Month: June 2016

Not a dime’s worth of difference

by digby

This piece by Eric Alterman about the press’s He said/ She said “both sides do it” coverage of the 2016 election is an absolute must read. There is a very big risk of the press normalizing Trump and pathologizing Clinton in order to pretend they are being “balanced.” This is always a bad thing, as we saw when they valorized that man-child George W. Bush and denigrated Al Gore back in 2000.  This time the threat is even more grave.



From the earliest days of this campaign, Times reporters have been transparently eager to blame “both sides,” often regardless of circumstance. Last November, Times reporter Michael Barbaro devoted a lengthy article to the GOP candidates’ most brazen lies, albeit one filled with euphemisms for the word “lie.” Carly Fiorina “refused” to back down from a story about Planned Parenthood that was “roundly disputed,” he wrote. Ben Carson “harshly turned the questions” about inconsistencies in his life story “back on the reporters who asked them.” Donald Trump “utters plenty of refutable claims” and “set the tone for the embroidery” by creating “an entirely new category of overstatement in American politics.” But guess what? “The tendency to bend facts is bipartisan.” How do we know? Well, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton chose not to confess their infidelities to the nation during election cycles that took place a generation ago. And apparently Hillary Clinton once mistakenly described herself as being the granddaughter of four immigrants when, in fact, her paternal grandmother was born shortly after her family arrived in the United States—an error she quickly corrected. Barbaro also found Clinton’s explanations about her personal and State Department e-mail accounts to be unsatisfactory. He wrote that she had “used multiple devices, like an iPad, to read and send e-mail,” even though she’d said she “preferred” to read them all on a single device. He failed to note that the iPad didn’t even exist when Clinton set up her e-mail account, nor did he explain why expressing a preference counts as bending the truth.

In the paper of record’s political coverage, false equivalence often appears to be the rule rather than the exception. For instance, on March 13, while most political observers were approaching panic over the chaos that Trump’s followers were causing—even Fox’s Chris Wallace felt compelled to tell the candidate, “You have condoned violence in rally after rally”—a front-page story in the Times investigated the question of responsibility for Trump-rally violence. The article, by Barbaro, Ashley Parker, and Trip Gabriel, quoted the corporate-friendly Democrat William M. Daley observing, “Both sides are fueling this.” Neither Daley nor the authors offered any evidence to support this accusation. It wasn’t even clear who represented “the other side.” Was it President Obama? (That’s whom The Wall Street Journal’s editors blamed.) The “communist” Bernie Sanders (Trump’s preferred culprit)? Democrats in general? Or the folks who were recklessly getting themselves beaten up by Trump’s thugs? The article didn’t attempt to explain.

I draw these examples from The New York Times not because the newspaper is the worst offender in this regard, but because it is by far America’s most comprehensive and influential news-gathering institution. More than any other source, the Gray Lady shapes the contours of the news narrative to which almost all mainstream reporters adhere. Others play an important role as well: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and, of course, the broadcast and cable networks and their news and Sunday shows contribute to the overall shape of the conversation. But none come close to challenging the Times’s 1,300-person newsroom in scope or ambition. The upshot is that if the Times is OK with a given journalistic practice, then so is just about everyone else. In an election campaign in particular, the dominant narrative acts as a kind of intellectual straitjacket on reporters’ coverage. In Frank Bruni’s unintentionally revealing memoir of the 2000 presidential campaign, Ambling Into History, the Times pundit and former campaign reporter admits that he occasionally found himself writing stories whose premises he didn’t accept. He couldn’t help but “follow suit,” he explained, if a particularly silly story line “was so rampant in the newspapers and newscasts that it had transmogrified into…fact.”

Raising questions

by digby

This investigation by Vice News is a must read for those who are interested in the topic of the NSA, the bipartisan Deep State and the Snowden revelations. Snowden has always said he tried to go through channels to raise the alarm about these surveillance programs and the agencies have always said he was lying. He wasn’t:

Snowden’s leaks had first come to light the previous June, when the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman published stories based on highly classified documents provided to them by the former NSA contractor. Now Snowden, who had been demonized by the NSA and the Obama administration for the past year, was publicly claiming something that set off alarm bells at the agency: Before he leaked the documents, Snowden said, he had repeatedly attempted to raise his concerns inside the NSA about its surveillance of US citizens — and the agency had done nothing.

Some on the email thread, such as Rajesh De, the NSA’s general counsel, advocated for the public release of a Snowden email from April 2013 in which the former NSA contractor asked questions about the “interpretation of legal authorities” related to the agency’s surveillance programs. It was the only evidence the agency found that even came close to verifying Snowden’s assertions, and De believed it was weak enough to call Snowden’s credibility into question and put the NSA in the clear.

Litt disagreed. “I’m not sure that releasing the email will necessarily prove him a liar,” Litt wrote to Caitlin Hayden, then the White House National Security Council spokesperson, along with De and other officials. “It is, I could argue, technically true that [Snowden’s] email… ‘rais[ed] concerns about the NSA’s interpretation of its legal authorities.’ As I recall, the email essentially questions a document that Snowden interpreted as claiming that Executive Orders were on a par with statutes. While that is surely not raising the kind of questions that Snowden is trying to suggest he raised, neither does it seem to me that that email is a home run refutation.”

Within two hours, however, Litt reversed his position, and later that day, the email was released, accompanied by comment from NSA spokesperson Marci Green Miller: “The email did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse.”

Five days later, another email was sent — this one addressed to NSA director Mike Rogers and copied to 31 other people and one listserv. In it, a senior NSA official apologized to Rogers for not providing him and others with all the details about Snowden’s communications with NSA officials regarding his concerns over surveillance.

The NSA, it seemed, had not told the public the whole story about Snowden’s contacts with oversight authorities before he became the most celebrated and vilified whistleblower in US history.

Hundreds of internal NSA documents, declassified and released to VICE News in response to our long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, reveal now for the first time that not only was the truth about the “single email” more complex and nuanced than the NSA disclosed to the public, but that Snowden had a face-to-face interaction with one of the people involved in responding to that email. The documents, made up of emails, talking points, and various records — many of them heavily redacted — contain insight into the NSA’s interaction with the media, new details about Snowden’s work, and an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the efforts by the NSA, the White House, and US Senator Dianne Feinstein to discredit Snowden.

The trove of more than 800 pages [pdf at the end of this story], along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented insight into the NSA during this time of crisis within the agency. And they call into question aspects of the US government’s long-running narrative about Snowden’s time at the NSA.

It’s funny. I can’t help but think about their elaborate Insider Threat Program:

Read the whole Vice story. It’s interesting how an unresponsive, secretive bureaucracy that couldn’t be bothered to respond to concerns about civil liberties from someone on the inside reacted by lying when the public found out. You’d almost think that maybe their internal oversight mechanisms aren’t trustworthy.

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They’re coming around

by digby

OG Movement Conservative Richard Viguerie:

On December 9, 2015 when I endorsed Ted Cruz for President I said, “conservatives and Republicans are often not the same. However, they definitely have one thing in common: They desperately want to win the White House in 2016. For Democrats this election is important, but for Republicans and conservatives 2016 is not just crucial to the survival of this country and constitutional liberty – it is the ball game.”

In the seven months since I made that statement the picture has gotten bleaker than it was back then. I still think Ted Cruz is the best candidate conservatives had in the race, but he is unfortunately not the candidate who won a majority of the delegates – that distinction goes to Donald Trump – and it is to Trump that right-Richard Viguerieof-center voters will have to look if our country and constitutional liberty are to survive.

And make no mistake, this election is about the survival of the country that Donald Trump has promised to make great again. Obama, Hillary Clinton and their far-left allies have increased the tempo of their assaults on constitutional liberty and the external threats to our national security and domestic tranquility have grown ever greater.

Why then, in the face of the indisputable threats facing our country, would mature men and women who purport to be leaders of the Republican Party and the conservative movement do anything that strengthens Hillary Clinton, that gives her even one more vote?

I find it very strange that many of the same individuals who decry Donald Trump’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy were quick to try to explain away the Romney family’s support for Planned Parenthood and other decidedly anti-conservative organizations and institutions.

And I find it stranger still that many of the Republicans and alleged conservatives who huddle over their smartphones tweeting outrage over Trump’s kneecapping of his various primary opponents were on strict radio silence when Romney did much the same thing to Newt Gingrich.

If you are angry and think Trump can’t be trusted or that he won’t fulfill his promises I say grow up and get in the real world – no politician, including Ronald Reagan the greatest president of my life time, fulfills 100% of their campaign promises.

The question is not will Trump bat 1000? It is will Trump try to undo the damage eight years of Obama and a feckless GOP Congress have inflicted upon America? And the undoubted answer to that is YES.

And in this dangerous environment I can think of nothing that is more disrespectful of the dire situation facing our country than the idea lately propounded by Bill Kristol that some obscure writer for National Review has a legitimate claim to enter the presidential contest because Donald Trump is not a conservative – this is nothing more than a fraternity house prank, and a demeaning one at that.

For those who say they are #NeverTrump because “Donald Trump is not a conservative” on this and that issue I’m curious as to what version of conservatism they subscribe to – the George W. Bush version that says Islam is a religion of peace and led us into an apparently endless and inconclusive war in the Middle East, or the Donald Trump version that says defeat radical Islam wherever we find it?

Or maybe it is the Paul Ryan version of conservatism that says we should fund Obama’s extra-constitutional amnesty for illegal aliens, the Planned Parenthood Industry of Death and a grotesque list of crony government raids on the taxpayers for things like “green energy” and bailouts of Puerto Rico?

The fact of the matter is that when one examines the views of many of the Republican and allegedly conservative #NeverTrump holdouts they are a lot closer to Hillary Clinton and the rest of the DC elite than they are to the views of the millions of country class citizens who turned-out to support Donald Trump.

Many #NeverTrump adherents seem to reject even a conversation about the threat of radical Islam. They are all about the econometric model of open borders that is supported by both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and far-left racial interest groups, and they have no interest in cutting spending or limited government, because government power is how they enforce their elitist views on the rest of us.

If this is standing for conservative principles I must have missed a turn in the road between the day in 1961 when I was hired as Executive Secretary of Young Americans for Freedom and today’s debate over whether or not the congressional Republican leaders who presided over an 80%+ increase in a national debt that now stands at over $18 trillion should get their hands dirty by endorsing Donald Trump.

The news media and DC’s elite pundits like to dance around the facts with euphemisms like “spoiler,” but it is time for those Republicans and conservatives who say they are #NeverTrump to come clean and to look in the mirror and repeat this list:

I’m OK with Hillary Clinton appointing three or four Supreme Court Justices.

I’m OK with Hillary Clinton appointing hundreds of Federal Court Judges.

I’m OK with Hillary Clinton stripping me of my Second Amendment rights.

I’m OK with Hillary Clinton using the power of the IRS and other federal agencies to terminate my First Amendment rights and the First Amendment rights of other Conservatives.

I’m OK with Hillary Clinton expanding Obama’s open borders and unlimited immigration policies.

And, I’m OK with the Hillary Clinton deciding the outer limits of my freedom of conscience and whether or not I can worship God and raise my children as my conscience dictates.

I say to anyone who claims to be a #NeverTrump conservative, look in the mirror and read that list, and if this is you, then be honest and admit that you prefer Hillary Clinton in the White House and why. Then drop the charade and have the guts to defend your choice to advance Hillary Clinton’s campaign and take ownership of the destruction of liberty and constitutional government that her election will surely bring.

The Greatest

by digby

My God he was beautiful

Muhammed Ali died today. He was a great athlete and a great American. He made my own father evolve on civil rights and the war. And my father was not a fan of African Americans and he was a big fans of wars. For all the beautiful speeches by various great leaders of the period, Ali had the power to make people like my dad think twice about their assumptions.

Here’s the statement from President Obama:

Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period. If you just asked him, he’d tell you. He’d tell you he was the double greatest; that he’d “handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail.”

But what made The Champ the greatest – what truly separated him from everyone else – is that everyone else would tell you pretty much the same thing.

Like everyone else on the planet, Michelle and I mourn his passing. But we’re also grateful to God for how fortunate we are to have known him, if just for a while; for how fortunate we all are that The Greatest chose to grace our time.

In my private study, just off the Oval Office, I keep a pair of his gloves on display, just under that iconic photograph of him – the young champ, just 22 years old, roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston. I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was – still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic Gold Medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power, and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.

“I am America,” he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me – black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”

That’s the Ali I came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the mic as he was a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right. A man who fought for us. He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t. His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing. It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.

He wasn’t perfect, of course. For all his magic in the ring, he could be careless with his words, and full of contradictions as his faith evolved. But his wonderful, infectious, even innocent spirit ultimately won him more fans than foes – maybe because in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves. Later, as his physical powers ebbed, he became an even more powerful force for peace and reconciliation around the world. We saw a man who said he was so mean he’d make medicine sick reveal a soft spot, visiting children with illness and disability around the world, telling them they, too, could become the greatest. We watched a hero light a torch, and fight his greatest fight of all on the world stage once again; a battle against the disease that ravaged his body, but couldn’t take the spark from his eyes.

Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it. Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family, and we pray that the greatest fighter of them all finally rests in peace.

And by the way, Donald Trump has been known to compare himself to Ali, even suggesting that his braggodoccio is somehow the same. It is not. Ali actually was the greatest and The Donald is a poseur. Ali was poetic. Trump is profane. Ali was in on the joke. Trump is the joke.

Let’s hope that even Trump doesn’t have the nerve to say anything like this during the period of mourning.

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A man like no other
by Tom Sullivan

Muhammad Ali after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from
President George W. Bush on November 9, 2005. (Public Domain.)

Now Ali, “The Greatest.” Tributes are pouring in from across the planet for Muhammad Ali, the three-time World Heavyweight Champion who captured boxing and the world through, speed, skill, and sheer force of personality after he upset Sonny Liston in 1964. Ali, 74, died at a Phoenix-area hospital last night after a long decline from a respiratory illness aggravated by Parkinson’s. Ali died a Sufi Muslim.

A report in the New York Times quotes Jim Murray of The Los Angeles Times on Ali’s talents, “He didn’t have fights, he gave recitals.”

The “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman (1974, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the “Thrilla in Manila” against Joe Frazier (1975) are legendary. But outside the boxing ring, as his Wikipedia entry notes, “Ali’s actions as a conscientious objector to the [Vietnam War] made him an icon for the larger counterculture generation.” Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., Ali converted to Islam at 22, changed his name, and in 1967 refused induction into the army claiming “his Muslim beliefs forbade him to go to war.” His conviction for draft evasion was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1971 and he returned to the ring.

The Washington Post summarizes:

Judged purely for his boxing skills, Mr. Ali ranks among the greatest heavyweights ever, alongside Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano. But he possessed a quality that reached beyond his accomplishments in the ring to make him recognized by millions the world over.

Even in his diminished physical state, Mr. Ali was admired not just as a supreme athlete but as a hero, as a symbol of understanding and hope. Presidents sometimes called on him to make diplomatic visits abroad, and in 1990 he helped return several U.S. hostages held in Iraq.

A 1996 documentary about Mr. Ali’s 1974 battle with Foreman, “When We Were Kings,” won an Academy Award for best documentary. A Hollywood feature film about his life, starring Will Smith, was released in 2001.

This obituary in the Los Angeles Times perhaps best captures the man in one paragraph:

If Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson opened the door for black athletes, Ali stormed through, making sure it would never close again. His celebrity transcended race and sports, for as dexterous as he was in the ring, he was equally skilled at challenging the status quo. Guided by his religion, bolstered by his popularity, he tempered his righteousness with an ever-quotable wit and a prevailing sense of cool.

The obit continues:

Sports Illustrated writer William Nack described Ali’s life as “so brassy and daring, so filled with wonders and adventure and so enlarged by the magic of his personality and the play of his mind, that no one remotely like him has ever been seen on the sporting scene.”

Ali’s cocky, taunting poetry before fights is what I best remember. As The Los Angeles Times writes, Ali “turned bragging into an art form.” This jaunty bit prior to the “Rumble in the Jungle” is classic Ali:

“I’ve done something new for this fight. I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”

Rest in peace, champ.

Friday Night Soother: Cecil’s legacy

by digby

Meet Cecil’s grandcubs!

Cecil would have been a grandfather today.

A video posted on YouTube Wednesday appears to capture a troop of tiny cubs being led down a path by lionesses in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park.

In all, eight cubs are seen in various states of furry frolic — from tumbling in and out of the tall grasses to scampering after a protective mother.

While a free-ranging lion’s family tree is famously complicated, it’s likely these babies share a bloodline with the famed lion.

Wildlife photographer Graham Simmonds describes the encounter in Africa Geographic:

“Buli, our guide, informed us that the two lionesses had been seen mating with a male named Xanda some months back. Xanda is one of Cecil the lion’s sons that has recently come into his prime, and the cubs seen here are thought to be the ‘grandcubs’ of the legendary Cecil.”

QOTD: Mr Cool

by digby

Trump in San Jose last night:

“Now she’s saying, ‘Donald Trump, do you trust him with the nukes?’ Let me tell you. My temperament is so much tougher and so much better than her temperament. And by the way, we need a tough temperament. All of these countries that are our allies — she talks about our allies — our allies think we’re very stupid people.”

Why would he bring up our allies in that context? Well, maybe because he has said that they should all get nukes because we can’t afford to use our military (which he plans to build up so YUUUUGWE that nobody will ever mess with us again) to keep them under our security umbrella.

This is what he really thinks. He’ll backtrack a number of times and he’ll say one thing today and another tomorrow. But if you really listen to him and see how he free associates, you can tell what he really believes.

This isn’t a joke. At all. This very scary article in The Atlantic about Trump’s nuclear blathering explains why this is so dangerous:

A nuclear-armed Trump is indeed a scary thought. But his apparent comfort with encouraging other countries to develop their own nuclear stockpiles is just as scary, if not more so. For 70 years, American presidents of both parties have understood the simple arithmetic involved—that the more countries have nuclear weapons, the more opportunities there are for nuclear war to break out, whether by design or by accident.

Yet the Republican nominee is effectively advocating the spread of arms so destructive they haven’t been used since their horrifying debut over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In addition to remarking that the United States would be “better off” if nations like South Korea and Japan had nuclear weapons, Trump also seemed open, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, to the possibility of Saudi Arabia, too, getting the bomb. He has since tried to walk this back—“They said that I wanted Japan to get nuclear weapons. Give me a break.” But as both Clinton and CNN have pointed out, he did say exactly that.

Given contradictions like this, it can be hard to take Trump seriously on foreign policy. But the implications of what he has said on nuclear weapons are extremely serious. A Trump presidency could reverse decades of American presidents’ work to hold the line against the spread of nuclear weapons, ushering in a new era of proliferation. U.S. leaders have applied “tremendous pressure” on allies to get them to turn back their nuclear programs. They have led efforts to successfully reduce the number of states that had or were actively pursuing nuclear weapons, from 23 in the 1960s down to nine.

At the core of Trump’s proliferation “policy” is a mistaken, reflexive belief that America is weak and will be powerless to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. “[I]f the United States keeps on its path, its current path of weakness,” he told The New York Times in March, Japanese and South Korean leaders would want such weapons “with or without me discussing it, because I don’t think they feel very secure in what’s going on with our country.” To CNN, he said: “It’s going to happen anyway. It’s only a question of time.” He ignores America’s past success in stemming proliferation—including in South Korea. It is unprecedented for an American leader to accept proliferation as inevitable because America is “weak.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, someone whom Trump praised as one of the “biggest diplomats in the country,” didn’t. In fact, he applied pressure on South Korea in 1975 to keep the country from going nuclear.

This isn’t a left-vs.-right issue—among the strongest opponents of nuclear proliferation was President Ronald Reagan. More than 30 years before Obama went to Hiroshima to warn about nuclear war, it was Reagan who went to Tokyo to state definitively, “A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,” and to pledge that “our dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.”

Read the whole thing. And then go have a very stiff drink. You’ll need it because the fact is that it isn’t totally necessary for Trump to win for this nuclear regime to start to fall apart. It’s enough that one of the two major parties has nominated him and millions of Americans are ecstatically cheering him on.

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The next president of the United States?

by digby

Here you go:

He is one racist piece of work. Can anyone still doubt it?

This Trump U thing has him spooked and this means the press needs to dig more deeply into his business dealings. He’s got something to hide.  He’s muddying the water throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall hoping he can insinuate it’s all political. He claims the plaintiff’s law firm gave money to Clinton, for instance. Presumably, that’s to deflect from this:

Attorneys general in Florida and Texas who declined to pursue lawsuits against the now-defunct Trump University received political contributions from Donald Trump, according to an Associated Press report.

Trump donated $35,000 to the successful gubernatorial campaign of then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott three years after a probe into the university’s “possibly deceptive trade practices” was dropped by his office when the university agreed to cease its Texas operations. 

Abbott’s office pushed back against the report in a statement to The Hill on Friday, saying that the then-attorney general was just doing his job. 

“The unthinkable has happened – the media’s obsession with Donald Trump is now leading them to highlight the job then-Attorney General Abbott did in protecting Texas consumers,” said Abbott spokesman Matt Hirsch.
And a political fundraising committee supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation just days after her office had announced it was looking into joining a multi-state lawsuit against Trump University. Her office later dropped the inquiry, citing a lack of evidence.

He’s definitely getting crispy. He thought he’d already taken the worst hits he was going to get when Marco Rubio said he had small hands. But that was the minor leagues.  All those losers didn’t want to alienate Trump’s voters so they went easy on him.  This is the big leagues now. And Democrats are laboring under no illusion that hardcore Trumpies are ever going to vote for them.

So far, he’s not handling the pressure very well.

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ICYWW, yes he has said all those things

by digby

Clinton laid out a long list of outrageous comments by Donald Trump in her speech yesterday. They are all true:

This is a man who said that more countries should have nuclear weapons, including Saudi Arabia.

ANDERSON COOPER: Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?

TRUMP: Saudi Arabia, absolutely.

This is someone who has threatened to abandon our allies in NATO – the countries that work with us to root out terrorists abroad before the strike us at home.

TRUMP: “We don’t really need NATO in its current form. NATO is obsolete… if we have to walk, we walk.”

He believes we can treat the U.S. economy like one of his casinos and default on our debts to the rest of the world, which would cause an economic catastrophe far worse than anything we experienced in 2008.

TRUMP: “I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts… I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”

He has said that he would order our military to carry out torture…

TRUMP: “Don’t tell me it doesn’t work — torture works… Waterboarding is fine, but it’s not nearly tough enough, ok?”

and the murder of civilians who are related to suspected terrorists…

TRUMP: “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families”

even though those are war crimes.

TRUMP: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me, If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”

He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals or ambassadors, because he has – quote – “a very good brain.”

TRUMP: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things…my primary consultant is myself”

He also said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals, believe me.”

TRUMP: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”

You know what? I don’t believe him.

TRUMP: “We don’t even really know who the leader [of ISIS] is.”

He believes climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese…

TRUMP: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

and has the gall to say prisoners of war like John McCain aren’t heroes.

TRUMP: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured, ok? I hate to tell you.”

He praises dictators like Vladimir Putin…

TRUMP: “I will tell you, in terms of leadership, he’s getting an ‘A,’ and our president is not doing so well.”

and picks fights with our friends – including the British prime minister…

TRUMP: “It looks like we are not going to have a very good relationship. Who knows?”

the mayor of London…

TRUMP: “Let’s take an I.Q. test… I think they’re very rude statements and frankly, tell him, I will remember those statements.”

the German chancellor…

TRUMP: “What Merkel has done is incredible, it’s actually mind boggling. Everyone thought she was a really great leader and now she’s turned out to be this catastrophic leader. And she’ll be out if they don’t have a revolution.”

the president of Mexico…

TRUMP: “I don’t know about the Hitler comparison [President Nieto made]. I hadn’t heard that, but it’s a terrible comparison. I’m not happy about that certainly. I don’t want that comparison, but we have to be strong and we have to be vigilant”

and the Pope.

TRUMP: “I don’t think [the Pope] understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico. I think Mexico got him to [criticize the wall] it because they want to keep the border just the way it is. They’re making a fortune, and we’re losing.”

He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia.

TRUMP: “I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, Miss Universe contest, which was a big, big, incredible event.”

And to top it off, he believes America is weak. An embarrassment.

TRUMP: “I think we’ve become very weak and ineffective.”

He called our military a disaster.

TRUMP: “Our military is a disaster.”

He said we’re – quote – a “third-world country.”

TRUMP: “We have become a third world country, folks.”

That’s why it’s no small thing when he talks about leaving NATO or says he’ll stay neutral on Israel’s security.

TRUMP: “Let me be sort of a neutral guy.”

It’s no small thing when he calls Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers.

TRUMP: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

And it’s no small thing when he suggests that America should withdraw our military support for Japan, encourage them to get nuclear weapons…

TRUMP: “And frankly, the case could be made, that let them protect themselves against North Korea. They’d probably wipe them out pretty quick.”

and said this about a war between Japan and North Korea – and I quote – “If they do, they do. Good luck, enjoy yourself, folks.”

TRUMP: “And if they fight, you know what, that would be a terrible thing, terrible. Good luck folks, enjoy yourself…if they do, they do”

Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program. Ask him. It’ll become clear very quickly.

TRUMP: “When those restrictions expire, Iran will have an industrial-size military nuclear capability ready to go.” (Politifact: False.)

There’s no risk of people losing their lives if you blow up a golf-course deal. But it doesn’t work like that in world affairs. Just like being interviewed on the same episode of “60 Minutes” as Putin is not the same as actually dealing with Putin.

TRUMP: “I got to know him very well, because we were both on 60 minutes, we were stablemates and we did very well that night. You know that.”

He wants to start a trade war with China.

TRUMP: “These dummies say, ‘Oh, that’s a trade war. Trade war? We’re losing $500 billion in trade with China. Who the hell cares if there’s a trade war?”

And I have to say, I don’t understand Donald’s bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen who have no love for America. He praised China for the Tiananmen Square massacre; he said it showed strength.

TRUMP: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”

He said, “You’ve got to give Kim Jong Un credit” for taking over North Korea – something he did by murdering everyone he saw as a threat, including his own uncle, which Donald described gleefully, like he was recapping an action movie.

TRUMP: “And you’ve got to give him credit. How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals…. It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn’t play games.”

And he said that, if he were grading Vladimir Putin as a leader, he’d give him an A.

TRUMP: “I will tell you, in terms of leadership, he’s getting an ‘A,’

What’s Trump’s [ISIS plan]? He won’t say. He is literally keeping it a secret. The secret, of course, is he has no idea what he’d do to stop ISIS.

TRUMP: “I do know what to do and I would know how to bring ISIS to the table or beyond that, defeat ISIS very quickly and I’m not going to tell you what is… All I can tell you it is a foolproof way of winning.”

Just look at the few things he actually has said on the subject. He actually said – quote – “maybe Syria should be a free zone for ISIS.” That’s right – let a terrorist group have control of a major country in the Middle East.

TRUMP: It’s really rather amazing, maybe Syria should be a free zone for ISIS, let them fight and then you pick up the remnants.

Then he said we should send tens of thousands of American ground troops to the Middle East to fight ISIS.

TRUMP: “We really have no choice. We have to knock out ISIS. We have to knock the hell out of them… I would listen to the generals but I’m hearing numbers of 20,000 to 30,000. We have to knock them out fast.”

He also refused to rule out using nuclear weapons against ISIS, which would mean mass civilian casualties.

TRUMP: “I’m never going to rule anything out—I wouldn’t want to say [if I’d use nuclear weapons against ISIS.]”

Trump says over and over again, “The world is laughing at us.” He’s been saying this for decades.

TRUMP (1999): “[Saudi Arabians] take such advantage of us with the oil… and they laugh at this country.

TRUMP (2010): “I know many of the people in China, I know many of the big business people, and they’re laughing at us.”

TRUMP (2011): “We have become a laughingstock, the world’s whipping boy”

TRUMP (2012): “The world is laughing at us.”

TRUMP (2013): “After Syria, our enemies are laughing!”

TRUMP (2014): “Mexican leadership has been laughing at us for many years”

TRUMP (2015): “The Persians are great negotiators. They are laughing at the stupidity of the deal we’re making”

TRUMP (2016): “We can’t afford to be so nice and so foolish anymore. Our country is in trouble. ISIS is laughing at us.”

He bought full-page ads in newspapers across the country back in 1987, when Reagan was President, saying that America lacked a backbone and the world was – you guessed it – laughing at us.

TRUMP (1987): “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help… “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

And it matters when he makes fun of disabled people…

TRUMP: “Now the poor guy — you oughta see this guy [imitating disabled reporter] ‘aaah, I don’t know what I said, aaah, I don’t remember.’”

calls women pigs…

TRUMP: “Does everybody know that pig named Rosie O’Donnell? She’s a disgusting pig, right?”

proposes banning an entire religion from our country…

TRUMP: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

or plays coy with white supremacists.

TRUMP: “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don’t know. I don’t know — did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.”

There are a lot of other horrifying things he’s said as well, including the truly stunning credo “Your civil liberties end where our safety begins.” (And he was talking about applying the death penalty to five people who later turned out to be innocent.)

You could go on for days with this stuff.

Via

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Tony Soprano was more subtle

by digby

There’s been a lot of discussion of Trump’s despicable comments demanding that the judge in his Trump University fraud case recuse himself because he’s Mexican (which he isn’t) and is therefore assumed to have a conflict of interest with Trump because Trump wants to build his silly wall.This was an escalation of his attack on the judge from his 12 minute rant in San Diego earlier in the week. It’s absurd on its face.

Donald Trump said in an interview published Thursday that that a federal judge’s Mexican heritage presents a “absolute conflict” in his fitness to hear lawsuits against Trump University because of the mogul’s hard-line stance on immigration.

While Trump has assailed the judge before with racially imbued language, his comments marked the first time he explicitly said the judge’s ethnicity should have disqualified him for presiding over the cases.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had a conflict in the cases because the judge is “of Mexican heritage” and the mogul is espousing polarizing views on immigration.

“I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Trump told the Journal, referencing his proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that his supporters have cheered but opponents have sharply criticized.

He didn’t mention it in his red-faced, sweaty, angry over-the-top rambling speech in San Jose last night but he did say something else that should have legal scholars and politicians a little worried. He apparently doesn’t know that presidents aren’t allowed to direct their Justice Department or judges to use their police powers to mete out punishment to his political enemies. He’s basically threatening Hillary Clinton with just that.

First he evokes his most common sexist dog whistle:

When you watched her today, she does not look presidential, that I can tell you, she does not. This is not a president.(11:25) …

I’m going to guess a lot of people agree with that. After all, she looks completely different than any president we’ve ever had.

But this (13:55) is where he really gets wound up:

This is about America first. This is about putting our country first, folks. This is about showing people that we’re not going to be listening to stupid people anymore. That we’re not going to have people making deals like the Iran deal, like the Sergeant Bergdahl deal. I mean, think of it. They get five of the people that they’ve wanted for 8 years and we get Sergeant Bergdahl, a traitor, where five people were killed looking for him. These are the deals. I call him the five for one president. So we’re not going to do this anymore folks. Those days are over. The days of the Iran deal where they get a hundred fifty billion dollars we get nothing in that deal, nothing, except laughed at and scorned.

(For those of you still confused about what Trump means by “America First” I hope that passage clears it up for you. Putting your “country first”means making other countries stop laughing at us. )

And then I watch Hillary Clinton, she started the foundation of that deal and now she’s proud of it. But she’s only proud of it for one reason. You know why? Because Obama wants it. Anything Obama wants, she’s going forward with, because you know why?? She doesn’t wanna go ta jail! That’s why folks!

Remember Hillary Clinton used to hate Obama! Bill Clinton hated him! Bill Clinton hated him! Obama called him a racist remember that? Bill Clinton hated him! And now it’s “yessir, Mr President Sir! Yessir! What would you like?! What would you like me to say here sir?!” The only reason she’s behaving like this and the only reason she’s been dragged so far left, believe me, is she doesn’t want to go to jail over the emails, buhleev me, ok? One simple reason.

Because you know what folks? I used to say, leave it up to the lawyers. I have watched so many lawyers on so many different networks. I have read so much about the emails. Folks, honestly, she’s guilty as hell. She’s guilty as hell. And the fact that they even allow her to participate in this race is a disgrace to the United States, it’s a disgrace to our nation. It’s a disgrace.

Sp we’ll see what happens, I don’t know. I’ve always had great confidence in the FBI, I have great respect, I know some FBI folks, I’ve always had great confidence in them. I can’t believe that they would let this go. When you look at General Petraeus, he got the equivalent of two years. He did nothing compared to her. You look at some of these other people, their lives have been destroyed. What she did is 20 times worse. And now her guys are taking the 5th amendment, the whole thing it’s a mess and she keeps running like it’s no problem.

I’m telling you, it’s a great system we have, we have a great country, we’re going to make it a lot greater by the war, we love our country, but look, we love our country and I don’t believe our country can let her get away with this crime, I don’t believe it. So we’ll see. And you know what? If they do let her get away with it, it will be a big topic of conversation on the campaign trail, I can tell you that.

And then if I win (shrugs dramatically like Mussolini, shakes his head) — it’s called a five year statue of limitations. If I win … everything’s going to be fair but I’m sure the Attorney General will take a very good look at it from a fair standpoint, ok? I’m sure. I think it’s disgraceful.

I’m not sure what crime she’s guilty of that has a five year statue of limitations but he’s sure that whatever it is she’s guilty of it.

If you are living your busy life and haven’t had a chance to really listen to Trump in all his glory recently, take the time this week-end to listen to the whole speech. You need to see it. I wish everyone could see it. There’s something mesmerizing about his extreme narcissism that I’ve never seen in any other human being. It’s got a powerful effect.

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