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.

This close to his comments is quite good. He says he’s been changed by his campaigning, noting also it’s about what he said in 2005.

Finally, his emphasis on the perilous times we live in:

“. . . Let’s be honest. We’re living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we’re facing today. We are losing our jobs, we’re less safe than we were eight years ago and Washington is totally broken.

Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground.

I’ve said some foolish things but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday,” Trump concluded.

More to come, for sure.

CNN promotes.

CNN’s KFile has uncovered two more Playboy videos in which Donald Trump makes an appearance, including one in which he is depicted photographing fully clothed models and conducting an interview with a potential Playmate.

Trump’s tame appearance in a 2000 Playboy video came to light late last week after he attacked a former beauty queen for her alleged “sex tape” past.

Wait. CNN doesn’t know he ran beauty contests? He photos fully clothed models, has a tame appearance in a video, and it’s something to connect with the Ms. Universe lady?

Slow news day, maybe? But we haven’t had one of those for quite a while, I’d say.

. . . as in this page of state-rep endorsements

Read the rest of it here, if you have a Wall St. Journal read-for-pay arrangement.

This year’s presidential campaign has caused journalists to lose all perspective, we keep thinking, and they keep proving us wrong by losing even more perspective. The latest example is a breathless Wednesday-afternoon tweet from Dylan Byers, who covers the media for CNN: “just got off the phone with @JeffreyGoldberg, who draf ted The Atlantic’s historic endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Full story TK…”

“TK” is journalese for “to come,” and the story kame as promised a few minutes later, with “Historic” in the headline:

Driven by its staunch opposition to Donald Trump, The Atlantic has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, marking just the third time in the magazine’s 160-year history that it has made a presidential endorsement.

Labeling the Republican presidential nominee “a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar,” The Atlantic’s editors encouraged their readers to “act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.”

So the editorial is “historic” only in the sense that the magazine has been around for a long time. (A headline last year from Scientific American read “Atlantic Circulation Weakens Compared with Last Thousand Years.”)

Etc. etc. etc. from witty, head-screwed-on-straight fellow . . .

She second-thoughted herself.

CHICAGO — As her face was being smashed into the pavement by a suspect Wednesday, a Chicago Police officer thought about using her gun to stop the man. Instead she was knocked out. She had been too worried about what people would think if she had used her weapon, she said.

The attack happened Wednesday. Officers on patrol were responding to a car crash in Austin when a man who had been in the crash attacked them, police said. Three officers were injured, one of them seriously, and they were taken to area hospitals for treatment.

Think of the young men in crime-filled ‘hoods, said Hillary in the debate.

Source: Officer Didn’t Shoot Attacker Because She Feared Backlash, Top Cop Says – Austin – DNAinfo Chicago

. . . as described by Episcopal priest-poet-essayist Chad Walsh, whom we — loving wife and baby Angela — visited in the early ‘seventies at Beloit (Wis.) College, where he taught.

Nice man, good man. I still have his God at Large (Seabury), then newly published, which opens with a very contemporary, “Brother, can you spare a joint?”

He had solid notions about our national origins, as in this from the excellent Liberty Tree quotation site.

“From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else.”

Source: Chad Walsh Quote – Liberty Quotes Blog