Showing posts with label Claire McCaskill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claire McCaskill. Show all posts

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Missouri Senate candidate has some rather antiquated views of women's rights. And yes he's a Republican.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

In a statement posted to Facebook on Tuesday, (Courtland)Sykes said that he had been asked if he “supports women’s rights.” 

“I want to come home to a home cooked dinner every night at six,” Sykes said, referring to demands he makes of his girlfriend. “One that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives.” 

According to Sykes, feminists push an agenda that they “made up to suit their own nasty snake-filled heads.” 

The candidate said that he hoped his daughters do not grow up to be “career obsessed banshees who forgo home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the top of a thousand tall buildings they are [SIC] think they could have leaped in a single bound — had men not been ‘suppressing them.’ It’s just nuts.” 

Sykes ended his rant by insisting that he supports women’s rights “but not the kind that has suppressed natural womanhood for five long decades.” 

“But good news,” he concluded. “They’re finished. Ask Hillary.”

And this guy is go up against Claire McCaskill?

She will clean his clock, and then teach him to make his own damn dinner.  

Thursday, January 05, 2017

During Senate hearing, intelligence community says they are more convinced than ever that the Russians hacked our election. Update!

(I am including Claire McCaskill's questioning of CIA Director Clapper because I found it to be one of the more entertaining exchanges. Though to be fair Lindsey Graham was a hoot to watch as well.)

Courtesy of CNN: 

In his opening questions to Clapper, Committee Chairman John McCain noted the Intelligence Community's conclusion that the cyberthefts and disclosures were intended to interfere with the US election process and could only have been authorized by Russia's most senior levels. 

"We stand actually more resolutely on the strength of that statement that we made on the seventh of October," Clapper said. After the election, the Intelligence Community concluded that at least one Russian motive had been to help Trump win. 

Clapper said that the hacking did not succeed in changing any vote tallies, but that it was impossible for intelligence to assess how the information released from the breaches affected voters' attitudes. 

McCain emphasized the Russian role and delivered an implicit rebuke to Trump, who has urged people to "move on" from the issue of Moscow-directed hacking.

I actually disagree that there is no evidence that the Russian hacks impacted the vote tallies.

In fact if you go through this timeline presented by ABC News you can see for yourself how the leaked information, carefully disseminated by Wikileaks over a period of four months, slowly eroded the trust for the DNC and later for Clinton herself.

I think without that, and the help of FBI Director Comey, Donald Trump would have had no way in hell of winning this election.

Wikileaks, which I now consider to be a propaganda outlet for Russia, also fed into conspiracy theories about a Clinton earpiece, and even diagnosed her with a fake disease

You do not get to hold yourself out as a paragon of truth and justice once you engage in that kind of conspiratorial nonsense.

Clapper and McCain also have little use for Julian Assange:  

McCain asked Clapper whether Assange had endangered men and women serving the US with his earlier release of State Department cables. 

"Yes, he has," Clapper said. 

McCain then asked whether Assange should be accorded any credibility -- another implicit rebuke of Trump. Clapper responded, "No, he should not."

And yet this is the guy that Donald Trump thinks the American people should listen to and consider as reputable as our own intelligence agencies.

I have to admit that I was really fascinated by the hearing, and watched the entire thing from start to finish.

At one point Director Clapper was asked by Lindsey Graham if he was prepared to be challenged by Donald Trump tomorrow when he provides a briefing, and he smiled and said yes and that he welcomes the exchange.

In other words Clapper, and the other intelligence professionals, are confident that the information that they have to share will be more than enough to convince even someone as dimwitted as Donald Trump.

It will be interesting to see if tomorrow's Trump tweets don't have a completely different tenor than the ones before the briefing.

For example:


By the way considering what James Comey did to sabotage Hillary's chances of winning the election, I do not blame the DNC for keeping the FBI away from their hard drives.

If in fact that's what happened. 

Update: Former CIA Director, James Wolsey, has just quit as a Trump advisor. 

I am not sure what that means, but I bet it means something.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Senator Claire McCaskill slaps the toupee right off Rand Paul's head after he dredged up Monica Lewinsky to attack Hillary.

Courtesy of TPM:

 "I think I can speak for most women to say that I found what he said infuriating. I think most women understand they should not be held accountable for the behavior of their husbands," McCaskill told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "You know, frankly, it was a long time ago. Our country did very well under the leadership of Bill Clinton." 

Paul accused former President Clinton on Sunday of engaging in "predatory behavior" with Lewinsky and, pointing to the successful female members of his family, argued that there is no such thing as a "war on women." 

McCaskill swatted down Paul's bit of mansplaining. 

"I think Rand Paul is grasping, trying to show that he can be tough and win the presidential nomination," she said. 

"It was a political posturing and, frankly, what Rand Paul doesn't get is that women want birth control. What Rand Paul doesn't get is that women don't want to be marginalized in the workplace, that we are not yet at the point we need to be in terms of our country and around the world."

I think that this will be the response from virtually everybody who is not a card carrying Republican. 

I will admit that I worried about it a little, but after considering it further I think that this will have just about the same impact on Hillary's chances in 2016 that the so-called IRS scandal, Benghazi, and Fast and Furious are going to have.

In other words, none.