“If you’re a progressive, you can and should critique Hillary Clinton right now — and that doesn’t have to mean that you want Donald Trump to be president,” writes Steven Thrasher at The Guardian.

It means we are still using our brains, “That we are not checkmated,” as Michelle Alexander puts it, that engaging in discourse is not just possible, but necessary in a race with less than terrific choices. No matter who you ultimately vote for, don’t stop demanding a candidate endorse policies that benefit you in order to get your support, even if you vote for them.

Clinton should be pushed relentlessly by the left on her economic policies and history, for starters. While she made fun of Trump on the stump for having “a dozen or so economic advisers he just named: hedge fund guys, billionaire guys, six guys named Steve, apparently,” she is living in a glass house funded by Goldman Sachs and should be throwing no stones. We’ll see whether she does in the big economic policy speech she is due to give on Thursday.

They’re not named Steve, but Clinton’s been courting endorsements from billionaires Meg Whitman, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg. Her own son-in-law is a “hedge fund guy”, and the Wall Street Journal reported that “hedge fund money has vastly favored Clinton over Trump” to the tidy sum of $122m. Being bothered by what this portends for our economic future this is not a vote for Trump.

Continue reading.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.