Oh Henry Kissinger, how we’re missin’ yer.

“Today the focus among foreign policy elite is on rebuilding a more muscular and more ‘centrist internationalism.'”

https://t.co/lj9wIgrQLR

I didn’t think it was close but that doesn’t change the reality that this guy is still likely to get 40-45% of the vote. SAD!

For some reason I’ve been missing these in my g+ stream. Thanks Google.

Any way, here is the latest and final one. Jeremy Nixon​ watches the debate so you don’t have to.

Originally shared by Jeremy Nixon

Debate notes.

This is it, folks: the third and, mercifully, final presidential debate.

Since our last outing, Donald Trump has come more and more unhinged, as allegations of sexual assault and harassment pile up. He had a Twitter meltdown over Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live. He is now convincing his True Believers that the election is rigged against him, preparing the flock to reject the legitimacy of the democratic process itself. Supporters, convinced that a vast conspiracy encompassing the Clinton campaign, all media outlets, and, presumably, local election workers all across the land truly exists, are preparing to intimidate and confront anyone they see at a polling place who looks Mexican or Syrian to them. Yes, the conspiracy even includes all those Syrian refugees Trump supporters imagine are streaming into the country to implement Sharia and take away our guns or whatever.

Republicans are running away in droves. John McCain, the party’s nominee in 2008, does not intend to vote for him. Even Mr. Trump’s bitch, Chris Christie, has been distancing himself. The election-rigging story is so absurd that even his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has publicly disagreed with it.

No one, not even his running mate Mike Pence, has been willing to defend the things Mr. Trump has said about women.

No one, that is, except his devoted wife, Melania. At forty-six and married to a seventy-year-old billionaire who once told Howard Stern that when a woman turns thirty-five “it’s called check-out time,” Mrs. Trump will likely stand by her man, hoping he doesn’t trade her in for a newer model before he shuffles off this mortal coil.

Meanwhile, there’s been actual news about Hillary Clinton, with Wikileaks releasing emails, the FBI releasing details of its interviews from the email investigation, and evidence that Clinton supporters instigated violence at Trump rallies—but no one gives a crap because no one can stop talking about Donald Trump.

§

There was no handshake between the candidates at the start of the debate—and there was none at the end. It was not a friendly debate. It was not a civil debate.

For the first half-hour, it looked like it might be. But, as we’ve seen before, Mr. Trump started to go off the rails after a half-hour and went into a downward spiral, interrupting, interjecting “wrong” when Mrs. Clinton was speaking, and, as we got closer to the end, just angrily shouting over her, and later, over the moderator. At one point he interjected “such a nasty woman.”

Remember that jaw-dropping, terrifying moment in the last debate when Mr. Trump promised to imprison his political opponent? It was an unprecedented threat in American politics. Well, the headline tonight was even worse: moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News directly asked Mr. Trump if he would accept the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump said, “I will look at it at the time.” He twice refused to say the election would be legitimate and repeated his assertion that the election is rigged.

This, too, is unprecedented in American politics, this undermining of the democratic process itself. This is, or should be, absolutely disqualifying. There was audible gasping in the audience. Mr. Trump was in full-on conspiracy mode.

In an early illustration of how thin-skinned Donald Trump really is, when asked about the Supreme Court, he immediately leapt to attacking Ruth Bader Ginsburg for having said bad things about him.

When Mrs. Clinton said that Russia was responsible for the hacking of her campaign’s email, Mr. Trump again couldn’t resist leaping to Russia’s and Vladimir Putin’s defense. Strongly, and at length.

Things got even worse on foreign policy. On the fight for Mosul, Mr. Trump repeated his bizarre rant about how the ISIS leaders in Mosul have left because the attack was announced, and why couldn’t it be a sneak attack? The breathtaking ignorance that would lead someone to think a major military attack on Mosul, involving more than thirty thousand troops and lots of heavy equipment, could be undertaken in secret, is scary. And do we really think ISIS thought no one would try to retake Mosul? This guy knows nothing about anything, and knows it very loudly.

The topic came up of Mr. Trump saying that more countries should have nuclear weapons—South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia—and Mr. Trump denied that he’d ever said it. He said you wouldn’t find a quote from him like that, and he said it was just another lie from Mrs. Clinton. Unfortunately for him, it was a flat-out lie from Mr. Trump, and the quote whose existence he denied happened on national television.

When the topic moved to Aleppo, Mr. Trump’s response was an incomprehensible word salad, an angry rant that made no sense at all. I mean, no sense as English paragraphs.

On immigration, “We have some bad hombres here” was Mr. Trump’s comment. He finally mentioned the border wall he wants to build, which, even if it were logistically practical, wouldn’t reduce illegal immigration very much. Somewhere around half of illegal immigrants came into the country legally and overstay their visas, and migration from Mexico is net negative. He also claimed Mrs. Clinton used to support building a wall—in fact, she voted for border fencing on seven hundred miles of the border, not the whole border.

When he said “nobody has more respect for women than I do,” the audience actually laughed.

Mrs. Clinton, for her part, was measured, composed, and knowledgable. She didn’t make any mistakes—but she did say that there would be no US ground troops in Iraq again, which would come as a surprise to the five thousand US troops in Iraq in an active war zone. That was probably her worst moment, and it wasn’t so bad.

Asked about the appearance of conflict of interest with the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state, she dodged the question and made a little speech about how great the Foundation is.

She had a couple of clever zingers. One, noting that while she was in the White House situation room monitoring the bin Laden raid, Mr. Trump was hosting Celebrity Apprentice. (The show was interrupted for the president’s announcement.) Another was noting that Mr. Trump had used Chinese steel to build his hotel in Las Vegas, after Mr. Trump bemoaned the Chinese dumping cheap steel here to the detriment of our steel industry.

When describing Mr. Trump as always claiming things are rigged against him when they don’t go his way, she said that he’d even claimed the Emmys were rigged when he failed to win three years in a row. Mr. Trump, as if to prove the point for her, interrupted to say, “I should have gotten it.”

Mrs. Clinton put in a solid performance, as usual. Also, she intends to accept the result of the election, and apparently we need to say that now.

Don’t mess with the reserve currency.

More reasons why the Republicans have taken leave of their senses and why the Democrats are now the party of the business class. They are just better at it.

Originally shared by Jeff Zahari

“An attack on the dollar’s role as world reserve currency is tantamount to a physical attack on the United States itself. Even if you are among those who know the US can and will wage a war for control of oil supplies, you probably still have no idea what Washington will do to protect the reserve currency status of a worthless piece of paper, the US dollar.”

https://therealmovement.wordpress.com/2016/10/19/game-theory-and-clintons-lesson-for-the-left/

Originally shared by Emlyn O’Regan

Hillary argued coherently, presented a cogent platform, performed professionally. Trump didn’t molest anyone live on stage or grab anyone’s pussy. So apparently a draw.