This isn't about Hillary Clinton. It's about a broader movement that took place within the Democratic establishment, and spread rapidly to blue-friendly media and academia.

It's a kind of repeat of post-9/11 thinking, when suddenly huge pluralities of Americans decided the stakes were now too high to continue being queasy about things like torture, extralegal assassination, and habeas corpus.

In the age of Trump, we're now throwing all sorts of once-treasured principles - press ethics, free speech, freedom from illegal surveillance - overboard, because the political stakes are now deemed too high to cede ground to Trump over principles.

But this distrust of democracy began before Trump was even a nominee. As Brazile notes, it started within the ranks of the Democratic Party near the outset of the campaign.

None of those things are new. He even writes about the post 9/11 psychotic episode without detailing how it ended. Because it really didn't. Guantanamo is still open.
And as Chomsky was fond of pointing out before I was even born: the "Crisis of Democracy" was that there was too much of it.

Noam Chomsky - Wikiquote -

During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.... The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy.

    Manufacturing Consent, lecture at the University of Wisconsin (15 March 1989) [4].

1/Back from meetings in Brussels. There's good news and bad news. First, the bad news. Because it's... extremely bad.

2/ While consensus in London seems to assume trade talks kick off in December, senior EU officials now consider this, on balance, unlikely

3/ Brussels monitors UK media & ministers' statements - they can see PM has been backtracking since Florence - ie backtracking to cliff-edge

4/ Behind the scenes, also evidence that UK has reneged on guarantees for citizens that it initially signalled it would make. Really bad.

5/ As for money, if May insists she can't make any further commitments, EU will not trigger trade talks in December. It's that simple.

6/ EU went as far as it could in Oct. Nobody's asking for precise figure, just specific commitments. €60bn the ballpark figure.

7/ UK Government knows all this, incidentally. They're in denial about it. But what happens if they test EU anyway?
.....

and there's more

keep to the Fen Causeway

Spend 15 minutes inside Carter-Page's head.

It will be...strange

WaPo - Alexandra Petri - The paranoid Carter Page transcript: What in God's name did I just read?

Carter Page's testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the transcript of which was released Monday night, was like trying to read a magic eye painting. It is the sort of thing a lawyer -- or, really, any person concerned with your welfare -- would tell you not to say to a congressional committee. Yet, here we are. For anyone who doesn't want to curl up with 243 pages of testimony and footnoted letters, here is pretty much how the thing went, severely condensed.

Carter Page: Hello. I am a doctor and a scholar, and I am here about the world premiere of the dodgy dossier that inexplicably made all kinds of charges against me, an innocent man who has never met anyone directly in my life! I have been illegally wiretapped by the FBI, CIA and other U.S. propaganda agencies, and my life has been ruined. I must be continually on the move, like a shark. I have done nothing wrong, but I will answer none of the questions put to me, because I have been studying the law. I am, as I said, a scholar. Here is a letter. I know it looks like a scrawl in red crayon, but trust me -- it is a letter about the CIA's illegal dossier.

Thomas Rooney: Okay. Who are you? Did you work for the Trump campaign?........

If the tax cuts are not enough for you....

How it became a crime to be poor in America

In the United States, a system of modern peonage - essentially, a government-run loan shark operation - has been going on for years. Beginning in the 1990s, the country adopted a set of criminal justice strategies that punish poor people for their poverty. Right now in America, 10 million people, representing two-thirds of all current and former offenders in the country, owe governments a total of $50bn in accumulated fines, fees and other impositions.

The problem of "high fines and misdemeanors" exists across many parts of the country: throughout much of the south; in states ranging from Washington to Oklahoma to Colorado [...]

As a result, poor people lose their liberty and often lose their jobs, are frequently barred from a host of public benefits, may lose custody of their children, and may even lose their right to vote. Immigrants, even some with green cards, can be subject to deportation. Once incarcerated, impoverished inmates with no access to paid work are often charged for their room and board. Many debtors will carry debts to their deaths, hounded by bill collectors and new prosecutions.

[...] to understand America's new impulse to make being poor a crime, one has to follow the trail of tax cuts that began in the Reagan era, which created revenue gaps all over the country.

The anti-tax lobby told voters they would get something for nothing: the state or municipality would tighten its belt a little, it would collect big money from low-level offenders, and everything would be fine.

Deep budget cuts ensued, and the onus of paying for our justice system - from courts to law enforcement agencies and even other arms of government - began to shift to the "users" of the courts, including those least equipped to pay.

Trump or sunshine...

Map of the earth if the earth was a bear pic.twitter.com/dcOEbgbRTD— Terrible Maps (@TerribleMaps) 17. September 2017

Firmen müssten im digitalisierten Wettbewerb agil sein und schnell ihre Teams zusammenrufen können, so der Waise zur Welt am Sonntag. Auf unseren nächtlichen Anruf, wie er das denn nun genau meint und dann auch in Angriff nehmen will, hat er aber nicht reagiert. Vielleicht war er auch im Urlaub.

During a debate in the Committee on Employment of the European Parliament, a Greek Eurodeputy asked the President of the Eurogroup (the informal economic government of the Eurozone) if the Greek bail-out program was an effort to help and save Greece, or an effort to save the banks. Mr Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch Finance Minister, answered that "We have used the money of the taxpayers to save the banks. Those who say that everything was done to save the banks have some point".

We remind our readers that Mr. Dijsselbloem threatened the Greek government with closure of Greek banks three days after the election of the new SYRIZA-ANEL government in January 2015, asking it to recognize the legitimacy of the debt and the validity of the neocolonial agreements signed by previous Greek governments, both accepted by Tsipras and Varoufakis one month later. He also applied every kind of pressure and blackmail during the first six months of 2015 in order to scupper any attempt by the Greek government to resist the program designed "to save banks" (and destroy Greeks), as he admitted in the Europarliament.

This same Dijsselbloem said more or less the same things in a recent interview to a Greek newspaper. Speaking about the way Europe addressed the problems after the 2008 crisis he answered:...

The obituary for this government was published within days of its birth. Theresa May was a "dead woman walking", proclaimed former cabinet colleague George Osborne. Thus was a sniggering bully transformed into an acerbic prophet. Who now dares argue with that verdict? Two senior ministers out within a week, two more barely clinging on to their jobs, and an administration that makes no progress, but merely lurches from disaster to catastrophe.

And so begins the Great Unravelling of the oldest political party in Europe, arguably the world. It leads the BBC bulletins. For the commentariat, it is their meat and drink and their tiramisu.

Yet what almost the entire political class cannot comprehend is why it is happening. To go by the stories told by most of the press, David Cameron's Tories were essentially a haven of competence for six years - then came Brexit, then came May, then came death by pratfall.

This is to get things precisely the wrong way round. What is destroying the Conservatives is not outside forces, nor the cack-handed pricking of a gusher of ministerial ineptitude. No, the fundamental cause is their own economic strategy of austerity. Of cutting taxes for the wealthy, while cutting public services and social security for the rest. Of rewarding the owners of capital, while punishing those who rely on their labour. Of claiming to have fixed the economy, while tanking voters' living standards.