Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by 8bitagent » Thu Nov 03, 2016 3:00 am
JackRiddler » Wed Nov 02, 2016 10:47 am wrote:How is it that the Ku Klux Klan hears what Trump says better than Nordic and 8bitagent? He's not transmitting in an ultrahigh frequency. My reception has been flawless, and I understand why the KKK has endorsed him. Do you?
by seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 03, 2016 4:42 am
8bitagent » Thu Nov 03, 2016 1:56 am wrote:I just don't get why all the polls are showing black enthusiasm and vote participation incredibly low in states that matter compared to 2008 and 2012.
When did Trump's heart turn racist?
Donald Trump’s dad on prospective tenant: ‘I don’t rent to n******s’
We already know Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump was a notoriously slimy slumlord who was frequently investigated for misappropriation of funds and housing discrimination. Hell, there’s even a Woody Guthrie song about it. Now new details have emerged about just what that discrimination looked like, and they are predictably ugly.
In a newly published interview with the New York Daily News, retired building manager and former Trump employee Stanley Leibowitz recalls how Fred Trump treated black people who applied to live in his buildings. Specifically, a registered nurse named Maxine Brown who applied for a place in Trump’s Wilshire Apartments in 1963.
Via NYDN:
“She was calling me on a daily basis, wanted to know the status of the application. I had her checked out and she should have been accepted,” Leibowitz recalled.
Leibowitz described what happened when he showed Brown’s application to Fred Trump while Donald was standing alongside his father.
“I asked him, ‘What do you want me to do with this application?’ He said, ‘You know I don’t rent to n—–s. Put it in your desk drawer.’ Donald was alongside of him. He was maybe 16, 17 years old at the time. He was learning the business of his father. He was right at his side.”
Young Donald, he says, just stood there silently. Listening. Learning.
Donald, Leibowitz said, had “no reaction” to his father’s use of the slur.
Leibowitz did as he was told and filed Brown’s application directly into the trash. (Just following orders!) Perhaps feeling guilty, the building manager testified about the incident before the Human Rights Commission after Brown filed a complaint, but left the N-word out of it. Brown won her case and moved into the complex.
Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks responded to the allegation in a statement Thursday:
“This claim, which is categorically false, is also totally unsubstantiated. Additionally, as you said, Mr. Trump would have been 16 years old at the time.”
Of course, it’s not fair to hold Trump responsible for the sins of his father. But given the level of racist bile on display in his own campaign trail rhetoric, it seems only logical that he learned it from somewhere.
Here Are 13 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist
He claims to have “a great relationship with the blacks,” which is totally something a normal person would say.
02/29/2016 05:17 pm ET | Updated Oct 10, 2016
34k
Lydia O’Connor
Reporter, The Huffington Post
Daniel Marans
Reporter, Huffington Post
X
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump may have failed to disavow the Ku Klux Klan in late February, but he’ll have you know he is not racist. In fact, he claims to be “the least racist person that you have ever met,” and last summer he pulled out the old standby about not having a racist bone in his body.
But he hasn’t given us a lot of reason to believe that. In fact, despite Trump’s protests to the contrary, he has a long history of saying and doing racist things. It’s not really surprising that he’s won the support and praise of the country’s white supremacists.
Here’s a running list of some of the most glaringly racist things associated with Trump. We’re sure we’ll be adding to it soon.
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Khizr Khan holding up a copy of the Constitution at the Democratic National Convention on July 28, 2016. Ghazala Khan (L) stood at his side, but did not speak.
He attacked Muslim Gold Star parents
Trump’s retaliation against the parents of a Muslim U.S. Army officer who died while serving in the Iraq War was a clear low point in a campaign full of hateful rhetoric.
Khizr Khan, the father of the late Army Captain Humayun Khan, spoke out against Trump’s bigoted rhetoric and disregard for civil liberties at the Democratic National Convention on July 28. It quickly became the most memorable moment of the convention.
“Let me ask you, have you even read the U.S. Constitution?” Khan asked Trump before pulling a copy of the document from his jacket pocket and holding it up. “I will gladly lend you my copy,” he declared.
Khan’s wife Ghazala Khan, who wears a Muslim head scarf, stood at his side during the speech but did not speak.
In response to the devastating speech, Trump seized on Ghazala Khan’s silence to insinuate that she was forbidden from speaking due to the couple’s Islamic faith.
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News that first appeared on July 30.
Ghazala Khan explained in an op-ed in the Washington Post the following day that she could not speak because of grief over her son.
“Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could?” she wrote. “Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”
He claimed a judge was biased because “he’s a Mexican”
In May, Trump implied that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over a class action against the for-profit Trump University, could not fairly hear the case because of his Mexican heritage.
“He’s a Mexican,” Trump told CNN of Curiel. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings — rulings that people can’t even believe.”
Curiel, it should be noted, is an American citizen who was born in Indiana. And as a prosecutor in the late 1990s, he went after Mexican drug cartels, making him a target for assassination by a Tijuana drug lord.
Even members of Trump’s own party slammed the racist remarks.
“Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a reaction to Trump’s comments, though he clarified that he still endorses the nominee.
The comments against Curiel didn’t sit well with the American public either. According to a YouGov poll released in June, 51 percent of those surveyed agreed that Trump’s comments were not only wrong, but also racist.Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump was wrong to complain against the judge, while just 20 percent think he was right to do so.
When asked whether he would trust a Muslim judge, in light of his proposed restrictions on Muslim immigration, Trump suggested that such a judge might not be fair to him either.
The Justice Department sued his company ― twice ― for not renting to black people
When Trump was serving as the president of his family’s real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, in 1973, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against black people looking to rent apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
The lawsuit charged that the company quoted different rental terms and conditions to black rental candidates than it did with white candidates, and that the company lied to black applicants about apartments not being available. Trump called those accusations “absolutely ridiculous” and sued the Justice Department for $100 million in damages for defamation.
Without admitting wrongdoing, the Trump Management Corporation settled the original lawsuit two years later and promised not to discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities. Trump also agreed to send weekly vacancy lists for his 15,000 apartments to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and to allow the NYUL to present qualified applicants for vacancies in certain Trump properties.
Just three years after that, the Justice Department sued the Trump Management Corporation again for allegedly discriminating against black applicants by telling them apartments weren’t available.
In fact, discrimination against black people has been a pattern in his career
Workers at Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, have accused him of racism over the years. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $200,000 in 1992 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler. A state appeals court upheld the fine.
The first-person account of at least one black Trump casino employee in Atlantic City suggests the racist practices were consistent with Trump’s personal behavior toward black workers.
“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, told the New Yorker for a September article. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”
Trump disparaged his black casino employees as “lazy” in vividly bigoted terms, according to a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
“And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” O’Donnell recalled Trump saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”
Trump has also faced charges of reneging on commitments to hire black people. In 1996, 20 African Americans in Indiana sued Trump for failing to honor a promise to hire mostly minority workers for a riverboat casino on Lake Michigan.
TAYLOR HILL/GETTY IMAGES
Apparently Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) does not mind Trump’s racism. Sessions endorsed the GOP front-runner on Monday.
He refused to condemn the white supremacists who are campaigning for him
Three times in a row on Feb. 28, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke, who told his radio audience last week that voting for any candidate other than Trump is “really treason to your heritage.”
When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn’t want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.
By Feb. 29, Trump was saying that in fact he does disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didn’t do so on CNN was because of a “lousy earpiece.” Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tapper’s questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing.
It’s preposterous to think that Trump doesn’t know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August.
His white supremacist fan club includes the Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people”; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill’s League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.
A leader of the Virginia KKK who is backing Trump told a local TV reporter earlier this month, “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”
And most recently, the Trump campaign announced that one of its California primary delegates was William Johnson, chair of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The Trump campaign subsequently said his inclusion was a mistake, and Johnson withdrew his name at their request.
CHRIS KLEPONIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
President Barack Obama mercilessly ridiculed Trump’s birtherism at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011.
He questions whether President Obama was born in the United States
Long before calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists,” Trump was a leading proponent of “birtherism,” the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is thus an illegitimate president. Trump claimed in 2011 to have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born there. He insisted at the time that the researchers “cannot believe what they are finding.”
Obama ultimately got the better of Trump, releasing his long-form birth certificate and relentlessly mocking the real estate mogul about it at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year.
But Trump continues to insinuate that the president was not born in the country.
“I don’t know where he was born,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. (Again, for the record: He was born in Hawaii.)
He treats racial groups as monoliths
Like many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the group in question. But that’s just as uncomfortable to hear, because he’s still treating all the members of the group — all the individual human beings — as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he uses the definite article the, as in “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims” and “the blacks.”
In that sense, Trump’s defensive explanations are of a piece with his slander of minorities. Both rely on essentializing racial and ethnic groups, blurring them into simple, monolithic entities, instead of acknowledging that there’s as much variety among Muslims and Latinos and black people as there is among white people.
How did Trump respond to the outrage last year that followed his characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists?
“I’ll take jobs back from China, I’ll take jobs back from Japan,” Trump said during his visit to the U.S.-Mexican border in July. “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.”
“The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.”
Donald Trump, July 2015
How did Trump respond to critics of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?
“I’m doing good for the Muslims,” Trump told CNN in December. “Many Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.’”
Not long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for “the Muslims,” disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson’s claim in September that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for president.
“I love the Muslims. I think they’re great people,” Trump said, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.
How did Trump respond to the people who called him out for funding an investigation into whether Obama was born in the United States?
“I have a great relationship with the blacks,” Trump said in April 2011. “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”
Even when Trump has dropped the definite article “the,” his attempts at praising minority groups he has previously slandered have been offensive.
Look no further than the infamous Cinco de Mayo taco bowl tweet:
Former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) had a good breakdown of everything that was wrong with Trump’s comment.
“It’s like eating a watermelon and saying ‘I love African-Americans,’” Bush quipped.
He trashed Native Americans, too
In 1993, when Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that would compete with one owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, a local Native American tribe, he told the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs that “they don’t look like Indians to me... They don’t look like Indians to Indians.”
Trump then elaborated on those remarks, which were unearthed last year in the Hartford Courant, by saying the mafia had infiltrated Indian casinos.
JOE MCNALLY/GETTY IMAGES
In the 1980s, Donald Trump was much younger, but just as racist as he is now.
He encouraged the mob justice that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five
In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City-area newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to the infamous case of a woman who was beaten and raped while jogging in Manhattan’s Central Park.
“They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump wrote, referring to the Central Park attackers and other violent criminals. “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.”
The public outrage over the Central Park jogger rape, at a time when the city was struggling with high crime, led to the wrongful conviction of five teenagers of color known as the Central Park Five.
The men’s convictions were overturned in 2002, after they’d already spent years in prison, when DNA evidence showed they did not commit the crime. Today, their case is considered a cautionary tale about a politicized criminal justice process.
Trump, however, still thinks the men are guilty.
He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester
At a November campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters physically attacked an African-American protester after the man began chanting “Black lives matter.” Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man after he has already fallen to the ground.
The following day, Trump implied that the attackers were justified.
“Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the protester is part of a larger, troubling pattern of instigating violence toward protesters at campaign events that has singled out people of color.
One reason Trump may have exhibited special disdain for that particular demonstrator in November, however, is because he believes the entire Black Lives Matter movement lacks legitimate policy grievances. He alluded to these views in an interview with the New York Times magazine this week when he described Ferguson, Missouri, as one of the most dangerous places in America. The small St. Louis suburb is not even in the top 20 highest-crime municipalities in the country.
He called supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man “passionate”
Trump’s racial incitement has already inspired hate crimes. Two brothers arrested in Boston last summer for beating up a homeless Latino man cited Trump’s anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it.
“Donald Trump was right — all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly told police officers.
Trump did not even bother to distance himself from them. Instead, he suggested that the men were well-intentioned and had simply gotten carried away.
“I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”
SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
Trump’s daughter Ivanka, second from left, converted to Judaism in 2009. That has not stopped Trump from bringing up anti-Semitic stereotypes.
He stereotyped Jews and shared an anti-Semitic meme created by white supremacists
When Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition in December, he tried to relate to the crowd by invoking the stereotype of Jews as talented and cunning businesspeople.
“I’m a negotiator, like you folks,” Trump told the crowd, touting his book The Art of the Deal.
“Is there anyone who doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room?” Trump said. “Perhaps more than any room I’ve spoken to.”
But that wasn’t even the most offensive thing Trump told his Jewish audience. He implied that he had little chance of earning the Jewish Republican group’s support, because his fealty could not be bought with campaign donations.
“You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money,” he said. “You want to control your own politician.”
Ironically, Trump has many close Jewish family members. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying the real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Trump and Kushner raise their two children in an observant Jewish home.
Then in July, Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic Hillary Clinton meme that featured a photo of her over a backdrop of $100 bills with a six-pointed Jewish Star of David next to her face.
“Crooked Hillary - - Makes History!” he wrote in the tweet, which also read “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” over the star.
THE HUFFINGTON POST
The holy symbol was co-opted by the Nazis during World War II when they forced Jews to sew it onto their clothing. Using the symbol over a pile of money is blatantly anti-Semitic and re-enforces hateful stereotypes of Jewish greed.
But Trump insisted the image was harmless.
“The sheriff’s badge ― which is available under Microsoft’s ‘shapes’ ― fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it,” he said in a statement.
Mic, however, discovered that the the meme was actually created by white supremacists and could be found on a neo-Nazi forum more than a week before Trump shared it. Additionally, a watermark on the image leads to a Twitter account that regularly tweets racist, sexist political memes.
He treats African-American supporters as tokens to dispel the idea he is racist
At a campaign appearance in California in June, Trump boasted that he had a black supporter in the crowd, saying “look at my African American over here.”
“Look at him,” Trump continued. “Are you the greatest?”
Trump went on to imply that the media conceals his appeal among African Americans by not covering the crowd more attentively.
“We have tremendous African-American support,” he said. “The reason is I’m going to bring jobs back to our country.”
In fact, Trump has the lowest level of African-American support of any Republican presidential nominee since 1948, according to FiveThirtyEight. As of the most recent polling, just 2 percent of black voters plan to vote for him ― fewer than the percentage who plan to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson.
It’s may not be surprising that Trump has brought so much racial animus into the 2016 election cycle, given his family history. His father, Fred Trump, was the target of folk singer Woody Guthrie’s lyrics after Guthrie lived for two years in a building owned by Trump pere: “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts.”
And last fall, a news report from 1927 surfaced on the site Boing Boing, revealing that Fred Trump was arrested that year following a KKK riot in Queens. It’s not clear exactly what the elder Trump was doing there or what role he may have played in the riot. Donald Trump, for his part, has categorically denied (except when he’s ambiguously denied) that anything of the sort ever happened.
Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/don ... 60bf777e83
Trump Was Sued by the Justice Department For Discriminating Against Black Families Trying to Rent Apartments
Trump’s real estate company had a disturbing practice of marking applications from black families with the letter “‘C’, for ‘Colored.” This troubling anecdote dates back to the early 1970s, when Trump was President of his dad’s real estate company and the family business was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to African Americans in New York City and Virginia. The lawsuit unearthed a disturbing pattern among employees of Trump’s real estate company, who appeared to systematically deny applications to aspiring black renters. Recent reports shine new light on these serious allegations and the painful anecdotes that accompanied them, including:
A Trump building superintendent testified that he was instructed to flag applications from black families with a “C”, and doormen were told to tell black applicants that no apartments were available: Los Angeles Times:“One doorman reported to investigators that he was told to tell black visitors that no apartments were available; a building superintendent in Queens said he was told to attach a paper to applications from blacks with a letter ‘C,’ for ‘colored.’”
A Trump building manager told the New York Times what happened when he asked Trump’s father what to do with a black couple’s application: “Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent, talked to his boss, Fred C. Trump. ‘I asked him what to do and he says, ‘Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,’’ Mr. Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview.”
We’ve since learned that Donald was in the room when it happened, and that use of the the N-word was not uncommon in Trump offices: New York Daily News: “Donald Trump’s father once used the N-word when rejecting a black tenant’s application to rent a Trump apartment in Queens, a retired building manager told the Daily News. And the now-GOP nominee was standing right next to his father Fred when it happened and did not react.”
Black families made up a tiny percentage of renters in Trump-owned buildings: Washington Post: “Other rental agents employed by the Trumps told the FBI that only 1 percent of tenants at the Trump-run Ocean Terrace Apartments were black, and that there were no black tenants at Lincoln Shore Apartments.” These and many more allegations formed the basis for the lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice in 1973. Trump would fight the charges for years before agreeing to a consent decree that required the company to do more outreach in black communities.
Trump would violate that decree just years later: Daily Beast: “The DOJ and the Trumps were back in court again, with the government charging that the real estate company wasn’t complying with the agreed terms in the consent decree…’racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents has occurred with such frequency that it has created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.’”
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing ... partments/
.Here's Video of Trump and an Alleged Mobster at Wrestlemania
Nothing to see here!
DONALD TRUMP'S CHILD RAPE ACCUSER CANCELED HER PRESS CONFERENCE DUE TO DEATH THREATS
BY JACK HOLMES
NOV 2, 2016
77
For months now, Rigged Biased Liberal Media outlets like The Wall Street Journal have been digging into Donald Trump's business ties to alleged mob-connected figures. For months, Trump has insisted he's "the cleanest guy there is" and denied knowing the made men in question. Today, however, courtesy of Yahoo! News, we get some confirmation that he knows a guy:
So there's video of the guy Trump twice claimed he didn't know (dismissing him as a nondescript "high-roller" he wouldn't recognize) standing next to said guy at—wait for it—a Wrestlemania event in Atlantic City. (Trump's affinity for America's Pastime is well known.) Maybe it's a coincidence. Not according to Robert LiButti's daughter, Edith Creamer, however, who told Yahoo! News this week that she and her father were Trump's guests at the event.
If LiButti was just some deep-pocketed gambler who frequented Trump's casino, why would Trump deny knowing him? Perhaps, as Yahoo! notes, because LiButti "was banned from the state's casinos in 1991 because of his ties to Mafia boss John Gotti, then the chief of the Gambino crime syndicate." (In an undercover police tape, LiButti repeatedly referred to Gotti as "my boss.") Yahoo! adds that the New Jersey Casino Control Commission also fined the Trump Plaza hotel for its dealings with LiButti, who died in 2014, to the tune of $650,000.
RELATED STORY
Guess Who Allegedly Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy
Predictably, Trump campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks denied anything and everything: "This was obviously a massive event, which took place decades ago," she told Yahoo! "Mr. Trump attended many similar events with thousands of people during this time period."
Did he bring thousands of people as his guests?
LiButti is just one of the mob-connected figures Trump has denied knowing in the press and in court filings, but he is undoubtedly one of the more unsavory. In a discrimination case filed by nine African-American employees at the Trump Plaza hotel, he was accused of destroying property when he lost money at the craps table, and of declaring that "he did not want women, blacks or other minorities dealing or supervising his games." He called one employee a "dumb cunt," another a "Jew broad," and an African-American dealer a "black bastard."
In a separate case, the Casino Control Commission fined Trump Plaza $450,000 for inappropriate gifts to LiButti, including "$1.6 million worth of luxury autos, including Ferraris, Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, that he then exchanged for cash—a violation of state laws at the time that barred cash 'comps' for high rollers."
So, yeah, Trump knows a guy
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/vi ... ob-figure/
by 8bitagent » Thu Nov 03, 2016 5:34 am
Bill Clinton’s Ugly Defense Of His Crime Bill That Harmed Black Communities
The former president hints at concerns about "superpredators" before backing down, at least a bit.
hat the laws advanced unjust, racially discriminatory policies is not subject to dispute. Those “unintended consequences” shattered the very communities that they were presumably designed to help. While the debate continues over whether those laws also had a significant impact on crime statistics, a report from The Brennan Center concluded that “increased incarceration at today’s levels has a negligible crime control benefit.”
A 2014 report from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project explained that incarceration has “diminishing marginal returns. In other words, incarceration becomes less effective the more it is used.”
by coffin_dodger » Thu Nov 03, 2016 6:43 am
by JackRiddler » Thu Nov 03, 2016 7:35 am
8bitagent » Thu Nov 03, 2016 2:00 am wrote:JackRiddler » Wed Nov 02, 2016 10:47 am wrote:How is it that the Ku Klux Klan hears what Trump says better than Nordic and 8bitagent? He's not transmitting in an ultrahigh frequency. My reception has been flawless, and I understand why the KKK has endorsed him. Do you?
How is it that "America's first black president" was such good friends with Trump?
by 82_28 » Thu Nov 03, 2016 8:26 am
by JackRiddler » Thu Nov 03, 2016 8:54 am
by seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 03, 2016 9:16 am
Donald Trump Already Knows He's Going to Lose: 'Think of the Bunker Right Before Hitler Killed Himself'
In a candid profile in the campaign's last days, manager Kellyanne Conway dishes on how she deals with Trump
By Sophia Tesfaye / Salon October 31, 2016
That a campaign manager would allow an in-depth profile in the waning days of a losing presidential election is not too surprising. But it’s stunning that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign manager would grant an interview with such revealing insights — that the Republican nominee is fully aware of his imminent defeat a full week ahead of the election.
In the interview conducted by New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, who is noted for his exposés on Fox News and its former CEO Roger Ailes, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway is remarkably telegraphing that Trump has given up on trying to win the election. As if Trump’s pronouncements of a “rigged” election on the campaign trail weren’t evidence enough, Conway told Sherman that the 70-year-old political neophyte is already talking like a man who has lost the election to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
“I got really mad at him the other day,” Conway told Sherman in a new profile published on Monday. “He said, ‘I think we’ll win, and if not, that’s okay too. And I said, ‘It’s not okay! You can’t say that! Your dry-cleaning bill is like the annual salaries of the people who came to your rallies, and they believe in you!’ ”
According to Sherman, “to hear Kellyanne Conway talk about managing her boss is to listen to a mother of four who has had ample experience with unruly toddlers.”
Sherman described how Conway, frustrated by her candidate’s refusal to take the advice of his third campaign manager, played to his habits to manipulate Trump into better behavior.
“A way you can communicate with him is you go on TV to communicate,” she told Sherman, explaining that she exploited Trump’s consumption of cable news. Conway said that she found more success with Trump after she ditched her attempts to give him direct advice and subliminally offered her suggestions through multiple appearances a day on cable news shows — on top of her otherwise time-consuming duties as campaign manager.
“It all has to be his decision in the end,” she explained.
“It’s his campaign,” Conway said. “He’s the candidate.”
But, Conway revealed, not all of her tricks worked on the notoriously stubborn Trump.
She was never able to get Trump to stop sending off his infamous 3 a.m. missives on Twitter, so Conway revealed that she just decided to join Trump at his game and encourage more positive tweets in between.
Still, Conway’s best efforts have done little to instill confidence at Trump campaign headquarters with little than a week to go before the election.
“In recent weeks, the mood at Trump Tower has veered between despair and denial — with a hit of resurgent glee when the news broke that the FBI was looking into more of Clinton’s emails,” Sherman wrote.
One senior Trump adviser told Sherman, “Think of the bunker right before Hitler killed himself. Donald’s in denial. They’re all in denial.”
But according to at least one other bit of Sherman’s reporting, Trump may be even more aware of his certain loss than he lets on.
“I can’t walk around,” the GOP nominee told Sherman. “Not that it was easy to do before, but getting privacy back, at least a certain degree of privacy back, wouldn’t be bad,” he said.
“Trump told a donor at a recent fund-raiser that he planned to take a six-month vacation if he loses,” Sherman added.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/d ... ed-himself
by seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 03, 2016 9:18 am
Save America from Trump to fix America, or, Did your Mother Drop you on Your Head?
By Juan Cole | Nov. 3, 2016 |
When I trained as a lifeguard they warned us that you have to be very careful how you approach a drowning victim flailing around. They will be so happy to be rescued that they will grab you and pin your arms and freeze up, and then you’ll both sink to the bottom and drown. You have keep your distance, keep your arm stiff, and pull them out straight on their back, head out of the water, to reassure them. Then you can rescue them. The rescued teenager may not be a saint. Or they may have a bad family situation. You’re not thinking about that when the issue is whether they will live or die. Maybe they can straighten out their lives if they end up having lives.
So America is drowning, and voting for Hillary Clinton is the equivalent of rescuing it. It is the stiff arm to deal with a hysteria that will otherwise sink us.
I see too many people agonizing over this election. Will they vote for the Greens? Libertarians? Is Hillary as bad as Trump?
Did your mother drop you on your head? This is a drowning country we’re talking about. You don’t have the luxury to sit on the beach and decide whether to go in. And maybe you’ll be delivering the country to someone who is a bad mother. But it will be a live country and maybe the mother could be reformed. Drowned people can’t be reformed. Remember when, in Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya brings Westley to Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) to be brought back from the dead? And Miracle Max discovers Westley isn’t dead, and so could be revived: “Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.” Inigo Montoya: “What’s that?” Miracle Max: “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”
An America under Trump would be all dead. Donald J. Trump is the greatest danger to American democracy in modern history. He openly menaces journalists, he keeps inquiring about why we have nukes if we can’t use them, he wants to steal Iraq’s petroleum wealth, he promises to use torture, he courts the KKK, he proposes tax and other policies that will vastly increase inequality and bankrupt the government, and he wants a trade war with China. I could go on with a litany of fatal “policies” (actually more like wicked quips) all the way down the page (and blog pages don’t really have a fixed bottom). All this is not to mention his criminal notion that he has a right to French kiss and fondle any woman he can get hold of with his tiny hands.
I think it is entirely possible that if Trump were president, I and other writers and journalists and critics could be targeted for dirty tricks. It happened even under Bush. This is one reason it is so dangerous to have a standing massive domestic surveillance program of our current sort; one election could put it into the hands of a dictator.
I get it. Hillary is Wall Street. She will do nothing to rein in the excesses of the financiers (and not all financiers need reining in, but many do). One of our country’s most pressing problems, wealth inequality, will almost certainly get worse in a Clinton presidency. She probably will continue Obama’s phony “all of the above” energy policy, which will mean an overheated climate (we need a Manhattan project to get off oil, coal and gas immediately). She is a foreign policy hawk and seems committed to intervening in Syria. She is in the back pocket of Haim Saban and the AIPAC Israel lobbies and has a virtual love fest with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu. She seems to want to make Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel illegal, which is a violation of the first amendment (and interfering in BDS has just been forbidden by the European Union).
But here’s a surprise. We live in a society dominated by corporations the way medieval Britain was dominated by feudal lords. The only difference is that we have a higher standard of living than did the serfs and we get to decide between two Establishment candidates for high office regularly.
Over two-thirds of America’s $18.5 trillion economy is generated by Fortune 500 big corporations (in 2014 it was 73%!)
When I was a graduate student 36 years ago it was about 50%. (Small business accounted for most of the other half then, and were the source of the vast majority of innovation).
Although the corporations and the economists who ultimately actually mostly work for them maintain that this system is efficient and based on competition, in fact there are lots of monopolies or near-monopolies, and it clearly has giant inefficiencies (compare your internet bill to that of people in Europe). They also complain about government regulation, but through lobbying most of them have actually captured the legislators who are supposed to be regulating them. Often they write the laws for the legislators and just have the latter sign them.
The corporations don’t always get their way. But they most often do. It would have cost them trillions of dollars in profits if the US had moved quickly to green energy in the 1990s when the climate crisis first became apparent, so they waged a PR campaign to smear climate scientists like Michael Mann and pull the wool over the eyes of most consumers to keep them burning coal, gas and oil as long as possible. In the US alone, they managed to put on the order of an extra hundred billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the past 20 years through this dishonest ruse. It’s like blowing up billions of atomic bombs, making the earth hotter and hotter. No one has been president who would have stood in their way, and almost nobody has been allowed in Congress who would obstruct them either. They are starting to give up on coal, and Obama did stab them in the back on that fuel, but they still burn as much gas and oil as they like and flare up methane when they frack both, destroying the environment (not to mention water pollution). I say ‘they’ because there are essentially interlocking directorates. A lot of the Fortune 500 is heavily invested in hyrdocarbons. That is why it is so hard to do environmental investing, because if you buy a bank stock you are buying Exxon-Mobil.There isn’t any more pressing issue than addressing climate change, and I’m sorry but nothing Hillary has said about the issue is actually ambitious enough to fit the scale of the emergency.
So I know.
But you aren’t thinking about this right. The people screwed over by the 1% are hurting and have turned to Trump because he talks like a maverick, even though he will screw them over even harder. They are drowning.
You can’t rehabilitate the patient if the patient drowned. And America would drown, would be all dead, would be beyond redemption, under 4 years of Trump.
Sec. Clinton is from that generation of baby boomer Democrats who decided in the Reagan era that they had to become Eisenhower Republicans ever to hold office. So she surrendered to Wall Street & etc. We know that. But she can be pressured, just as Eisenhower was pressured (if only we could get back to his tax policies!) We can oppose her if she drags her feet on key issues. It will be easier to pressure her from below if we can also take back Congress and can get some liberals on the Supreme Court.
We can’t oppose Trump because he has made it clear that he will rule as dictator and will brook no opposition. He has lots of goons to sic on his critics already, and would pick up their entire Federal government if he wins.
I have made my peace with being a serf who gets to vote for the candidates the two parties (mainly representing the corporations) present me with. (It is a first past the post system, so creating a 3rd party is almost impossible). It is a very corrupt system, maybe the most corrupt on earth. I’ll probably never see a president who really represents the mainstream of America, because of voter suppression and big money in politics and the corruption of corporate media. I blow off my frustrations at this blog and maybe I change a few minds here and there. Civil disobedience seems increasingly called for with regard to hydrocarbons. And, many bad features of the system could be changed if only enough people cared. But we can’t do that if America is dead. And Clinton won’t kill it, however wrongheaded some of her announced policies. We survived Bush, though with a $6 trillion bill, and we can survive Clinton. We can’t survive Trump.
http://www.juancole.com/2016/11/america ... other.html
by 82_28 » Thu Nov 03, 2016 9:40 am
JackRiddler » Thu Nov 03, 2016 4:54 am wrote:Said unfunny joke is in direct response to a particular statement. Context counts.
Oh but wait, I'm joking too! I don't really want 8bitagent to be an unpaid intern to Rush Limbaugh for a decade, just because he makes exactly the rhetorical move that Limbaugh makes.
by Rory » Thu Nov 03, 2016 12:03 pm
Donald Trump supporters cover damage costs for black church burnt down by someone who spray-painted ‘Vote Trump’ on the side of the burnt down building.
Trump supporters have raised over $100.000 to rebuild a church in Mississipi. Recently, the church was supposedly burned down by a rogue Trump supporter. The church was lit on fire, and someone spray-painted “vote Trump” on the side of the building. This attack is similar to another attack, in which a mosque in Texas was set on fire in the name of Trump. While the arsonist in the church fire is unknown, the Mosque was burned down by a Muslim man.
The reaction to the church fire had quite the opposite affect on Trump supporters. Instead of taking it lying down and allowing it to be used as another attack on Donald Trump, they started a GoFundMe page to raise money to rebuild the church.
Trump supporters have reached their goal in about thirteen hours, with over $120,000 in combined donations from over 3500 people.
The Church itself has been around for 111 years according to Bishop Green, who has spent the entire day on premises.
The attack itself is nonsensical. If a Trump supporter did this, they would be doing it while knowingly hurting his campaign. Even if this attack was from a Trump supporter, they do not represent all supporters.
People have taken an active role in his campaign, from investigating and combing through Wikileaks and FBI documents to fundraising and starting grassroots twitter campaigns to help cut through media oppression. The internet has allowed for political activism from the comfort of people’s homes and has been a great launching point for the Trump campaign.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 03, 2016 12:06 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Nov 03, 2016 12:25 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 03, 2016 12:28 pm
by Rory » Thu Nov 03, 2016 1:07 pm
Belligerent Savant » Wed Nov 02, 2016 11:45 am wrote:.
I find myself agreeing with the comments more so than the offering in the below link. As such, I'll let y'all click on the link at your leisure while memorializing a few choice comments:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... dream.html
John Michael Greer said...
A note before I proceed -- as expected, I've received a flurry of fist-pounding, salive-spraying tirades from people who thought that rehashing canned talking points at the top of their lungs counts as polite discourse. With that in mind, I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to read this week's post and respond to it in a thoughtful and courteous manner, whether or not they agree with me.
That said, on to the comments...
Gee, since this is a weekly blog post rather than a book, I didn't include every relevant factor. The gyrations of the central banks in recent years are indeed important, though my interpretation of them veers as far from the conventional wisdom as it does from any of the standard theories out here in the doomosphere. I'll be doing a post on that, focusing especially on negative interest rates, as we proceed.
Hubert, I'm not entirely sure that you're right. The GOP is by no means as unanimous as you make it out to be, and a Trump victory is going to show every ambitious politician in the country which policies will get him or her an instant following among voters. Still, we'll see.
Mister R., glad to hear it. I'm enough of an old-fashioned small-d democrat that I consider voting an important civic ritual, if nothing else.
Bill, as I noted in my post, many of the people who are voting for Trump know as well as you do that they can't be sure that electing him will help. What they know for a fact is that voting for Clinton will prolong the unendurable, and voting for Trump will at least annoy the political class. As for substantive change, that's on its way, though not because of the two figures currently whacking each other in our quadrennial Punch and Judy show...
Vadim, the fact of the matter, as noted in my post, is that Trump has consistently talked about exactly those issues I enumerated. Whether that's pure opportunism or not, it's taken him from the fringe to an election in which he has a serious chance at victory -- and that right there means that the issues in question are not going to go away, because every ambitious politicisn in the country now knows how to win an instant mass following.
Bill, my guess is that you're quite correct. When I first heard of the scale of the latest round of Obamacare rate hikes, my immediate reaction was that that, all by itself, could put Trump in the White House. But we'll see...
Robert, no argument there! We're headed for very, very troubled times.
Matt, thank you. I've noticed that if you just keep spelling things out over and over again, sooner or later people start to get it!
Rich_P, I'd be perfectly happy seeing the federal government get out of the job creation business, so long as it also gets out of the job destruction business. The federal policies that subsidize automation and offshoring, penalize employers for hiring people, and tacitly allow unlimited illegal immigration have played a huge role in creating the jobless pseudorecovery we're in. More generally, I don't disagree at all that the federal government needs to get back to the purposes established for it by the constitution as amended, and stop trying to do things that were left to the states and the people. More on this as we proceed!
Varun, thank you! Yes, York Rite Grand Sessions is always a bit of a vacation weekend; it was again at Ocean City, a good time was had, and I came back with a grandiosely titled minor office -- for the next year I'm Grand Principal Sojourner for the Grand Chapter R.A.M. of Maryland. (That and $3.30 will get you a cup of coffee.) As for the more substantive aspects of your comment, I suspect it's not just the working class that's ditching the liberal program. A lot of the lower end of the salary class is turning to something a lot more like social democracy, as exemplified by Bernie Sanders, which is just as much of a challenge to the liberal status quo. One way or another, we're in for a wild ride.
David, thank you. For what it's worth, I see a third party vote as a valid option -- anything that'll point out to the establishment that people aren't willing to tolerate the lesser evil any longer applies pressure in the right direction.
Peter, yes, I saw that. The hubris implied in the claim that the Democratic Party owns a certain section of the electorate is impressive, in its own way.
Doug, I think there are policies that would help, and I'll be talking about them as we proceed -- but those are going to have to be accompanied by a lot of work on the part of individuals, families, and communities. More on this in an upcoming post!
Rustin, I'm coming to see a universal basic income as a relatively simple fix for one of the industrial economy's most pervasive self-destructive features. I'll be talking about that, too, in an upcoming post.
Breanna, no, I didn't see that -- thank you! That's really quite stunning, and I hope a lot of people read it and think about what the United States has become.
Dfr2010, if I had a dollar for everyone who's said much the same thing in my hearing, I could probably buy pizza for everyone who comments on this week's post.
FiftyNiner, good. Of course you're right; even if Trump wins, the real work will be waiting, and if he loses, it'll still be waiting.
Pygmycory, of course. How can they break the unions and force Canadian workers to accept starvation wages and no benefits without an ongoing influx of immigrants? That's certainly how it worked down here.
Matt, if Clinton loses this time, the Democrat nomination is going to be wide open next time, and a competent Berniecrat will be hard to beat. (She'd certainly have my vote.) If she wins, the Dems will be committed to the existing order until 2024 at least. But we'll see...
Pygmycory, many thanks! I'll make time to read it as soon as I've waded through the current round of comments. As for the cluelessness of the elites, yep. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Jordan, thank you!
Hhawhee, it'll happen from time to time, but not too often. Remember that you can always read the archive!
Ezra, fascinating. Thanks for the heads up.
Beetleswamp, when I was a kid, Cracked was the lamest humor magazine in print, a Mad wannabe that never even got halfway there. I have no idea how its online incarnation has turned into so lively, funny, and routinely thoughtful a site, but there it is. Thanks for the data points from Hawai'i -- worth knowing that the same causes are driving the same backlash there as elsewhere.
Christopher, he could be our Gorbachev, or he could be our Yeltsin. Either way, what's unsustainable sooner or later will not be sustained...
Mister R., yep -- that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. As for Beale, hmm. Maybe, but I don't think Trump believes that.
Lordberia3, I'm kind of in the middle here; I'm no admirer of Donald Trump, and I certainly don't expect him to come through on all the promises he made, but yes, I think it's possible he could at least slow down the endless march to war in the Middle East and maybe ditch some of the policies that are getting rid of American jobs. I doubt it will be enough, but it could be something.
David, exactly. That wider perspective has to be kept in mind even, or especially, while dealing with the crises of the moment.
Professor, I see the same thing. The one point I'd make about the change of power is that it's not actually the political class that has the weapons and the power. All they do is issue orders -- and we got to see in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the former Warsaw Pact states, what happens when the people who are supposed to follow orders stop doing so.
NomadicBeer, so noted!
Shane, some major elements go back to Ronald Reagan, for that matter, but the neoconservative ascendancy really got bolted into place with George W. Bush.
John, he doesn't have to care. He simply has to recognize that if he pursues policies that discard business as usual in favor of a rebalancing that benefits the silenced majority, he's going to be reelected in a landslide. I think he's more than enough of an egotist to want that!
NomadicBeer, notice that they left out everyone in the middle. The rich have enough money to pay for coverage; the poor get subsidies, though the co-pays and deductibles are still ruinously high; it's the people in the middle who don't get the subsidies and don't have the cash to cover medical insurance bills that cost more than a mortgage.
Dale, Pence is supposed to scare you; he's a well-chosen impeachment insurance policy. Clinton's choice of Kaine was stunningly inept; if you're one of the most detested people in American political life, you don't choose a well-liked moderate with no baggage as your running mate -- not unless you basically want to pin a sign saying IMPEACH ME to your own backside.
Bill, I'm by no means sure that that's a valid generalization. As I noted in my post, a lot of Trump voters seem to be motivated by specific, concrete issues, not the sort of fantasy images you've evoked.
Patricia, I'm not saying that Trump's a good choice. As I noted quite some time ago, there are tens of thousands of Americans who would be a better president than he will. It's just that, to my mind, Hillary Clinton is not one of them.
Tolkienguy, I certainly didn't mean to present Trump as a panacea! Quite the contrary, he's nearly as problematic as his main adversary, and you're quite right that no matter who wins, we're in for a period of bitter polarization and quite probably political violence. Reconciliation, I suspect, is still a long way away -- at least as far as it was in, say, 1860...
Notes, my own visits to northern California don't lead me to think that it's a good measure of the rest of rural America. If you have the chance to visit the Rust Belt or the South some day, I'd encourage you to give it a try.
Danil, well, we'll see. If I turn out to be wrong, of course, I'll admit it.
Peakfuture, I expect whoever wins to be bogged down in sixteen different kinds of trouble starting the moment they take their hand off the Bible. The next four years are going to be, well, colorful.
Richard, you could arguably do much worse.
Gabriela, back in ancient Athens, people were selected for the legislature by random, and I'm sorry to say it didn't work any better than our system -- read Thucydides sometime to get the whole story. I'm fond of Winston Churchill's famous comment: "Democracy is the worst political system, except for all the other ones."
Jay, oh, I think we've still got a ways to go before we reach peak political lunacy -- but I think we'll get there.
MawKernewek, I really should get around to reading that.
Armata, yes, I saw that. The word that came to mind was "meretricious."
Edward, well, we'll see.
Bill, exactly. It's going to be a wild ride.
Justin, fascinating. There are honestly times that I wonder if somebody in his campaign staff has been reading this blog.
Armata, thanks for the link -- and also the comment. I haven't had any problems with Blogger this time around, but of course I'm coming at it from the other side.
Repent, no, I keep premonitions, divinations, visionary experiences, and horoscopes strictly to the other blog. What guides my predictions here is history: the recognition that similar causes produce similar effects in human societies.
Shane, I'm not going to put money against that happening in your lifetime.
Mark, oh, granted, but the shape and trajectory of the craziness will likely depend on who wins.
Shane, I didn't abandon it, I just didn't want to add that additional bit of complexity to this post.
Avery, exactly. If the current US government implodes, whatever government or governments replace it will have a very rough row to hoe.
Donalfagan, and notice the strident effort to shove a class issue back into the convenient categories of race and sex. Utterly typical.
Armata, well, we'll see. I wouldn't be surprised by some amount of violent unrest, whoever wins, but I don't think we're quite ready for civil war yet. Give it another five to ten years. No, I hadn't heard about Farrakhan; thanks for the heads up.
Onething, yes, there's that!
Cherokee, fortunately we stayed clear of bars this time! Your comment on "living in the moment" is astute -- and of course it's always convenient for the political status quo to convince people to do that, too, since it keeps them from noticing which way the wind is blowing over time. Hmm. I may want to bring that into a discussion of Barbara Ehrenreich's fine book Brightsided.
Pygmycory, I think you'd find a lot of takers for such a bumper sticker.
Glenn (if I may), you're still missing the existence of millions of people too poor to afford the premiums and too rich to get the subsidies. I'm one of them and I know many, many others.
Megan, you've never heard of him and neither have I. He probably holds down a midlevel job in the Pentagon right now.
Robert, I ain't arguing. The events of a century ago have been rather on my mind in recent years!
Curtis, thanks for the link. The tension between shared values and freedom is always a challenging one, but it's also critically important -- thank you for catching that in my narrative!
Matthew, exactly. Like every other policy, it benefits some people and costs others, and who benefits and who pays have been taboo subjects for too long.
D. Mitchell, thank you. More people need to hear that.
Candace, and people in some states are getting hit with much higher hikes, and get lower subsidies, higher deductibles, and higher co-pays. It really does suck.
Mark, the law has sent health care costs soaring year over year, while more and more insurance companies pull out of the market and the exchanges go broke. I think it's going to take much, much more than the bandaid you've offered to fix it.
Dennis, sounds like a plan.
Bill, this may be another regional thing, because I hear people talking about issues, not just party line votes or fantasies. As for your conclusion, though, no argument there. I think the crucial figure will simply be how many people on each side vote vs. staying at home with a muttered "frack it."
Ian, I watched the documentary, and I didn't see any particular way out of the predicament being offered -- just more of the same rhetoric the American left has been using to prevent constructive change for decades. I agree, for what it's worth, that the US has far and away the worst (and most expensive) health care in the industrial world, but Clinton's proposed solution is to keep the Obamacare fiasco in place, which has made health care here even more expensive than it was. That's not exactly going to help!
Rich, I think we're going to have an interesting conversation down the road! I'm considering proposing a series of Constitutional amendments, which might be called the Bill of Redress, to clean up the messes that 220-odd years have made of our republic.
Guilherme, I had a hard time getting past the shrill tone of the thing, but you're right that it deserves a closer read.
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