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This evening's music features New Orleans r&b, soul and doo-wop singer Aaron Neville. Enjoy!

"The reason someone like [Trump] can get so far is because the one thing he does seem to understand is how to get attention. He constantly says provocative or offensive things, and that’s what the media wants to showcase.

If Paul Ryan walked into Congress and introduces a health care plan that would drive millions of people into a situation where they can’t afford care, and thousands more would die prematurely, the news media would yawn. (We know this, because he did just that and he is still considered a legitimate, serious figure). If Ryan walked out onto the street and yelled the N word 50 times at a random stranger, he’d be on the chyrons of every cable news network.

Trump understands that, and he’d rather be the guy who yells the offensive phrase 50 times than the person who makes policy that hurts of millions of people. That gets him the attention. Ryan, and other politicians who behave destructively, also understand that. They want to govern. They want to do terrible things without a lot of attention."

-- Zaid Jilani

News and Opinion

Wikileaks Drops E-Reader Version of Clinton Speeches Alongside New Email Dump

Emails lay bare what members of Hillary Clinton's own inner circle believe to be her vulnerabilities—from ties to big money to scandal-laden husband

WikiLeaks on Monday dropped its second tranche of the so-called Podesta Emails, laying bare what members of her own inner circle believed were the vulnerabilities of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, from her emails and ties to big money, to her scandal-laden husband and propensity for saying things that are "untrue."

It is the second batch of documents obtained by the transparency group from the email account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The first, released late Friday, contained excerpts of paid speeches the former secretary of state gave to Wall Street banks that were flagged by her aides for being potentially problematic for the presidential hopeful.

On Monday, WikiLeaks made those controversial snippets even more accessible by releasing download options for the 80-page document, which included Kindle, book reader, and pdf formats. ...

During the Sunday evening debate against Republican nominee Donald Trump, Clinton responded to a question about a line from one of her speeches—that politicians "need both a public and a private position"—which many took to be an admission of the emails' authenticity, contradicting her campaign's stated position.

WikiLeaks celebrated the gaffe by take a swipe at news outlets that questioned the reliability of the anti-secrecy site.

Editorial: Last night even Clinton confirmed our transcripts. No doubt media who spread disinfo will now do the right thing and apologise.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 10, 2016

Editorial: Reporters should not let themselves be gamed by the Clinton campaign. There is no denial and we have a 100% record for accuracy.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 9, 2016

WikiLeaks Appears To Release Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speech Transcripts

Excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s closed-door paid speeches, including to financial firms, appeared to be made public for the first time on Friday when WikiLeaks published hundreds of hacked emails from her campaign chairman.

The speech transcripts, a major subject of contention during the Democratic primary, include quotes from Clinton about her distance from middle-class life (“I’m kind of far removed”); her vision of strategic governing (“you need both a public and a private position”); and her views on Wall Street, health care, and trade policy (“my dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”). ...

Clinton research director Tony Carrk sent the excerpts in an email to Podesta and other senior aides, sourcing the “the flags from HRC’s paid speeches” to the Harry Walker Agency, the firm that represented Clinton and arranged her dozens of public and private paid speech deals after she left the State Department in early 2013. ...

Carrk identified and sent the “highlights” in the email, telling Podesta and Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, that there were “a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub” with the campaign’s policy department.

Here's a link to, and some excerpts from, the email published by Wikileaks about Hillary Clinton's private speeches to Wall Street:

HRC Paid Speeches

“I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn't believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I'm kind of far removed because the life I've lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy.”

[Hillary Clinton Remarks at Goldman-Black Rock, 2/4/14]

"You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."

[Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13]

“Remember what Teddy Roosevelt did. Yes, he took on what he saw as the excesses in the economy, but he also stood against the excesses in politics. He didn't want to unleash a lot of nationalist, populistic reaction. He wanted to try to figure out how to get back into that balance that has served America so well over our entire nationhood. Today, there's more that can and should be done that really has to come from the industry itself, and how we can strengthen our economy, create more jobs at a time where that's increasingly challenging, to get back to Teddy Roosevelt's square deal. And I really believe that our country and all of you are up to that job.”

[Clinton Remarks to Deutsche Bank, 10/7/14]

But, at the State Department we were attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had. And that was true across the U.S. government. And we knew it was going on when I would go to China, or I would go to Russia, we would leave all of our electronic equipment on the plane, with the batteries out, because this is a new frontier. And they're trying to find out not just about what we do in our government. They're trying to find out about what a lot of companies do and they were going after the personal emails of people who worked in the State Department."

[Clinton Speech At UConn, 4/23/14]

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

[05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p. 28]

Hillary Clinton, In Paid Speeches To Wall Street, Promoted Commission That Pushed Social Security Cuts

During the Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton was criticized for refusing to release the transcripts of paid speeches she gave after she ended her term as Secretary of State. Now, just a month before the election, a transparency group has published what it says are excerpts of those speeches -- and the remarks show Clinton appearing to reassure Wall Street with rhetoric that differed from the kind she voiced in more public forums. ...

In the email published by Wikileaks, Clinton tells a real estate industry trade association that she believes that as a public official, “You need both a public and a private position” on major issues. ...

Clinton on the campaign trail declared, “I won’t cut Social Security.” Yet in the email’s excerpts of her Morgan Stanley speech, she lauded a presidential commission that proposed changes that would slash Social Security benefits, according to experts.

The email shows Clinton specifically telling Morgan Stanley that the Simpson-Bowles commission “put forth the right framework” for dealing with fiscal challenges. She also said “the Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right.”

As the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported in 2011, that commission proposed a plan to “cut benefits for the vast majority of Social Security recipients, weaken the link between a recipient’s benefits and past earnings (which could undermine public support for the program), and, despite the claims of the co-chairs, fail to protect most low-income workers from benefit cuts.”

Clinton campaign fends off questions about WikiLeaks speech excerpts

Leaders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign were forced on the defensive on Sunday, over apparent leaks from paid speeches the Democratic presidential nominee made to top bankers, whom she said she had fought for as a senator for New York and whose role after the 2008 financial crisis she said was misunderstood.

The leaked excerpts also exposed Clinton to uncomfortable questions about her true views on trade deals and the movement of labour, both hot-button issues in the presidential election against the Republican Donald Trump.

In interviews hours before the second presidential debate in St Louis, Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, said he could not verify whether the candidate had actually said what was in the excerpts, which were released by WikiLeaks through hacked emails from members of the Clinton campaign. ...

Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, similarly struggled to answer questions about the purported excerpts, including a 2013 speech to Goldman Sachs bankers which discussed Clinton having a separate “public and a private position”. ... Mook told CBS: “I think there’s a distinction between what goes on in negotiations and what her positions are on the issues and have been on the issues.”

Contradicting FBI view, Clinton’s leaked speeches portray her as computer savvy

Contrary to views collected by the FBI that Hillary Clinton was a technophobe unsophisticated in the use of computers, her paid speeches indicate that she was well aware of the dangers of computer hacking and penetration and that diplomats would be “totally vulnerable” without extreme precautions. ...

One of the newly released emails includes transcripts of numerous private remarks Clinton made in recent years about the dangers of being a victim of hacking and the backwardness of the State Department bureaucracy in adopting new technology. ,,,

In that speech and in others, Clinton cast herself as knowledgeable about technology, even a paladin of sorts to bring change to the federal government, and hyper aware of global cyber threats.

The excerpts contrast sharply with the portrait of Clinton drawn in documents released by the FBI of its investigation into her use of private email servers while she was secretary of state.

At a congressional hearing July 7, two days after the FBI announced it would not seek prosecution of Clinton for sending and receiving classified email on the private system, James Comey, the FBI’s director, portrayed Clinton as less-than-sophisticated about classification levels of federal cables that she handled on her computer.

Harvey Weinstein Urged Clinton Campaign to Silence Sanders’s Black Lives Matter Message

Hacked emails show that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a longtime ally of Hillary Clinton and a major fundraiser for her 2016 campaign, urged her campaign team to silence rival Bernie Sanders’s message against police shootings of African-Americans. He suggested countering it with “the Sandy Hook issue” — a reference to Sanders’s opposition to lawsuits against gun manufacturers.

The emails were released by the group DCLeaks, which in the past has shared hacked emails from U.S. political and military figures. ...

In an April 10 email sent to Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, just days before the New York primary, Weinstein invited Mook to meet up. He pointed to a Sanders ad featuring Erica Garner — the daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by New York City police officers — as well as growing support for Sanders among Latino activist leaders. “I’m probably telling you what you know already, but that needs to be silenced, probably with the Sandy Hook issue,” he wrote. ...

Mook wrote back replying to Weinstein’s offer to meet up and discuss strategy: “Are you kidding? Let’s do it! I’m here all week. This is all hands on deck–it’s must win! Would tomorrow or Tuesday work?”

Throughout the primary, Clinton repeatedly assailed Sanders for his vote to limit legal liability for gun manufacturers, specifically claiming that vote was preventing the families of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre from successfully suing the industry. It was a feature of her attack on Sanders during their final debate in New York on April 14.

So, the Obama administration is going to go with this "Putin stole my homework" bs? Really, Obama?

US officially accuses Russia of hacking DNC and interfering with election

The US government has formally accused Russia of hacking the Democratic party’s computer networks and said that Moscow was attempting to “interfere” with the US presidential election.

Hillary Clinton and US officials have blamed Russian hackers for stealing more than 19,000 emails from Democratic party officials, but Friday’s announcement marked the first time that the Obama administration has pointed the finger at Moscow.

“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” said the office of the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a joint statement. ...

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman dismissed the accusation as “rubbish.”

“Every day Putin’s website gets attacked by several tens of thousand of hackers. A lot of these attacks are traced to the territory of the USA, but we do not blame the White House or Langley each time,” he told the Interfax news agency.

The Russian foreign ministry said Washington lacked any evidence for its accusations, which were an attempt to fan “unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria”.

Administration Deeply Divided on Attacking Russia in Syria

With three months left until the inauguration of the next president, President Obama is virtually out the door. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have time to start World War 3, however, and he has plenty of members of his administration arguing he should do exactly that.

Officials are eager to scream genocide over the fighting in Aleppo, which up until a couple of weeks ago the US was supposed to be participating in, and to argue that the US cannot possibly sit by and do nothing. What that “something” would be, however, is a matter of considerable debate among top policymakers. ...

Officials are using any and every opportunity now to escalate tensions with Russia, with the DHS openly accusing them of trying to hack the US election, and several officials suggesting it to be a plot to get the Republican nominee elected.

At Debate, Clinton Blames Russia for Many Things

[In the second presidential debate,] Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was quick to blame Russia for anything and everything, from the refugee crisis in Europe to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign, making very specific point of talking about confronting Russia militarily. ...

Clinton talked of arming Syrian rebels, and imposing a no-fly zone over the whole of Syria, which would in effect attempt to militarily deny Russia access to Syrian airspace. She insisted that this would grant the US military leverage over Russia that would force them to the negotiating table.

While imposing a no-fly zone would be an act of war against Syria, and necessarily spark a military conflict with Russia, Clinton attempted to be a bit evasive about specifics beyond that, insisting that she “would not use American ground forces in Syria.”

As with the Obama Administration, the no ground troops pledge appeared to be pretty vaguely defined, as Clinton then rattled off an array of ground troops she would use in Syria, including special forces, trainers, and “enablers.” ...

Trump insisted the war needs to remain focused on ISIS, and warned that neither Clinton nor anyone else really knows who these rebels they want to arm are, saying that backing the rebels risks putting an even worse force in power in Syria. He cited Libya as an example of this.

An excellent article, worth a full read:

Key Neocon Calls on US to Oust Putin

The neoconservative president of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy [NED] has called for the U.S. government to “summon the will” to engineer the overthrow of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that the 10-year-old murder case of a Russian journalist should be the inspiration.

Carl Gershman, who has headed NED since its founding in 1983, doesn’t cite any evidence that Putin was responsible for the death of Anna Politkovskaya but uses a full column in The Washington Post on Friday to create that impression, calling her death “a window to Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin autocrat whom Americans are looking at for the first time.”

Gershman wraps up his article by writing: “Politkovskaya saw the danger [of Putin], but she and other liberals in Russia were not strong enough to stop it. The United States has the power to contain and defeat this danger. The issue is whether we can summon the will to do so. Remembering Politkovskaya can help us rise to this challenge.”

That Gershman would so directly call for the ouster of Russia’s clearly popular president represents further proof that NED is a neocon-driven vehicle that seeks to create the political circumstances for “regime change” even when that means removing leaders who are elected by a country’s citizenry.

And there is a reason for NED to see its job in that way. In 1983, NED essentially took over the CIA’s role of influencing electoral outcomes and destabilizing governments that got in the way of U.S. interests, except that NED carried out those functions in a quasi-overt fashion while the CIA did them covertly.

NED also serves as a sort of slush fund for neocons and other favored U.S. foreign policy operatives because a substantial portion of NED’s money circulates through U.S.-based non-governmental organizations or NGOs.

That makes Gershman an influential neocon paymaster whose organization dispenses some $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money to activists, journalists and NGOs both in Washington and around the world. The money helps them undermine governments in Washington’s disfavor – or as Gershman would prefer to say, “build democratic institutions,” even when that requires overthrowing democratically elected leaders.

In Second Presidential Debate, Clinton Escalates Her Call for Military Solution in Syria

US and EU sanctions are ruining ordinary Syrians' lives

The US and EU economic sanctions on Syria are causing huge suffering among ordinary Syrians and preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid, according to a leaked UN internal report. The embargo was supposed to target President Bashar al-Assad and contribute to his removal from power. Instead it is making it more difficult for foodstuffs, fuel and healthcare to reach the mass of the people.

Aid agencies cited in the report say they cannot procure basic medicines or medical equipment for hospitals because sanctions are preventing foreign commercial companies and banks having anything to do with Syria. A European doctor working in Syria says that “the indirect effect of sanctions… makes the import of medical instruments and other medical supplies immensely difficult, nearly impossible.”

The revelations in the internal UN assessment of the effect of sanctions on aid delivery, entitled Humanitarian Impact of Syria-Related Unilateral Restrictive Measures and leaked by the investigative publication The Intercept, open up the US and EU to the charge of hypocrisy, after criticising Syria and Russia for impeding the delivery of UN aid supplies to besieged cities in Syria.

The Intercept quotes an internal UN email from a senior official saying that sanctions have been a “principal factor” in degrading the Syrian health system and have contributed to a 300 per cent rise in the price of wheat flour and 650 per cent rise for rice, following a doubling of fuel prices in the last 18 months. ...

US and EU sanctions are contributing to this humanitarian calamity while Mr Assad remains firmly in power. In many respects, the situation resembles that in Iraq between 1990 and 2003 when UN sanctions destroyed the Iraqi economy and helped dissolve its society while doing nothing to reduce the power of Saddam Hussein as Iraqi leader. Many critics of Iraqi sanctions argue that the mass impoverishment they produced contributed significantly to the political and sectarian breakdown after the invasion of 2003.

Former UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on Yemen Conflict and Syrian War

More US - Saudi war crimes:

US-Backed Saudi Airstrikes on Yemen funeral kill at least 140 people, UN official says

More than 140 people were killed and more than 525 wounded when airstrikes hit a funeral ceremony in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, a senior UN official has said, as Houthi rebels blamed the attack on the Saudi-led coalition.

The dead and wounded include senior military and security officials from the ranks of the Shia Houthi rebels fighting the internationally recognised government of president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi as well as their allies, loyalists of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

In the aftermath of the strike on Saturday, hundreds of body parts were found strewn in and outside the hall. Rescuers collected them in sacks. “The place has been turned into a lake of blood,” said one rescuer, Murad Tawfiq.

Ambulances rushed to the site to ferry the wounded to hospitals. In radio broadcasts, the health ministry summoned off-duty doctors and called on residents to donate blood. Rescuers, meanwhile, sifted through the rubble in search of more casualties but a fire hindered their efforts.

The funeral was for Ali al-Rawishan, the father of the interior minister Galal al-Rawishan, an ally of both the Houthi movement and their chief ally, Saleh. ...

The Houthi-controlled news site sabanews.net said: “Dozens of citizens fell as martyrs or were wounded in this attack by planes of the Saudi-American aggression.”

Missiles fired at US navy destroyer from rebel-held Yemen

A US navy destroyer was targeted with missiles from rebel-held territory in Yemen, a day after Washington said it would review its support for a war led by Saudi Arabia that has devastated the impoverished nation and led to thousands of civilian casualties.

The latest escalation came as the Saudi government pledged to investigate an incident on Saturday in which airstrikes by its coalition allegedly killed more than a hundred mourners at a funeral wake and wounded more than 600 in one of the deadliest single incidents of the 17-month war.

The killing of so many civilians has refocused international attention on the role of western powers in the conflict. Both the UK and the US back the Saudi campaign with intelligence and weaponry despite repeated bombings of civilians as well as hospitals during the conflict.

In a statement on Monday, the navy said no US sailors were injured and no damage was done to the USS Mason. Lt Ian McConnaughey, a spokesman for US naval forces central command, said it was unclear if the ship was specifically targeted, though the missiles were fired in its direction for an hour, starting at about 7pm.

Saudi media also said a ballistic missile fired from Yemen had apparently targeted a Saudi airbase near Mecca, the deepest strike yet into the kingdom by Yemen’s Shia Houthi rebels and their allies

New Documents Show US Knew Helping Saudis in Yemen Could Be War Crime

Officials doubted Saudi military could target Houthi militants without hurting civilians or destroying infrastructure, Reuters reports

As the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia comes under renewed scrutiny in the wake of the Gulf nation's weekend bombing campaign in Yemen, a Reuters exclusive published Monday reveals that the Obama administration approved a $1.3 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last year despite warnings that it could implicate the U.S. in war crimes.

The Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen on Saturday killed at least 140 people and wounded hundreds more, prompting the U.S. to launch a "review" of its support for the kingdom. On Monday, Reuters reported that the U.S. Department of State had already warned the government that "the United States could be implicated in war crimes" for aiding the campaign. ...

American officials were actually well aware that airstrikes in Yemen were killing scores of civilians. Reuters writes:

State Department lawyers "had their hair on fire" as reports of civilian casualties in Yemen multiplied in 2015, and prominent human rights groups charged that Washington could be complicit in war crimes, one U.S. official said. That official and the others requested anonymity.

During an October 2015 meeting with private human rights groups, a State Department specialist on protecting civilians in conflict acknowledged Saudi strikes were going awry.

"The strikes are not intentionally indiscriminate but rather result from a lack of Saudi experience with dropping munitions and firing missiles," the specialist said, according to a department account of the meeting.

The specialist also noted that "weak intelligence" had contributed to confusion over who was who on the ground.

The investigation comes just after the U.S. approved yet another billion-dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia. At the time of the authorization in September, Oxfam America president Ray Offenheiser condemned the deal as continued evidence of both nations' "startling indifference to civilian lives."

As Torture's Mental Toll is Illuminated, Doctors Call for US Accountability

The advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) on Monday said the U.S. has lost any moral high ground in the so-called war on terror after years of revelations that the CIA secretly tortured detainees, and warned that history would "certainly" repeat itself without full accountability.

PHR released its statement in response to new reporting by the New York Times which highlighted the long-term psychological devastation that the torture program wreaked on former prisoners, many of whom now live with debilitating trauma, anxiety, and in some cases, psychosis.

The article, published Sunday, shed yet more light on the gruesome tactics carried out against detainees that ranged from threats to beatings, sleep deprivation, and sexual violence.

"This latest revelation of the scope, pervasiveness, magnitude, and utter unlawfulness of this so–called 'enhanced interrogation' program and related practices should be a wake–up call to the administration," said Dr. Vincent Iacopino, PHR's medical director.

Ex-Yahoo Employee: Government Spy Program Could Have Given a Hacker Access to All Email

Contrary to a denial by Yahoo and a report by the New York Times, the company’s scanning program, revealed earlier this week by Reuters, provided the government with a custom-built back door into the company’s mail service — and it was so sloppily installed that it posed a privacy hazard for hundreds of millions of users, according to a former Yahoo employee with knowledge of the company’s security practices.

Despite this week’s differing media accounts, this much isn’t disputed: In 2015, Yahoo provided the U.S. government with the means to scan every single email that landed in every single Yahoo Mail inbox. The scanning was kept an absolute secret — and as this ex-Yahoo source describes, that meant keeping it a secret from security personnel who came to believe it endangered Yahoo’s hundreds of millions of unwitting customers.

Baltimore Police took 1 million surveillance photos of city

Baltimore Police on Friday released data showing that a surveillance plane secretly flew over the city roughly 100 times, taking more than 1 million snapshots of the streets below.

Police held a news conference where they released logs tracking flights of the plane owned and operated by Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is promoting the aerial technology as a cutting-edge crime-fighting tool.

The logs show the plane spent about 314 hours over eight months creating the chronological visual record.

The program began in January and was not initially disclosed to Baltimore's mayor, city council or other elected officials. Now that it's public, police say the plane will fly over the city again as a terrorism prevention tool when Fleet Week gets underway on Monday, as well as during the Baltimore Marathon on Oct. 15.

The logs show that the plane made flights ranging between one and five hours long in January and February, June, July and August. The flights stopped on Aug. 7, shortly before the program's existence was revealed in an article by Bloomberg Businessweek.

Donald Trump threatens Hillary Clinton with jail in second presidential debate

A cornered Donald Trump prowled the presidential debate stage on Sunday, threatening to jail an opponent he called “the devil” in a last-ditch bid to staunch his hemorrhaging campaign hopes.

Swaying malevolently behind Hillary Clinton as she parried attacks on everything from her husband’s sex life to Wall Street and her foreign policy judgment, the Republican dominated the night but made little effort to seduce new voters.

Instead, he began the night by assembling a group of women in a press conference to revisit alleged sexual assaults by Bill Clinton, before confronting his opponent hardest on her private email server. ...

The Democratic frontrunner fired off occasional attacks of her own, accusing Trump of being in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, but looked rattled by the brutal onslaught over her record in office.

Trump, embracing the spirit of the “lock her up” mob chants at his rallies, threatened: “If I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation – there has never been so many lies and so much deception,” he threatened.

Clinton said it was “awfully good” that someone with the temperament of Trump was not in charge of the law in the country, provoking another Trump jab: “Because you’d be in jail.”

“She got caught in a total lie and now she is blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln,” added Trump as Clinton attempted to defend leaked Wall Street speech transcripts.

Jill Stein Spars with Clinton & Trump in "Expanding the Debate" Special

This is why American capitalist markets can never be defined as free markets where innovation and better ideas thrive. It's also an illustration of the fact that Corporate America will not get out of the way and let consumer preferences lead the way to a more sustainable energy economy.

Tesla fights back as Michigan goes to new lengths to shut company out

In the city that put America on wheels, in a state whose largest city is synonymous with automobile manufacturing, one auto company has been effectively boxed out.

Since 2014, a Michigan law has limited Tesla Motors’ capacity to sell in the state, after the Republican-led legislature implemented a statute that banned the company’s only method of selling its cars to consumers.

The move is part of a trend around the US to block the electric car company’s direct-to-consumer sales that cut out dealerships from the sales process. The company’s efforts to open its own dealership have been resisted by independent franchise dealers around the country, as well as the Big Three automakers.

In four states, it means customers can’t buy Tesla vehicles. In Michigan, even customers who own Tesla vehicles have to leave the state to get them serviced. And Tesla has beaten back attempts to block sales in several other states, with more battles likely to come, amid fears that they threaten to eliminate the middleman.

Hillary Clinton Expresses Support For Fracking In Wikileaks Document

During the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton cast herself as a skeptic of hydraulic fracturing -- the controversial process to extract natural gas. But newly released documents purporting to show excerpts of her paid speeches show that Clinton proudly touted her support for fracking, which environmental groups say can pollute groundwater and undermine the fight against climate change. The excerpts also show Clinton saying that some environmental organizations trying to restrict her work to promote fracking were front groups for Russian oligarchs. ...

In one excerpt of a speech to Deutsche Bank in April 2013, according to the document, Clinton boasted about the federal government’s support for fracking and her own work to promote the process across the globe.

“Fracking was developed at the Department of Energy,” the document shows Clinton saying. “I mean, the whole idea of how fracking came to be available in the marketplace is because of research done by our government. And I've promoted fracking in other places around the world.”

In another excerpt of the same speech, Clinton outlines why she supports a continued push for fracking.

“The ability to extract both gas and oil from previously used places that didn't seem to have much more to offer, but now the technology gives us the chance to go in and recover oil and gas,” the document shows her saying. “Or with the new technology known as fracking, we are truly on a path -- and it's not just United States; it's all of North America -- that will be net energy exporters assuming we do it right."

Court Rejects Dakota Access Injunction, But Standing Rock Sioux Vow 'This is Not The End'

'This ruling puts 17 million people who rely on the Missouri River at serious risk'

A U.S. federal court of appeals ruled against the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe late Sunday evening and denied its request for an emergency injunction against the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

"The ruling allows Energy Transfer Partners—the Dallas-based company funding the project—to move forward with construction of the pipeline on all privately owned land up to the Missouri River," NBC notes. Construction was temporarily halted in late August while the case was considered by the court. ...

"This ruling puts 17 million people who rely on the Missouri River at serious risk," said Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. "And, already, the Dakota Access Pipeline has led to the desecration of our sacred sites when the company bulldozed over the burials of our Lakota and Dakota ancestors. This is not the end of this fight. We will continue to explore all lawful options to protect our people, our water, our land, and our sacred places."

As Native News Online explains: "The 1,168-mile pipeline crosses through the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's ancestral lands and within a half mile of the reservation boundary. Construction crews have already destroyed and desecrated confirmed sacred and historic sites, including burials and cultural artifacts. The original pipeline route crossed the Missouri River just north of Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota. The route was later shifted downstream, to the tribe's doorstep, out of concerns for the city's drinking water supply."

While the two-page ruling found that the tribe had not met the requirements for emergency injunctive relief, the court did note that the National Historic Preservation Act may require additional consultation. In fact, "the court's ruling acknowledged that it was 'not the final word,' noting that the final decision lies with the Corps of Engineers," as NBC reports. "While it said the tribe hadn't met the strict requirements of the act to force a halt to construction, the three-judge panel said it "can only hope that the spirit" of the [National Historic Preservation] act 'may yet prevail.'"

Indigenous Peoples Day Sweeps Nation as Battles Intensify for Native American Rights

As the movement to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day finds success in communities from Phoenix, Arizona to the state of Vermont, the battle for Indigenous rights in the face of industrial development rages on.

In North Dakota, 27 Indigenous water protectors were arrested in Monday's action to peacefully occupy a Dakota Access Pipeline construction site. The arrests at the hands of militarized police came less than a day after a federal court of appeals ruled against the Standing Rock Sioux's request for an emergency injunction against the controversial pipeline project.

Meanwhile, on Alcatraz Island, a sunrise ceremony saw hundreds gather to honor the culture of Indigenous peoples and express solidarity with the fight against Dakota Access.

The scenes of Indigenous solidarity and the battle against the pipeline were ever more resonant as many parts of the country celebrated Columbus Day, which honors the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas. To many Indigenous people, Columbus was a harbinger of centuries of slaughter.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Excerpts of Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speeches to Goldman Sachs Finally Leaked

New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship

We’re Not With Him: GOP Discovers Women’s Rights, Slams Donald Trump

In the world’s war zones, medical facilities are being routinely bombed by Americans, Russians and Saudis

A Little Night Music

Aaron Neville - Hard to Believe

Aaron Neville - Angola Bound

Aaron Neville - Louisiana

Aaron Neville - Everybody Plays The Fool

Aaron Neville - Hercules

Aaron Neville - It Feels Like Rain

Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville & Gregg Allman -Tell It Like It Is

Aaron Neville - When A Man Loves A Woman

Aaron Neville - The Grand Tour

Aaron Neville - Be Your Man

Aaron Neville - Stand By Me

Aaron Neville - Crazy Love