. Louis, the cameras repeatedly panning to them.

“If you look at Bill Clinton ― far worse ― mine are words and his was action,” Trump said at one point during the debate. “His was what he’s done to women. There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women.”

Trump claims that these women’s stories are especially relevant now because Hillary Clinton has at various times tried to bully or silence them. It’s a shaky assertion that looks a lot like an effort to distract attention from Trump’s own record of misconduct, which includes not just lewd behavior but instances where Trump has been specifically, credibly accused of sexual assault. Trump has denied those accusations, but they dovetail with his very public history of misogyny.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean Broaddrick’s rape allegation is untrue. Like so many allegations of sexual assault, Broaddrick’s story is both unproven and plausible. But its relevance to the 2016 election is a separate question.

Broaddrick’s tale ― which NBC’s “Dateline” first publicized in 1999 and BuzzFeed re-examined in August of this year ― begins in 1978, in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Bill Clinton was the state’s attorney general and running for governor. As Broaddrick tells it, she was volunteering for Clinton’s campaign and was supposed to meet him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, she says, Clinton called her and suggested they meet upstairs, in a hotel room, because reporters were in the lobby. She agreed. When Clinton got to the room, she says, he raped her ― at one point biting her lip, causing it to bleed.

Two women have since said they saw Broaddrick in the hotel room, right after the alleged incident ― disheveled and, yes, with a blue, swollen lip. The women said Broaddrick told them she’d been raped by Clinton, but that she was afraid to say anything about it. She would remain silent until the late 1990s, when federal prosecutors were investigating Clinton’s personal history as part of the inquiry that exposed his now-infamous affair with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

It was not the first time lawyers had asked Broaddrick about the incident. Previously, when lawyers in the Paula Jones lawsuit approached Broaddrick directly, she had signed an affidavit in which she described being “hounded” by reporters about rumors of the rape.

“I repeatedly denied the allegations and requested that my family’s privacy be respected,” she said in that affidavit. “These allegations are untrue and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me, or cause further disruption to my family.” But in response to the federal inquiry, Broaddrick said Clinton had raped her.

Clinton, who was by then president, denied the allegation, unambiguously and strongly, through his lawyer. Ken Starr, the lead federal prosecutor, ultimately deemed Broaddrick’s story “inconclusive.” When the tale came out in the media, and Broaddrick gave that 1999 interview to “Dateline,” the controversy got lost in the aftermath of Clinton’s impeachment and near-removal from office. And at that point the story faded ― until about a year ago, when Broaddrick began speaking out about it.

Broaddrick later told BuzzFeed’s Katie Baker that she was moved to speak out after hearing a series of comments that Hillary Clinton made about sexual assault ― specifically, about the importance of believing victims. Broaddrick has long claimed that Hillary tried to intimidate her, citing as proof a brief conversation the two women had during an Arkansas encounter shortly after the alleged rape. Here’s how Broaddrick remembers that conversation, as the BuzzFeed article described it:

Soon after, Broaddrick says, she ran into Hillary Clinton at a political rally Broaddrick had promised friends she would attend. Hillary shook her hand and thanked her for everything she had done for Bill. To Broaddrick, the gesture felt like a threat to stay silent. As attorney general and later governor, Bill Clinton was “the main person that regulated my business and my income,” Broaddrick said. “After she said what she did to me, I just thought, I will keep quiet.”

Broaddrick says that she went “ballistic” when she heard Hillary’s statements about sexual assault, and eventually sent out the following message on Twitter: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73....it never goes away.”[...]

Trump and his supporters insist they aren’t simply trying to distract attention from Trump’s problems, or to disparage Hillary by reminding everybody of Bill’s history of unfaithfulness. The issue, they say, is how the former first lady behaved.[...]

Whether any of this is relevant to Hillary’s campaign is another question entirely. Broaddrick’s claim that Hillary Clinton meant to intimidate her is based on a conversation the two women had ― and how Broaddrick perceived it. “I have to go by what I felt then and the look that she gave me,” she told Breitbart News in a recent interview. “I felt like she knew, and she was telling me to keep quiet.”

To think that Hillary was trying to bully Broaddrick into keeping quiet about a rape, you have to believe that Hillary knew Bill had committed the rape. But that would mean, presumably, Bill had told her ― something he was unlikely to have done. Cheaters and rapists don’t tend to tell their wives about their deeds in real time. (And sometimes rapists convince themselves their encounters were consensual.)

Meanwhile, to think this part of Broaddrick’s story is wrong, you don’t have to believe she is trying to deceive anybody, or that she’s wrong about the other charge she makes. You simply have to believe she misinterpreted visual and tonal cues during a quick conversation with a relative stranger ― which is something that happens all the time, in all kinds of circumstances. It would be even easier to understand in the circumstances Broaddrick was under.

As for the relevance to the 2016 election, the most telling aspect is that Trump ― cornered politically, struggling to keep his candidacy alive ― has chosen to compare his behavior to the husband of his opponent. But he’s not running against him. He’s running against her.

Snopes: Trump supporters claim that Hillary Clinton freed a child rapist and later laughed about the case - is mostly false

Snopes

WHAT'S TRUE: In 1975, young lawyer Hillary Rodham was appointed to represent a defendant charged with raping a 12-year-old girl. Clinton reluctantly took on the case, which ended with a plea bargain for the defendant, and later chuckled about some aspects of the case when discussing it years later.

WHAT'S FALSE: Hillary Clinton did not volunteer to be the defendant's lawyer, she did not laugh about the case's outcome, she did not assert that the complainant "made up the rape story," she did not claim she knew the defendant to be guilty, and she did not "free" the defendant.

Origin:In May 2016, the image macro shown above began circulating on Facebook, holding that back in 1975 a young Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) had "volunteered" to represent a 42-year-old man (Thomas Alfred Taylor) who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, that Clinton told the judge in the case that the complainant "made up the rape story because [she] enjoyed fantasizing about older men, that Clinton "got [the] rapist freed," and that Clinton later admitted she knew the defendant was guilty and "laughed about" the outcome of the case. Although Hillary Clinton was indeed involved in a case of this nature, the aspects of the case presented in the image were largely inaccurate or exaggerated.

Finally, Hillary didn't "free" the defendant in the case. Instead, the prosecuting attorney agreed to a plea deal involving a lesser charge that carried a five-year sentence, of which the judge suspended four years and allowed two months credit of time already served towards the remaining year:

Additionally, according to Newsday it was the complainant and her mother who pushed the state to make a quick plea deal rather than have the former go through the ordeal of a court trial, with the mother actively interfering in the investigation to bring about that result:

The victim says it was her mother, who had recently been abandoned by her husband, who pushed for a quick plea deal to avoid the humiliation of having her daughter testify in open court. The mother, who died several years ago, was so eager to end the ordeal she coached her daughter’s statements and interrupted interviews with police, Sgt. Dale Gibson [the department’s lead investigator] recalls.

“We both wanted it to be over with,” the victim told Newsday. “They kept asking me the same questions over and over. I was crying all the time.”

Even now, that outcome is not unusual for violent criminal charges: 2014 statistics show that 97% of criminal cases (including rape) are resolved by plea bargain, and only 3% go to trial. The ratio of plea bargains to trials was similar in 1970 [PDF].

Additionally, that 1975 criminal case came before the widespread adoptions of rape shield laws that now protect rape victims in court from some forms of questioning. A case brought in 1975 would have been subject to much weaker legal protection for the accuser than today.