It's another haunting picture of a wounded child from Syria. This one has also gone viral on social media.

The video and images were posted online by a pro-opposition activist group, Talbiseh Media Center.

It shows an 8-year-old girl in a medical facility, her hair and body covered with dust. There's blood tricking down her forehead, her nose. She looks confused and scared and keeps calling out for her father.

Off camera, a man talks to her, asking for her name.

"Aya" she replies, crying.

"Where were you when this happened?" the questioner asks.

"At home but the roof fell on us," she replies, looking around for her father.

"Oh Daddy... Daddy, come," she cries.
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Two big-money donors who have given or raised tens of thousands of dollars for Donald Trump are livid at the Republican presidential nominee and are asking for their money back, according to a bundler who raised money for Trump.

"I cannot express my disappointment enough regarding the recent events surrounding Mr. Trump," one donor wrote to a Trump fundraiser in an email with the subject line "Trump support withdrawal."

"I regret coming to the Trump support event, and in particular allowing my son to be a part of it," the donor, who had given to and raised money for Trump, said. "I respectfully request that my money be refunded."

Senior Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the campaign is "unaware of any donors making such a request."
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As organizations such as WikiLeaks and DCLeaks continue to release emails that appear to originate from individuals close to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign, a group of former top national security officials and outside experts are warning “members of the media to stay engaged and to think critically about the facts they consume and disseminate.” The group notes that “what is taking place” in terms of the leaking of private emails “follows a well-known Russian playbook,” and “it is imperative that we focus on the broad disinformation campaign that is already underway.”

In multiple email dumps, WikiLeaks published a trove of what appear to be hacked emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Politico reported that “there have been no bombshells,” adding that Podesta and the Clinton campaign have “neither verified nor denied the authenticity of the emails.”

National security and cybersecurity experts have been saying for months that Russian intelligence services were most likely involved in the hacks -- and the U.S. government has now formally accused them of attempting to “interfere with the U.S. election process.” Yet right-wing media, including one of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s closest allies, Roger Stone, have cheered for Russian espionage and the hacking of private emails of American citizens. Fox News has even credulously reported on the illegally obtained documents. Donald Trump himself has said he is not convinced Russia is behind the leaks, which an unnamed intelligence briefer for Trump called a “willful misrepresentation” of reality, given the information Trump received in his intelligence briefings.

A group of 16 former top national security officials and outside experts have penned a letter saying they are “concerned that an ongoing Russian influence operation is targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” The signatories of the letter note that American “debates on critical national security issues will be targeted” by Russian intelligence “in an effort to sway public opinion away from our national interests.” The experts conclude, “There is no amount of short-term partisan gain or perceived media scoop that could justify that outcome,” imploring “members of the media to stay engaged and to think critically about the facts they consume and disseminate.” From the October 6 letter:

Russia Influence Warning Letter from NSA members -- by Yahoo News on Scribd

There is no way to sugarcoat this: At Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump threatened to throw Hillary Clinton in jail if he wins the presidency. This — threatening to jail one’s political opponents — is how democratic norms die.

The exchange happened during a discussion of the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Trump began by decrying Clinton’s conduct — which, according to the FBI, was quite bad but not illegal. He then proposed appointing a special prosecutor to investigate her, and warned Clinton that, if he were president now, “you’d be in jail”:

TRUMP: I'll tell you what. I didn't think I'd say this, and I'm going to say it, and hate to say it: If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there's never been so many lies, so much deception … A very expensive process, so we're going to get a special prosecutor because people have been, their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you've done. And it's a disgrace, and honestly, you ought to be ashamed.

CLINTON: Let me just talk about emails, because everything he just said is absolutely false. But I'm not surprised … It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country.

DT: Because you'd be in jail.

This is so far beyond normal that it’s hard to even know where to start.

In his last line — “you’d be in jail” — he is outright saying that he would imprison Hillary Clinton in office (if he could). This comes despite the fact that there is no evidence Clinton committed a crime in her handling of the email servers, despite lengthy investigations that found evidence of carelessness and dishonesty. That would be a politically motivated prosecution — retribution for daring to run against Trump and attack him during the campaign.

This is everything we feared about Donald Trump. His long history of trying to silence critics with lawsuits, his inability to let personal slights go, his pettiness: The nightmare scenario is that these would incline him to use the power of the presidency to forcibly silence his critics and opponents. That’s what is done by tin-pot dictators spanning the globe from North Korea to Zimbabwe. That’s what happens in countries where peaceful transitions of power are the exception, not the rule.
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[font size="3"]Watch: Trump is running for dictator, not president[/font]

"That's all we need, an insecure child-man as a dictator, tearing up our Constitution."

I don't think people would see her responding to his bullshit, as inappropriate at all. I think most would applaud her for it.

I have been a registered Republican since I was first eligible to vote in 1980. In college, I was taught that democracy is often difficult, challenging and may exhort a personal cost. While I believe Hillary Clinton has many issues, I’m very concerned about the philosophy of the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

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The most troubling thought was presented by Trump during the second presidential debate. Trump stated that if he were to be president, his political rival “would be in jail.” [font color="red"]This philosophy is at best an authoritarian view, and at worst[font size="+1"] the words of a dictator[/font][/font].
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"That's all we need, an insecure child-man as a dictator, tearing up our Constitution."

She would be saying what is obvious to most people.

Updated | I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe. And that should raise concerns about not only Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.

An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros, at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by WikiLeaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to WikiLeaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblower group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that the Russians are not only orchestrating this act of cyberwar but also really, really dumb.

The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government-controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya.

The documents that WikiLeaks has unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the WikiLeaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.

The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fever dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.

The latest release from WikiLeaks, a collection of emails supposedly hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, is getting very little public attention due to the fact that it contains nothing particularly scandalous to begin with, and the fact that it was released just as Donald Trump’s campaign was imploding in a sexual assault scandal. But those who have examined the Clinton email dump have found something fascinating: several of the emails aren’t real, and aren’t even good forgeries.

Malcolm Nance, a U.S. intelligence expert and MSNBC analyst, has issued what he’s calling an “official warning.” He’s reporting that the emails in question “already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries” and goes on to add that they’re “not even professionally done.” Nance announced his conclusion via Twitter just a few hours after the supposed emails were released. MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid retweeted his warning, adding “FYI” to her own audience.

WikiLeaks had spent the past month claiming that it would be releasing election-altering hacked information on Hillary Clinton which would cost her the election. But the bizarre advance hype, coupled with repeated delays and a surreal middle-of-the-night press conference last week in which absolutely no information was revealed, suggested that they had nothing all along.

This evening’s email dump, which appears to have been specifically timed on a Friday evening in order to avoid the scrutiny of the major media outlets, has revealed relatively little of interest. Some of the emails purport to contain the transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, but use odd phrases such as “and/or” which would not have been included in the original prepared text of a speech and would not have been spoken out loud by someone giving a speech.

WASHINGTON — The stark choice that Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump pose for voters goes as well for their revised tax plans: Mr. Trump would simplify the tax code but cut taxes mainly for the rich and add trillions of dollars to the federal debt, while Mrs. Clinton would do the opposite, an independent analysis released Tuesday concluded.

The review by the Tax Policy Center, a joint research arm of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, is the first to examine the plans since Mr. Trump significantly rewrote his proposal after criticisms of its costs and inequities and Mrs. Clinton on Monday proposed to double the existing tax break for parents with young children.

“They really couldn’t be more different,” Len Burman, director of the center and a professor at Syracuse University, said in a conference call with reporters.

It is unclear that either plan would pass in Congress. If Republicans keep control of the House, even if they lose the Senate, they would probably block Mrs. Clinton’s proposed tax increases. And while Mr. Trump’s plan is similar to one that House Republicans have outlined, many Republicans would probably object to its cost given the size and projected growth of the federal debt as an aging population drives spending higher.
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