Justice Scalia's seat is vacant, and Ginsberg is 82 years old, Kennedy is 79, Breyer is 77, Thomas is 67. Nowadays, the data shows that the average age of a Supreme Court retirement or death occurs after 75. These are 5 vacancies that will likely come up over the next 4-8 years. The next President will have the power — subject to Congressional confirmation — to create a 7-2 Supreme Court skewed in their ideology.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd occasionally gets one just right. Her attached op-ed, The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee, well sums up the happy state of affairs in the smoke filled rooms of the Single-Party American Deep State. I particularly like Ms. Dowd's loaded reference to primogeniture, particularly — at the risk of mixing metaphors — its sly allusion to the possibility of HRC becoming American-anglophile slang for HRH in Versailles on the Potomac. Ms. Dowd’s reminder of HRC's relationship to Henry Kissinger conjures the imperial pretensions of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Perhaps Nixon’s re-uniforming of the White House Palace Guard will turn out to have been theater for the masses that was merely ahead of its time. The emergence of the American variant of a Single-Party Deep State is well described in two important books written by Mike Lofgren: The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted and The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. Like the imagery evoked by uniforms of Nixon’s palace guard, Lofgren’s books are impressive portraits of post-democratic America. Chuck Spinney
Hillary will keep the establishment safe. Who is more of an establishment figure, after all? Her husband was president, and he repealed Glass-Steagall, signed the Defense of Marriage Act and got rid of those pesky welfare queens.
In August 2015, I wrote a column for The Hill titled “Is Trump a Clinton plant?” At the time, I wrote that I was not seriously suggesting that Donald Trump is running as a Hillary Clinton plant for the purpose of bringing a second Clinton to the White House, but noted some facts. . . . A year after my tongue-in-cheek column asking whether Trump is running as a plant to elect Hillary Clinton, I will now raise the possibility, much more seriously, that one way to explain Trump's repeatedly self-destructive behavior could be that deep down Trump does not want to win the election and is clumsily throwing the game.
Here's the deal: Donald Trump has to have a conversation with Cynthia McKinney. If he does that, he wins. There are more blacks in prison today than there were slaves at the beginning of the Civil War — a direct result of the Clinton Co-Presidency (she actually threw Al Gore out of the Vice President offices and took them over for herself).
ROBERT STEELE: I could not be more pleased by several searches combining variations of my name with the word “Integrity.” Integrity is the central word in my life.