September 30, 2016

Philippines' Duterte likens himself to Hitler, wants to kill millions of drug users

Source: Reuters

By Karen Lema and Manuel Mogato | MANILA

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte appeared to liken himself to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on Friday and said he would "be happy" to exterminate three million drug users and peddlers in the country.

His comments triggered shock and anger among Jewish groups in the United States, which will add to pressure on the U.S. government to take a tougher line with the Philippines leader. Duterte recently insulted President Barack Obama and in a series of remarks he has undermined the previously close relationship between Manila and Washington.

In a rambling speech on his arrival in Davao City after a visit to Vietnam, Duterte told reporters that he had been "portrayed to be a cousin of Hitler" by critics. Noting that Hitler had murdered millions of Jews, Duterte said: "There are three million drug addicts (in the Philippines). I'd be happy to slaughter them.

"If Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have...," he said, pausing and pointing to himself.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-hitler-idUSKCN1200B9

September 29, 2016

Trump’s desperate dive into the sewer - By Jennifer Rubin

By Jennifer Rubin September 29 at 11:45 AM

Having suffered a humiliating loss on Monday and dug themselves a deeper hole in the days afterward, Donald Trump and his brain trust have come up with one of their most feeble gambits: If Hillary Clinton keeps talking about Trump’s treatment of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, why, he’s going to bring up Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky. This is just dumb. (Republicans sensing disaster are trying to dissuade him from going down this road.) Let’s count the ways this is likely to backfire:

First, Clinton is never so sympathetic as when she is the long-suffering wife. Trump and his hard-core fans may think they can convince millions outside their right-wing bubble that she was an “enabler,” but the average voter doesn’t recall all the details and doesn’t believe it. The whole crass attack smacks of blaming the victim.

Second, the argument that “I am a rotten human being, but your husband is, too” in essence acknowledges that Trump is a cruel bully. To the extent that members of the public remember the 1990s, they know Bill Clinton was a cad, but that doesn’t take away from Trump’s image as a no-good, abusive figure. In fact, dredging up Flowers and Lewinsky confirms that Trump uses women for selfish ends.

Third, this is intensely un-presidential. Trump was supposed to be showing a more disciplined, restrained and mature version of himself. The latest gambit certainly does not help in this regard.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/09/29/trumps-desperate-dive-into-the-sewer/?utm_term=.4ab76e1f5b87&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1

September 29, 2016

Trump Asks Supporters to Tell Him to Attack Hillary More

By Ed Kilgore

Donald Trump’s campaign continues to make up new rules for post-debate behavior. First, they were frantic to claim he won overwhelmingly, while the candidate himself spent time attacking the Venezuelan beauty-pageant winner whose treatment at his hands was the subject of a pretty effective volley by Hillary Clinton on Monday night. But now, Team Trump is looking ahead … with a strange survey of his supporters.

Framed as a “Debate Preparation Survey” in anticipation of the next debate, it asks 30 questions about what Trump did or should have done in the first debate. Eighteen of the 29 questions test out attack lines on Hillary Clinton. Mostly, they involve issues and pseudo-issues he failed to bring up in the first debate (“Should Trump attack Hillary for referring to tens of millions of American men and women as ‘deplorables’?” and “Should Trump have called out Hillary’s massive Wall Street fundraising and the paid speeches that she refuses to release to the public?”). There are proposed attacks on Clinton involving Obamacare, too, and her alleged hatred of coal miners.

There is approximately a zero percent chance that respondents to Trump’s survey will say “no” to any of these proposed attack lines. Had its designers offered “Hell yes!” or “Damn straight!” as options, they might have obtained some relatively useful information. As it is, the survey appears to represent an indirect apology for Trump’s failure to cover the anti-Clinton landscape the first time around, along with a permission slip for him to go medieval on his opponent at the next opportunity.

Another possible motive could be to set up expectations for what future moderators ought to be asking the candidates about, so that anything other than an inquisition of Hillary Clinton can be described as biased. That could be a bit tricky for the next debate, with a “town hall” format wherein all the questions will be posed by “real people” in the audience or online. Team Trump probably should not attack the American people or their representatives for failing to focus sufficiently on Benghazi.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/trump-asks-supporters-to-tell-him-to-attack-hillary-more.html

September 29, 2016

Hillary Clinton Can’t Let Donald Trump Win the Corruption Issue

By Jonathan Chait

Donald Trump’s campaign is signaling that its new, post-first-debate message will be an attack on Hillary Clinton’s finances, under the catchphrase “Follow the money.” This is probably Trump’s most fruitful avenue of attack. The Clinton Foundation has created appearances of a conflict of interest, and the Clintons’ policy of accepting speaking fees from any source as long as the check would clear the bank has tarnished her image, and months of bashing at the hands of Bernie Sanders left her branded in the mind of many young liberals as a handmaiden of Wall Street.

And yet the notion that a voter ought to support Trump over Clinton on grounds of financial ethics or transparency is insane. Trump is corrupt on a world-historic scale. Andrew Prokop’s summary merely skims the surface of a career that has left hardly any rule or norm of business conduct un-violated. It is not only Trump’s history of misconduct, or even his ongoing abuse of his foundation for personal gain, but his astonishing promise, if elected, to continue to abuse his power to enrich himself by having his children manage his branded business that he will enhance via public office.

Even if none of that were true, it remains the case that Trump has shattered modern precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns. How on Earth can a candidate run on the slogan “Follow the money” while stonewalling any questions about his own money? The only possible context in which this makes sense is a myopic, context-free focus on Clinton’s ethical shortcomings, combined with the assumption that Trump’s dangerous lunacy amounts to some kind of independence from big moneyed interests.

That the latter is not the case is a point Clinton ought to press more forcefully. A Gallup poll finds that, for voters under 35 years old, the only issue on which Trump beats Clinton is “government regulation of Wall Street and banks.” This is an understandable heuristic based on a combination of Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Sanders positioning himself to her left on financial regulation, and the uncertainty with which Wall Street views Trump.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/clinton-cant-let-trump-win-the-corruption-issue.html

September 29, 2016

Clinton’s Hand Gestures During the Debate Are the Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory Du Jour

By Adam K. Raymond

When is a scratch of the nose more than a scratch of a nose? When it’s a hand signal from Hillary Clinton to Lester Holt, telling the moderator of the first presidential debate to let Clinton jump in with a zinger.

That’s what happened Monday night on a handful of occasions according to a YouTube video called “Signaled and Triggered #RiggedDebate,” which had just over 60,000 views before YouTube yanked it down. Posted by a user called “400 lb hacker,” the video was removed this afternoon due to a copyright claim, but other users have re-uploaded it. The theory, which Trump supporters are eating up, was also mentioned today by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show.

The premise of the conspiracy is hard to get behind. It suggests that Clinton’s hand signals to Holt signaled him to give her a chance to speak without asking a new question, allowing her to let loose with a “zinger” related to the last thing Trump said. But why would that even be necessary? If Holt had completely changed the subject, there would have been nothing stopping Clinton from unleashing her “zingers” simply as an aside before starting in on the new topic.

Holt asking Clinton for her response to what Trump said was not a sign of him teeing her up, it was exactly how the debate was supposed to be conducted. Here’s how the Commission on Presidential Debates described the format of Monday’s debate: “The moderator will open each segment with a question, after which each candidate will have two minutes to respond. Candidates will then have an opportunity to respond to each other.”

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/hillarys-hand-gestures-are-the-subject-of-conspiracy-theory.html

September 29, 2016

GOP leaders express reservations a day after 9/11 veto override

Source: The Hill

By Jordain Carney - 09/29/16 02:29 PM EDT

A day after the House and Senate overwhelmingly voted to override President Obama's veto, GOP leaders are expressing reservations about legislation that would allow lawsuits related to 9/11 to go forward against Saudi Arabia.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) both said they were open to discussions about changing the bill, which Congress approved unanimously.

"I do think it's worth further discussions, but it was certainly not something that was going to be fixed this week," McConnell told reporters on Thursday. McConnell also criticized the lack of a discussion about "the potential consequences" of a very "popular bill."

Ryan agreed that Congress may need to "fix" the legislation but said he wasn't sure when that would happen.

Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/298530-gop-leaders-open-to-fixing-saudi-9-11-bill

September 29, 2016

Top Trump Aide Doesn't Deny Report Trump Company Spent Money In Cuba

Source: Talking Points Memo

In an appearance on "The View" Thursday morning, Donald Trump's campaign manager insisted that a report alleging one of his companies broke the Cuban trade embargo in 1998 does not mean that the candidate had been “treasonous.” But she did say “they paid money, as I understand from the story, they paid money in 1998," referring to the story published by Newsweek hours earlier.

“The question is: ‘Did he spend money?’ He’s very critical of Cuba, he’s very critical of Castro, and he’s been critical,” Kellyanne Conway said. “He gave a speech the very next year to the Cuban-American National foundation of Miami critical of those who want to do business with Castro, and he’s talked about the Cuban Embargo even on this campaign trail.”

“But again, we’re talking about, ‘Did his hotel invest money in 1998 in Cuba?’ No,” she continued.

Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts paid at least $68,000 to a consulting firm called called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp., which sent consultants to Cuba for the purposes of "giving Trump’s company a foothold should Washington loosen or lift the trade restrictions” on the Communist country, according to the investigation from Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald. Seven Arrows advised Trump Hotels to mask the consulting bill as a charitable expense, according to the report.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/conway-view-trump-cuba-embargo

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Watch the exchange below at 2:32:

September 29, 2016

Trump's rise draws white supremacists into political mainstream: 'I am winning,' says David Duke

Lisa Mascaro

David Duke worked the Louisiana gun show like a preacher pursuing souls, cornering potential voters as they picked over firearms and ammo.

The robes are gone and the rhetoric is softer than during his grand wizard days. But Duke has not shed his relentless proselytizing for the white race, even though voters have repeatedly rejected the former Ku Klux Klan leader’s attempts to regain public office.

Duke is undeterred. As he sees it, this is the moment. After last running for election in 1999, he’s back with a long-shot bid for Louisiana’s open U.S. Senate seat.

And his reason for optimism is clear: Donald Trump.

“I love it,” said Duke, 66, tearing into a chicken garlic pizza at a nearby restaurant later. “The fact that Donald Trump’s doing so well, it proves that I’m winning. I am winning.”

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http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-david-duke-20160928-snap-story.html

September 29, 2016

Reid Says GOP 'Treated President Obama With Unprecedented Disrespect'

Source: Talking Points Memo

By LAUREN FOX Published SEPTEMBER 29, 2016, 10:56 AM EDT

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) went to the Senate floor Thursday morning to declare that when history looks back on the current Congress, it will "note the Republicans in Congress treated President Obama with unprecedented disrespect."

"President Obama is the first President to be denied a hearing on his budget. He's the first President to be denied a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee. President Obama is the first President asked to show his birth certificate," Reid said on the floor. "President Obama is the first President to face over 500 filibusters here in the Senate. In this Republican Senate, President Obama will receive fewer nominees confirmed than any President in many many decades. Republicans have not done their basic work of government."

The comments were part of a string of political speeches Reid has given on the floor in recent months, as the general election has approached and Congress' productivity has come to a screeching halt. During his speech, Reid blamed Republican obstructionism and political games for laying the groundwork for Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

"They would have us believe that Trump just fell out of the sky and somehow mysteriously became the nominee of the party, but that's not the way it is," Reid said. "Everything that he's said, stood for, done in this bizarre campaign that he's run has come, filtered up, from what's going on in the Republican Senate." Trump, Reid said, "is the monster Republicans built. He is their Frankenstein monster. They own him," he said.

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Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/reid-gop-congress-obama-disrespect

September 29, 2016

EXCLUSIVE: NY Attorney General's Probe Of Trump Foundation Appears To Widen

Source: Talking Points Memo

By TIERNEY SNEED Published SEPTEMBER 29, 2016, 11:07 AM EDT

The New York attorney general's investigation of the Donald J. Trump Foundation appears to have broadened to include new allegations of self-dealing by Trump that surfaced after the probe began, TPM has learned.

The town of Palm Beach, Florida, has provided documents to the New York Attorney General's Office as part of the probe, a lawyer for the town confirmed to TPM on Wednesday. The documents relate to a legal dispute that Trump settled with the town using foundation money. The details of the 2007 Palm Beach case were first reported by the Washington Post last week.

"The New York Attorney General’s Office did contact me in regard to this matter," John Randolph, the Palm Beach town attorney, told TPM Wednesday evening. "I just sent them the documents that I had previously sent to the Washington Post."

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had announced earlier this month, before the Washington Post's reporting on the Palm Beach case, that his office had opened an investigation into Trump Foundation after it was reported that Trump had used foundation money to buy personal gifts for himself.

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/trump-foundation-new-york-attorney-general-palm-beach