Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win – I will teach them!

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

—George Orwell, 1984: “

This is what happens when you allow corporations to write the laws. This one comes from the heady days of the Reagan administration when Democrats still ruled the Congress.

Because of Section 6B of the Consumer Product Safety Act, added by Congress in 1981, companies have the power to restrict and even edit what the CPSC can tell the public about their products. Americans are generally under the impression that US regulatory agencies have relatively unlimited freedom to protect consumers. But agencies like the CPSC, tasked with protecting us from things like toppling dressers and exploding smartphones, are often at the mercy of the companies they’re supposed to be watching.

“Our agency is not permitted to discuss a product if we don’t give the company 10 days notice on what we want to say,” Scott Wolfson, Communications Director at the CPSC, said over the phone.

If the company objects to whatever the CPSC wants to tell the public, the company can kick the statement back to the agency, which has another five days to negotiate with the company about wording.

The section “is unparalleled in government,” said Rachel Weintraub of the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. “Normally what happens in the process of negotiating a recall, every word of the release is negotiated. Consumer groups have long been fighting to get rid of this provision or limit its very broad scope.”

http://gizmodo.com/how-one-outrageous-law-turned-the-samsung-phone-recall-1787659621

The situation has led to “people in London making comparisons between my father and Tony Blair’s profit motivations. Which would horrify my father.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/chelsea-clinton-foundation-conflicts-emails-229605

“I am still worried that we will antagonize and activate Elizabeth Warren by opposing a new Glass Steagall. I worry about defending the banks in the debate,” wrote Mandy Grunwald, one of Clinton’s longtime advisers. “I worry about Elizabeth deciding to endorse Bernie.”

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/300243-emails-clinton-team-worried-warren-could-back-sanders-over-wall-street-plans

Media consensus:

Trump stopped the bleeding…

out of his whatever.

Well, a lot of noise has been made about Trump threatening to criminally prosecute the former secretary of state if he got to be president. That certainly sounds vindictive and authoritarian and is typical of the kind of bluster that comes out of this buffoon.

However, that being said, I can’t oppose the principle that if your predecessors really did commit crimes while in office then those crimes should be investigated and if a case can be made then prosecutions should follow.

President Obama failed to do precisely this when he came into office and allowed the biggest war crime in recent history to go unprosecuted. This opened to door to even more war crimes.