Election Night 2016
A look back on my U.S. election doodles
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Convention Sketches
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Click for poster ending with Barack Obama
Hillary Clinton
Tuesday November 11, 2016
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator –Tuesday November 11, 2016
The Issues Facing Canada If Trump Or Clinton Win
Canada’s neighbour elects a new president Tuesday with either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump to take up residence in the White House. Each are proposing different agendas for the U.S. that pose questions, opportunities and challenges to cross-border relations.
October 15, 2016
Hillary Clinton is a known quantity to Canadian officials from her time as a U.S. senator and secretary of state, which has also given her an understanding of Canada’s role in the world, says Gordon Giffin, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada: “Sometimes there’s too much focus on what we sell back and forth across the 49th parallel and not enough attention to the fact that Canada is quite engaged with the United States all over the world on issues and principles and values that we share. And she knows all of that, so she starts from a pretty strong foundation of engagement with Canada.’’
March 11, 2016
As a self-described outsider of American politics, Donald Trump would have few connections to the Liberal government in the Great White North. Trudeau would have to build a relationship with a man who he has suggested holds different values than himself. And Trump has bashed Canada at various points during the campaign, specifically on health care. Political relationships would be built from scratch. But Trump does have economic advisers familiar with Canada who could guide Trump in cross-border issues, Brock says.
October 19, 2016
Despite Canada’s best efforts, Canadian interests could be sidelined while Clinton deals with more pressing domestic issues like resistance to her supreme court nominees and congressional Republicans who will work to thwart her agenda at every turn. Coupled with her international obligations like involvement in the Middle East and Asia, Clinton may be hard-pressed to find a lot of time for major new issues in the Canada-U.S. Relationship.
Given Canadian public opinion polls that show respondents favour Clinton over Trump, it’s not farfetched to say the Liberals are hoping the Republican candidate doesn’t win on Tuesday. Giffin says a Trump presidency wouldn’t be a fatal blow to Canada-U.S. relations: The relationship may be a little rough at the outset based on Trump’s tough stances on trade and immigration, but would smooth out over time. Giffin says the relationship itself is bigger than any one president: “It has a momentum and a centre of gravity that sort of drags an administration towards engagement with Canada, which is good.’’ (Huffington Post)
Tuesday November 1, 2016
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday November 1, 2016
FBI gets warrant to search new Clinton emails
The FBI has obtained a warrant to begin reviewing newly discovered emails that may be relevant to the Hillary Clinton email server investigation, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
October 15, 2016
FBI investigators want to review emails of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on a device seized during an unrelated sexting investigation of Anthony Weiner, a former New York congressman and Abedin’s estranged husband.
The official, who has knowledge of the examination, would not say when investigators might complete the review of Abedin’s emails but said Sunday they would move expeditiously.
The Clinton email inquiry, which closed without charges in July, resurfaced on Friday when FBI Director James Comey alerted members of Congress to the existence of emails that he said could be pertinent to that investigation.
The FBI wants to review the emails to see if they contain classified information and were handled properly, the focus of the earlier Clinton inquiry.
June 4, 2016
Separately Sunday, another law enforcement official said FBI investigators in the Weiner sexting probe knew for weeks about the existence of the emails potentially related to the probe of Clinton’s server. A third law enforcement official also said the FBI was aware for a period of time about the emails before Comey was briefed, but wasn’t more specific.
In his letter that roiled the White House race, Comey said he’d been briefed on Thursday about the Abedin emails and had agreed that investigators should take steps to review them.
It was not immediately clear Sunday what steps investigators took once the emails were first found to fully advise FBI leaders that additional and potentially relevant messages had been discovered.
The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.(Source: Toronto Star)
Wednesday October 19, 2016
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday October 19, 2016
Nearly two-thirds of Canadians approve of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government: Ipsos
One year since the Liberals won the federal election, two-thirds of Canadians approve of the job Justin Trudeau’s government has done, according to a new Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News.
“He’s very popular. If you look at leaders in the rest of the world, he’s got numbers that any of them would envy,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs. “We’re finding 64 per cent of Canadians saying that they basically approve of his performance and the government’s performance.”
March 29, 2016
But although Trudeau is popular, his numbers aren’t that different from the last time Canada elected a new government at the federal level.
“People might say that Justin Trudeau is at an unprecedented level of public support, but we did the same poll with Stephen Harper in 2006 after one year of him being in power and he was at 62, so the difference is only two points, pretty much within the margin of error,” said Bricker.
“So I think when big change happens, after 10 years somebody’s in power, somebody new comes in and they deliver something different, people generally respond well to it. That’s what we saw in the first year of Harper and it’s what we’re seeing in the first year of Justin Trudeau.”
If Trudeau’s government follows the same kind of public opinion trajectory, they’re in for a slow, steady drop: by the 2015 election, the Conservative approval rating had fallen to 41 per cent. (Source: Global News)
Saturday October 15, 2016
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 15, 2016
Donald Trump’s problem isn’t a conspiracy. It’s him.
This has been a bad week for Donald J. Trump. But what shouldn’t be lost is that it’s been a bad week because of Donald J. Trump.
That’s not how Trump sees it, of course. In his wild, conspiratorial speech yesterday, he blamed a “concerted, coordinated, and vicious attack” by the media and the Clinton campaign. He explained that his campaign represented an “existential threat” to “those who control the levers of power in Washington” and “the global special interests,” and it was their counterattack that was behind his current troubles. If he loses, he said, it will be because the system is “rigged.”
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The only person who doesn’t know what’s gone wrong for Trump’s campaign, it seems, is Donald Trump.
None of Trump’s errors were forced. None of his problems were out of his control. He wasn’t buffeted by bad economic news, or a staffer who said something dumb on television, or a change in geopolitics that undercut his campaign.
Instead, the last week has been driven by three characteristics that are purely Trump’s: his absence of impulse control, his overwhelming desire to be and to seem dominant, and his tendency to lash out counterproductively and personally when attacked. (Continued: Vox)