September 15, 2016

The Trump Organization Is A National Security Nightmare For A Trump Presidency | Ivanka Trump Aborts Cosmo Interview

September 15, 2016/ Anne Enke

How the Trump Organization's Foreign Business Ties Upend U.S. National Security Newsweek

This very important article by Kurt Eichenwald is one of the first to look deeply into the Trump organization and the heap of conflicts of interest and ethical problems that would exist in a Trump presidency. The candidate replies that his kids will run the business while he devotes himself to making America great again. Trump refers to this as a 'blind trust' arrangement, which is technically incorrect. The article also touches on important info on the Clinton Foundation. It's doubtful that this article will have any impact on Trump voters, but any citizen concerned about how a Trump presidency could read it beginning to end.

"The Trump Organization is not like the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the charitable enterprise that has been the subject of intense scrutiny about possible conflicts for the Democratic presidential nominee. There are allegations that Hillary Clinton bestowed benefits on contributors to the foundation in some sort of “pay to play” scandal when she was secretary of state, but that makes no sense because there was no “pay.” Money contributed to the foundation was publicly disclosed and went to charitable efforts, such as fighting neglected tropical diseases that infect as many as a billion people. The financials audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global independent accounting company, and the foundation’s tax filings show that about 90 percent of the money it raised went to its charitable programs. (Trump surrogates have falsely claimed that it was only 10 percent and that the rest was used as a Clinton “slush fund.”) No member of the Clinton family received any cash from the foundation, nor did it finance any political campaigns. In fact, like the Clintons, almost the entire board of directors works for free."

The 'new liberal economics' is the key to understanding Hillary Clinton's policies VOX

VOX writes that both the Democratic primary and now the general election shows how the party is shifting on the subject of economic policy. Hillary Clinton's policy proposals and the Democratic platform reflect this new thinking.

Key planks now governing the Democratic thinking include:

Inequality is not a regrettable but inevitable byproduct of an efficient economy, nor a temporary, self-correcting trend. It’s driven by policy choices, and new choices can make a difference.

The economy will not simply bounce back from any weaknesses, as was assumed under Alan Greenspan’s Great Moderation. Rather, there are deep structural problems that include a global savings glut and unwillingness by US companies to make investments.

"Nudging" the private market is not always the best way to deliver core goods and economic security. Deploying government services directly can be more effective.

Ivanka Trump on Her Father's New Child Care and Maternity Leave Policy Cosmopolitan

On Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump released a child care and maternity leave plan, one that offers new mothers only -- not fathers -- six weeks of paid maternity leave, tax deductions for stay-at-home parents, and dependent care savings accounts for families. America is the only industrialized country in the world that does not offer federally-mandated family leave, an idea that Republicans have lobbied against for decades. The campaign hopes that this idea, supported by a newly-launched Women Empowerment Tour, will help boost its highly-negative image among women voters — a deficit estimated at 65 percent in a late August ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Trump credits his highly-visible daughter, 34-year-old Ivanka Trump, an executive at the Trump Organization, mother of three and fashion designer, as the originator of the new policy. Ivanka joined her father in Pennsylvania on Tuesday evening and published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal outlining the policy. Cosmopolitan.com spoke with Ivanka over the phone Wednesday morning about her father’s new family leave and child care policy in what became a fiery interview.

Asked to explain how his newly stated policy lined up with Donald Trump's 2004 comments lamenting the toll of maternity leave on companies, Ivanka pushed back against the question, accusing the writer of 'editorializing' and questioning her with 'hostility'. At the time, Trump said pregnancy is "a wonderful thing for the woman, it's a wonderful thing for the husband, it's certainly an inconvenience for a business. And whether people want to say that or not, the fact is it is an inconvenience for a person that is running a business."

“My father obviously has a track record of decades of employing women at every level of his company, and supporting women, and supporting them in their professional capacity, and enabling them to thrive outside of the office and within,” she said. “To imply otherwise is an unfair characterization of his track record and his support of professional women.”

“You said he made those comments,” she said. “I don't know that he said those comments.”

Prior to her ending her interview ahead of schedule, the businesswoman was also asked to explain why the family plan did not include paternity leave and how it would apply to gay male couples. A competing plan long-ago published on the Hillary Clinton website includes fathers. In response, Ivanka Trump insisted that her father’s plan was “a giant leap from where we are today,” but acknowledged the priority was on the mother.

“The plan, right now, is focusing on mothers, whether they be in same-sex marriages or not,” she said.

Related: Ivanka Trump Is Lying About Both Candidates' Records on Family Leave New York Magazine

Report: Ivanka Trump wrong about Trump Organization's Leave Policy CNN

Donald Trump's Maternity Leave Proposal Keeps the US in Dead Last Compared To Its Peers Fortune

Back on the campaign trail, Clinton speaks about helping families at NC rally The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton Headlines September 15, 2016

Clinton maintains a narrow lead over Trump YouGov.com

Poll Shows Tight Race for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton New York Times

Clinton's doctor declares her 'fit to serve' as president Politico

Emails show Colin Powell unloading on Clinton, Rumsfeld and Trump Politico

Bill Clinton is no longer the closer 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