Month: August 2016

It occurs to me that someone could write the story of this election by using nothing other than slightly modified quotes from The Big Lebowski:

WOLF BLITZER: “Mr. President, ya know, it’s Trump, so his toe slipped over the line a little, big deal. It’s just an election.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: “Wolf, this is a presidential election. This determines who’ll control the nuclear codes. Am I wrong? Am I wrong?”
DONALD TRUMP: “Yeah, but I wasn’t over. Gimme the marker, Wolf, I’m marking it 8.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: (pulls out gun) “Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules? Mark it zero!”

According to “more than 20 security and immigration officials surveyed by NBC News,” trying to ban Muslims from entering the country “would be virtually impossible to implement and would cripple the current immigration system.”

We know that Trump is tanking his own campaign and dooming the Republicans’ Senate majority, but “could this Cheeto-hued dumpster fire of a candidate go one further and actually put the House in play?” David Nir of Daily Kos takes a look.

Say what you want about Trump’s supporters but they ponied up with a hefty haul of small donations.

Don’t say I didn’t warn/predict this, but there’s another poll out of Arizona showing Hillary Clinton in the lead.

It’s hard to say if Yuval Levin is more disgusted with elected Republicans or the Republican electorate, but he sure is disgusted.

Or, as Greg Sargent puts it: “Republicans nominate dangerously insane person to lead America, then panic when he proves he’s dangerously insane.”

Somehow, this song seems appropriate:

Kinda captures the national mood.

The New York Times made a video of things they’ve recorded people saying at Trump rallies over the last year. It’s actually a little tame compared to what I expected, but still beyond appalling.

The compilation is only modestly more disgusting than the things Trump has said himself.

Reuters/Ipsos, Clinton +6
CBS; Clinton +7
ABC; Clinton +8
CNN; Clinton +9

90% of Sanders supporters have come home and will vote for Hillary.

I heard alarm bells ringing when Hillary was either tied or losing the Trump. Simple question, where are you now??

Picking up where I left off, I guess I’ll start with a donut. News has been percolating that Paul Manafort is unhappy, that he feels like he’s wasting his time trying to advise Donald Trump, and that he’s basically just “mailing it in.” If that was a cry for help, it has apparently been heard, because some folks are going to try to come to the rescue:

Key Republicans close to Donald Trump’s orbit are plotting an intervention with the candidate after a disastrous 48 hours led some influential voices in the party to question whether Trump can stay at the top of the Republican ticket without catastrophic consequences for his campaign and the GOP at large.

Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus, former Republican New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are among the Trump endorsers hoping to talk the real estate mogul into a dramatic reset of his campaign in the coming days, sources tell NBC News.

The group of GOP heavyweights hopes to enlist the help of Trump’s children – who comprise much of his innermost circle of influential advisers – to aid in the attempt to rescue his candidacy.

No one, so far, has been able to convince The Donald to stop landing haymakers on his own face, and there’s increasing talk that he’s on the verge of knocking himself out of the race. Consider this weak response to the speculation that Trump might just throw in the towel.

Adviser Kellyanne Conway disputed the notion that Trump would bolt the ticket, saying “I would push back on any formal report that the candidate is going to leave the race.”

That’s a very oddly constructed sentence, don’t you think?

To be sure, the polls do not look promising for Trump, but they are not yet so bad that they would ordinarily start a conversation about stopping the fight.

But that’s exactly what’s happening:

There’s absolutely no indication Trump is considering leaving the race, a move that would seem wildly out of character for a candidate who has prided himself on “winning” and grasped at any poll that shows him dominating an opponent. Still, some Republicans are quietly considering the arcane mechanics of what would happen to the party’s ticket if Trump was to leave the presidential race.

Yesterday, I wrote that the charade of Trump's campaign "will not hold for another three months," but I was talking about his relatively competitive standing in the polls.

What's he’s done, though, in refusing to endorse Speaker Paul Ryan or John McCain's reelection campaigns is to make enemies that he could not afford to make. At least, that's clear in the case of Ryan who is the only force holding the House Republicans in any semblance of order.

People talk about there being a 40% floor or a 45% floor below which no Republican or Democratic presidential candidate can fall, but that floor is held up by joists and support beams that Trump has eaten through like an army of famished termites. Trump can absolutely fall below 40%, and possibly far below it. His support right now is around 41 percent and it’s eroding. The defections will continue and could easily become a stampede. It couldn’t be more obvious that this is the future that is anticipated by the Republicans who are plotting an intervention with Trump’s children.

For this reason, though, the Democrats don’t want Trump to drop out. So, maybe now is the time to ease up on him while he deals with the insurrection he’s caused?

I originally posted the following as a comment on Booman’s post With Trump, Everyday is a New Buffet. I reconsidered after posting it. Here it is as a standalone article.

===========================

Booman  wrote:

I go to sleep and wake up and there’s always a fresh all-you-can-eat [Trump] buffet set up

That’s the secret of his success so far. Will it last? I dunno. It’s lasted over a year, hasn’t it?

He also quoted:

Meg Whitman, the Hewlett-Packard chief executive who ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 2010, will back Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, joining other prominent Republicans troubled by Donald Trump’s candidacy.

“As a proud Republican, casting my vote for president has usually been a simple matter. This year is different,” Whitman wrote on Facebook. “Donald Trump’s demagoguery has undermined the fabric of our national character.”

Whitman, a major GOP fundraiser whose net worth is about $2 billion, also told the New York Times that she planned to raise money for Clinton.

More undecideds swing towards Trump every time some billionaire RatPublican says something like this. I cannot imagine how many made up their minds to vote for Trump after Mike Bloomberg threw in his two billion (two cents adjusted for inflation) recently. They feel…quite correctly…that the “fix” of which Trump speaks is indeed in, and the the proof of the pudding lies in this very kind of thing. The establishment is the enemy now in the minds of many Americans, and bipartisan support of Hillary Clinton seems to be sufficient proof of the matter for them.

Read on for more.
He also quoted:

Donald Trump on Tuesday defend his claim that the election will be rigged, offering no actual evidence but saying he hears and feels things.

“Well, I’m talking about at the voter booth,” Trump told CBS12 in Florida. “I mean, we’ve seen a lot of things over the years. And now without the IDs, you know the voter IDs, and all the things that are going on. And some bad court cases have come down.”

Asked if he had any reason to believe something illegal was going on, Trump offered the answer, “I just hear things, and I just feel it.”

You really don’t get Trump’s appeal to voters, do you?

He is saying “I’m just like you, only wealthier. I ‘just hear and feel things’ too. Do you think the system is crooked enough to go to those lengths to stop me from repairing it? I do, and I think you do, too.”

There was a great deal of evidence in the 2000 and 2004 elections that key electoral states were fixed. That evidence was stopped from having sufficient power to change things by Gore and Kerry’s public surrenders, ostensibly “for the good of the country.” Yeah, right. The Iraq War and the banking crisis and subsequent massive bailout were also “for the good of the country” as well, correct? Riiiiiight. Normal, walking-down-the-street people, people who also “just hear and feel” because they’re too fucking busy surviving to do much else are beginning to wake up to the truth of this matter, Booman. There is and has been an ongoing fix…a fix that has been propagated in numerous ways by the financial interests that own both parties…since at least the assassination years. Now the successes of Sanders and Trump are pointing towards an awakening of the general public to just this fact.

It took them long enough, but they’re finally waking up to that single fact.

Trump is openly running on that fact. The idea that he is if a crude, egomaniacal asshole does not seem to bother a large portion of the population. In fact, they seem to like it. They feel that he is one of them, that he is speaking for the people who have been massively injured by that fix.

Is he hustling them?

Yes. Of course. Hustlers hustle. It’s what they do. These people don’t care anymore. They have only two choices. It’s his hustle or the establishment hustle. The’re choosing his hustle.

Will this be enough to get him elected? We shall see, soon enough. Personally, I think that if the media just stopped its daily Trumpamania his campaign would begin to deflate within one week.

But…they aren’t going to do that. It’s too profitable for the media and the people who control the media simply aren’t smart enough or organized enough to get that done. Unless that happens? Unless the daily, fresh, all-you-can-eat Trump buffet is shut down and shut down soon, I think he’s either going to win outright…barring of course bipartisan vote fraud in a few states…or come so close that it goes right to the wire. And even then he won’t stop. Watch. I can see some version of the “Make America Great” party headed down the tracks already.

Watch.

Hustlers never voluntarily put down a profitable hustle. He’l ride it until it no longer works, then he’ll tank it just as he has his other bankruptcies.

Watch.

AG

I’m getting weary of writing about Trump so much, but I go to sleep and wake up and there’s always a fresh all-you-can-eat buffet set up. Over here are the donuts:

A knowledgeable Republican source told CNN that some of Trump’s campaign staff — even campaign manager Paul Manafort — “feel like they are wasting their time,” given Trump’s recent comments…

…Two Trump insiders said Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus has talked to Trump several times in recent days, conveying the dismay among senior party leaders and donors.

It has been relayed to Trump hat he is losing what tenuous support he has in the party establishment, and that already skeptical donors are heading for the exits or telling the senior team can’t count on serious progress when he looks so toxic.

“(Manafort) has made clear no one can help him if no one believes he will do what it takes to win,” said a senior trump aide.

And over here are the scrambled eggs:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump escalated his war with his own party’s leadership Tuesday by refusing to endorse House Speaker Paul D. Ryan or Sen. John McCain, two of the GOP’s highest-ranking elected officials, in their primary campaigns…

…Trump praised Ryan’s underdog opponent, Paul Nehlen, for running “a very good campaign” and said of Ryan: “I like Paul, but these are horrible times for our country. We need very strong leadership. We need very, very strong leadership. And I’m just not quite there yet. I’m not quite there yet.”

And over here are some bagels and cream cheese:

Meg Whitman, the Hewlett-Packard chief executive who ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 2010, will back Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, joining other prominent Republicans troubled by Donald Trump’s candidacy.

“As a proud Republican, casting my vote for president has usually been a simple matter. This year is different,” Whitman wrote on Facebook. “Donald Trump’s demagoguery has undermined the fabric of our national character.”

Whitman, a major GOP fundraiser whose net worth is about $2 billion, also told the New York Times that she planned to raise money for Clinton.

And there’s a nice selection of fresh fruit and fruit juices:

Former Donald Trump campaign manager and CNN contributor Corey Lewandowski on Tuesday night suggested that President Obama did not release his Harvard transcripts in order to hide that he was not born in the United States.

And I can’t forget about the sausage and bacon:

Donald Trump on Tuesday defend his claim that the election will be rigged, offering no actual evidence but saying he hears and feels things.

“Well, I’m talking about at the voter booth,” Trump told CBS12 in Florida. “I mean, we’ve seen a lot of things over the years. And now without the IDs, you know the voter IDs, and all the things that are going on. And some bad court cases have come down.”

Asked if he had any reason to believe something illegal was going on, Trump offered the answer, “I just hear things, and I just feel it.”

I may get to some of these stories in more detail throughout the day, but I gorged myself on an entirely different buffet yesterday, writing about the president’s evisceration of Trump, the first iteration of his theory that the election will be rigged, pressure that Republicans feel to un-endorse him, and how there’s still so much dirt in his history that hasn’t even been discussed.

Tomorrow there will be a new buffet set up.

It’s exhausting for political writers, but I think it’s having an even more enervating effect on the Republican Party establishment.

More on that, next.

Read Washington Monthly editor-in-chief Paul Glastris’s editorial on the Olympics in the Washington Post.

North Carolina is interesting right now because the Attorney General is running to defeat the governor, and the governor needs the Attorney General to appeal rulings that have gone against him in things like reinstating Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws and making it legal to discriminate against gays. Needless to say, the Attorney General is not being very helpful in that regard.

Someone (Assad? Putin?) is lobbing chlorine gas (or something toxic, anyway) out of helicopters on civilian towns in Syria.

I feel like we’ve been waiting to see an effort to liberate Mosul for a very long time. It sounds like we still a long time, yet, to wait.

It seems like a lot of Turks are convinced that the United States is responsible for the coup attempt there and the government is encouraging folks to take that view. I honestly don’t think the U.S. was behind it, but we do have the guy who is supposedly responsible for the uprising living in Pennsylvania, so unless we’re going to turn him over I don’t expect America to be too popular there for the foreseeable future.

The Japanese are concerned that North Korea is getting pretty advanced both in their missile technology and in their ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons down to a point that they can be mounted on their missiles.

Will anti-trade sentiment sink an effort by Australia and Indonesia to strike a free trade deal?

Amid persistant unrest, Mali extends its State of Emergency until April 2017.

The Pope is setting up a panel to investigate whether or not women can serve as deacons but still is not even considering whether they can serve as priests. Baby steps, I guess.

Have a pleasant evening.

This is just a casual observation, but I’m pretty sure that the Clinton campaign is sitting on top of a dossier of Trump atrocities that details every single imprudent thing he’s done and said since he claimed his feet didn’t work well enough to fight the Viet Cong. They probably have it mapped out so that they can release the best tidbits in drips and drabs, obviously saving the best stuff for the Fall, or whenever they badly need to get the focus off themselves. I’m sure it’s all very detailed and meticulous, and the only debate has been over how to fit it all in and which pieces are going on the cutting room floor.

The thing is, I just don’t think they’ll ever get to most of it. When Trump isn’t attacking fire marshals and the parents of fallen soldiers, he’s kicking babies out of his rallies. When is there ever going to be time to make him explain that Andrew Dice Clay was only making a joke when he thanked him for the whores at his 44th birthday party?

Democratic National Committee CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall and Director of Communications Luis Miranda  all announced resignations today.  This follows DW Shultz’s resignation as Chairwoman before the convention.  Many speculate that this is more fall out from the leaked emails showing employees of the DNC speculating, and perhaps acting, on ways to sabotage Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the nomination.

This is very strange to do during a campaign and is timed poorly as it will inject the “Democrats in disarray” meme all over Trump’s fitness for office debate.

Ridge

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/08/02/report-dnc-ceo-resigns-over-email-hack.html?via=deskt
op&source=copyurl

President Obama absolutely blistered Donald Trump today, and the interesting thing about what he said is that there’s really nothing debatable about any of it. The Republicans absolutely know that Obama is correct, down to the smallest detail.

“I think what’s been interesting is the repeated denunciations of his statements by leading Republicans,” he said in a press conference. “The question I think they have to ask themselves is, if you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him? What does this say about your party that this is your standard-bearer? This isn’t a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily and weekly where they are distancing themselves from statements he’s making.”

Obama wondered what comment from Trump would actually force Republicans to withdraw their support for the Republican nominee.

“There has to be a point in which you say this is not somebody I can support for President of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party. The fact that that has not yet happened makes some of these denunciations ring hollow. I don’t doubt their sincerity. I don’t doubt they were outraged about some of the statements that Mr. Trump and his supporters made about the Khan family,” he said. “But there has to come a point in which you say somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn’t have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world because a lot of people depend on the White House getting stuff right.”

He noted that the denunciations coming from Republicans differ from the typical policy disagreements between Democrats and Republicans.

“I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job. And had they won, I would have been disappointed, but I would have said to all Americans, this is our president, and I know they’re going to abide by certain norms and rules and common sense, will observe basic decency, will have enough knowledge about economic policy and foreign policy, and our constitutional traditions and rule of law that our government will work,” Obama said. “But that’s not the situation here.”

“There has to come a point in which you say, enough,” Obama told Republicans.

The President also said that Trump is “unfit” to be president in light of his attacks on the Khans, who are the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who died in combat.

“Yes, I think the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president,” he said at a press conference when asked if he questions Trump’s fitness to serve given his comments on the Khan family and on Russia. “I said so last week. And he keeps on proving it. The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia means that he’s woefully unprepared to do this job.”

It’s awfully early for the country to be at this point, and it’s not like anyone is going to cancel the campaign or the election, but Trump isn’t an option and that’s not going to change.

When Obama spoke today, he spoke for every person of even modest judgment, and that includes nearly every Republican officeholder in the country. This charade will not hold for another three months.