The confused sardine wriggles sideways towards Happiness

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Hindu devotees splash a water buffalo with water from Hanumante River as part of rituals before it is sacrificed on the ninth day of Dashain Hindu Festival in Bhaktapur Nepal: photo by Niranjan Shrestha/AP, 10 October 2016  

 
 
Hindu devotees splash a water buffalo with water from Hanumante River as part of rituals before it is sacrificed on the ninth day of Dashain Hindu Festival in Bhaktapur, Nepal: photo by Niranjan Shrestha/AP, 10 October 2016


Nepal -  Hindu devotees splash water on a buffalo set to be sacrificed during the Hindu Dashain Festival in Bhaktapur. By @PrakashMathema: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 10 October 2016
 

Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters aim their weapons around the town of Basheqa which remains on the frontline of fighting between Kurdish forces and militants from Islamic State, 150 Km northeast of Erbil, Iraq: photo by Ahmed Jalil/EPA, 10 October 2016



 Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters aim their weapons around the town of Basheqa which remains on the frontline of fighting between Kurdish forces and militants from Islamic State, 150 Km northeast of Erbil, Iraq: photo by Ahmed Jalil/EPA, 10 October 2016

Baghdad needs the Kurds to oust Islamic State from Mosul. But are Kurdish forces settling older scores?: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 10 October 2016

Baghdad needs the Kurds to oust Islamic State from Mosul. But are Kurdish forces settling older scores?: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 10 October 2016

Baghdad needs the Kurds to oust Islamic State from Mosul. But are Kurdish forces settling older scores?: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 10 October 2016

Russian President Vladimir Putin returns to his seat after delivering a speech at the World Energy Congress, in Istanbul: photo Emrah Gurel/AP, 10 October 2016

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Russian President Vladimir Putin returns to his seat after delivering a speech at the World Energy Congress, in Istanbul: photo Emrah Gurel/AP, 10 October 2016


 

Hillary Clinton boarding her campaign plane Monday in White Plains for a trip to Michigan: photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times, 10 October 2016

 

 

 
Hillary Clinton boarding her campaign plane Monday in White Plains for a trip to Michigan: photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times, 10 October 2016

 

“My dream,” she said, “is a hemispheric common market, with open borders, sometime in the future.”

Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease With Wall Street: Amy Chozick, Nicholas Confessore and Michael Barbaro, The New York Times, 7 October 2016

 

In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.

The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had they become public.

Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.

In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

The passages were contained in an internal review of Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches undertaken by her campaign, which was identifying potential land mines should the speeches become public. They offer a glimpse at one of the most sought-after troves of information in the 2016 presidential race — and an explanation, perhaps, for why Mrs. Clinton has steadfastly refused demands by Mr. Sanders and Donald J. Trump, her Republican rival, to release them.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign would not confirm the authenticity of the documents. They were released on Friday night by WikiLeaks, the hacker collective founded by the activist Julian Assange, saying that they had come from the email account of John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

In a statement, a Clinton spokesman, Glen Caplin, pointed to the United States government’s findings that Russian officials had used WikiLeaks to hack documents in order to sway the outcome of the presidential election, suggesting that the leak of Mr. Podesta’s emails was also engineered by Russian officials determined to help Mr. Trump. Mr. Caplin noted that a Twitter message from WikiLeaks promoting the documents had incorrectly identified Mr. Podesta as a co-owner of his brother’s lobbying firm.

But Clinton officials did not deny that the email containing the excerpts was real.

The leaked email, dated Jan. 25, does not contain Mrs. Clinton’s full speeches to the financial firms, leaving it unclear what her overall message was to these audiences.

But in the excerpts, Ms. Clinton demonstrates her long and warm ties to some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures. In a discussion in the fall of 2013 with Lloyd Blankfein, a friend who is the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Mrs. Clinton said that the political climate had made it overly difficult for wealthy people to serve in government.

“There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Mrs. Clinton said. The pressure on officials to sell or divest assets in order to serve, she added, had become “very onerous and unnecessary.”

In a separate speech to Goldman Sachs employees the same month, Mrs. Clinton said it was an “oversimplification” to blame the global financial crisis of 2008 on the U.S. banking system.

“It was conventional wisdom,” Mrs. Clinton said of the tendency to blame the banking system. “And I think that there’s a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened.”

And she praised a deficit-reduction proposal from President Obama’s fiscal commission that called for raising the Social Security retirement age, saying that the commission’s leaders “had put forth the right framework.”

Such comments could have proven devastating to Mrs. Clinton during the Democratic primary fight, when Mr. Sanders promoted himself as the enemy of Wall Street and of a rigged economic system.

Several of the most eye-popping passages ultimately express more nuanced explanations of her views. When Mrs. Clinton describes herself as “far removed” from average Americans and their finances, she had just finished describing her growing appreciation for how “anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged.” And she reminds the audience that her father “loved to complain about big business and big government.”

The Clintons have made more than $120 million in speeches to Wall Street and special interests since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001. Mrs. Clinton typically earned $225,000 for speeches, though she sometimes donated her fees to her family foundation.

“I kind of think if you’re going to be paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be a fantastic speech,” Mr. Sanders said during the primary, “a brilliant speech which you would want to share with the American people.”

As her race against Mr. Sanders — who now campaigns for Mrs. Clinton — grew unexpectedly contentious and close, Mrs. Clinton sought to portray herself as deeply skeptical of Wall Street and eager to punish its wayward leaders.

“I believe strongly that we need to make sure that Wall Street never wrecks Main Street again,” Mrs. Clinton said in January. “No bank is too big to fail, and no executive is too powerful to jail.”

As she sought to burnish her image as an advocate of working America, Mrs. Clinton declared her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Mr. Obama’s 12-nation trade pact, and distanced herself from Nafta, which her husband signed into law.

But in a 2013 speech to a Brazilian bank, Mrs. Clinton took a far different approach. “My dream,” she said, “is a hemispheric common market, with open borders, sometime in the future.”

Some of her paid remarks embrace the view that the public can benefit when Wall Street partners with government. When it comes to writing effective financial regulations, Mrs. Clinton said, “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”

Foreign hackers — authorized by Russian security agencies, according to national security officials — have successfully penetrated the operations of the Democratic Party and its candidates over the past year. They broke into the email servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing internal messages in which party leaders who were supposed to be neutral expressed their preference for Mrs. Clinton even as she was campaigning against Mr. Sanders. And Mr. Assange is an avowed critic of Mrs. Clinton who has made clear that he wishes to hurt her chances of winning the presidency.

Half of all registered voters said it bothered them “a lot” that Mrs. Clinton had given numerous paid speeches to Wall Street banks, according to a Bloomberg Politics poll in June.

Asked in an interview that month if the practice was self-defeating, given the anger over income inequality, Mrs. Clinton responded that her predecessors as secretary of state had given paid speeches, too.

“I actually think it makes sense,” she said. “Because a lot of people know you have a front-row seat in watching what’s going on in the world.”

 

John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, on the campaign plane last month: photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times, 10 October 2016

 

 
John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, on the campaign plane last month: photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times, 10 October 2016

“Hammed dropped!” they exulted

Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Strained to Hone Her Message, Leaked Emails Show: Amy Chozick and Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times, 10 October 2016

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary in February, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton was worried. Hillary Clinton was about to go down to defeat in the state, and the former president was despondent.

“He’s losing it bad today,” Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, wrote to John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, in an email. She added, “If you’re in NH please see if you can talk to him.”

The email was one of thousands released by WikiLeaks on Monday that provided a revealing glimpse into the inner workings of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. They show a candidacy that began expecting a coronation and was thrown badly off course by a misreading of the electorate and a struggle to define what she stood for.

Stretching over nine years, but drawn mainly from the past two years, the correspondence captures in detail the campaign’s extreme caution and difficulty in identifying a core rationale for her candidacy, and the noisy world of advisers, friends and family members trying to exert influence.

At one point, more than a dozen campaign aides corresponded about whether Mrs. Clinton could tell a joke at an Iowa dinner about the hairstyles of two Republicans: Donald J. Trump and Trey Gowdy, the representative from South Carolina who led the inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

“I love the joke, too,” wrote Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s policy chief, but he added that Mrs. Clinton should stay “above the committee.”

The exchanges show how Mrs. Clinton’s long-gestating plans to pursue the presidency collided with a newly populist mood in the Democratic electorate (which one of her advisers called the “Red Army”).

And they detail how, even as Mrs. Clinton was brushing off questions early on about her political plans, insisting that a run was not on her mind, she had already enlisted aides to wrestle with how to reposition a career politician as an agent of change and how openly to rely on gender to stoke grass-roots enthusiasm.

Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, did not dispute the authenticity of the emails, which were believed to have been obtained by hackers who breached Mr. Podesta’s account. But he assailed Mr. Trump’s campaign for praising their release.

“This comes after Donald Trump encouraged more espionage over the summer and continued to deny the hack even happened at Sunday’s debate,” Mr. Caplin said, alluding to election-related email hacks that have been linked to Russian security forces.

Mrs. Clinton’s voice is mostly absent: The leak includes few emails from the candidate herself. But the exchanges among her aides are sometimes less “House of Cards” than “Veep,” HBO’s scabrous comedy dissecting the vanity and phoniness of Washington.

In one 2014 email exchange with top Clinton aides, Roy Spence, a longtime friend and ad maker for Mrs. Clinton, sent over possible slogans to sum up her candidacy.

“Neither change nor continuity but The different way. The new way,” Mr. Spence wrote. He went on: “She champions with clear vision and grit. We will build not the partisans ships. But rather the Ship of State flying the American Dream flag.”

The emails reveal interminable debate on matters both large (such as Mrs. Clinton’s splashy June 2015 campaign rollout speech on Roosevelt Island in New York City) and small (such as whether she should make a crack about her graying hair).

“More humor, first woman, ass kicker and coloring her hair,” Jennifer Palmieri advised, referring to a line in which Mrs. Clinton says she would not have to worry about her hair going gray in the White House.

Almost all campaigns calibrate stagecraft, speeches and strategy. But the new emails seem to underscore Mrs. Clinton’s public struggles in defining her politics and her reasons for wanting to become president.

The private discussions among her advisers about policy -- on trade, on the Black Lives Matter movement, on Wall Street regulation -- often revolved around the political advantages and pitfalls of different positions, while there was little or no discussion about what Mrs. Clinton actually believed. Mrs. Clinton’s team at times seemed consumed with positioning and optics.

In August 2015, her aides debated how Mrs. Clinton should reveal her long-awaited position on an issue of major concern to the Democratic electorate: the Keystone XL oil pipeline. She had chosen to oppose it, potentially undermining President Obama.

Dan Schwerin, Mrs. Clinton’s speechwriter, wrote to her longtime adviser Cheryl D. Mills, “We are trying to find a good way to leak her opposition to the pipeline without her having to actually say it.” A month later, Brian Fallon, a press aide, suggested leaking her position to the news media by mentioning it during a meeting with labor leaders, rather than with an op-ed article.

“Do we worry that publishing an op-ed that leans this aggressively into our newfound position on Keystone will be greeted cynically and perhaps as part of some manufactured attempt to project sincerity?” Mr. Fallon wrote. The best way to appear consistent, he concluded, was “if her position merely leaked out of the labor meeting.”

In another exchange, in the fall of 2015, Mrs. Clinton’s speechwriter circulated a draft of an op-ed about her plan to reform Wall Street. Her senior advisers agonized over whether she should address calls to reinstate Glass-Steagall, the post-Depression rules separating commercial and investment banking.

One aide, Mandy Grunwald, said that Mrs. Clinton was leaning toward endorsing a return to Glass-Steagall, and that not doing so risked antagonizing Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who had campaigned to reinstate the rule. The campaign feared that Ms. Warren might back Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for president.

“I understand that we face phoniness charges if we ‘change’ our position now -- but we face political risks this way too,” Ms. Grunwald wrote. “I worry about Elizabeth deciding to endorse Bernie.”

Mrs. Clinton ultimately did not support Ms. Warren’s proposal, arguing that other policies would better regulate Wall Street risk. Mr. Sanders criticized Mrs. Clinton on the issue throughout the campaign. (Ms. Warren stayed out of the primary battle until June, when Mrs. Clinton had all but secured the nomination.)

The Clinton campaign had plenty of its own ammunition ready to deploy against Mr. Sanders, the emails show. Ms. Grunwald wrote that she had been digging through opposition research and had “a couple new possible negatives to suggest we test in the poll, since most of our attacks haven’t been working.”

In another lengthy exchange, aides debated various ways to repair the damage with gay rights activists angry over Mrs. Clinton’s long-stated -- and dubious -- assertion that the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by her husband in 1996, was necessary to defuse political momentum toward a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

There was little evidence for her claim, the aides agreed, and gay rights advocates were frustrated that she continued to insist on it. Some aides suggested emphasizing her “evolution” on the issue. Another aide recommended a statement in which Mrs. Clinton would admit she was wrong. But Mr. Schwerin said Mrs. Clinton would resist.

“I think everyone agrees we shouldn’t restate her argument,” he wrote. “Question is whether she’s going to agree to explicitly disavow it. And I doubt it.”

A few days later, at a presidential forum, Mrs. Clinton revised her explanation but fell short of admitting a mistake. “Thinking back on it, those were private conversations that people did have” about a potential constitutional amendment, she said. She added, “If I’m wrong about the public debate, I obviously take responsibility for that.”

In another email chain, from March 2015, four aides fine-tuned and sought State Department approval for a Twitter post in which Mrs. Clinton would address for the first time revelations that she had used a private email server during her tenure at the State Department.

By August 2015, when Mrs. Clinton agreed to publicly apologize for exclusively using a private server, her lawyer, David Kendall of Williams & Connolly, vetted Mrs. Clinton’s belabored statement of remorse. “Maybe it’s only me, but ‘hand over’ seems a little pejorative -- how about just ‘turn over’?” Mr. Kendall said, referring to Mrs. Clinton’s explanation that she had provided 30,000 emails.

One misstep, he warned, and people will say, “There they go again -- misleading, devious, non-transparent, tricky, etc.”

Mr. Podesta’s correspondence also provides fresh insight into his rarefied role as the de facto head of a sprawling political and philanthropic operation with dueling fiefs and family members. When an outside group headed by David Brock, a Clinton ally, signaled plans to demand that Mr. Sanders release his health records, drawing Mrs. Clinton into an unwelcome spat, another Clinton adviser, Neera Tanden, wrote to Mr. Podesta to grouse.

“Maybe he actually is a Republican plant,” Ms. Tanden said of Mr. Brock, a self-described former “right-wing hit man.”

Dramas within the campaign aside, Mr. Podesta wrestled with public criticism of the Clinton Foundation and a bitter rift that broke out between Chelsea Clinton and Douglas J. Band, a longtime aide to her father.

“She is acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do,” Mr. Band wrote to Mr. Podesta in November 2011, after Mrs. Clinton had begun to exert influence at her family’s foundation.

“Doug apparently kept telling my dad I was trying to push him out, take over,” Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Podesta.

The emails showed that the old tensions between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama’s inner circle occasionally surfaced. In a June 2015 email, Huma Abedin celebrated that Mrs. Clinton, who at the time was hoping to shore up her populist credentials, had “smacked down POTUS on trade and kept kicking for a little bit.”

That year, the campaign faced another headache as it heard escalating chatter that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. would mount his own campaign for president. Donors phoned in reports on Mr. Biden’s behind-the-scenes maneuvers to advisers like Ms. Tanden, a longtime policy aide to Mrs. Clinton, who relayed them back to Mr. Podesta.

Steve Elmendorf, a lobbyist and longtime Clinton backer, emailed her campaign manager to warn about one supporter in particular: Linda Lipsen, the head of the American Association for Justice, a trade group for trial lawyers, who was working to make sure members of the group did not back Mr. Biden, but who felt neglected by the Clinton campaign.

“I get multiple freak out calls every morning and I try to talk everyone off the ledge and not bug u all,” Mr. Elmendorf wrote. “But linda is in a different category.”

Meanwhile, elected officials who supported Mr. Sanders over Mrs. Clinton often felt the wrath of the Clinton network. When Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii resigned her position at the Democratic National Committee to endorse Mr. Sanders, two longtime Clinton supporters wrote to Ms. Gabbard to say they would no longer raise money for her. They also forwarded the email to Ms. Abedin and Mr. Podesta.

“Hammed dropped!” they exulted, with a typo, clearly meaning “hammer.”

John D. Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, in Washington last week. The emails released on Monday were believed to have been obtained by hackers who breached his account: photo by Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse, 10 October 2016

 

 

John D. Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, in Washington last week. The emails released on Monday were believed to have been obtained by hackers who breached his account: photo by Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse, 10 October 2016

 

The Benghazi attack was certainly preventable. "Anyone but Clinton" #podestaemails #Clinton #Election2016 @wikileaks: image via PK @pkellyshock, 10 October 2016
 

#podestaemails2: image via PK @pkellyshock, 10 October 2016

#podestaemails2: image via PK @pkellyshock, 10 October 2016

 

#podestaemails2: image via PK @pkellyshock, 10 October 2016

 

 

Hillary Clinton arriving in Detroit for a campaign event on Monday: photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times, 10 October 2016

Hillary Clinton arriving in Detroit for a campaign event on Monday: photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times, 10 October 2016

 

LEBANON - A Lebanese Christian believer flashes his religious tattoos as he poses for a picture in Beirut. By @PatrickBaz #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 10 October 2016

 

JERUSALEM - An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish man swings a chicken over his family as they perform the Kapparot ceremony. By @menahemkahana #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 10 October 2016

somewhere around here the confused sardine became roadkill

Headlights, Marin Avenue, Berkeley, February 11, 2011. Near Ensenada Avenue.: photo by Michael Patrick, 11 February 2011

Mt. Taranaki, NZ. This shot was taken soon after dawn from Mokau, looking SW across the North Taranaki bight to Mount Taranaki or Mount Egmont, as it was subsequently named by Captain James Cook.: photo by bobsan88, 20 April 2016

 

Trying on rings (Alameda, California): photo by efo, 2 October 2016

Happiness

I didn't mean it that way. No blame. I have you to thank for your continuous applicability.

You have been sufficient unto every day. That's an awful lot of days I have you to thank for

but I keep thinking about that confused sardine who said later

as well as our earlier revels

back in the day when it was said you were an actress

that was the day before the access

past reason hated expressway ran straight through here, and the mad possessed traffic,  

when it should have been said

a bliss in proof to make the taker mad is well worth the expense of spirit

and I have you to thank for your beauty and for your patience

and you have me to thank for... uh your uh... shame

and I have you to thank for happiness

Conversations with a swan (Alameda, California): photo by efo, 2 October 2016

Ice cream truck (Richmond, California): photo by efo, September 2016

 

mid-San Francisco Bay [seen from Berkeley]: photo by franciscophile, 1 January 1980

Northern Bay: San Francisco to Mt. Tamalpais. Berkeley, University Avenue in foreground.: photo by Bill Abbott, 30 April 2011

LS: photo by jokin lara, 13 September 2016

LS: photo by jokin lara, 13 September 2016

LS: photo by jokin lara, 13 September 2016