October 03, 2016

Big Fat Zero: Trump Plummets In Polls As Post-Debate Positive Hillary Vibe Rises

October 03, 2016/ Anne Enke

Christie, Giuliani on Tax Bombshell: Trump A 'Genius' Politico

Trump's boys club hunkers down around Trump paying no taxes for roads, bridges, social security benefits, the military and all other federal programs. He's a 'genius'!!!

"There's no one who's shown more genius in their way to maneuver around the tax code," New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday."

Trump's campaign was playing defense after a Saturday New York Times story revealed hat Trump reported a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, allowing him to avoid paying federal income taxes for as long as 18 years. Trump has refused to release his tax returns.

"The headline should have been, 'Donald Trump takes advantage of legal provisions in tax code,'" former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said on CNN's "State of the Union."

Group Apologizes for Giuliani's 'Unscripted' Remarks At Awards Dinner; Trump's Attack Dog Loses Major Upcoming Keynote Speech AOC

Is the Trump campaign in meltdown mode? Top Trump adviser and surrogate Rudi Giuliani spoke at a recent Commercial Finance Association event -- the 40 Under 40 dinner at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. A formal apology was issued for his appalling remarks where -- like his big buddy Donald Trump -- the former New York mayor went totally off script.

Whether or not it was these exact remarks that precipitated the cancellation of Giuliani's upcoming keynote address at a conference held by the International Council of Shopping Centers is unknown.
While the apology for Giuliani's Waldorf Astoria speech did not include his specific remarks, one attendee reported: “Rudy talked about immigration and made a really, really inappropriate comment about the quote-unquote Mexicans in the kitchen at the Waldorf,” the attendee said. “It was bad. You could hear a pin drop. I think he was looking for applause.”

Note that with all the accusations against Hillary Clinton over her $200,000 speaking fees, Rudy Giuliani earned more than $11 million in paid speech in the 13 months directly prior to kicking off his Republican presidential campaign in February 2007. Did anyone in the media care? No. ~ Anne

When Youth Violence Spurred 'Superpredator' Fear New York Times

A self-proclaimed mansplainer Bernie Bros who refuses to vote for Hillary for countless reasons wrote today that she 'coined' the term 'superpredator'. SHE DID NOT!!!!!!!!

If Hillary Clinton is guilty of anything, it's being her wonk self when she testified about youth violence in America and used the false and unfortunate term 'superpredator'.

The term 'superpredator' was first used by an inmate but then incorporated into the research work of "John J. DiIulio Jr., then a political scientist at Princeton. Chaos was upon us, Mr. DiIulio proclaimed back then in scholarly articles and television interviews. The demographics, he said, were inexorable. Politicians from both major parties, though more so on the right, picked up the cry. Many news organizations pounced on these sensational predictions and ran with them like a punt returner finding daylight."

I'm pulling together a FB note on this entire topic because we have millennials everywhere believing that Hillary Clinton coined the term 'superpredator'. SHE DID NOT!!!

This 2014 article and fantastic, informative video tells the story of how this deadly superpredator theory came into being. ~ Anne

I Wrote That I Despised Hillary Clinton. Today I Publicly Take It Back. Huffington Post

"When Hillary Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee, I was distraught. Months before I had written about her on Huffington Post, explaining that I despised her not for her gender — as some of her supporters accused — but for her hawkishness, her center-left policies, her husband’s crime bill that incarcerated so many people of color, her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and her inability to get progressive on climate change policy.

I’ve spent almost every waking hour of every day following this election, reading about Hillary, Donald Trump, both parties’ platforms, and the under-qualified Libertarian and Green Party candidates running. During these months of obsessing over my choice, I’ve watched my position slowly shift. I’ve felt myself start advocating for Hillary more than advocating a vote against Trump, culminating in last night’s debate when she finally, totally, completely won me over.

In an election that features one of the most well-documented liars and scam artist businessmen to ever run for public office, much of the attention has been on him — how we can’t put him in office, give him keys to a nuclear warhead, trust him in the most powerful position in the world. Some of it has been more positive: how he’d turn the system on its head, be a Washington outsider, completely rewrite the script. While it’s easy to make the case for voting against Trump, it occurred to me during the debate last night how much we’ve taken Clinton for granted.

Let’s start with a simple but important position: Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person to ever run for president.

{. . . }

All this work, and what did Clinton get? She got an actual smug, young journalist named Isaac Saul writing about how I despised her, when I hardly knew the depth of her accomplishments, when I was clinging to the pipe dream of a Bernie Sanders presidency that may have never been in the cards, when my own father got ignored while he tried his best to talk some sense into me.

Secretary Clinton, I’m sorry. And I retract my previous position of hatred and angst towards you. You have made mistakes, some of them grave, and some of them unforgivable. Unfortunately, that comes with decades of life in the public eye, pressure and microphones in your face. But you have also accomplished far more in your life as a public servant than just about anyone that’s run for this office, and certainly far more than I ever will. When November rolls around, you’ll have my vote.

And you’ll get it enthusiastically."

Hillary Clinton Headlines October 2, 2016

Post-debate, Clinton takes the lead CNN

Hillary Clinton edges ahead of Donald Trump after first debate CBS News

Trump appears to suggest veterans are not 'strong' Politico

Trump running out of time as controversies pile up CNN

Clinton Promises 'End to End' Criminal Justice Reform in Pitch to Black Voters Politico

Sanders Says Clinton Comments in Leaked Audio 'Absolutely Correct' ABC News

Virginia poll shows Clinton with 7-point lead The Hill

Donald Trump Reportedly Pressured His Second Wife to Appear in Playboy Huffington Post

LeBron James: Why I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton Business Insider

In a Time of Trump, Millennial Jews Awaken to Anti-Semitism Politico

Oregon gubernatorial candidate says educated, 'powerful' women not susceptible to domestic violence minutes after opponent reveals she was abuse victim NY Daily News

Trump's bad week is a 'nightmare' for the GOP Washington Post

Trump Is No Moral Exemplar -- He's a Champion The Atlantic

Vermont Democrats: Where's Bernie? Politico

September 12, 2016

Keith Olbermann for GQ Links Trump To Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Jefferson Davis & Other American Firsters

September 12, 2016/ Anne Enke

Why Donald Trump gets a pass Politico

There is no doubt that Trump voters have a different set of expectations for their candidate, and it's politically correct to be quiet about it. They love his being a renegade who wants to build walls and say Hillary Clinton could shoot people in the heart and not be arrested. They love Trump's fist-in-your face attitude, saying he would blow up Iran in their serious and concerning skirmishes with the American navy. Trump is the ultimate macho f#ck you candidate, and Trumpsters love him for it. I disagree with Politico that the press is blameless because they made Trump a hero for ratings and profits. But based on the extensive polling and behavior of Trump supporters, he accurately represents the attitudes of large numbers of his supporters -- every poll we read DOES have numbers in the 45-70% approve scale on issues Clinton supporters vehemently disagree with like illegal immigrants are moochers. There was a 50 pt difference between Trump and Clinton supporters on data we posted last night.
Let's start talking -- not only about the candidates -- but the values of the supporters of both presidential candidates. They are REAL and the press shouldn't be scooping them under the carpet every day. ~ Anne

“We’d show voters stupid things he’s said, and they’d just shrug and say, ‘That’s just Trump being Trump,’” said one Democratic operative who has observed Clinton campaign focus groups. “It was a fairly common response, and it was horrifying.”

"People are willing to give him a pass because he doesn’t have a career in service. I think it’s the wrong approach because you should be assessing the candidate’s readiness to do the job,” said Lanhee Chen, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign who recalls how Romney was excoriated for “gaffes” during his Europe trip that, by comparison to Trump’s behavior on an almost daily basis, would now be considered as minor mistakes. “People have such low expectations because his campaign has been so dysfunctional that when they run like a normal campaign should run, people tend to give them a lot of credit. There’s a relativism there.”
Indeed, Trump’s turn to scripted speeches, delivered via teleprompter in the last month since bringing in his third campaign manager to date, have been widely characterized as a much-awaited “pivot” into a “more presidential” mode — even though the candidate’s message hasn’t changed much. During one such speech before a raucous crowd in Pensacola on Friday night, Trump returned went off-script and told the crowd that Clinton could literally get away with murder.

“She could walk into this arena right now and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching, right smack in the middle of the heart, and she wouldn’t be prosecuted,” Trump said. “OK? That’s what’s happening.”

In the same speech, Trump drew loud applause with even more provocative bluster as he referenced an incident earlier this year in which Iran seized U.S. Navy patrol boats on suspicions the American personnel were spying. If he were president, Trump said, the Iranians “will be shot out of the water.” But on the front page of Saturday morning’s Pensacola News Journal, a banner headline read “TRUMP WOWS AGAIN” while one of two stories covering the rally declared “Supporters: Trump more ‘presidential’ in second local speech.”'

Kaine: Clinton's 'Deplorables' Characterizations Doesn't Merit An Apology Washington Post

“She said, 'Look, I’m generalizing here, but a lot of his support is coming from this odd place, that he’s given a platform to the alt-right and white nationalists,’” Kaine said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But then she went on to say, ‘Look, there’s also a number of his supporters that have economic anxieties, and we’ve got to speak to those.’”

(....)

He noted Saturday that “I was just seeing this morning there’s some press event in D.C. today by a white nationalist group that’s talking about how they’ve received a higher profile because of the Trump campaign. We’ve seen (former Ku Klux Klan leader) David Duke do robo-calls encouraging people to vote for Donald Trump last week. So there is an odd way in which [Trump’s] campaign has elevated the profile of some of these groups that are very, I think, dangerous.”

Kaine said he doesn’t think the Democratic tickets needs to “chase after” voters aligned with those kind of groups.

176 Reasons Donald Trump Shouldn't Be President GQ

Count me out as a fan of Keith Olbermann and his shoe-pounding, testosterone-rich approach to political commentary. However, all the yelling and screaming in this campaign makes me receptive to the main message of Olbermann's first podcast for GQ.

As a young girl, my first boyfriend was the grandson of Wisc. senator Wiley, who was Sen. McCarthy's right-hand man. I learned fact moving to New York years later, sitting on a brownstone stoop with my landlord, a playwright who was imprisoned during McCarthy's 1950's roundup of writers, artists and all the educated thinkers and progressives, who were labeled Communists. McCarthy's young lawyer during those ghastly proceedings was Roy Cohn, who became one of Donald Trump's closest advisers before dying of AIDS.

Within this context that touched my own life, Olbermann's words resonate:

Every few generations, we Americans are called upon to defend our country. To defend it not so much from foreign dictators or war or terrorism, but from those here who have no commitment to progress or democracy or representative government—no commitment to anything except their own out-of-control minds and the bottomless pits of their egos.

Our society has thrown up these people before: Joseph McCarthy. George Wallace. Father Coughlin. Jefferson Davis. Aaron Burr. The Know-Nothings. The Blacklisters. The America-Firsters. And we have always thrown them out.

And now our generation has its own: the most dangerous individual ever nominated by a major party for the highest office in this country.

His base wants few details and fewer facts; they just want to burn it down and blame their failures on the collective other. And Donald John Trump is their demonic messiah in Oompa Loompa's clothing.

We must stop him.

There Were Five Phantom Donations in the Files of Donald Trump's Foundation. Here's What We Know. Washington Post

It is DEPLORABLE to have your name on a foundation, but you haven't contributed to it since 2008, as HWN has previously reported, thanks to WaPo. It is DEPLORABLE and CONTEMPTIBLE to take money that people have donated to your foundation and buy a statue of yourself for $20,000 and also buy yourself a $12,000 helmet. In our playbook, this is called STEALING.

WaPo reports that the Trump foundation has reported five donations that when queries with the organization, have never existed. We know about one of the 5: the illegal $25,000 donation to LA Attorney General Pam Bondi.

We already know -- that just like his campaign -- Trump used donations from others including business to hold charity events in his hotels and business properties. Using other peoples' money, did he pay himself above the going rate, as he does his presidential campaign, when far cheaper events could be help in luxury hotels in the same city?

Dear media. How about you give equal airtime going forward to focus on both the Clinton Foundation and the Trump Foundation. That's all we ask. Oh -- and please tell us that neither Trump or members of his family take salary for the Trump Foundation???? We'll be waiting. ~ Anne