The New Republic Mon, 04 Apr 1994 13:56 UTC You see a girl walking down the street. You can say, "There goes a beautiful girl" or "There goes a whore." What the hell's the difference? They've both got legs. ~ Jon E.M. Jacoby, executive vice president of Stephens Inc., explaining the Arkansas system of politics and finance as it reached perfection during the Clinton years Part 1 © Unknown In Arkansas, the latest backstairs of the national political system, you hear a lot of things. Concerning Whitewater, for example, you are constantly-- and probably correctly--reminded that the dustup involves nothing but a typical loony tunes savings & loans deal from the 1980s, despite the august personages involved and their perplexing insistence on behaving like refugees from a Raymond Chandler novel. In Arkansas memories are long, political rascality is king of regional sports and rumor and truth tend to commingle until otherwise reasonable people are driven slightly bonkers trying to sort out one from the other. In Little Rock the whole Whitewater affair is regarded as something of a hoot--the Yankee carpetbagger press, with the reality of Arkansas staring it in the face, has gone and missed the real story again. But if Whitewater was nothing but a minor peccadillo that the press has glommed onto because it thinks it understands it--and compared with the private financial shenanigans of Arizona Governor Fife Symington, Whitewater resembles a misdeed along the lines of crossing the street against the light-- why, then, has the Clinton administration so frantically placed its back to the door, as though a peek beyond would reveal grandpa tied to a chair, surrounded by his looted bank books? In Arkansas the answer to this question eerily resembles the epitaph on the tombstone of Sir Christopher Wren: if you would see Clinton's monument, look around. When it comes to Bill Clinton's home state, the national press has repeatedly looked, seen everything and observed next to nothing (the honorable, largely ignored exception being the Los Angeles Times ). Visiting Little Rock in search of atmosphere during the presidential campaign, reporter after reporter dutifully described the imposing Stephens Building, the elegant Capitol Hotel, the Worthen Bank tower and the headquarters of Arkla Petroleum, future White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty's gas company, without realizing that all of these things were either owned, controlled or under the influence of a single, immensely powerful family: the Stephenses . By a happy chance, the family is also the stellar client of Hillary Rodham Clinton's old employer, the Rose Law Firm . Although it usually served as a hired gun with a conveniently blind eye, Rose proves to be a handy prism for observing a Gothic, sometimes darkly humorous tale of bonds, banks, a friendly cocaine distributor, sinister Pakistanis, shadowy Indonesians and the uses to which an agreeable state government can be put. The story is in fact three connected stories, combined in a typically Southern saga: Stephens Inc. and the Worthen Bank Corporation; the Rose Law Firm itself; and the Arkansas bond business, which, like most bond businesses, is extremely difficult for the well-educated layman to understand, thus making it an excellent place to hide things in plain sight. Central to the story is a pair of siblings named Witt and Jackson Stephens. Part 2 In one sense, nothing unusual occurred in Arkansas during the 1980s: tales of high jinks in high places have always figured prominently in American discourse, and some of the most colorful stories--a number of them actually true--have come out of the Bubba Belt of the South and Southwest, whose geographical heart happens to be occupied by Arkansas. But Arkansas is rendered sui generis by the presence of the only major investment bank not headquartered on Wall Street, Stephens Inc. of Little Rock, which does much to explain some of the arresting peculiarities of a state that is more than a little strange even when judged by the spacious standards of its region. For one thing, although Arkansas is the home to some of the nation's wealthiest families, it is one of the poorest states in the country , although there is no reason for it to be poor at all. Abundantly endowed with minerals, petroleum, timber and some of the most fertile agricultural land on the surface of the planet, it bears a close resemblance to a Third World country, with a ruling oligarchy , a small and relatively powerless middle class and a disfranchised, leaderless populace admired for its colorful folkways, deplored for its propensity to violence (on a per capita basis, Little Rock has one of the highest murder rates in the nation) and appreciated for its willingness to do just about any kind of work for just about any kind of wage. In the words of one local wag, the farther you get from Arkansas, the better the Stephens boys look. Indeed, the family's sanitized, Horatio Alger- like biographies have been featured, accompanied by a remarkable lack of examination, in publications as various as Forbes and Golf Digest . The dynasty's founder, Witt Stephens, together with his younger brother by sixteen years, Jackson, grew up on a hardscrabble farm near the town of Prattsville, the sons of a small-time speculator in oil stocks and sometime state legislator, A.J. Stephens, who remained a power in state Democratic politics until the end of his life. An eighth-grade dropout, Witt first made his living by peddling Bibles and belt buckles before he discovered a pair of bonanzas in undervalued, Depression-era municipal bonds and the natural gas with which Arkansas is so richly endowed. Meanwhile, Jackson briefly served as a page with his father in the state legislature and went on to become a classmate of future president Jimmy Carter at the Naval Academy, a circumstance that would later serve the family's fortunes well while causing a disaster of still unmeasured magnitude in the American banking system. After World War II the brothers joined forces at Stephens Inc. in Little Rock, with Witt--or Mr. Witt, as he came to be known--serving as the company's colorful, cigar-chomping and aphoristic face to the world (or as much of the world as paid attention) while the taciturn Jack toiled away in the back office, revealing a golden touch at investment strategy. These things are relative, of course; by the time Witt (who died in 1992 at the age of 83) handed over the reins to Jack in 1957, while retaining his petroleum interests and serving as the presiding genius of the firm, Stephens Inc. was worth a beggarly $7.5 million. But in the Arkansas of 1957, a financial institution with $7.5 million had the money and the clout to do a number of things--including purchase a governor. Witt, like his father before him, was a staunch hereditary Democrat, a supporter and friend of such Arkansas luminaries as Senator William Fulbright. He was also a great patron of the infamous, six-term Orval Faubus--not, apparently, because of the governor's segregationist policies (to the family's credit, Jack Stephens, a trustee of the University of Arkansas since 1948, had successfully lent his voice to the cause of integrating the institution), but because Faubus was sound on the subject of natural gas, a subject dear to the Stephens' heart. As the family's fortune continued to wax after the Faubus years, it became an axiom of Arkansas politics that someone could occasionally become governor without permission from Stephens headquarters, but the politician was unlikely to remain governor for very long unless he paid close attention to the care and feeding of the brothers-- the great exception to the rule being two-term Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, the beneficiary, representative and broken reed of an even vaster American fortune, who became the failed hope of Arkansas liberalism. Decades later, when the self-effacing Jack became chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, naive visitors were quickly enlightened on the subject of how a man so shy could assume a post so prominent in the sport of the moneyed and the gently bred. "Jackson Stephens?" it was explained. "He's the man who owns Arkansas." It was with Jackson Stephens at the helm that Stephens Inc. propelled itself into the stratosphere of the American financial plutocracy, making a bewildering variety of investments in enterprises as various as real estate, hazardous waste incineration, data processing, nursing homes, trucking and airplane maintenance, while simultaneously diversifying into the business of underwriting issues of common stock. In its new role, the firm called on the services of young C. Joseph Giroir, the only trained securities lawyer in the state, and his paralyzingly respectable firm, Rose. The securities business, in turn, led to a chain of peculiar events beginning in 1977 (the year, it so happened, that Bill Clinton became Arkansas attorney general and that Rose hired his wife). That year, no less a figure than T. Bertram Lance appeared on the corporate doorstep of his old friend's classmate, bringing with him a load of troubles and a glittering opportunity. Lance was compelled to resign as head of Jimmy Carter's Office of Management and Budget because of his long history of questionable financial practices in Georgia. As a result of that history, he was also beset by a negative net worth, substantial loans from banks in Chicago and New York and a large stockholding in the National Bank of Georgia. Sadly for Lance the price of the bank stock was depressed and its sale on the open market could not rescue him from the specter of bankruptcy, which was the dilemma Stephens Inc. was invited to solve. A solution was soon found in the form of the now notorious Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) , although whether Lance introduced Stephens to the Pakistani-run scam or vice versa is a matter of some debate. Beyond dispute, however, is the fact that the comptroller of the currency, the nation's principal regulator of commercial banks, had clearly stated that BCCI was never to enter the American banking system under any circumstances. Oddly, this unambiguous order did nothing to prevent Stephens Inc. from solving Lance's problems while settling a small score of its own. The National Bank of Georgia was controlled by a holding company called Financial General, one of the few entities in the country allowed to engage in interstate banking under the laws of the time. The Stephens interests controlled slightly less than 5 percent of Financial General and the investment had soured, partly because Financial General refused to hire the family's data processing company. It was, Stephens soon persuaded BCCI, just the sort of investment BCCI was looking for, the comptroller's edict notwithstanding. Comment: BCCI was pretty much the global (not 'Pakistani') financial instrument that got the Western 'war on terror' up and running, funneling weapons to terrorists via payments of hard drugs, prostitutes and cash. In short order, Stephens launched Lance on the path to renewed solvency, assembled blocks of stock for purchase by the front men who would conceal BCCI's identity, effected an introduction to the subsequently disgraced Democratic wise man Clark Clifford, turned a small but tidy profit on the sale of its own shares, pocketed fees of at least $95,000--and, in return for a sum that in Stephens terms amounted to chump change, set in motion the process that would give BCCI its long-sought beachhead in the American financial community. When subsequently confronted with its BCCI involvement by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Stephens Inc. neither admitted nor denied the sec's findings but promised to go and sin no more. But BCCI was not the only exotic party attracted by Lance's bank holdings. Also appearing on the scene was Mochtar Riady, one of the wealthiest men in Indonesia, with far-ranging interests and a known connection to his country's dictator, General Suharto . When someone went into business with Riady, there was also the possibility that they were in business with the general, a fairly decent chap by dictatorial standards (he had begun his reign with the slaughter of 200,000 supposed Communists, a feat he had not found necessary to duplicate except on the island of Timor) but a tyrant nonetheless. Stephens Inc., which appeared to be uninterested in the true activities of BCCI, exhibited a similar indifference when it came to Riady. Moreover, the Stephens people did not appear to be the least bit curious about the business endeavors of the distinguished former statesman who effected the introduction between Jakarta and Little Rock. This was Robert B. Anderson. Formerly a secretary of the treasury in the Eisenhower administration, Anderson had carried out diplomatic assignments for President Lyndon Johnson in the Middle East and had served as President Richard Nixon's chief negotiator in the Panama Canal talks before opening an offshore bank--Commercial and Trade Bank and Trust Ltd. on Anguilla--that catered to people who needed to launder money, evade taxes, or both. Jack Stephens had willingly presided over the handoff of a big hunk of an American bank to a bunch of Pakistani thugs, but he was not willing to let Riady go so easily. "He wanted to buy into an American bank, an idea I was not enthusiastic about," Stephens told an interviewer some years later, perhaps making an unconscious semantic distinction. He'd seen nothing wrong with selling BCCI an American bank--they even named it First American--but he and Riady soon began planning an entirely new kind of Arkansas bank holding company, for which they required the services of Giroir and his expertise in securities law. But they also needed something that increasingly became a hallmark of the Rose firm: a willingness to perpetrate a subtle conflict of interest. Founded in 1820, well before Arkansas became a state, Rose is one of the oldest surviving law firms west of the Mississippi, one of the most competent and one of the most quietly influential. Often, in looking at the state government of Arkansas, the Rose firm and the Stephens interests, it is hard to escape the impression that one is looking at a single entity, rather along the lines of NATO. The law partnership takes its curious name from U.M. Rose, a talented attorney who dominated the firm from the mid-1860s to the end of the century, was one of the founders of the American Bar Association and is one of two Arkansans whose statues adorn the Capitol in Washington. Over the years Rose has provided Arkansas with numerous legislators and justices of the state supreme court. In 1957, when the modern civil rights era was born in Governor Faubus's refusal to integrate Little Rock's Central High, it was a Rose lawyer who acted as lead counsel to the school board. (Rose still has no black partners.) And from 1975 until 1988 the firm enjoyed a spectacular run--growing from seventeen lawyers to fifty-three--under the leadership of the dapper and charming Giroir, the first and only chairman in the history of Rose, who deeply entwined the partnership and his personal destiny in the affairs of the Stephens family's empire. During the Clinton administration, the history of the Rose firm could be divided into two periods: the Giroir years, and the shorter period, from 1987 to 1992, when the firm claimed to be a democracy, voting on its future rather than blindly following a single, charismatic leader. This democracy, however, was publicly dominated by three partners: the amiable Webster Hubbell, who was until a few days ago associate attorney general; the quiet Vincent Foster, who was deputy White House counsel until his suicide last summer; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who as of press time is still First Lady. The firm's sea change, which generated a certain amount of hoopla from the legal press, was more apparent than real. Under the surface, Rose was much the same as always, doing good for its friends and clients while doing well for itself, but much more silently. In his years as Rose's chief, Giroir conspicuously chaired a group drawn from the state's so-called Good Suit Club. The club successfully lobbied the legislature to change the state usury law, which made owning an Arkansas commercial bank a much more attractive proposition. It also was active in convincing the state's lawmakers to revise the law restricting the formation of bank holding companies, which enabled Giroir, Riady and Stephens to make a substantial and potentially lucrative investment. On his own, Giroir had purchased control of four Arkansas banks. He sold all four--including the second-largest bank in the city of Pine Bluff--to Worthen Banking Corporation, the new holding company Riady and Stephens had been able to set up after state law, with Giroir's help, had been made more congenial to such things. For his part in the deal, Giroir was compensated with $53,760,294 in cash, stock and assumed debt. He also became a major stockholder of Worthen (named after the venerable and very large Little Rock bank that was the pride of the Stephens commercial banking empire) and a powerful member of its board. He received further income by renting property to the company, and he pocketed an additional $2.1 million when he sold part of his stockholdings to a company affiliated with Riady's son James (who was also Worthen's co-president). More important, he managed to create a whole new client for his firm; Rose became Worthen's principal outside counsel. These things are complicated, dull and dry, which is an excellent form of concealment, but consider the sequence of events. With the stroke of a pen and without a visible second thought, then-Governor Bill Clinton, following his traumatic period as a voter-rejected civilian between 1980 and 1982, gave life to two pieces of legislation inspired by his wife's boss--revising the usury laws and permitting the formation of new banking holding companies. In a state as small as Arkansas, where everybody of importance knows everybody else, it seems impossible that Governor Clinton could not have known that the relevant legislation would be of immense personal benefit to the boss in question, the state's most powerful family and an Indonesian investor whose presence in Arkansas seemed to be regarded as the most natural thing in the world. Last and not incidentally, the governor, by permitting the creation of the Worthen Bank Corporation, had arranged a new payday for the Clinton family through the windfall in legal fees provided to the Rose firm (Hillary Rodham Clinton, partner). When the compensation of the firm's partners was computed, Rodham Clinton has insisted, she specifically exempted herself from receiving a share of Rose's business with the state. But although Worthen could not have been brought to life without the help of her husband's government, it was not a government agency. Rodham Clinton was therefore not excluded from a partner's share of its fees. More important, Worthen also became a major depository of the state's tax receipts. Nothing unusual here; governments frequently park their undeployed funds with large private banking institutions until they decide what to do with the money. But the results soon proved to be imprudent under the most charitable interpretation of the word. In 1985 Worthen Bank managed to lose $52 million of Arkansas state taxpayers' money in a purchase of government securities from a New Jersey brokerage with a questionable past and no future whatever; several of its principals ended up in jail for fraud. With its capital wiped out in a single stroke and a seizure by federal regulators imminent, Worthen was swiftly rescued with a $30 million cash infusion from its major stockholders, in the form of a loan that paid the Stephens partners a handsome 10 percent--together with additional funds from Stephens Inc., which pocketed a $3.2 million fee for its trouble. (The risk, in true Stephens fashion, was not great. Two-thirds of the funds were swiftly replaced by Worthen's insurance company, which made Stephens Inc.'s noble rescue of the bank--and of a big hunk of the Arkansas treasury--an almost surefire, profitable investment.) Also conspicuous during the complex negotiations were Joe Giroir and his partner Webb Hubbell, appearing in their capacity as members of Rose. Two questions surround this incident. First, how could Worthen have allowed the state to make such an obviously tainted investment via the New Jersey brokerage firm? Second, and more important, why did nobody in Arkansas appear before the bar of justice? The New Jersey firm was a direct lineal descendent of a peculiar regional phenomenon: the world of so-called bond daddies. The bond-daddy racket, long centered in Memphis but with many of its members drawn from Arkansas, specialized in selling questionable government securities to gullible investors, principally small banks with little financial sophistication. Here is where the oddity begins, at least as it concerns Worthen. The Stephens brothers, if not Giroir and Riady, were intimately familiar with the black arts of finance. They were also experts in the government bond market. Moreover, at least one of the principals in the New Jersey brokerage of Bevill, Bresler & Schulman Inc. (which executed the transaction for Worthen and the state of Arkansas) was well-known in the region. Bevill's operations had all the earmarks of a standard bond- daddy scam, and yet Worthen committed $52 million anyway. (At the bank, the official explanation was that co-president Jim Jett acted naively, on his own and without the supervision of his principal stockholders, which is possible but not entirely plausible, since Giroir, who represented the Stephenses, sat on the board.) Consider a virtually identical event at the same time in Ohio, in which a savings bank controlled by Marvin Warner, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Switzerland, invested in the same kind of fraudulent securities, destroyed itself, ignited a statewide financial panic and caused Governor Richard Celeste to declare the first Ohio bank holiday since the Great Depression. A number of the responsible parties, including Warner, found themselves behind bars, some for a very long time. Why? Under long established Anglo-American law, an officer or director of a bank is governed by the "prudent man" rule, which states that he is personally responsible for the financial and legal consequences of his acts. In Arkansas, where the prudent man rule seems to have been suspended, a number of people were fired, but the Clinton government hauled precisely no one into court on criminal charges. Once again in Clinton's Arkansas, the law seemed to be different than it was in the rest of the United States--which makes certain Arkansans smile in knowing amusement over the fact that Bill Clinton now happens to be running the United States . Part 3 The near failure of Worthen in 1985, like the arrival of BCCI, proved to be another pivotal event in recent Arkansas history: Stephens, Worthen, Rose and the Clintons remained at the center of the stage, but the cast of supporting players began to change. A former Stephens executive named Ray Bradbury, who had been deeply involved in the bcci negotiations--hardly a job qualification, one would think--took the helm at Worthen, where he discovered that the bank was also stuffed with bad real estate loans. Meanwhile, federal regulators learned that the bank had made an excessive number of insider loans, particularly to the Riadys, although what happened next is, as usual, a matter of mutually exclusive explanations. Knowledgeable observers in Little Rock and elsewhere say that the Riadys were slowly forced out of the bank by the federal government; at Worthen, the official version says that the Riadys disengaged because it was clear the troubled bank could not be a major force in international finance. In any event, the Riadys soon departed. The role of Joe Giroir also underwent a change. As a principal owner of Worthen, he was charged with securities fraud in a shareholder suit; he was also sued by Worthen itself for taking illegal "short-swing" profits when he sold stock to the Riady affiliate. Not only did Giroir lose his board position and partial ownership of the bank--with Giroir and Riady out of the picture, the Stephenses gradually increased their stockholding to more than 40 percent, while stoutly denying they controlled the place--but, following Giroir's disgrace in 1988, Rose lost Worthen as a client that had once paid the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. As for Giroir, his troubles were far from over. In 1986 he was revealed to be a shareholder in and a substantial borrower from a Pine Bluff thrift called FirstSouth, the first billion-dollar savings & loan failure in the country . Comment: Isn't that curious; the first S&L bust happened under the Clintons' watch. Before the dust had cleared, the head of FirstSouth had gone to jail together with a former president of the Arkansas Bar Association, and Giroir had sued the federal regulators while the federal regulators were suing him, putting a considerable crimp in the plans of his partners, Hubbell and Foster, to create a lucrative practice in the cleanup of the s&l crisis. (At failed s&ls, the fees for firms like Rose could be enormous. According to one frustrated federal investigator, private lawyers in Dallas were making $500,000 per month from the thrift catastrophe, more than the total annual budget for the federal cleanup effort in the entire state of Texas--and in Arkansas, where lawyers were cheaper, the damage per capita was among the worst in the country. Somehow, Governor Clinton escaped criticism for this interesting fact.) It was clear that Joe Giroir, who had built the modern Rose Law Firm, was now the partnership's greatest liability--the firm's reputation aside, federal regulators charged that Giroir had used Rose letterhead to give FirstSouth legal advice beneficial to himself; Rose was forced to settle with the Federal s&l Insurance Corporation regulators for a reported half-million dollars--although once again there is a contradictory official version of his abrupt departure. Giroir once claimed that he left the firm voluntarily but will no longer comment on the matter. The Rose firm fell abruptly silent on this and all other subjects following recent allegations that it had shredded its Whitewater files, but its spokesman told American Lawyer in 1992 that Giroir departed in a coup arranged by litigators who were miffed that he and the firm's other rainmakers were paid substantially more than the lawyers who actually did the scut work in court--litigators prominently including Hubbell, Foster and Rodham Clinton, who actually seemed to be engaged in very little legal work at all. With the departure of Giroir, life at Rose became quieter if no less active. The three partners became the firm's public face to the world. The most physically imposing and locally active of these was Hubbell, a six-foot, five- inch giant of a man who had played football for the University of Arkansas, had almost made it into the big time with the Chicago Bears, had served briefly as mayor of Little Rock (when Rose received a significant portion of the city's bond business) and had received an interim appointment as chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court from Governor Clinton. (According to a reliable source, Hubbell's father-in-law, Seth Ward, a septuagenarian self-made entrepreneur, once complained that keeping Hubbell in politics cost him $100,000 a year.) The second was Foster, once described as an immaculately brown-suited man in an immaculate brown office, who was regarded as the "soul" of a firm that, according to grand jury testimony, shredded volumes of his records the moment an independent federal prosecutor appeared in the vicinity . The last was Rose's first female partner, Rodham Clinton, who occasionally did some lawyering in the intervals when she wasn't working for the Children's Defense Fund, attending to her personal business affairs or serving as the governor's first lady. The three were described to American Lawyer as "big, big buddies"; Rodham Clinton's office was next door to Hubbell's, and much of her work was actually done by Foster. Comment: Hubbell is very likely the father of Chelsea Clinton. And Foster, another 'lover', was suicided shortly after he followed Killary to the White House. The three also were closely entwined in a curious financial arrangement. This was Mid-life Investors, a partnership set up by E. F. Hutton in 1983. Hubbell, Foster and Rodham Clinton each kicked in $15,000 and named each other--rather than their spouses--as beneficiaries. But although the fund was active at least until 1991, Rodham Clinton reported annual dividends of under twenty dollars from Mid-life Investors, a sum that comes as a surprise to Roy Drew, the financial counselor who supervised the partnership and invested its money in such 1980s takeover candidates as Diamond Shamrock and Firestone Tire. According to Drew, with the likes of Sir James Goldsmith and the Japanese offering huge sums for the stock of Shamrock and Firestone, there was no way Mid-life Investors could have failed to reap substantial profits. Although Rodham Clinton was a litigator--that is, a lawyer whose task is to appear in court, if only to force the other side to settle--and an attorney who was named one of the 100 most influential in the country by the National Law Journal in 1988 and 1991, she was almost never seen in the courtrooms of Little Rock ; some court reporters remember an occasional appearance, and one could not remember having seen her at all. According to a search conducted by American Lawyer , she tried just five cases during her fifteen years at Rose; other published sources say her work revolved around copyright infringement cases involving songwriters and bread companies. But paradoxically, in view of what happened to Giroir, she (like Giroir) received extra compensation for the business she generated from her extracurricular activities, even if she did not work on the cases at all. For example, she was only one of two Rose partners to act as a corporate director, serving at various times on the boards of four companies and earning $64,700 in 1991 from director's fees alone . (Her 1991 salary from Rose was in the vicinity of $110,000; her husband earned $35,000 and got to live in a free house.) She was on the board of Wal-Mart, a Rose client that Stephens had launched on the road to glory . (Rodham Clinton also owned $80,000 worth of Wal-Mart stock.) She served Southern Development Bancorp, a holding company created to give development loans in rural Arkansas, which, according to The Washington Post , paid Rose somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 in fees. In 1989 she joined the board of TCBY yogurt company, which occupies the tallest building in Little Rock. TCBY then proceeded to pay Rose $750,000 for legal work during the next few years. Last, and puzzlingly, she was a director of Lafarge, a giant French cement company that had no discernible connection to Arkansas except, like Stephens Inc., it was engaged in burning hazardous waste . (As president, Bill Clinton did nothing to stop operation of an Ohio waste incinerator, partly backed at one time by Stephens Inc., despite the fact that it didn't work, had no legal permit and his own vice president had promised that it would never operate until it was thoroughly investigated, which it wasn't.) Comment: That's the same Lafarge recently caught trading with Head-chopper Inc, ISIS: Paris strikes corporate partnership with Lafarge, who secretly sponsored ISIS for profit and has ties to Killary With Rodham Clinton aboard at Rose, the firm's long established connections to the governor's office were made firmer still. Rose, the gold standard of Arkansas law firms, had long enjoyed unusual access to the state's corridors of power. It both advised and did the bidding of the powerful family that acted as the state's shadow government, and during the Clinton years, the Rose Law Firm sometimes behaved as though it were an agency of the state rather than a legal partnership with offices in a converted YMCA. The intimate connection between Rose, Stephens Inc. and the governor's office may help explain how the Stephens family made a vast amount of money when its most visible enterprises were doing no such thing. The investment bank had hit a gusher when it took Wal-Mart public, made a pleasing sum on the stock of Tyson Foods, the nation's largest chicken processor, but otherwise cut no great swath in the stock market. Until recently, Worthen was a disaster area. At least part of the answer for the family's continued prosperity seems to reside in the unusual way Bill Clinton's state dealt with Stephens Inc.'s old specialty, government bonds. Part 4 The crown jewel of Bill Clinton's avowed attempt to create industries and jobs in the state was an unusual entity called the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA). According to well-established common law, a government-chartered authority is supposed to be an independent body, insulated from the hurly-burly of everyday political life and its temptations. But ADFA, written into law with the help of Webb Hubbell, was no such thing. All ten members of its board were appointed by the governor. Though it was specifically granted the power to issue industrial development bonds, the governor, personally, was required to approve every bond issue. State agencies with the ability to issue industrial bonds are supposed to distribute the money (and thus create jobs and wealth) to companies and individuals who can't receive lines of credit on favorable terms from the usual financial institutions or venture capitalists. On significant occasions, however, ADFA spread its bounty to less than deserving clients. Nor do the peculiarities of this body end here. Although it issued bonds, ADFA did no due diligence--the common practice of engaging an outside financial expert to examine the applicants for the proceeds and determine if they actually need the money and are otherwise worthy recipients. (Due diligence, according to an ADFA spokesman who happens to be the brother-in-law of one of Witt Stephens's daughters, was the responsibility of the purchasers of the bonds under the ancient principle of caveat emptor --a practice that had previously helped the region's bond daddies flourish and had wiped out the capital of the Worthen bank.) While its spokesman is a little fuzzy on the subject, it seems that there was no regular ADFA oversight to ensure that money was being spent according to the original purpose of the loan, although an ADFA employee might occasionally be sent into the field to discover if everything was tickety-boo. It is also somewhat difficult to discover just what ADFA was actually doing. A recent examination of the log kept at ADFA headquarters for the enlightenment of wandering reporters and inquisitive citizens reveals just twenty-five bond issues from 1985 to the present--or twenty-six, if you count the paperwork on a bond issue that was removed in a reporter's presence. Moreover, the log suggests that ADFA was heavily involved in good works with religious orders. But according to the Los Angeles Times ' count of ADFA's activities, the authority released seventy industrial bond issues--according to my count, the number is sixty-five--none of them to religious charities or university hospitals, and most of them missing from the official log. Which begs the question: Just what was ADFA doing with the $719 million it dispensed (or whose dispensation it authorized) as of January 1992? "ADFA," says Larry Nichols, a dismissed authority official, "was set up by Clinton for Dan Lasater." Now, it should be borne in mind that Nichols is something of an Arkansas character and, in some circles, a figure of fun. A well-known supporter of the Nicaraguan contras, Nichols was also the person who originally alleged that Clinton had an affair with Gennifer Flowers and four other women, only to destroy his credibility when he retracted his charges in a document remarkable for its abject contrition . But there are those in Arkansas who insist that Nichols is neither entirely a vindictive nut nor the sort of notorious regional liar who has to hire a man to call his own dog. "You ought to listen to Larry Nichols," says a Little Rock political consultant. "He says a lot of things, but sometimes he tells you something you really need to know." And, certainly, there is something intriguing about Bill Clinton's relations with Lasater, a man no governor in his right mind would let in the front door. If Dan Lasater was not the largest cocaine user in the state of Arkansas, he was certainly the most conspicuous one. A prosperous Little Rock bond dealer, he was an acquaintance of the Clinton family and a contributor to the governor's political fortunes. Lasater distinguished himself in other ways, too. He served ashtrays full of cocaine at parties in his mansion, stocked cocaine on his corporate jet (a plane used by the Clintons on more than one occasion) and later told the FBI that he had distributed cocaine on more than 180 occasions . "I shared my success ... in that manner," he explained. He was also a patron of Governor Clinton's cocaine-using half-brother, Roger, employing the younger man in his thoroughbred racing stables in Florida and claiming that he gave Roger Clinton $8,000 to pay off debts to drug suppliers . By 1985 it was also known that Lasater was the subject of a police investigation that, even the most uneducated guess would suggest, could end in only one way. But that year, Governor Clinton deemed Lasater worthy of handling a $30.2 million bond issue to modernize the state police radio system, despite the fact that the expenditure would normally be made by an appropriation from the treasury and the fact that Lasater was about to be busted . Nonetheless, Clinton vigorously lobbied the legislature, ignored the wishes of the Stephens family and won the day, giving Lasater & Co. a handsome $750,000 underwriting fee , according to the Los Angeles Times . In 1986 Lasater was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, with Roger Clinton testifying against him at his trial. In 1990 he received a state pardon from Governor Clinton . For whatever it's worth, one of the few people to have access to the office of the late Vincent Foster during the three days it was unsealed following his suicide was White House official Patsy Thomasson, who managed Lasater's business affairs while he was in jail. But in the Clinton system, perfected in Little Rock and now being practiced in Washington, none of these things should be considered a mistake or an aberration. Lasater was not the only strange thing about the Arkansas bond business during the time of Bill Clinton. Whenever a normal state issues bonds, there are many ways for a variety of people to get well on the public nickel. The beneficiary of the proceeds receives a loan at below-market rates. The financial institution that sold the bonds receives underwriting fees. For each bond issue, an outside attorney is engaged to certify that the deal conforms to the law and prepares the documents required by the Internal Revenue Service and the federal treasury. A bank is chosen as trustee for the money, collecting the repayments from the lucky borrowers and making the repayments to the purchasers of the bonds. And the borrower itself almost invariably retains a lawyer. But when one examines the activities of ADFA, a certain pattern emerges concerning at least some of the beneficiaries of Arkansas largess. For example, one of the very first ADFA bond issues provided $2.75 million to POM, a manufacturer of parking meters in Russellville, whose president happened to be Seth Ward II, the brother-in-law of Webb Hubbell. Despite the fact that Hubbell was chairman of the conflicts committee at Rose, he seemed to see nothing amiss in the fact that Rose then collected a fee as adfa's certifying attorney or that he himself served as POM's attorney. Nor did Hubbell seem to see anything unusual in the fact that he was representing the Resolution Trust Corporation in its case against the auditors of Madison Guaranty, despite the fact that his father-in-law, the senior Ward, had not repaid millions in loans from the thrift, or that Ward had received an airplane from Madison in the bargain. Between 1985 and mid-1992 Stephens Inc. was involved in the underwriting and sale of 78 percent of ADFA's housing and industrial bonds, an unsurprising figure considering the firm's familiarity with the market and its clout in the state. Still, considering Stephens's involvement in the authority's affairs, Governor Clinton did not appear to feel that it was ever so slightly wrong to appoint two Stephens associates--a vice president of one of Worthen's banks and a vice president of a chain of nursing homes partly controlled by the Stephens empire--to ADFA's ten-member board. Nor did the man who signed off on every single ADFA bond issue exhibit suspicion when Stephens seemed to be supplementing its brokerage fees by helping itself to ADFA's money in the form of favorable loans. Meanwhile, at least another member of the board, the vice president of Twin Cities Bank, an institution that served as trustee in one of ADFA's tangled deals, appeared to take a similar double-dip. And the governor's wife's law firm was not only receiving a healthy chunk of ADFA's legal business, but Rose apparently found nothing wrong with affiliates of Stephens receiving ADFA money, or with the fact that on not one but two occasions, ADFA issued bonds that benefited the relatives of Rose partners. In 1988 and 1989 ADFA lent a total of $1.37 million to the Pine Bluff Warehouse Company. Rose received $22,321 in legal fees from ADFA. The trustee bank was Worthen's National Bank of Commerce in Pine Bluff, whose vice president sat on the ADFA board and whose chief executive officer was not merely a member of Pine Bluff Warehouse's board but the father of a senior Rose partner, William Kennedy III, now associate White House counsel. Stephens, unsurprisingly, underwrote the bonds. In 1989 ADFA loaned $4.67 million to Arkansas Freightways, whose largest outside stockholder was Stephens Inc. Co-counsel on the bond issue was Rose. The trustee bank's executive vice president was a member of the ADFA board. The underwriter was Stephens. Also in 1989 ADFA tried to loan $83 million to a Texas entrepreneur for the purpose of bailing out Beverly Enterprises, the country's largest operator of nursing homes, 10 percent owned by Stephens, whose vice president sat on the ADFA board, at a time when Beverly's stock was being hammered by the company's persistent losses. A swift and decisive halt to the deal was called by Arkansas Attorney General Steve Clark, a rising political star who was expected to be a strong gubernatorial candidate in 1990, and who claimed that a Stephens-Beverly lobbyist had offered him a $100,000 bribe (as campaign contributions, of course) if he would just lay off and let the deal go through. The lobbyist was later cleared by an Arkansas court, but Clark was caught charging personal expenses on his state credit card. His political career in shambles, he was later disbarred. Current reports place him somewhere in the state of Georgia. But these were only the most conspicuously questionable of ADFA's doings, the ones most easily understood by the public and the press. There was also the question of the true extent of Rose's involvement in the authority's bond business. According to the Daily Record , a Little Rock business journal, Rose ranked fourth among the law firms working directly for ADFA, with fees of only $175,000 for the years up to 1991. But not everyone agrees with this assessment. When Frank White, the only man ever to defeat Clinton in a gubernatorial election, tried to repeat the feat in 1986, his campaign claimed that Rose had actually been in on every ADFA deal (for the authority or for the recipient) while Clinton was governor . Unfortunately, the relevant data was assembled under the supervision of White's political consultant, Darrell Glasscock, a former Louisiana state official and a great supporter of the contras ( an occupation that appears to have been an Arkansas cottage industry ). Reached recently by phone, former Governor White, now an officer of Worthen's principal competitor, the First Commercial bank holding company, clearly wishes he had never heard of Glasscock, cheerily questions Glasscock's veracity and pleasantly turns aside any questions about Rose. When a visitor to ADFA asks for the complete documentation on any particular bond issue, he is presented with a thick volume that, if placed on a chair, would allow him to dine with the grown-ups. A small sampling of these volumes reveals an interesting thing: every company examined, including POW, Arkansas Freightways, Pine Bluff Warehouse and Concert Vineyards appears to be eminently creditworthy. These are the sorts of enterprises that could walk in the door of any bank and walk off with any reasonable sum they needed. Why, then--in addition to the mutual back-scratching described above--were they being given loans at below market rates by a desperately poor state with other uses for its money? This question takes added luminosity from the fact that ADFA really didn't work very well. The old Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, started by Orval Faubus, created 90,000 jobs in nine years. And it had no bonding power. After seven years under the Clinton regime and with tens of millions in issued loans, ADFA had created just 2,700 jobs, many at wages significantly below the national standard. This anemic showing obscures the fact that ADFA had yet another purpose: its generosity was returned in the form of campaign contributions for William Jefferson Clinton . According to the Los Angeles Times , in the 1990 race for the governorship, the recipients of ADFA's largess contributed $400,300, nearly one-fifth of the Clinton war chest. They then kicked in with millions more for the presidential race. Outside Arkansas the white-shoe investment bank of Goldman Sachs, which later contributed its co-chairman, Robert Rubin, to President Clinton's inner circle of economic advisers, raised millions for the presidential race and even paid for a substantial hunk of the Democratic National Convention. According to ADFA's incomplete records, Goldman was either the lead or sole underwriter of at least $400 million in ADFA bonds. In addition, two of ADFA's board members were active Clinton fund-raisers, which raises yet another question among many: Wasn't this against the law? For once, the answer is terse and straightforward. Not in Arkansas . Under the Arkansas ethics-in-government act, passed in 1988 and, according to state legislators, either drafted or inspired by Hubbell, state legislators were required to report possible conflicts of interest. Surprisingly, the law specifically exempted the governor and other elected or appointed officials, including officials of state agencies and commissions. Moreover, these officials were not even required to report dealings with entities--such as Rose--that employed their relatives. This was not the only remaining service that Rose had provided to the governance of its state. When the time came to rewrite the state's incorporation laws, it was Rose that drew up the 397-page treatise that formed the basis of the legislation. Well, somebody has to draft a state's legislation, and under Arkansas's unusual ethics law, it was perfectly all right for Rose to do just that. Less clear (if anything in these murky waters can be described as clear) is just why Clinton seemed so eager to assist the Stephens family, which was hardly enamored of the man and kept bankrolling the candidates who ran against him for governor until it experienced a change of heart in 1990. Witt Stephens habitually referred to Clinton as "that boy." In a moment of candor his brother Jack once remarked that "it would be awfully easy for Stephens, if we wanted to be close to a governor, to be close to Bill Clinton." Nonetheless, the Clinton governorship's assistance to Stephens extended well beyond ADFA. During Clinton's years in Little Rock, the Stephens interests were involved in some 61 percent of the $7 billion of all the state bonds issued in Arkansas . Contrary to state law, Stephens Inc., according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette , was given the underwriting for the state university system without competitive bids from other bond dealers. The Fayetteville campus alone, where the Clintons had once taught law, had $33 million in bonds outstanding. Under Clinton, Stephens devised a plan to rescue the state's troubled student loan authority, in which the authority's bonds would be bought by the state employees' retirement funds. An independent consultant--Roy Drew, the very man who created Mid-life Investors for Hubbell, Foster and Rodham Clinton-- was brought in to examine the deal. Drew thought it was a terrible investment and so did the state's auditor, Julia Hughes Jones. But Drew was dismissed, Jones's budget failed to pass the legislature (the first time ever for an Arkansas state auditor) and she began to receive late-night harassing calls from a collection agency--concerning, ironically, her own daughter's student loan, which was current. In the upshot, the retirement funds bought $100 million of the loan authority's bonds, another $100 million in the bonds of two other state agencies, ADFA was given the task of overseeing the retirement fund's investment policies and Stephens Inc., according to The Philadelphia Inquirer , made $1.8 million. These were very considerable favors to a family that not only bankrolled Clinton's opponents but seemed to despise him as a man. But Bill Clinton's canny instinct that the Stephenses needed to be appeased--rather than ignored--eventually paid off. After Clinton's unexpected loss in the New Hampshire primary, with the campaign coffers bare, the staff paying its bills on their personal credit cards and federal matching funds just beyond reach, the Worthen Bank rescued the candidacy with a prearranged $3.5 million line of credit, selflessly advanced at a lucrative rate of interest. Later, Worthen - whose executives, like many Stephens executives, experienced a spasm of Arkansas patriotism that caused them to reach for their checkbooks - became the Clinton campaign's depository of $55 million in federal campaign funds, which, in effect, was free money. Worthen did not have to pay any interest on this staggering sum, but as long as it was on deposit (and as long as Worthen, with its undistinguished track record in the department of government deposits, managed not to lose it), the bank was free to use it to make itself some money that it got to keep. And when the votes were counted, everybody who wanted to go to Washington got to go to Washington: Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, president and First Lady; Mack McLarty, White House chief of staff; Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel; Webb Hubbell, associate attorney general; Patsy Thomasson, a White House aide. Jack Stephens, though mentioned as a candidate for secretary of the treasury, had, it now seems safe to say, the good sense to stay home. Oh, and one last thing: when Whitewater special prosecutor Robert Fiske--who once defended Clark Clifford, the famed friend of Jack Stephens's old client, BCCI--arrived in Little Rock, something strange happened. Worthen Bank had a fire. Is this a great country, or what? Comment: Yeah, it's a great country if you love giving free reign to your baser instincts. See also:


It s common knowledge that Donald Trump is a self-obsessed narcissist, but he also considers himself to be somewhat of a patriot, so when the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain was involved in a collision on Sunday evening with an oil tanker near the mouth of the Strait of Malacca en route to Singapore, an incident that left 10 sailors missing and another five injured, one would expect the President of the United States to have some compassionate words.But that wasn t to be the case. Instead, President Trump had a simple three-word reaction for journalists That s too bad. The Commander in Chief reportedly didn t even offer any further comment for the media, instead taking to his preferred platform, Twitter, to send his condolences to those involved in the collision, offering the stock-standard thoughts and prayers response, but very little else.Thoughts & prayers are w/ our @USNavy sailors aboard the #USSJohnSMcCain where search & rescue efforts are underway. https://t.co/DQU0zTRXNU Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2017It is unknown whether the President had been briefed prior to commenting on the incident, but regardless, neither his comments to the media or those he later tweeted showed anything that came even remotely close to true compassion.According to the US Navy, the USS John S. McCain, based in Yokosuka, Japan, sustained damage to its port side after colliding with the merchant ship, the accident reported at 5:24 am Monday local time, as the destroyer passed the entrance to one of the world s most congested shipping routes, the Strait of Malacca. Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command s Joint Intelligence Center, claims the oil tanker also involved in the incident would have been at least three times larger than the USS John S. McCain.


It has been nearly fifty years since the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Loving v. Virginia, that made interracial marriages (relationships) legal in the United States, but apparently some people are unaware of the ruling. A teenager in Texas recently tweeted an infuriating letter from her dad explaining the reason why he s disowning her: the relationship she was in with an African-American male.Stephanie Hicks, 19, is dating a black male and apparently this pissed her father off so much that he disowned her. In a letter she posted on Twitter, her father says: My belief is that interracial relationships are despicable. Vulgar and reprehensible. There s nothing worse than a half-black, and I m crushed that my own daughter has entered into such a disgusting relationship Mistakes can be forgiven, but you have willingly and consciously chosen a lifestyle of sickening choices, and I won t tolerate it. Her father then tells her that is she does not break up with her boyfriend, Nike, that she is not welcome in his life any longer: If you choose this black kid over your parents fill [suitcases] up and leave my house Change your name as soon as possible, because I won t have any association with you. Ever. First of all, as a parent, I am disgusted by this piece of garbage who has the audacity to call himself Dad. If he s are willing to disown his child over who they are dating, he never had any business raising a kid in the first place.Secondly, it is 2016 and no matter how much the GOP would like us all to believe racism is dead, it is clearly alive and thriving in the state of Texas. Her father called her relationship sickening but the only thing sickening about any of this is that guy s vile, hatred for a person because of the melanin he has in his skin. It is sad that this is even a battle that needs to be fought still, but it does.Like Stephanie, I am super white. I m so white that you could all use me to guide your way through a dark forest and my husband isn t white at all. I also live in the South, just like her and know what it is like to have people stare at me with disgust because my husband and child are naturally tan. Seriously. In 2016.America really has changed that much in the last fifty years because we have an entire political party that campaigns on platforms of racism and hate hell, just look at Donald Trump. And this is going to continue to be a problem until we all step up and fight back. That means that we all have to vote for progressive candidates who want to move this country forward, not back.Hopefully, Stephanie takes this and uses it to become an even stronger human being. Sometimes the best thing a toxic person can do for you is cut themselves out of your life.


The green criminals who re working on how to distribute your money to those in far away places had a splendid meal last night in Paris. Could someone tell Obama we re broke?As working dinners go, President Obama s meal Monday night in Paris with French President Francois Hollande, Secretary of State John Kerry and others wasn t too shabby.No cartons of takeout instead, the gang fueled up after a long day of climate talks at L Ambroisie, the three-Michelin-starred temple of gastronomie in the Marais neighborhood.Per the Michelin Guide, the ornately be-chandelier-ed dining room is known for incomparable classicism and an immortal feast for the senses. Perhaps worried that Obama would create an international faux pas by ordering a burger or a margarita (two of his faves), a reporter asked what he planned to eat. Obama was, appropriately, diplomatic: I will get recommendations from the president, he answered, nodding in Hollande s direction.According to the AP, Obama cracked a joke about the opulence of the setting. Don t break the chandelier, he warned as a reporter s microphone got just a little too close to the crystal. You can t afford it.


One thing that has continuously dogged the Donald Trump for president campaign is the fact that racists, anti-semites, xenophobes, misogynists, and various other bigots have stuck with the bombastic real estate mogul since he first launched his travesty of a campaign. No matter how much Trump s people try to say he doesn t want the support of such folks, the candidate himself refuses to take the fact that there is anything about the campaign he has been running that attracts these people seriously. So, naturally, when Trump s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway sat down with an interview with CNN s Jake Tapper on Sunday, that particular issue came up again. Of course, Conway was not happy. Tapper began: There are a lot of anti-Semites and racists and misogynists who support the Trump candidacy. Conway immediately went on defense, saying, wow. Tapper went on to reference a man who was shouting JEW-S-A at the press pen at a recent Trump rally, and directly asked Conway if she would refer to such people as deplorable. She responded: Yes, I would. Wow, I have to push back on some of the adjectives you just used to describe I hope you ve been to Trump rallies and I hope that you ve seen the tens of thousands. I mean, he s had over half a million people easily, I think in excess of that. These are U.S.A.-loving Americans. Tapper went on to say that no, he isn t putting all Trump supporters into that camp, but went on to force Conway s hand on this one: But without question, people who are experts on hate groups say that there has been a comfort level that has been offered to people who are anti-Semitic that has been offered to people who are anti-Semitic and racists and on and on. And these people are comfortable coming out in the open and supporting Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump has refused to condemn in a very serious way his racist and anti-Semitic fans, Tapper continued. He just has. He says things like, Oh, sure, I disavow, I disavow. But he has never serious said, I don t want the support of those people, they are reprehensible, they have nothing to do with me. He has never seriously done it. Conway used the pushing to pivot back to the idea that the Trump campaign is winning, saying: I think this exchange is frankly the best piece of evidence I have that we re actually going to win in nine days because the idea that we re going to shift away from the pattern of corruption the cloud of ethical stain that Hillary Clinton would bring to the Oval Office in such an important week. No, Kellyanne, it s not a sign that Trump is winning. It s pointing something out that has been true since this whole fiasco began: That Donald Trump is a raging bigot, and he has been so openly. Dog whistles have turned into fog horns this election cycle, and it s all because of Donald Trump. He embraces these bigots because he s one of them. The quicker you learn that, the better.Watch the exchange below:


Trump World's Darkest Side November 8, 2016  Donald Trump's campaign has exposed and spoken to the real pain and profound alienation of many Americans, but the candidate also has exploited those emotions with lies and appeals to prejudice, says Michael Winship.  By Michael Winship  When I grow up, I want to be Charlie Pierce , who covers politics for Esquire magazine and has toiled in our scrivener's trade, as far as I can tell, since the late 1970s.  I know, technically, he's a couple of years younger than I am, but he writes with the fierce wit and well-aimed anger to which I aspire, and as this wheezing milk train of a presidential campaign clanks into the final station, few have been as perceptive when it comes to trying to figure out just what the hell has happened to America this year. Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (Photo credit: Grant Miller/RNC)  Charlie Pierce has done so with great style throughout, but now, thanks to Donald Trump and just hours before Election Day, he has come to the end of his watchdog rope. He wrote on Saturday that Trump — to whom he refers as El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago — had "managed to exceed even my admittedly expansive limits for political obscenity."  Pierce was talking about Trump's reaction after President Obama responded to an elderly heckler wearing a military tunic at a Friday campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina.  As the crowd booed the man, Obama said, "Hey! Listen up! I told you to be focused, and you're not focused right now. Listen to what I'm saying. Hold up. Hold up! … Everybody sit down, and be quiet for a second… First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might've served in our military and we got to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we got to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don't boo, vote."  In other words, the President showed poise, grace and yes, class. But shortly after, here's how the moment was seen through Trump's eyes at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania: "There was a protester and a protester that likes us," Trump said. "And what happened is they wouldn't put the cameras on him. They kept the cameras on Obama. … He was talking to a protester, screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say he became unhinged."  Unhinged? Really? We all know that Trump seems to get his news from an implanted electrode picking up propaganda signals from the Planet Mongo. But there comes a point when the lies piled upon lies become too much for even the fairest and most equable of us. Hearing Trump's demonstrably false description of what happened at Obama's rally, Charlie Pierce finally had it.  "Maybe it was because it was so ludicrously provable a lie," he wrote. "[Trump] didn't care. He never has cared. His contempt for the democratic processes and for the norms of self-government is matched only by the deep contempt he has for all the suckers who mistake his contempt for the American experiment for their deep disappointment in it. He has measured their intelligence by his heavily leveraged net worth and found them hilariously lacking.  "We are all the subcontractors who build his indomitable ego for him and, as such, he can stiff us according to his customary business plan. His campaign long ago became a sickening charade performed by a grotesque charlatan."  The Scene in Reno  And so it is. Look, too, at how Trump and his followers at a rally in Reno, Nevada, on Saturday responded to a man with a "Republicans against Trump" sign. Before someone shouted "Gun!" and the moment turned even uglier, Trump had looked down and said, "Oh we have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign. How much are you being paid, $1,500?" As the crowd booed, Trump said, "Okay. Take him out." The run-down PIX Theatre sign reads "Vote Trump" on Main Street in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. July 15, 2016. (Photo by Tony Webster Flickr)  The protester, a Reno resident named Austyn Crites, described himself as Republican and a fiscal conservative. He told The Guardian he was grateful to the police who removed him from the auditorium for interrogation — they kept him from being further kicked, choked and pummeled by the gang of Trump supporters who surrounded him.  Still, he said, "The people who attacked me — I'm not blaming them. I'm blaming Donald Trump's hate rhetoric, … The fact that I got beat up today, that's just showing what he's doing to his crowds."  Throughout the campaign, whenever Trump has egged on his followers, I've thought of that line in Young Frankenstein, when the angry Transylvanian villagers are told by the local police inspector, "A riot is an ugly thing, and I think that it is just about time we had one."  Remember what Trump said when a protester was dragged out of a February rally in Las Vegas: "I love the old days — you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks. … I'd like to punch him in the face."  By now, you've heard it all before and the litany of lies, outrageous claims and insults has climbed so high that many of us have become numb and weary from the sheer repetition of Trump's buffoonery. You can only go to so many demolition derbies before the sight of flaming car wrecks becomes routine.  Dog Whistles  What's more, you can argue that far more insidious and frightening are the dog whistle attacks appealing to the baser instincts of the bigoted and ignorant. The latest: the closing ad from the Trump campaign that, with anti-Semitic overtones, points fingers at "a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class." Former speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona. March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)  As Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo , "The four readily identifiable American bad guys in the ad are Hillary Clinton, George Soros (Jewish financier), Janet Yellen (Jewish Fed Chair) and Lloyd Blankfein (Jewish Goldman Sachs CEO)… This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas… This is intentional and by design. It is no accident."  Here is something Charlie Pierce wrote back in May . Trump, he said, "is riding on a wave of pain that he never has felt."  "He is riding on a wave of anxiety he never has encountered. Beyond their love of him, there is no indication that he is as deeply aware of what has powered his rise as the people whose fear, and doubt, and, yes, hatred has powered his rise. Their job is still to wait in line, cheer on cue, and give him the devotion that he has earned because, after all, he is He, Trump, and they're not, and that will never change."  Add it all up and to me, this is what it comes down to: Do you want to live in a United States where anger, prejudice and fear rule, and dissent is viewed as treason, or in a country where we try to meet every issue from terrorism to education with clear eyes and a rational mind?  This year's choices are far from perfect, but nonetheless a choice must be made. To quote a founding father who believed in such things: liberty, once lost, is lost forever. This could be democracy's last stop. Vote.  Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship .


In the past week, as a swirl of sexual assault accusations against Donald J. Trump has prompted a loud national discussion about male power and women's rights, the first woman to be a major party's presidential nominee was barely heard from. Though Hillary Clinton has stood at the center of feminist debates for more than two decades, she has at times been an imperfect messenger for the cause. That has never been more apparent than now, as her old missteps and her husband's history have effectively paralyzed her during a moment of widespread outrage. The most impassioned speeches on the topic have come not from her, but from the first lady, Michelle Obama, who said Mr. Trump's words had "shaken me to my core," and from President Obama and others. When Mrs. Clinton herself spoke, she quickly changed the subject to other groups of people Mr. Trump had insulted, and she tried to lighten the mood with a joke about watching cat videos. "It makes you want to turn off the news. It makes you want to unplug the internet or just look at cat GIFs," Mrs. Clinton told donors in San Francisco on Thursday, making her first remarks on Mr. Trump's treatment of women since several came forward to accuse him. "I've watched a lot of cats do a lot of weird and interesting things," she said, drawing a few laughs. "But we have a job to do. And it'll be good for people and for cats. " The virtual silence from Mrs. Clinton speaks volumes about the complicated place she has occupied as a 1960s Wellesley feminist who stayed as a devoted wife to her husband through infidelities and humiliation. Forcefully denouncing sexual assault would most certainly provoke ugly attacks on Bill Clinton and Mrs. Clinton's role in countering the women who accused him of sexual misconduct. That painful past haunted Mrs. Clinton last Sunday when Mr. Trump invited some of her husband's accusers to the second presidential debate. In the days since, Mrs. Clinton has had to once again navigate the messy crosscurrents of politics, symbolism and her ambition to shatter "that highest, hardest glass ceiling" of being elected the first female president. Now, when the collective voice of American women and victims of sexual assault seems to be letting out a cathartic scream, Mrs. Clinton has deferred to another first lady to speak for her. At the San Francisco on Thursday, she pointed to Mrs. Obama's speech earlier that afternoon when the first lady placed her hand on her heart and spoke out for the many who were outraged. Speaking to college students in New Hampshire, Mrs. Obama called Mr. Trump's lewd remarks about how he had forced himself on women "disgraceful" and "intolerable. " "I can't believe I'm saying that a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women," Mrs. Obama said as a crowd of young women watched with silent and somber expressions. "I can't stop thinking about this — it has shaken me to my core. " Mrs. Clinton has every political reason to avoid wading into the discussion of sexual assault that has riled a nation and thrown her Republican rival's candidacy into chaos. Not known as a naturally emotive public speaker, Mrs. Clinton risks stumbling if she embraces the issue at a time when polls show that she is in her strongest position yet to defeat Mr. Trump on Nov. 8. She has played it safe, all but disappearing from the campaign trail until the next debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday. But then again, two decades ago, it was Mrs. Clinton, who, as a first lady in a powder pink suit, defied her husband's West Wing advisers and captured the attention of women worldwide by declaring, "Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights once and for all. " Last summer, Mrs. Clinton began her campaign by declaring that she wanted to create "an America where a father can tell his daughter: 'Yes, you can be anything you want to be. Even president of the United States. '" Since then, allegations of sexual harassment have led to the ouster of Roger Ailes as chairman of Fox News college campuses have been shaken by the jail sentence given to Brock Turner, a former Stanford University student found guilty of sexual assault and women continue to come forward with allegations against Mr. Trump. At the same time, Mrs. Clinton, so close to becoming the first woman to win the White House amid national outrage over reports of her rival's male lechery, has all but abandoned gender as an issue. On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton appeared to get choked up on the set of "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" when, during a taping, Ms. DeGeneres played a portion of Mrs. Obama's speech. But Mrs. Clinton quickly composed herself and, in a remarkable punt, pivoted to a laundry list of other constituencies whom she said Mr. Trump had offended. "It's not just what Trump has said about women, as terrible as that has been," Mrs. Clinton told Ms. DeGeneres. It's "what he has said about immigrants and and Latinos and people with disabilities and P. O. W.s and our military and Muslims and everybody. " On Friday, without mentioning the accusations against Mr. Trump, Mrs. Clinton told volunteers in Seattle: "This election is incredibly painful. I take absolutely no satisfaction in what is happening on the other side with my opponent. " Asked if Mrs. Clinton would be speaking more directly about the issue, Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign's communications director, noted that Mrs. Clinton had confronted Mr. Trump at the last debate about the recently released 2005 video in which he bragged about groping women. "You should expect that she'll continue to do that," Ms. Palmieri said. Mrs. Clinton has battle wounds from wading into gender in the past. In 1992, she seemed an affront to mothers when she defended her legal career, saying, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies. " As a working mother in the White House, Mrs. Clinton redefined the role of first lady when she tried, and subsequently failed, to overhaul health care, but she also played the role of a traditional wife when she stayed with Mr. Clinton despite his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In hacked emails released by WikiLeaks this week, Mrs. Clinton was shown in an interview transcript pondering, at length, the many complexities of running to be the first female president. "When I ran the last time, the research was pretty clear that there was a resistance to a woman president, not just among Republicans and independents, but among Democrats," she said in one of the thousands of emails obtained by hackers who illegally breached a top aide's account. "They didn't think a woman was qualified, could do the job, didn't see a woman as commander in chief," Mrs. Clinton continued. So, in 2008, she played up her fortitude and tried essentially to run as if she were a man. Eight years later, Mrs. Clinton talks regularly about being a mother and a grandmother, and she doesn't shy away from embracing her potential to make history. She has also promised that as president she would advance policies that would help women, including doubling the child care tax credit, increasing the minimum wage and pushing for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. And yet Mrs. Clinton has found in her second presidential campaign that young women aren't particularly moved by her promise to make history. Many of them voted instead for Mrs. Clinton's primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Thinking about her current campaign, Mrs. Clinton said in the transcript, "You know, I mean, I'm damned if I do, I'm damned if I don't. "


Uganda is launching a drive against online pornography that critics condemn as a diversion from deeper problems of graft, unemployment and crumbling social services facing President Yoweri Museveni. The campaign is the latest salvo in a culture war between conservatives fighting what they see as foreign moral influences promoting criminality and a more liberal, often younger population. This is an invasion, it s Western culture, said Simon Lokodo, a 59-year-old Catholic priest who serves as minister of ethics and integrity. Over consumption of pornography ... the consequences are very dire, he told Reuters this week. The government had released 2 billion shillings ($556,000) to his office to combat online pornography. Some money would go to pornography-blocking software, he said. Some Ugandans expressed anger at the cost of the ban, saying it served only to divert public attention from failures of President Museveni s government. Critics of Museveni, who has ruled for 31 years, say he presides over widespread corruption and human rights abuses. Parliament is considering a removing a constitutional age cap to allow Museveni to serve longer. He is also widely considered to be grooming his son, a presidential adviser and the former commander of an elite military unit, to succeed him. Andrew Karamagi, a rights activist and lawyer in Kampala, said he could not understand government obsession with what people watch, who sleeps with whom, how and when , while it struggled to fund social services such as hospitals and schools. Uganda s only radiotherapy machine broke down last year and hasn t been replaced due to funding shortages. Drug shortages are common in public hospitals where and in dilapidated public schools poorly-paid teachers often don t show up for class. The regime ... does not have the moral authority to combat pornography, Karamagi said. They are themselves an obscenity.


Puerto Rico's debt crisis, if left unaddressed by the U.S. Congress where legislation has stalled in the House Natural Resources Committee, will result in the need to pay for a humanitarian aid package, Congressman Raul Grijalva said on Thursday. Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the HNRC from Arizona, said in a teleconference with reporters that it is an "either/or" situation as Puerto Rico faces $70 billion in debt it cannot pay off and a growing humanitarian crisis because it cannot afford maintaining basic social services. "Either we begin this process, stabilize, create some carve out opportunities for essential services and/or wait for the crisis to get worse and then have to respond with humanitarian relief," Grijalva said, adding that a new draft of the bill had not been made available as of Thursday morning. Grijalva visited Puerto Rico this week and met with the island's leadership and toured its main medical facilities. He said austerity alone is not going to stay the situation of degraded conditions for health, nutrition and education. "People talk about a bailout. Thus far there is no money being talked about extended by the United States government," Grijalva said, adding: "We are talking about a piece of legislation that provides for a method of restructuring and for some accountability attached to that restructuring." The Republican chairman of the HNRC, Rob Bishop of Utah, said he wants a bipartisan bill to emerge from committee but canceled an expected release of the legislation on Wednesday while lawmakers hashed out language revolving around the status of the island of Vieques, pensions and minimum wage rates. Puerto Rico defaulted on May 1 for a third time on some of its debt, missing a roughly $400 million payment owed by the Government Development Bank, the island's main fiscal agent. It faces a near $2 billion July 1 debt payment. The legislation's basic structure still includes the creation of an independent oversight board to lead the restructuring of the U.S. commonwealth's credit and work with the local government to develop an economic reform plan. On the issue of Vieques, Democrats are concerned the language regarding the transfer of federal land on the island, which is mainly a nature preserve, could leave it vulnerable to commercial development in the name of recreation. "Our position has been from the beginning that Vieques did not belong in this package of legislation," said Grijalva.


Earlier today, President Trump tweeted: We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY! Not only is his latest tweet hilarious, but it speaks to the millions of Trump supporters who are sick and tired of watching #FakeNews networks like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS spew their vile, leftist propaganda. These over-paid activists, who are posing as hosts of news shows, are so consumed with hate, that they don t even try to hide their embarrassingly biased coverage of our President.We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2017Is President Trump correct when he says the media has treated him unfairly? Well, an interesting study from the far-left leaning Harvard University, provided stunning evidence that proves President Trump is 100% correct: Chicago Tribune Harvard University s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has come out with a study of media coverage of the Trump White House in its first 100 days.It is astonishing because it comes from Harvard, not exactly the bedrock of American conservatism.The study found that in Trump s first 100 days in office, the tone of the news coverage of the president has been a whopping 80 percent negative to 20 percent positive.So what does fair and balanced really mean, anyway? It confirms what most people understand, said Tom Bevan, publisher and co-founder of RealClearPolitics, one of the go-to websites for media and political junkies.Bevan spoke as a guest on The Chicago Way podcast that I co-host with WGN-AM radio producer Jeff Carlin. The response will be that Trump is deserving of this kind of coverage because he s conducted himself inappropriately, and these are self-inflicted wounds, and the press is doing nothing but covering him and his actions. But that s a little bit disingenuous, Bevan said.So how was President Obama covered in his first 100 days? With a 60-40 positive to negative ratio, according to the Harvard study. That s a significant shift, a significant difference, says Bevan. I think this is reflective of the fact that the media does root from the press box and they do cheer for certain personalities and they do cheer against others. I have my own memory of the media s tone after Obama took office. It wasn t merely positive, it was adoring, gushy, in the way a small child looks up to a beloved parent, or a dog to the master who gives it biscuits.It was as if the media were hugging a magical unicorn. Obama wasn t only given the benefit of the doubt. He was handed the Nobel Peace Prize though he hadn t done anything to earn it. And critics were trashed as nothing but racists.Obama controversies, from his administration s gun running scandal in the Fast and Furious debacle to using the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon against conservative groups, were covered, somewhat. But generally, the tone was muted, respectful, nothing like it was for Trump or the Clintons.Later, in Hillary Clinton s failed 2016 campaign, leaks of Democratic National Committee email whether hacked by the Russians or not demonstrated collusion between journalists and Democrats. But that cozy relationship has never properly been addressed, and that avoidance undermines the credibility of journalism as the media challenges Trump. Because of the way the press covered Obama, they lost so much credibility, Bevan said. And because they did not take these things seriously, the IRS Scandal, Fast and Furious, you could go down the list of where they turned the other cheek. And now where they re giving Trump the third degree on everything, that makes the contrast all that much greater. So you have a certain segment of the public, the people who voted for Trump, who literally do not trust what the media says. And the divide between rigidly defined political tribes, one courted by the media, the other dismissed by it, grows even wider. It s not good for journalism, and it s not good for the country, said Bevan.


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A women s rights group has called a rally to protest against a Portuguese court ruling that upheld a light sentence for a woman s attackers on the grounds they may have been driven to it by her adultery, an offence punishable with death in the Bible. Judges Neto de Moura and Maria Luisa Arantes rejected the prosecutors appeal to toughen the suspended sentence and fine, saying the depressive state of the two defendants - the woman s former husband and her former lover - was a mitigating factor. We read in the Bible that an adulteress should be punished with death, the judges in the Porto Court of Appeal wrote. They also referenced the symbolic sentences given to men who murdered adulterous wives in the late 19th century in Portugal. These references are merely intended to stress that the society has always strongly condemned adultery by a woman and therefore sees the violence by a betrayed, humiliated man with some understanding, they wrote in their Oct. 11 verdict. The UMAR Women s Union for Alternative and Response called the verdict in Portugal s second-largest city revolting and said it perpetuated the ideology of victim-blaming . Evoking the Bible does not combine with the rule of law in our country and discredits the judicial norms, UMAR said in a statement. In the 2015 attack, one of the men assaulted and held the victim while the other attacked her with a nail-spiked club. Her injuries were not life-threatening. Both were convicted and sentenced to pay large fines in addition to suspended time in prison of about a year each. UMAR and the feminist movement Por Todas Nos (For all of Us Women) called a protest rally in downtown Lisbon for Friday. Protests were also called in Porto under the slogan Male chauvinism is not justice, but crime . Ultra-orthodox patriarchy - one of the cornerstones of the fascist dictatorship of Antonio Salazar up until the 1974 revolution - still survives in parts of Portugal.


U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Tuesday that the United States' response so far to Russia orchestrating hacks during the 2016 presidential campaign was just the start. "Some responses have been made. I think you should regard that as a start and not the end," Carter said during a news briefing at the Pentagon alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Joseph Dunford. Last month, President Barack Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian suspected spies and imposed sanctions on two intelligence agencies over their involvement in hacking U.S. political groups in the 2016 presidential election. The Kremlin has said the U.S. hacking allegations are "reminiscent of a witch-hunt."


ESPN host Jemele Hill called President Trump and Kid Rock white supremacists . It didn t end there she said in one of several tweets that Trump is unfit to be president. The screenshot below gives you an idea of how Hill represents ESPN on twitter. It s disgusting!What did ESPN do? You guessed it NOTHING! They tweeted out a mild apology and that s it!This is after Mike Ditka was fired for supporting President Trump and criticizing Obama. Kurt Schilling was also fired after posting a picture on social media against transgender bathrooms.Why hasn t this woman been fired by ESPN?Please contact ESPN to let them know how you feel about this outrage: ESPNTucker Carlson spoke with the awesome Clay Travis last night. Travis shed some light on why Hill is still employed by ESPN:


In what some may assume is a misspeak and others may attribute to a Freudian slip, Sarah Palin took to Facebook to go after rapper Azealia Banks. To be honest, the two of these ladies fighting is a mind-numbing assault on everything good and decent, because both women are outrageous in their own regards. The two have been trapped in a Twitter battle that s gotten kind of ugly.Trying to end the battle, in her own condescending way, was Palin when she took to her medium of choice, Facebook. She wrote: Hey Female Rapper listen up, little darling. No one has any idea what you re wigging out about in these bizarre, violent rants against me, but you re obviously not exercising enough intelligence to acknowledge you ve been sucked into believing some fake interview in which I supposedly offered comments representing the antithesis of my truth.In this life, you re blessed to have been given an influential platform. So have I. Why don t we strengthen both our platforms and work together on something worthwhile like condoning racism, along with empowering young women to defend themselves against a most misogynist, degrading, devastating assault perpetrated by evil men rape.Thanks. And now I ll go through my young daughter s playlist to make sure there hasn t been any inadvertent addition of any anti-woman, pro-rape garbage that you seem to endorse, which perpetuates the cultural challenges we face in America. I encourage other parents to do the same.God bless you Ms. Banks, as you consider a change of heart. Sarah Palin Mediaite seems to have captured the original post:via FacebookOf course, she either didn t know what condoning means or she really meant it. Either way, she s clearly been notified of how horrific she sounded, because her post was deleted and re-posted with the word condemning instead.Here s the thing, Palin is backing the most racist candidate running for president Donald Trump. His outright bigotry towards Latinos, Muslims, etc. isn t even thinly veiled. He boasts his hatred for the other right in the open. So while Palin may have written the wrong word initially, she clearly is condoning racism and misogyny by backing Trump.Featured Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images


Liberal Democrats and progressive activists have grown wary of the state of the 2016 presidential race, chafing at Hillary Clinton's courtship of Republican leaders they have long opposed and fearing the consequences of shaping the contest as a referendum on Donald J. Trump. While few have questioned the electoral strategy of bringing Republicans into the fold by casting Mr. Trump as a singular threat to democracy, both skeptics and some admirers of Mrs. Clinton have come to view her decisive advantage in the polls with mixed emotions. She may win by a margin, they say. But what, exactly, would the mandate be for? In a matter of weeks, beginning with the party conventions, the debates that animated the Democratic primary race have largely disappeared from the political foreground, giving way to discussions of Mr. Trump's temperament, his inflammatory remarks and even his sanity. "If she's going to get anything done as president, she is going to have to have a mandate," said Robert B. Reich, a secretary of labor in Bill Clinton's administration who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary. The subject of Mr. Trump's temperament was unavoidable, Mr. Reich said, "but temperament doesn't give you a mandate to do anything. " Mrs. Clinton's dogged pursuit of Republican votes has especially rankled progressives, and highlights the divisions within the Democratic Party, even as they see a victory more likely. They have grumbled at her eager promotion of endorsements from veterans of the George W. Bush and Reagan administrations, including that of John D. Negroponte, a top diplomat and intelligence official under Mr. Bush. They worry aloud that Henry Kissinger, of whom Mrs. Clinton has often spoken fondly, could be next. "Secretary Clinton's decision to aggressively court Mitt Romney's base has her looking more and more like Mitt Romney every day," said Benjamin T. Jealous, a former N. A. A. C. P. president who initially supported Mr. Sanders. "That's not a good thing. " By most measures, the Democratic Party's left flank has had a banner year. Mr. Sanders's primary challenge pushed Mrs. Clinton conspicuously left, coaxing her into policy shifts on trade and college tuition. The party platform was, by virtually all accounts, the most progressive in history, and Mrs. Clinton has not made any perceptible changes in substance recently. Notably, a major economic speech from Mrs. Clinton on Thursday in Michigan would not have seemed out of place in the primary race, with discussions of expanded Social Security, college and a higher minimum wage. And on Friday morning, her campaign, sensitive to any suggestion that Mrs. Clinton might waver on promises to the left, emailed reporters a collection of 22 sympathetic quotes and Twitter posts from leaders and organizations. "She is not just running as the alternative to the other guy. She is running on a progressive policy agenda that she seriously believes will make a difference in people's lives," Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesman, said in an email. "If she wins, it will not just mean a rejection of Donald Trump. It will be a call to action on the issues she has championed. " But the campaign's chief gambit since the start of the Democratic convention — depicting Mr. Trump as a menacing anomaly, disconnected from mainstream Republican thought — has already supplied conservatives with an opening: Even if Mrs. Clinton wins big, Republicans opposed to Mr. Trump's rise may argue that Americans were not voting for her policy proposals. Some are not waiting. "Clinton is not likely to emerge with a legislative mandate," said Rick Tyler, a former top aide to Senator Ted Cruz's presidential run. "She will have to start from zero in terms of selling all her policy proposals. They will not have been sold through this process. " Mr. Tyler, who believes the 2016 election has effectively been decided, predicted a common refrain from Republican legislators next year: "We didn't see that the people voted for that we see that the people voted against Donald Trump. " In interviews, elected progressive leaders, activists and local lawmakers made clear that their top priority remains defeating Mr. Trump. Most cautioned that the race was a long way from over, despite a wave of encouraging polls for Mrs. Clinton. Still, some liberals fear their leverage has been diminished, though the vast majority of Sanders supporters have rallied to Mrs. Clinton's side, if sometimes tepidly. If she can win without generating excitement among that already distrustful wing of the party, they reason, she may be less inclined to accommodate it once in office. "We need the broadest popular front against Donald Trump," said Bill Lipton, a founder of the Working Families Party. "The challenge for the left is, if that's all we do, we're saying anyone one degree to the left of David Duke is O. K. with us. " Many of Mr. Sanders's backers believe that two of the principal issues he raised during his primary contest against Mrs. Clinton — her foreign policy hawkishness and her Wall Street ties — remain central to her political core. "I fully expected that we would be at war with the Clinton administration, if there is one," said Jonathan Tasini, a former union leader who challenged Mrs. Clinton in her Senate primary in 2006. "Once she is elected, I suspect she will go back to being what she is, which is a relatively moderate, centrist, corporate Democrat. " Helen Gym, a Philadelphia City Council member who supported Mrs. Clinton in the primary, said the dynamics between Mrs. Clinton's team and the party's activist base reflected "a fragile negotiation. " "The coalition has to hold together," she said. "Is a Clinton victory synonymous with a progressive victory? It depends. I don't think I can give a full yes or no. " Megan Ellyia Green, a St. Louis alderwoman and Sanders delegate, said she feared Democrats were squandering "our New Deal moment" by not focusing voters' attention more intensely on the issues that powered enthusiasm for Mr. Sanders. Mrs. Clinton and her team have long ago grown weary of any implication that she is not entirely committed to liberal causes, repeatedly presenting her as a fusion of pragmatism and idealism. She has called herself "a progressive who likes to get things done. " In both of her presidential primary runs, Mrs. Clinton accused her opponents — first Barack Obama in 2008, then Mr. Sanders — of promising more than they could credibly deliver. But when approached at her rallies, even zealous Clinton supporters are often to name a signature policy proposal of hers. Her speech in Michigan touched on, among other things, a planned $275 billion infrastructure investment and green energy spending. Mr. Fallon noted that Mrs. Clinton has pledged to act on issues ranging from immigration reform to gun safety. On some such measures, she has promised to pursue executive action in the face of possible congressional resistance. Recent unease from the left has often centered more on presentation and messaging than on the merits of her proposals. "Her policy proposals are admirably detailed, but they cover so much ground that their whole is less than the sum of their parts," Mr. Reich said. "She really needs to focus on a few big ideas. " Some Clinton allies have argued that the most pressing goal should be to run up the largest possible margin of victory, which could enable the party to seize seats that might be unwinnable in an ordinary year. And a number of candidates in such elections, including some elevated by Mr. Sanders, have said it is incumbent on them to frame their races as something more than a Trump litmus test. "It's up to us," said Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state senator who recently won her primary in a run for Congress. Adam Green, a founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said Mrs. Clinton's efforts to cast a wide net and train voters' attention on Mr. Trump amounted to a " sword. " "Republicans in Congress won't grant as easily after the election that we won a huge mandate on progressive issues, but thanks to Donald Trump, we might have more progressives and majorities in Congress," Mr. Green said. "I'd rather have a Republican minority in denial about what just happened than a Republican majority standing in the way. "