November 1, 2016

I really don't understand how Trump is even competitive in this race

I know the country is very partisan, and Republicans hate Hillary, and all that, but I've never seen anyone run a worse presidential campaign than Trump. No one even close in my lifetime.

He's basically insulted every demographic possible, even his uneducated base of white males.

What rule or norm hasn't he broken? What cruel, racist, sexist obnoxious thing hasn't he said? He's been incoherent on policy. He's proposed seriously insane things. He knows almost nothing about the job of president and how the government works. He's insulted the military and the leadership, insulted the intelligence community. He doesn't understand nuclear weapons. He got absolutely trounced in the 3 debates. He shows every sign of being a Russian agent. He is petty, child-like, and has no impulse control. His voice and face and hair are grotesque. He's clearly a conman, and a scam artist. He has at least a dozen women accusing him of sexual assault!!!

I mean, WTF????????????????

I'm not saying Dems should be over-confident or anything, and I know the odds of Hillary winning are good. But I still don't get at all why he is even close? What is with ANYONE voting for this guy?

Just because he's supposedly rich? Somehow this rich elitist playboy appeals to working class folks and will be their champion??? They honestly think he's going to "make American great again", somehow without any real plan or without driving us into the ditch? Is it just conservatives have gone insane??? Do this many people really want to blow up the system?

Someone please help me.

November 1, 2016

Olbermann-- Is Donald Trump a Russian Agent?

November 1, 2016

NYT 11/1-- Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/donald-trump-tax.html

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

Thanks to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.

Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits on Mr. Trump for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City.

Some really shady stuff in this piece. And a reminder that we still have not seen Trump's federal tax returns and almost certainly will never see them.

October 31, 2016

Hillary's Email "Scandal" is the Biggest Load of Trumped Up GOP Nonsense ...

at least since the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair.

Is there any more transparent nonsense than this email story?

WHY is the media taking this seriously in the least?

WTF is it about the Clintons, that drives people crazy???

It bugs me no end that even liberals get taken in by this story. It's a distraction. Bernie thankfully admitted it from early on.

Remember, the WHOLE THING was driven by the completely politicized and bullshit Benghazi committee, whose Chairman admitted that the main purpose was to damage Hillary for her presidential run.

October 31, 2016

The Media Freakout Over the Clinton Email Story Is a Preview of the Next Four Years

http://prospect.org/article/media-freakout-over-clinton-email-story-preview-next-four-years

If there's an archetypal Clinton "scandal" story, it may be the one we saw break on Friday. Some piece of information is revealed, though it really isn't any information at all, just the fact that someone says there might be some information somewhere that we might someday find. There's nothing indicating any wrongdoing on anyone's part. There's nothing to be disturbed or outraged about, yet Republicans dutifully pretend to be disturbed and outraged anyway. And the media react as though they just got an injection of adrenalin, had a quadruple espresso, and then did five lines of coke. An explosion has rocked the campaign! New revelations send Clinton reeling! The race is upended!

If you find this profoundly depressing, then you're going to really hate the next four years.

But before we get to that, let's review. On Friday, FBI director James Comey sent members of Congress a letter that amounted to "Something something Hillary emails," so vague that it could barely be understood. Sure, it was just 11 days before the election, and the Justice Department has a clear policy against doing anything that threatens to be, or even be perceived as, the Department injecting itself into such a volatile political moment. But for whatever reason, Comey decided he simply had no choice.

Then journalists just about lost their minds. To take just one example, Saturday's New York Times had three separate articles about this story on its front page, written with the contributions of no fewer than seven of its top reporters. You'd think we had just learned that Clinton had killed Antonin Scalia with her bare hands before having an affair with Brad Pitt to break up his marriage to Angelina Jolie. By the time the weekend ended, a mountain of column inches and cable news hours had been devoted to the topic. Yet the most striking thing about this whole story is how empty it is.

You'd have to pay close attention to realize it, but there's virtually nothing there. The FBI, investigating Anthony Weiner's sexting with an underage girl, found metadata on his laptop indicating that emails from or to the Clintons' email server had passed through there. They were likely from or to his wife Huma Abedin, who had an account on that server. What were they about—chatting with friends, trading Game of Thrones recaps with co-workers, cat gifs? We don't know. Were any these emails from or to Hillary Clinton? We don't know. Did they contain classified information? We don't know. Was there any indication that somebody somewhere committed a crime? We don't know, because—and this is important—the FBI hasn't even read them. They needed to get a warrant to do so, which they didn't obtain until Sunday, two days after Comey made his blockbuster announcement. It'll take weeks to actually determine whether there's anything even remotely interesting there.

October 29, 2016

Rude Pundit: It's Alive: The FBI Reanimates the Clinton Email Server Fake Scandal

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2016/10/its-alive-fbi-reanimates-clinton-email.html

Well, the motherfuckin' joke was on every one of us motherfuckers.

Today, FBI Director James Comey released a nearly meaningless, cagey letter to members of Congress saying the FBI, while looking into some unnamed matter, found some emails "that appear pertinent to the investigation" of Clinton's private email server. So the FBI is gonna check 'em out to see if "they contain classified information" and if they have any "importance to our investigation."

This isn't a "reopening" of the investigation, as everyone is breathlessly saying. If it had ever been closed, Comey wouldn't have said he was going to "supplement" his previous report. It would be a new investigation. Besides, reporter Pete Williams says that the emails aren't actually from Clinton, just from a device that was found. In other words, chances are it's a big fucking pile of nothing and Comey was covering his ass and/or starting up some shit because he's, hell, who knows? bored? Or was he trying to get the FBI out of the crosshairs of the Republican pigfuckers in Congress who have vowed nonstop investigations of the bureau?

And thus, with a whiff of pheromones in the air, the right-wing feeding frenzy went from "shit fight at a monkeyhouse" to "weasels fucking after getting into the meth stash." All of a sudden, Trump was loving the FBI after talking shit about it for months, and declared that the email "scandal" was "bigger than Watergate" (and obviously more important than being a sexual predator). The Republican National Committee, facing the loss of the Senate and the potential loss of the House, went all in on saying that the mere hint at some iota of something slightly suspicious automatically disqualifies Clinton. Conservatives yelped out in simultaneous orgasm all over social media. Sean Hannity was last seen still convulsing on the floor of his office as a weeping intern waited to clean him up. Ann Coulter just squirted and exploded.

October 29, 2016

Rude Pundit: It's Alive: The FBI Reanimates the Clinton Email Server Fake Scandal

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2016/10/its-alive-fbi-reanimates-clinton-email.html

Well, the motherfuckin' joke was on every one of us motherfuckers.

Today, FBI Director James Comey released a nearly meaningless, cagey letter to members of Congress saying the FBI, while looking into some unnamed matter, found some emails "that appear pertinent to the investigation" of Clinton's private email server. So the FBI is gonna check 'em out to see if "they contain classified information" and if they have any "importance to our investigation."

This isn't a "reopening" of the investigation, as everyone is breathlessly saying. If it had ever been closed, Comey wouldn't have said he was going to "supplement" his previous report. It would be a new investigation. Besides, reporter Pete Williams says that the emails aren't actually from Clinton, just from a device that was found. In other words, chances are it's a big fucking pile of nothing and Comey was covering his ass and/or starting up some shit because he's, hell, who knows? bored? Or was he trying to get the FBI out of the crosshairs of the Republican pigfuckers in Congress who have vowed nonstop investigations of the bureau?

And thus, with a whiff of pheromones in the air, the right-wing feeding frenzy went from "shit fight at a monkeyhouse" to "weasels fucking after getting into the meth stash." All of a sudden, Trump was loving the FBI after talking shit about it for months, and declared that the email "scandal" was "bigger than Watergate" (and obviously more important than being a sexual predator). The Republican National Committee, facing the loss of the Senate and the potential loss of the House, went all in on saying that the mere hint at some iota of something slightly suspicious automatically disqualifies Clinton. Conservatives yelped out in simultaneous orgasm all over social media. Sean Hannity was last seen still convulsing on the floor of his office as a weeping intern waited to clean him up. Ann Coulter just squirted and exploded.

October 29, 2016

Everyone please calm down... I can't believe how many people are freaking out here about

the email story. It's a nothing burger and deserves to be treated as such.

Ordinary people don't care about this story, and the vast majority of people have already made up their mind. Who is really going to vote Trump now, that were thinking of voting for Hillary because of this?

The media and the GOP are being ridiculous, as usual, because they are desperate for a competitive race.

October 29, 2016

A newly surfaced video shows Donald Trump grabbing and kissing a former Miss Universe onstage

this whole video is so gross... UGHH. He's such a fucking creep. Just his overall attitude is SICK.

http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/10/28/13459750/trump-video-miss-universe-grab-kiss-jennifer-hawkins

October 28, 2016

The conspiracy theory-based campaign of Donald Trump and the GOP

I woke up with the thought that basically almost every criticism of Hillary from the right boils down to some conspiracy theory where they assume ill intent on her part, or that there is some greater involvement of her than there is any evidence for, or where we just don't have the complete set of facts. The email scandal, pay-for-play with her foundation, Benghazi, Libya, Syria, stealing the election from Bernie. The list goes on. Basically EVERY criticism of Hillary by the right is base don some conspiracy theory, some wikileaks email blown out of proportion, etc. A long string of Hillary conspiracy theories, as fun as they may be for conservatives, is not a good basis for winning the presidency.

And there's also a reason why none of this has really stuck to her-- because the evidence is not there.

Whereas with Trump, all the problems with him are out right out there in front of us, on video, or twitter. His own words are not a conspiracy!

To some extent, the GOP in 2012 ran a campaign based on silly lies, like taking Obama's line about "you didn't build this" out of context, or that he didn't call Benghazi an terrorist attack. But with joining forces of Breitbart and Alex Jones, the GOP has gone full crazy conspiracy theory. Which is why they really can't be reasoned with at all, anymore, and why they are losing.