June 21, 2016

Mr. Trump’s sense of humor is about as sharp as a soup spoon.

At roasts, the “guest of honor” gets to give a rebuttal — written by professional comedians — to the people who have spent the past hour raking him over the coals. While most guests of honor will be good-natured about poking fun at themselves, Mr. Trump was not, according to Mr. Joyce. He said the writing team would send potential jokes to Mr. Trump, and the script would come back with the punch lines blacked out with marker.

“He would literally send it back redacted, like a real estate contract. I’ve never seen anybody do this before,” Mr. Joyce said.



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/opinion/campaign-stops/can-you-insult-your-way-to-the-white-house.html

June 21, 2016

#TrumpSoPoor

Duh! Of COURSE Trump has virtually no "cash on hand!" Have you seen his hands?

THE ONE PRESIDENTIAL candidate who’s staked his reputation on being “really rich” is actually not all that rich, at least, not as far as his campaign is concerned.

On Monday, the Federal Election Commission’s monthly report revealed a historic gap between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaign war chests. Where Clinton ended the month with $42 million in cash on hand, Trump rounded out May with just $1.3 million. To put that in context, that’s less than the $1.8 million Ben Carson’s campaign still has left, and Carson dropped out of the race in March.

Word traveled fast, and overnight, the hashtag #TrumpSoPoor began trending on Twitter, spawning endless tweets about his business dealings…

my favorite:

#TrumpSoPoor his next trophy wife will be from Mexico.
https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/745090241313177600

http://www.wired.com/2016/06/trumpsopoor-trending-well-kind/
https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpSoPoor?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpSoPoor?src=tren&data_id=tweet%3A745186104815423488

June 21, 2016

The Trump Campaign Spent $208,000 on Hats in May

Trump is totally crushing Clinton in the all-important campaign infrastructure category of hat buying.


https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/745098363155132416


http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/06/21/the-trump-campaign-spent-208000-on-hats-in-may-n2181535



hat tip to liberal N proud for reminding me about this:

June 21, 2016

Robert Crumb & Friends Flush Donald Trump Down The Toilet, 1989

Such a thing actually fucking exists!

In 1991 Crumb left America for France, but before he did so he put out “Point the Finger,” a comic about a certain over-publicized real estate mogul that appeared in his short run of Hup comics (Issue #3). In the five-page strip, “Crumb” (the character) has a run-in with Trump, whom he calls “one of the more visible big time predators who feed on society” and “one of the most evil men alive.” He also says, “Hey Don—Ugh! You’re so hateful I can’t even look at you!”




http://dangerousminds.net/comments/robert_crumb_and_friends_flush_donald_trump_down_the_toilet_1989






MORE:
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/robert_crumb_and_friends_flush_donald_trump_down_the_toilet_1989

June 21, 2016

Will Trump Swallow the G.O.P. Whole?

Inside the identity crisis roiling the Republican Party.

By MARK LEIBOVICH
JUNE 21, 2016



Every week or so during the spring, I met with Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, at the party headquarters on Capitol Hill. We fell into a familiar routine. I would enter his office, usually chaperoned by Sean Spicer, the R.N.C.’s chief strategist and head of communications. Priebus has a healthy appreciation for gallows humor, which is not a bad thing for an R.N.C. chairman these days. “I haven’t started pouring Baileys in my cereal yet,” he says often enough that it has become a signature line. I would regularly break the ice with something sarcastic, like asking Priebus how his party’s Hispanic outreach program was going on the morning after the committee’s head of Hispanic outreach resigned rather than work another day for Donald Trump’s election. “The scent of party unity is in the air,” I said in May when Paul Ryan reported that he was “not there yet” on supporting Trump. “No, that’s incense,” Priebus said, pointing out that he had been burning some behind his desk.

As suits a man occupying what might be the toughest political job in America, Priebus does his best to stay availed of serene distractions. He plays jazz piano at home late at night and gazes into the 29-gallon saltwater fish tank that he keeps next to his desk. “You see that big eel?” Priebus asked one day, pointing out a black slithery creature on the bottom, before noting others. “That’s a yellow tang, hippo tang, a spotted puffer. There’s an anemone. An urchin. An orange clown fish.” He took a hunk of shrimp from a refrigerator and dangled it with a set of tongs into the water. A race to the bottom ensued as bits fell away and the fish vied for pieces of flesh. It was difficult to look away from the feeding frenzy. The big orange clown fish flailed at front and center. I asked Priebus if it reminded him of anyone. “That’s not funny,” he said with something between a slight grunt and chuckle.

No matter how much Trump has roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it. The presumed Republican nominee appears on many days to be at open war with the party that is about to nominate him. The entire campaign, meanwhile, has been a proxy battle for the proverbial “soul of the party” that has been escalating between the G.O.P.’s populist grass roots (captured by Trump) and “party leaders” (embodied by Priebus, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell). Is the G.O.P. now the “party of Trump”? Priebus bristles when people ask him this — or taunt him. I asked Priebus some variation on this question during each of my visits. “Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” Priebus says. “And the party is the party.”

..............

For a while this spring, it seemed possible to contain the earthquake. Trump showed flickering signs of “maturing” as a candidate, and Republicans seemed willing to “support the nominee,” if not endorse him. The “normalization” of Donald Trump became a media watchword, the idea that his daily affronts could be integrated into the routine paces of a quadrennial exercise. Formerly hostile primary opponents like Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry all at various points said they would support Trump or were at least no longer (in Rubio’s case) deriding him as a “fraud,” “con man” and “lunatic” or (in Graham’s) a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” or (in Jindal’s) a “madman who must be stopped” or (in Perry’s) a “barking carnival act.” I imagined Trump laughing at how easy it was to get Republicans to submit to him after he had savaged so many of them during the primaries. Actually there was no need to imagine because Trump was doing exactly that. “I’ve never seen people able to pivot like politicians,” he said at a rally in California in late May while boasting of his support from Perry. In an interview, I asked Trump if it was harder to flip politicians or the real estate people he has dealt with over the years. His smirk was audible over the phone. “Well, I’m not referring to any politicians in particular, but I’ve said many times that businesspeople are much tougher,” Trump said. “Politicians tend to be much more deceptive and deceiving and more willing to break a deal. But they are not as tough.”


Way, way more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/magazine/will-trump-swallow-the-gop-whole.html?_r=0

June 21, 2016

NRA & Congress

The Republicans like to mouth their concern over the mass shootings, and their desire to prevent terrorists from buying guns -- but their votes yesterday show just the opposite. They voted to continue allowing anyone to legally buy a gun, and to ignore the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans. They still believe that the profits of gun manufacturers are more important than the lives of their fellow citizens.

http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2016/06/gop-senators-vote-to-let.html


New York Daily News Slams Senate Gun Vote With Bloodied Capitol Building
?cache=hfjpf3lh8k
Seemingly unfazed by the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history just eight days earlier, the Senate chose the latter, voting down proposals aimed at keeping weapons out of the hands of suspected terrorists and tightening background checks.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/daily-news-senate-guns_us_5768a959e4b0fbbc8beb83de?section=


Every senator who voted AGAINST background checks & how much they got from NRA:
https://twitter.com/igorvolsky/status/745039215520514048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

June 21, 2016

Sen. Chris Murphy: ‘Republicans Have Decided to Sell Weapons to ISIS’

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told the Washington Post be that Republicans are partially culpable for attacks like the Orlando nightclub shooting because they refuse to restrict gun sales to those on the terror watch list.

Said Murphy: “We’ve got to make this clear, constant case that Republicans have decided to sell weapons to ISIS.”

He added: “ISIS has decided that the assault weapon is the new airplane, and Republicans, in refusing to close the terror gap, refusing to pass bans on assault weapons, are allowing these weapons to get in the hands of potential lone-wolf attackers. We’ve got to make this connection and make it in very stark terms.”

https://politicalwire.com/2016/06/20/republicans-have-decided-to-sell-weapons-to-isis/

June 20, 2016

We Have Found The Weapons Of Mass Destruction - They're In Congress, holding up gun reforms

VOTE THEM OUT!!!



Congress is the most powerful enabler of gun violence in America, unmoved from their Second Amendment alarmism even by the slaughter of 49 people by a terrorist using a weapon of war that he purchased legally. Voting these elected officials out is of primary importance for any effective gun reform agenda to progress. Before we can talk about ways to have fewer shootings, Congress needs fewer cowardly Democrats — and fewer Republicans, period.

The entire House of Representatives, of course, is up for reelection in November. Twenty-four of the 34 Senate seats being contested are Republican, secured during the great tea-party wave of 2010. The GOP won control of the Senate that year, but with the indefensible and severely unpopular Donald Trump running at the top of their ticket, they could suffer some significant losses — if not outright lose control — in 2016. Democrats need to gain five seats, which is possible; Republican incumbents face tough races in Ohio, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Illinois, and (potentially) Florida, for example. Perhaps, if Democrats regain the majority, progressive legislators who haven’t yet stepped up might find the strength in numbers that they have so far failed to find in their consciences.

And lest we forget: Defeating these Republicans, especially on a gun-control platform, also means defeating the National Rifle Association. Anyone who’s played with puppets knows it’s not easy to get them to sit on their hands, so the NRA has accomplished quite a feat and should be applauded for its skill at stagecraft, if nothing else. The GOP would rather endorse hyperbolic lies about the Second Amendment to keep people buying firearms than take even superficial measures to address gun violence. PSA, guys: No, the Democrats are not coming for “all your guns” and/or seeking to abolish the constitutional right to bear arms. If only they were!

................

We know where the problem lies. None of us should be content to await disappointment. In the coming months, the most urgent action citizens can take for gun control will be inside a polling booth.


MORE:
http://www.mtv.com/news/2894605/we-have-found-the-weapons-of-mass-destruction/?utm=share_twitter



Every senator who voted AGAINST background checks & how much they got from @NRA
:large
https://twitter.com/igorvolsky

June 20, 2016

Hillary Clinton issues one word statement on Senate gun amendments failing: "Enough"

Hillary Clinton's statement on the Senate guns votes. "Enough."
And the names of the Orlando victims.



https://twitter.com/danmericaCNN/status/745038648635232256
https://twitter.com/jeneps/status/745038628196225024

June 20, 2016

Evidence is growing that gun violence in America is a product of weak gun laws

:large

http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21700596-evidence-growing-gun-violence-america-product-weak-gun-laws-guns?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/gunsinamericaahistoryofviolence