Perfect:

“It’s one of the great political phenomenons. The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media, the press. Let’s be clear on one thing: The corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They are political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda — and the agenda is not for you, it’s for themselves. Their agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy. For them, it’s a war, and for them, nothing at all is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. Believe me.”

Never been said better.

Sen. Harmon, Rep. Lilly, Galewood town hall, September, 2013. The alderman had sat down after declining to comment on the questions and complaints which she had just heard from her constituents over the past hour of the meeting which she had not called.

As the meeting drew to a close, a woman called for Lilly and Harmon to “be a moral voice” in their roles as public officials.

Something in her voice set Lilly off. “My morals cannot be questioned,” she responded, as the woman protested that she had been misunderstood. Lilly ignored her. “You are talking about me as an individual,” she said, reaching her highest state of indignation yet.

The meeting ended a few minutes later. Lilly thanked all for coming, adding as a pledge of continuing interest, “I want you to contact me.”

She did not say how to do this, but people could look it up. I did after the Franklin Park meeting in July and tried to contact her, as I said earlier. Got no answer.

Harmon closed with thanks of his own.

More to come, from Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters— available in paperback, epub and Amazon Kindle formats.

As in this from 1896:

In 1896 it was Dems consuming themselves, from which came a third party. NY Sun discusses the third-party possibility if Trump loses, with an eye on history, but with a caution:

We don’t mean to rule out the possibility that Mr. Trump could yet win. We’re too close to the experience of Brexit, which elite opinion predicted for months would be defeated. Or the 2015 election at Israel, where polls predicted a razor thin result or a win by Labor only to be met with a runaway victory by Mr. Netanyahu. For that matter, there’s the 2004 American election, when the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth defeated an overconfident John Kerry.

So buck up, Trumpsters. Think Brexit etc.

If, however, Trump lost and took his followers into a new party, says Sun . . .

If he does that — we’re not making a prediction here — it would be as American as apple pie. Our history is littered with parties created as vehicles to pursue all sorts of visions and represent all sorts of factions — the Prohibition Party, the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, the Toleration Party, the Anti-Masonic Party, the Nullifier Party (which fought for the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in which the two states vowed not to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts).

We but touch the list. There was the Free Soil Party, the Greenback Party, the Silver Party, the Readjuster Party, the National Woman’s Party, the Vegetarian Party, the Boston Tea Party, Natural Law Party (which favored transcendental meditation), the Anti-Nebraska Party, and the National Democratic Party. The latter’s 15 minutes of fame was at 1896, when the regular Democrats nominated the populist William Jennings Bryan.

Autophagy, anyone?

Joins the Never-Trump fold.

Will he be happy there?

The Harmon and Lilly town hall meeting in Galewood, Sept. 12, 2013, questions and complaints:

It was 7:30, 45 minutes into the meeting. A pleasant-looking young woman, Harmon’s aide, stood with a clip board, said it was time to gather written questions. She began walking the room gathering questions.

Meanwhile, questions and complaints continued from the floor — about illegal immigrants using scarce resources while not paying taxes, declining property values, lack of a public library “we can take our kids to,” a North Avenue pawn shop.

“Residents need a voice,” a woman said. “We are stuck. You have to listen.”

Ms. Graham, alderman with a history:

The airing of North Avenue problems prompted a call for comment from the alderman, Deborah Graham, who had sat quietly through it all, unannounced.

She had been a state rep for Oak Park and Austin, winning election in 2002 over an Oak Park woman after losing a mandatory coin toss that broke a tie in the primary, challenging that, and winning a manual recount of 500-plus ballots.

During the recount, more than a hundred uncounted ballots were found in an Austin polling place in sealed envelopes at the bottom of a bin. “For a bag of ballots to show up suddenly six months” after the election “is just deplorable,” the Oak Park candidate told the Tribune. Her lawyers had wanted a second election. A judge had ordered one, but an appellate court had canceled it.

She finds silence is golden:

In 2010 Graham had been chosen alderman by Mayor Richard M. Daley, who by then had appointed more than half the sitting aldermen, to replace one who had pleaded guilty to corruption charges. She won election to a full-term in the next year.

At Galewood on this occasion, she rose, said she had learned quite a bit from the meeting, and sat down.

More to come, from Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters— available in paperback, epub and Amazon Kindle formats.

Seems to have required a tough Trump performance. A quick learner, he’s hard to beat at this game.

The full results from Sunday night’s debate are in, and Donald Trump has come from behind to take the lead over Hillary Clinton.

The latest Rasmussen Reports White House Watch national telephone and online survey shows Trump with 43% support among Likely U.S. Voters to Clinton’s 41%.

Yesterday, Clinton still held a four-point 43% to 39% lead over Trump, but that was down from five points on Tuesday andher biggest lead ever of seven points on Monday.

As Porky Pig did not say, th-th-th-that’s not all, folks.

From CBS report on latest WikiLeaks Podesta emails:

Two days after The Associated Press was first to report in March 2015 that Clinton had been running a private server in her home in New York to send and receive messages when she was secretary of state, her advisers were shaping their strategy to respond to the revelation.

We can do this thing, they said.

Among the emails made public Tuesday by WikiLeaks was one from Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, who optimistically suggested that the issue might quickly blow over.

Nick Merrill, Skidmore College, ‘2005

On Skidmore web site, he was featured, explained his approach to getting ahead, which we may note is done in quite laudatory terms as regards his employer:

Quick Pitch

In terms of growing your career, the most important thing is not necessarily what you do but putting yourself around smart, competent people. It has certainly served me well.

He advised these smart, competent people of the Clinton campaign:

“Goal would be to cauterize this just enough so it plays out over the weekend and dies in the short term,” Merrill wrote on March 6, 2015.

Alas, it became another well-laid scheme that went “agley,”

It did not [die], and became the leading example of Clinton’s penchant for secrecy, which has persisted as a theme among her campaign critics and rivals throughout her election season.

Clinton did not publicly confirm or discuss her use of the email server until March 10 in a speech at the United Nations, nearly one week after AP revealed the server’s existence.

After a week, Nick Merrill and friends told her she had to confess.

Mother may I?

Hillary Clinton spent time in summer 2015 with The New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich and made a crack about 2008 Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

But the remark didn’t make it into the long profile. Leibovich agreed to give the Clinton campaign veto power over the statements she made.

Pleeeeeze!

“These exchanges were pretty interesting … would love the option to use,” he wrote.

No.

Clinton did not want the Palin quote to appear, and it did not. Instead, the passage in a story titled “Re-Re-Re-Reintroducing Hillary Clinton,” read: “She had seen a few in her day, she told me. ‘I’ve eaten moose, too,’ she said. ‘I’ve had moose stew.'”

Thus went a crack about Sarah Palin, spiked!

And:

The Clinton camp also objected to using a quote in which the candidate said that “gay rights has moved much faster than women’s rights or civil rights, which is an interesting phenomenon somebody in the future will unpack.”

The damn interview meant so much to the Times that it was bending over backwards. The communications director

thought the campaign would be able to pick the quotes [!] that would be used. Leibovich responded, “I wanted the option to use all — and you could veto what you didn’t want. [!] That’s why I selected the 5 or 6 I sent to you…The moose [quote] is good, but I’d really love to use the other things I sent, too. [Really!] They were all on point. Sorry for mis-communique here, but do you think you can check?”

Sorry behavior, is what it was. OK with communications director, who wrote,

“Pleasure doing business!”

Why wouldn’t it be?

Not so much bending backwards, but forward, the better to be kicked.

via New York Times Gave Hillary Veto Power | LifeZette

“This is a sin,” he said. Also: “Be disturbed” when you see poverty etc.

This sermonizing is not a sin, but neither is it a message of mercy to the benighted who turn blind eye and are not disturbed at poverty etc.

Nor is it a stirring call to service in the spirit of Francis’ order’s founder. Rather, it is a hard-nosed, even bullying tactic out of sync with his smiling, friendly exterior.

 He says this kind of thing a lot.

I am a gut-level supporter of Trump, and even as a law-abiding, morality-upholding adult Christian husband and father of four lovely daughters and two handsome sons and grandfather of five wonderful grandchildren, I empathize with him in most of what he does.

As law-abiding, etc., I must and do of course register my uncompromising disapproval of Trump’s various, indeed multifarious, offenses and indiscretions, which I cannot, however, help but compare with those of his opponent’s husband and of the opponent herself as condoner and defender of her husband and accuser and chastiser of his accusers.

In which behavior, she has been and remains a blamer of victims, which makes her an unlikely model for women young and old, or anyone else. Not to mention her much publicized incompetence and venality. She’s a sorry specimen.