Facing an increasingly tough primary fight against Bernie Sanders last October, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, tried to distance herself from her push to negotiate the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal during her time atop the State Department (2009-2013). After months of taking positions on the deal that were criticized — even by members of her own party — as vague, Clinton said the deal wasn’t what she’d hoped it might be.

Since then she’s held fast on that position, weathering a primary fight that was anything but expected from the populist, self-described Democratic socialist Sanders, who has repeatedly railed against the TPP. At the same time, a review of the hardback edition of her memoir as secretary of state, “Hard Choices,” compared to the paperback — first noted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) — finds that segments of the book where Clinton describes an effort to convince American countries to join the TPP negotiations have been left out.

We encouraged “all open-market democracies driving toward a more prosperous future to join negotiations with Asian nations on TPP, the trans-Pacific trade agreement,” the original version of the book reads in a two-page segment discussing a 2009 conference in El Salvador. Those two pages have been cut from the paperback version of the book, according to CEPR.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries that was signed earlier this year in New Zealand.

That isn’t the only portion of the memoir where Clinton discusses TPP, an International Business Times review found. Earlier in the book when describing her work with China, Clinton noted that there were several potential upsides to negotiating the TPP. In the segment, which does not appear to have been omitted from the paperback versions of the book, she also says that, because the negotiations were ongoing, it made sense to “reserve judgment.”
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In the first alternative, we asked about Clinton, Trump, Gary Johnson (the Libertarian) and Jill Stein (the Green Party candidate) as explicit options with their party affiliation. The results from this question among registered voters show Trump at 40 percent, Clinton at 39 percent, Johnson at 9 percent and Stein at 4 percent; 8 percent did not answer the question.



The other alternative vote choice question we asked gave the option of choosing Clinton, Trump or another candidate with an option to specify the candidate name in an open-ended format. In this version of the question, among registered voters, Trumps beats Clinton by 3 percentage points — 39 percent to 36 percent — with responses for "other" pulling in a very large 22 percent.

"John Edwards' decision to pay $400 for a haircut smacks of liberal elitism.", Clinton told the jubilant crowd, "If John Edwards thinks that the average Pennsylvanian is going to spend $400 in a trendy hair salon, it is pretty clear that he is out of touch with Pennsylvanian voters".

One of the greatest free speech threats in the west is the growing, multi-nation campaign literally to outlaw advocacy of boycotting Israel. People get arrested in Paris – the site of the 2015 “free speech” (for Muslim critics) rally – for wearing pro-boycott t-shirts. Pro-boycott students on U.S. campuses – where the 1980s boycott of apartheid South Africa flourished – are routinely sanctioned for violating anti-discrimination policies. Canadian officials have threatened to criminally prosecute boycott advocates. British government bodies have legally barred certain types of advocacy. Israel itself has outright criminalized advocacy of such boycotts. Notably, all of this has been undertaken with barely a peep from those who styled themselves free speech crusaders when it came time to defend anti-Muslim cartoons.

But now, New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo (above, in 2016 Celebrate Israel Parade) has significantly escalated this free speech attack on U.S. soil, aimed at U.S. citizens. The prince of the New York political dynasty yesterday issued an executive order directing all agencies under his control to terminate any and all business with companies or organizations that support a boycott of Israel. It ensures that citizens who hold and express a particular view are punished through the denial of benefits which other citizens enjoy: a classic free speech violation (imagine if Cuomo issued an order stating that “anyone who expresses conservative viewpoints shall have all state benefits immediately terminated”).

Even more disturbing, Cuomo’s Executive Order requires that one of his Commissioners compile “a list of institutions and companies” which – “either directly or through a parent or subsidiary” – support a boycott. That government list is then posted publicly, and the burden falls on them to prove to the state that they do not, in fact, support such a boycott. Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told The Intercept: “Whenever the government creates a blacklist based on political views it raises serious First Amendment concerns and this is no exception.” Reason‘s Robby Soave denounced it today as “brazenly autocratic.”

To read the relevant provisions of Cuomo’s order is to confront the mentality of petty censoring tyranny, flavored with McCarthyite public shaming, in its purest form. See for yourself:
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Wealthy “1 percenters” who live in ritzy East Hampton aren’t racist, according to the town’s housing director — they just don’t like looking at poor people.

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East Hampton’s Housing Authority bought the 4.67-acre property for $3.415 million with bonds backed by the town, and some wealthy residents showed up last month to a public meeting about the project to complain about “paving paradise,” while hundreds have signed a petition calling for the project to be abandoned.

“Most opponents would prefer the people who mow their lawns, cook their food and babysit their children live elsewhere,” said Catherine Casey, the director of the East Hampton Housing Authority.

The area’s Latino population jumped 166 percent between 2000 and 2010, the newspaper reported — but the Housing Authority director insisted wealthy critics had no racial motivation for opposing the project.

“It’s not that they don’t want Latinos,” Casey said. “It’s that they don’t want poor people.”
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To cut costs, voting was scheduled for the same day as local elections. In April, as the elections commission and treasury department tussled over the $3m tab of printing and counting papers, the ballot was at risk of not happening at all.

Now, further austerity cuts have slashed polling stations to fewer than one-third of the 1,115 sites originally announced last month, sparking accusations from supporters of Bernie Sanders of voter suppression.

The frustration is understandable given that Puerto Rico’s 67 delegates, 60 of them uncommitted, are crucial to Sanders’ fast-dwindling hopes of catching Hillary Clinton and becoming the Democratic nominee for November’s general election.

But party leaders in the US territory insist the decision to reduce polling stations to 432 was a simple matter of resources, based on the island electoral commission’s inability to fund and handle the extra workload of simultaneous local elections at so many sites.
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