Weekend Open Thread: A New Hillary Scandal; Disdaining Leverage; and Ivanka Soon Turns 35

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See if you can pick out which one is Ivanka Trump.  (Hint: no necktie.)  Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seedsofpeaceofficialsite/3342324542/in/set-72157614961325283. “Seeds of Peace” apparently facilitate young leaders’ involvement in making peace in South and Western Asia.  A terrible thing for a young woman to have been involved in, of course!

Some national political news for all of us to enjoy, since this past week was the week for it.

(1) California Has 2.4 Million Ballots Left to Count, but The Race Was Called Quickly

Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Clinton supporter, announced that California has 2.4 million votes left to count for Tuesday’s election, which is about 37% of the 6.5 million already counted and 27% of what the final total will be if all of those ballots do count.  Hillary Clinton currently leads Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary race by about 475,000 votes.  Sanders supporters have complained that procedures for NPP voters to cast Democratic Crossover ballots were confusing and enforced both too strictly and incorrectly.  Sanders has been picking up votes daily — but by the time it’s over relatively few will likely be paying attention.

(2) A New Hillary Clinton Scandal Broke Friday Afternoon, and It Looks Pretty Substantive

Slate.com released a new Hillary Scandal(tm) Friday afternoon.  It looks like it’s not strictly illegal, at least that anyone not directly involved can prove, and so perhaps it should not be called a scandal at all, but just an amusing story.  It involves a big donor getting appointed at Hillary’s apparent insistence to an advisory panel on nuclear weapons policy for which he was entirely unqualified.  See — amusing!  Check it out yourself.  Luckily, the disgusting nature of this amusing story won’t be a problem for Hillary so long as she’s running against Donald Trump….

(3) “Talk Grows of Replacing Trump at GOP Convention”

Hahahahaha … what was I just saying?  Oh, let me just quote the article:

There is growing talk on the right of replacing Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president, and even chatter about a possible alternative.

As Trump has floundered over the past week after questioning a federal judge’s impartiality because of his Mexican ancestry, Trump’s critics within the GOP have stepped up their efforts to thwart him. Some anti-Trump conservatives, who have tried for months to recruit an independent candidate, have begun looking more closely at attempting to persuade delegates at next month’s GOP convention to nominate someone other than Trump.

“There is a rapidly moving train toward the convention to try to obstruct it at the convention. Trump in the last 72 hours has given hope to people who think it’s now possible,” said Erick Erickson, a conservative radio talk show host and one of Trump’s most resolute critics.

“He’s starting to give everybody hope that he should be stopped at the convention,” Erickson said, though he cautioned that if Trump “cleans up his act then I think that hope will go away.”

Of course, you’re never going to get Trump to give up the nomination unless there’s something yuuuuuge in it for him personally, so we don’t have to worry about this.  After all, what could possibly persuade Trump to fake a heart attack or a cancer diagnosis and step aside for someone who could take a scandal like Hillary’s Amusing Story and ride to unexpected victory?

(4) Happy 35th Birthday, Ivanka Trump, Nine Days Before Election Day 2016

We know how much Donald Trump loves his daughter Ivanka — and I don’t mean that in a weird way.  At least not entirely.  So on, a whim, I looked up Ivanka’s Wikipedia page to test my hypothesis that, while pretty much unqualified for the Presidency, this young woman was still more qualified than her father.  And the first thing that jumped out at me was her birthday: October 30, 1981.  Yes, she will turn 35 just before the election.  She is, in other words, eligible to become President next year.

Donald Trump’s youngest daughter, Ivanka’s half-sister Tiffany, will not be eligible to run for President until 2028 — by which year that mascara may have worn off.

Ivanka is 5′ 11″, a former model, an entrepreneur, and apparently has a responsible position as an executive within the Trump organization (where she is responsible for acquisitions rather than bankruptcies and slave labor or whatever else goes on there), but seems intelligent, well-spoken, and probably no less serious or more spoiled than her good friend Chelsea Clinton, who said of her: “There’s nothing skin-deep about Ivanka. And I think that’s a real tribute to her because certainly anyone as gorgeous as she is could have probably gone quite far being skin-deep.”  She is also good friends with Georgina Bloomberg, daughter of former New York City Mayor Michael.

She is a bona fide Orthodox Jew, by conversion prior to her marriage to real-estate investor and New York Observer publisher Jared Kushner.  She keeps kosher and observes the Sabbath.  She meditates twice daily.  She donated $1000 to Hillary Clinton in 2008, endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012, and has held a fundraiser for charter-school loving New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker.  “Trump has been involved with her father’s campaign by making public appearances in support of him and has defended him.  However, she admitted mixed feelings about his presidential ambitions, saying, “As a citizen, I love what he’s doing. As a daughter, it’s obviously more complicated.”  In August, Trump’s father stated that she was his leading advisor on “women’s health and women” and said it was she who propelled him to elaborate on his views of women.”  (So she also clearly has a sense of humor.)

In other words, she’s a moderate Republican who could balance a ticket with a Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Chris Christie, or someone else who could do an even better job of blowing Hillary Clinton out of the water.  Yes, by traditional standards, she is not qualified to be President — but neither is her father.  (For that matter, she’d probably compare favorably to both Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle.  And she would be sold to voters as someone who would be positioned to maintain her father’s influence in, and perhaps even control over, the White House without having his obvious personal detriments, such as being a loud and nasty bigoted asshole.  Most importantly, she could give her father a way to ease out of a job that presumably — I certainly hope, at least — intimidates him, and set up someone far more appealing for long-term political success while retaining his own strong public image as he convalesces from the fake heart attack or fake cancer diagnosis that will have given him a way to gracefully turn down the nomination.  Best of all, she’s not going to be responsible for Melania’s semi-nude “First Lady-in-Waiting” photos.

But don’t worry, Democrats, because the use of the Clinton Foundation to put a rich wart-brain onto a nuclear advisory committee was LEGAL — LEGAL, I say! — and so having an attractive young candidate who could attack Hillary in sorrow rather than anger, with disappointment at her manipulating the system as she did, could not possibly succeed.

[5] You Now Know Which Lefty Democrats Do Not Understand the Concept of Political Leverage

What one thing should lefty Democrats most NOT want Hillary to do between now and the convention — and onward towards the election?  That’s right!  We don’t want her to lurch to the left and fail to activate the Democratic base, because if he’s losing Trump could still have his heart attack as late as Halloween and pledge to resign and allow his Veep pick to ride on to victory with a pledge to appoint Ivanka as VP once elected.

So what do we not want to do right now?  Right — give Hillary the impression that our votes are in the bag!  We have to avoid commitment to her — sorry, “Her” — at this early stage because we know that she’s going to turn into Olympia Snowe by election day if she possible can.  And the only way to do that in good faith is to really mean it.  I’m not going to vote for Trump, but that doesn’t mean that — if she doesn’t give us lefties some serious reason to support her (like picking Elizabeth Warren (or, better yet, Keith Ellison) for VP — I will vote for Hillary.  (And before you say “how can you support Trump by not voting in the Presidential race — I’m in California, people: if Hillary is in any danger of losing California without my vote — and probably hundreds of thousands like me, then she’s already lost the election.  You care so much about what we each do with our individual vote?  You still have time to move to Ohio and register to vote there.  Go.  Shoo!)

So given that we we don’t want to give up our leverage, why the hell are good leftists posting recaptioned and repurposed New Yorker cartoons like this?

Hahahaha — see, if YOU don’t drink the Kool-Aid, then everyone will DIE!

Let me put this as clearly and directly as I can:

IT IS ABOUT LEVERAGE, YOU DROOLING KNUCKLE-DRAGGERS, AND YOU ARE GIVING IT UP IN EXCHANGE FOR NOOOOOOOOOOOOTHING!  DO YOU ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND ANYTHING ABOUT POLITICS OTHER THAN HOW TO LOSE GRACEFULLY SO THAT YOU GET YOUR HEAD PATTED BY CENTER-RIGHT LEADERS WHO MAY AGREE TO FORGIVE YOU FOR SUPPORTING BERNIE?  YOU HOLD ONTO YOUR LEVERAGE UNTIL YOU GET SOMETHING BIG FOR IT!

Far from being petulant foot-stampers, actual leftist Democrats understand that it’s actually the people who won’t hold Hillary’s feet to the fire who endanger her success — because left to her own political judgment she has an astonishingly consistent record of, when in this sort of situation, doing the wrong thing.  And, crazy as it may seem, voters are onto it.

Having cheered up our Republican readers this drizzly day, I give you our Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about all that or whatever else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decency and discretion.  If you’ve been banned from the site, and that’s a very small (albeit energetic) number of you, do not expect to see your comments appear below.  Dead is dead.