"There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves.

"From hacked email troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter resumes, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful -- and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat.

"Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about wealth and status in the fashion of preteens.

"Journalists often violated their own ethics codes during the campaign. ...

"One big loser is the Obama Justice Department -- or rather the very concept of justice as administered by the present administration. It has gone the tainted way of the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Veterans Affairs and National Security Agency. The Justice Department clearly pressured the FBI to limit its investigation of pay-for-play corruption at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department."

"The nation's cultural and political elite has been handed its walking papers by the American electorate.

"What just happened is the most momentous shift in American political and cultural life in our time. There's no way to digest the meaning of Donald Trump being on the verge of victory. Understanding it is the work of a generation. ...

"He won it because he had something to say that resonated across the country and Hillary Clinton ran saying absolutely nothing other than that Trump was scum.

"That's why the confident folk who understood he would be the next president had shocking clarity while the rest of us were blinded by the steam rising from the stew. They thrilled to the way Trump threw all the ideological cards in the conservative Republican deck in the air and then went entirely on instinct about what was troubling America and what America needed to make it great again."

"Ever since Jimmy Carter's early concession in 1980 was blamed for losses to down-ballot Democrats in Western states, both politicians and media outlets have been religious about not reporting the results until everyone's voted.

"But that's all about to change, starting early Tuesday morning.

"This year, a handful of different projects are underway to disrupt the rhythm and flow of information on Election Day -- including one controversial effort that some worry could affect the actual election results.

"Slate and Vice News have partnered with Votecastr, a company helmed by Obama and Bush campaign veterans, to provide real-time projections of how the candidates are faring in each state throughout the day. They expect to begin posting projections at 8 a.m. Eastern time on Election Day -- a dramatic departure from current practice, where representatives from a consortium of news organizations (The Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News) huddle in a quarantine room without cell phones, poring over the earliest exit poll data but declining to release anything that points to an election result until all the polls have closed."

Read entire article here.

"If you think our marathon election season will end on Tuesday, you might be wrong.

"'Margin of litigation' is a phrase we might hear a lot after Tuesday if the presidential election is close in one or more states. It refers to the number of votes by which a candidate must win in order to prevent litigation -- and delays -- before a result is final. Both parties will have armies of lawyers deployed on Election Night looking for irregularities and opportunities to go to court. On Sunday, Trump running mate Mike Pence told Fox News Sunday that 'a clear outcome, obviously both sides will accept.' But then he went on to say, 'I think both campaigns have also been very clear that, you know, in the event of disputed results, they reserve all legal rights and remedies.' ...

"It's said that the fervent wish of every election official is 'Lord, please don't make the election super close.' But if several of Tuesday's races are tight, we could enter a quagmire of recounts, lawsuits, and protests outside government offices. If you thought the election campaign was ugly, just wait in case there is a post-election legal contest."

"The FBI has found emails related to Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state on the laptop belonging to the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, according to a U.S. official.

"These emails, CBS News' Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton's private server. At this point, however, it remains to be seen whether these emails are significant to the FBI's investigation into Clinton. It is also not known how many relevant emails there are."

"It is, of course, true that Clinton has not yet been found guilty of any crime. That certainly shouldn't inhibit rational people from having an opinion about her actions. Richard Nixon was never found guilty of a crime, either. We have an abundance of evidence regarding her emails and foundation that point to corruption. Most of us don't have the power to right what we believe are injustices.

"The president, however, does. And if he truly believes that the FBI operates through innuendo and leaks rather than evidence, doesn't he have an obligation to fire the person in charge? If he truly believes the FBI is compromised and partisan in its investigation of Hillary Clinton -- which is still open and ongoing -- doesn't he have an obligation to call for a special prosecutor to make sure Hillary is given a fair shake?

"I look forward to someone with access asking him these questions, because it would be a dereliction of the president's duty to allow the nation's top law enforcement agencies to undermine justice."

"Because of Democratic and media furor over Director Comey's reopening of the Clinton e-mails investigation last week, the FBI is now under enormous pressure to review tens of thousands of e-mails stored on the laptop shared by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. The point is to hound the bureau into announcing before Election Day (seven days from now) whether any new classified e-mails have been found. If none are found, this outcome will be spun as yet another 'exoneration' of Hillary Clinton.

"Here, however, is the real outrage: Beneath all this noise, Loretta Lynch's Justice Department is blocking the FBI from examining Clinton e-mails in connection with its investigation of the Clinton Foundation -- an investigation that is every bit as serious.

"Were it not for the Clinton Foundation, there probably would not be a Clinton e-mail scandal. Mrs. Clinton's home-brew communications system was designed to conceal the degree to which the State Department was put in the service of Foundation donors who transformed the 'dead broke' Clintons into hundred-millionaires.

"At this point, the reopened classified-information investigation is a distraction: Under the Comey/DOJ 'insufficient intent evidence' rationale, there would be no charges even if previously undiscovered classified e-mails were found on the Abedin/Weiner computer. Instead, what is actually essential is that the FBI's Clinton Foundation investigators get access to all the thousands of Clinton e-mails, including those recovered from the Mills and Samuelson laptops. The agents must also have the time they need to piece together all the Clinton e-mails (from whatever source), follow up leads, and make their case."

Read entire piece here

"Collate the FBI reopened investigation, WikiLeaks Podesta trove, revelations about the Clinton Foundation, the e-mail-server scandal, the DNC disclosures, and the various off-the-cuff campaign remarks of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one then ponders what was the point of the Clinton shakedowns, the loss of reputation, the crude lawbreaking, as they neared their seventh decade. To paraphrase Barack Obama, in his progressive sermonizing on making enough money, did the two ever think they had enough money, enough honors, enough power already?

"The Hillary/Bill fortune -- generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary's aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies -- hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer."

"The surprise disclosure that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are taking a new look at Hillary Clinton's email use lays bare, just days before the election, tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. ...

"Early this year, four FBI field offices -- New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark. -- were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter.

"Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public-corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said."

Read entire article here.

"In an election season that has been full of surprises, let's hope the electorate understands that there is at least one thing of which it can be certain: A Hillary Clinton presidency will be built, from the ground up, on self-dealing, crony favors, and an utter disregard for the law.

"This isn't a guess. It is spelled out, in black and white, in the latest bombshell revelation from WikiLeaks. It comes in the form of a memo written in 2011 by longtime Clinton errand boy Doug Band, who for years worked simultaneously at the Clinton Foundation and at the head of his lucrative consulting business, Teneo.

"It is astonishingly detailed proof that the Clintons do not draw any lines between their 'charitable' work, their political activity, their government jobs or (and most important) their personal enrichment. Every other American is expected to keep these pursuits separate, as required by tax law, anticorruption law and campaign-finance law. For the Clintons, it is all one and the same -- the rules be damned."