Month: September 2016

You sir, are no Bernie Sanders

by digby

I wrote about Gary Johnson for Salon this morning:

As we hit the final stretch of the most incredible presidential campaign in modern memory, it appears that third-party candidates may end up being more consequential than they’ve been since Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000. It’s very close, and there is a real possibility they could decide the election. With Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, the onetime Republican governor of New Mexico, at nearly 10 percent and pulling more people who say Clinton is their second choice, Donald Trump may be the beneficiary in the all-important battleground states.

After watching Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, in Wednesday night’s town-hall meeting with Chris Matthews, I think maybe they should let Johnson in the debates so more of these voters could see exactly what they’re voting for. The risk is that while Johnson would reveal himself as a bizarre and ignorant man, he might just make Republican presidential nominee Trump look smart and competent by comparison.

When Johnson was interviewed on “Morning Joe” in early September he made one of the more memorable gaffes in campaign history when his answer to “What would you do about Aleppo?” was “What is Aleppo?” He didn’t recognize it as the name of the second-largest city in Syria, which has been in the headlines for months as a battleground where the government is fighting rebel forces. On Wednesday, Johnson said he took responsibility for his Aleppo gaffe, but further explained that he doesn’t believe that just because “a politician can dot the I’s and cross the T’s on some geographic location or the name of some foreign dictator, now we should believe them when it comes to these interventions.”

I’m not sure who believes that just because someone has educated herself about geography and foreign leadership that her ideas must automatically be followed. It’s just that most of us used to think that presidents should have some basic knowledge of facts before they propose policies. The campaign of 2016 has revealed that such qualifications are no longer considered a requirement for the job — at least not by the half of the electorate who claim to be voting for Trump or Johnson.

And then Johnson did it again. Matthews asked him to name his favorite foreign leader, and Johnson again drew a blank, finally admitting, “I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment.” Unfortunately, the exchange went on and on, with Matthews pushing and Johnson floundering, until Weld finally stepped in to cite Chancellor Angela Merkel as his favorite and the whole thing mercifully came to an end.

When asked by one of the fresh-faced young people in the crowd what he said to people who claim that a vote for Johnson is a wasted vote, the candidate told him, “A wasted vote is a vote for someone you don’t believe in.” Matthews came back with a quote from President Barack Obama from earlier in the day:

If you don’t vote, that’s a vote for Trump. If you vote for a third-party candidate who’s got no chance to win, that’s a vote for Trump.

Johnson’s bizarre nonresponse was to say that Clinton and Trump are doing nothing about Medicare and Medicaid and that “we’re headed to bankruptcy with the size and scope of government.”

When asked about his views on climate change, Johnson rambled on about the coal industry going bankrupt and said he believes the free market is going to fix the problem. How would he make college more accessible to students, a matter central to the Democratic primary campaign and now integral to Hillary Clinton’s platform? Johnson said that the reason why college costs so much is that government-guaranteed student loans have “skewed supply and demand.” In other words, if fewer people go to college, tuition will go down.

A young woman asked if a Johnson administration would cut Planned Parenthood funds, and Johnson said he plans to submit a balanced budget in the first 100 days that would require 20 percent trims across the board. Asked about money in politics, he said he believes there should be no restrictions on campaign contributions. A young man asked him if he would consider rethinking his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and Johnson said absolutely not. He made it very clear that he intends to eliminate every trade barrier he can find.

The theme that Johnson returned to over and over is that he believes in balanced budgets, cutting entitlements and reducing debt over everything else.

Johnson did express the standard libertarian belief that he believes in civil liberties and gay rights, although he fudged his answer about abortion rights. He left out the fact that although he believes in a woman’s right to choose he also believes in a state’s right to take it away, with horrific consequences for women.

He portrayed Hillary Clinton as a psycho who is going to start a nuclear war. When asked about it again later in the broadcast, Johnson said that would happen because Clinton refuses to be “seen as weak” and “she will shoot.” It was yet another absurd statement in a long line of them. There’s only one candidate who’s threatening to start a nuclear war and it isn’t Clinton.

Many young people become attracted to libertarianism for a time after they read Ayn Rand’s novels and are exposed to the seductive lure of selfishness as a philosophy. Some stick with it for a while, or become standard Republicans as time goes on. But judging from the questions at Wednesday’s town hall event, this audience was not a bunch of Rand acolytes eager to talk about the moochers at Planned Parenthood or the parasites who want free college. With the exception of one or two questioners, most sounded like earnest progressives who may have voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders during the primary season.

Johnson’s libertarianism is very, very different from Sanders’ altruistic democratic socialism. Sanders believes that government has an affirmative duty to help people. Johnson believes that government is an impediment to the natural working of the free market. It’s overwhelmingly obvious that Clinton comes much closer to the Sanders philosophy than does Johnson.

Given how close the election is in certain key states, a few protest votes could put Trump in the White House. As Sanders is telling anyone who will listen, “Before you cast a protest vote — because either Clinton or Trump will become president — think hard about it. This is not a governor’s race. It’s not a state legislative race. This is the presidency of the United States.”

It’s also the future of the planet.

#hardball WATCH #GaryJohnson. Last 10 secs.of video will be the weirdest thing you will see this year. Guaranteed. pic.twitter.com/Lp1cIbrtvJ

— vlh (@coton_luver) September 29, 2016

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Buncha white guys sittin’ around talkin’ about wimminn gettin’ fat

by digby

All those fine fellows in that picture “weighed in” on the fat shaming issue yesterday. I’m sure they had a great deal of insight.


So did this one:

On Wednesday night, Gingrich defended Trump by saying essentially that he had every right to call Machado fat because she did get fat.

“You’re not supposed to gain 60 pounds during the year that you’re Miss Universe,” Gingrich said, according to Politico. Gingrich was speaking in front of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group devoted to representing LGBT conservatives and allies.

Trump also defended his comments on Wednesday night, telling Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that he “saved her job because they wanted to fire her for putting on so much weight.” Trump commented that despite wanting to save her job, he never really spoke to her.

“I’ll bet you if you put up and added up all the time I spoke to her, it was probably less than five minutes,” he said, according to Talking Points Memo. “I had nothing to do with this person.”

It’s insane to have to get into this but it seems important for the record. Here’s a picture of Machado on the day Trump ambushed her by bringing a bunch of reporters to her gym and talking about her weight gain on camera:

Does that look like someone who is 60 pounds overweight? It’s ridiculous.

Machado says she gained 19 pounds during that first year because she’d lost that much in the run-up to the contest. I think many women can relate to going on a strict diet to lose weight for an event and not being able to keep it off once it was over. That he had to turn it into a public show of dominance, making her smile and accept the humiliation says everything you need to know.

But then Trump doesn’t only believe that women are ornaments that must meet his personal specifications in beauty contests:

After the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes opened for play in 2005, its world-famous owner didn’t stop by more than a few times a year to visit the course hugging the coast of the Pacific.

When Trump did visit, the club’s managers went on alert. They scheduled the young, thin, pretty women on staff to work the clubhouse restaurant — because when Trump saw less-attractive women working at his club, according to court records, he wanted them fired.

“I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were ‘not pretty enough’ and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women,” Hayley Strozier, who was director of catering at the club until 2008, said in a sworn declaration.

Trump told managers to fire restaurant hostesses who were “not pretty enough” and replace them with “more attractive women,” Hayley Strozier, former catering director at the golf club, said in her court declaration.

Initially, Trump gave this command “almost every time” he visited, Strozier said. Managers eventually changed employee schedules “so that the most attractive women were scheduled to work when Mr. Trump was scheduled to be at the club,” she said.

A similar story is told by former Trump employees in court documents filed in 2012 in a broad labor relations lawsuit brought against one of Trump’s development companies in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The employees’ declarations in support of the lawsuit, which have not been reported in detail until now, show the extent to which they believed Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, pressured subordinates at one of his businesses to create and enforce a culture of beauty, where female employees’ appearances were prized over their skills.

A Trump Organization attorney, in a statement to The Times, called the allegations “meritless.”

In a 2009 court filing, the company said that any “allegedly wrongful or discriminatory acts” by its employees, if any occurred, would be in violation of company policy and were not authorized.

Employees said in their declarations that the apparent preference for attractive women came from the top.

“Donald Trump always wanted good looking women working at the club,” said Sue Kwiatkowski, a restaurant manager at the club until 2009, in a declaration. “I know this because one time he took me aside and said, ‘I want you to get some good looking hostesses here. People like to see good looking people when they come in.’ ”

As a result, Kwiatkowski said, “I and the other managers always tried to have our most attractive hostesses working when Mr. Trump was in town and going to be on the premises.”
[…]
As part of the lawsuit over a lack of meal and rest breaks at Trump’s golf club about 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles — his largest real estate holding in Southern California — several employees said managers staffed Trump’s clubhouse restaurant with attractive young women rather than more experienced employees in order to please Trump.

The bulk of the lawsuit was settled in 2013, when golf course management, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $475,000 to employees who had complained about break policies. An employee’s claim that she was fired after complaining about the company’s treatment of women was settled separately; its terms remain confidential.

The former employees’ statements primarily describe the club’s work culture from the mid- to late 2000s. The Times spoke at length to one of the ex-employees, who described in detail the allegations about workplace culture. The person declined to be quoted by name, citing a fear of being sued.

In their sworn declarations, some employees described how Trump, during his stays in Southern California, made inappropriate and patronizing statements to the women working for him.

On one visit, Trump saw “a young, attractive hostess working named Nicole … and directed that she be brought to a place where he was meeting with a group of men,” former Trump restaurant manager Charles West said in his declaration.

“After this woman had been presented to him, Mr. Trump said to his guests something like, ‘See, you don’t have to go to Hollywood to find beautiful women,’” West said. “He also turned to Nicole and asked her, ‘Do you like Jewish men?’”

He’s a fucking pimp.

And then there’s this:

Female employees said they faced additional pressures.

Strozier, the former catering director, said Vincent Stellio — a former Trump bodyguard who had risen to become a Trump Organization vice president — approached her in 2003 about an employee that Strozier thought was talented.

Stellio wanted the employee fired because she was overweight, Strozier said in her legal filing.

“Mr. Stellio told me to do this because ‘Mr. Trump doesn’t like fat people’ and that he would not like seeing [the employee] when he was on the premises,” wrote Strozier, who said she refused the request. (Stellio died in 2010.)

Hayley Strozier, the former catering director, said a vice president from the Trump Organization told her to fire an employee because “Mr. Trump doesn’t like fat people.”

A year later, Mike van der Goes — a golf pro who had been promoted to be Trump National’s general manager — made a similar request to fire the same overweight employee, Strozier said.

“Mr. van der Goes told me that he wanted me to do this because of [the employee’s] appearance and the fact that Mr. Trump didn’t like people that looked like her,” Strozier wrote.

When Strozier protested, Van der Goes returned a week later “and announced he had a plan of hiding [the employee] whenever Mr. Trump was on the premises,” Strozier wrote.

West, who worked as a restaurant manager at the club until 2008, wrote that Van der Goes ordered him “to hire young, attractive women to be hostesses.” West also said Van der Goes insisted that he “would need to meet all such job applicants first to determine if they were sufficiently pretty.”

What a disgusting meat market. But lean meat only! Even by Hollywood standards he’s a crude piece of work.

But I have to say at the very least, he and Newt Gingrich and all those men on that panel in the picture above are in super shape so they’re setting a great example:

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This man is so odious it’s almost beyond belief that anyone would agree to be in the same room with him much less that the Republican Party has nominated him to compete against the nation’s first woman nominee for president.  I guess Andrew Dice Clay’s repulsive character from the 1980s wasn’t available.

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This is what the Trumpies hear

by digby

Seconds after the presidential debate ended, Hillary Clinton couldn’t get off the stage fast enough. She went through the proper motions of thanking the moderator and waving at the few fans she had in the audience before her handler whisked her out of the room and down a private tunnel to her car without realizing that a surveillance camera caught what she tried to hide.

Many viewers speculated that Hillary was heavily medicated while on stage to get her through the public event and hide her illness that’s been a plague on her campaign. With the perpetual grin that she displayed but is not usually known to have, slow blinking as she tried to talk, and even a few seconds of appearing as her brain “short-circuited,” she all but had a seizure to prove what many conservatives have been saying for months. Perhaps the medication was starting to wear off after 90-minutes, which was why she was swept away quicker than her counterpart.

Hillary made a beeline to her medically equipped ride through a special tunnel which she thought was private. The ailing Democratic candidate likely wouldn’t have made it to the vehicle had it not been for a special tool, which a security camera caught, exposing what she thought she had disguised well on stage with drugs and prepared answers that she simply had to recite. Secret Service lit the way for Hillary using pointer lights on the ground specifically designed for those with Parkinson’s disease.

The use of these exact lights was discussed by Dr. Ted Noel days before the debate, as seen in this video here. Another thing the camera caught was Donald Trump exiting through the exact same tunnel after Hillary, but no special lights were used to guide him.

With this side-by-side comparison, along with the facts about these pointers, it’s these things against Hillary’s word that she’s healthy. Americans have the right to know if a candidate isn’t equipped for the job. We’ve had eight years of failed leadership, and we don’t need another liar in the White House who can’t even walk without help, let alone run a country. Her desire to be president is to fulfill a personal need for control and power, and that’s not what this country needs after Barack Obama.

I don’t know what you do about stuff like this although it might be helpful if mainstream outlets stopped internalizing Drudge’s crazy.

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“Super Careless, Fragile Ego, Extra Braggadocious”

by Gaius Publius

I couldn’t help passing this along. There’s a lot of piling on to the veering-off-the-tracks Trump Train, and plenty of eager folks to do it, so I’ve been mainly looking at other things.

But this is just too good, a terrific parody song by Randy Rainbow. Enjoy!

This is Randy Rainbow:

He’s new to me, but what a find. Bio here.

GP

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Surreal to a surrealist
by Tom Sullivan

Still from Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), 1929, by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel.

Luis Buñuel would have found this election surreal.

Josh Marshall at TPM last night:

In the situation Donald Trump is in with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, any media professional or really anyone with a conscience would say this: “We quarreled many years ago. It’s in the past. I truly wish her the best.” Done and done.

But just an hour ago Trump went on O’Reilly to again trash Machado, now saying that he saved her job, gave her a shot at not being fat and this is the thanks he gets. Yes, he really said that. “You know, they wanted to fire her. The company itself wanted to fire her. I saved her job … I saved her job because I said that’s going to — I did that with a number of young ladies. The staff itself [wanted to fire her]. Look what happened. Look what I get out of it. I get nothing. A lot of things are coming out about her.”

“Why Would You Vote for a Man This Insecure?” asked the headline on a Charlie Pierce post from Tuesday. Trump’s campaign tried to change the subject to Clinton’s health or to make her husband’s sexual history a campaign issue.

"you're fat" -these guys pic.twitter.com/0KlTT5mVSa— victoria (@theblowout) September 29, 2016

Chris Cillizza tweeted last night “Well I have now seen everything in this election” in response to this:

Was @HillaryClinton wearing an earpiece during last night’s presidential forum? Check it out: https://t.co/xO3cCdgaCe #sayfie— Florida GOP (@FloridaGOP) September 8, 2016

Dave Weigel replied, “Yes, that is the verified account of the biggest swing state GOP linking InfoWars.”

Tuesday morning in the red-state town where I work, two women coming down in the elevator at lunch were speculating whether the careful, measured way Hillary Clinton answered questions during the debate meant she was using a hidden teleprompter. I guess they don’t read InfoWars.

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) suggested to FBI Director James Comey that “Hillary Clinton had broken her college’s honor code” from 40 years ago by using a private email server.

And in case you missed this tweet on Monday night:

Hillary Clinton belongs in the White House. Donald Trump belongs on my show.— Jerry Springer (@jerryspringer) September 27, 2016

You might need a bottle of Absinthe to weather the next few weeks.

His assets are yuge. Believe me. It’s not a problem


by digby

Campaign response to the kids being unhappy about adverse effects to the business pic.twitter.com/C4GSwwQz3V

— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) September 28, 2016

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About that White House “delegation” that came to Trump about Iraq

by digby

As expected, it didn’t happen:

Trump has repeatedly brought up his opposition to the Iraq invasion. As he put it during the second G.O.P. debate last September: “I think it’s important, because it’s about judgment.”

Much as he did against Clinton, Trump in that earlier debate cited proof that he was, in his words, “the only person that fought very, very hard against” invading Iraq. First, he said, “I’ll give you 25 different stories” — though the only article his campaign would later offer was an interview in Esquire that took place fully a year after the invasion. Intriguingly, Trump also claimed he had a meeting with George W. Bush administration officials to discuss his opposition to the war. “In fact, a delegation” — from the administration, he would later elaborate — “was sent to my office to see me because I was so vocal about it.”

I recently reached out to Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, for more details about this meeting. She didn’t provide any, but a high-ranking former Bush White House senior official told me categorically that no such meeting ever happened, and that no one from the administration was deputized to talk to Trump.

Of course not. Because he wasn’t speaking out against the war, number one. And nobody in the White House gave a damn about what he was saying about anything anyway.

This man is truly delusional. And that’s not just rhetorical hyperbole. He is literally delusional.

Not that we didn’t know that:

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Colbert on the debate

by digby

Just so good:

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He said people who pay taxes are stupid

by digby

The Washington Post reported on a debate focus group:

Trump’s response Monday night when Hillary Clinton accused him of not paying a cent of federal tax left Townley appalled.

“That makes me smart,” Trump said, unapologetic and smiling, during the presidential debate, held in Hempstead, N.Y.

Hillary Clinton suggested a few reasons why Donald Trump is not releasing his tax returns during the first presidential debate, suggesting “maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is” and that he doesn’t pay federal income taxes. “That makes me smart,” Trump interjected. 

That comment caused a gasp in the hotel conference room where Townley and five other undecided voters in this ­battleground state were watching the debate.

“That’s offensive. I pay taxes,” said Townley, 52, a program ­director for a local council of governments.

“Another person would be in jail for that,” said Jamilla Hawkins, 33, who was sitting beside him in the Crescent conference room at the Embassy Suites in this city of 150,000 near Raleigh.

That focus group of undecided voters mostly seemed to be people who had never seen Donald Trump before.

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First a black man, now a woman and it’s just too much

by digby

I wrote about the problem of the one-two punch for Salon today:

It has always seemed to me that the extremely close presidential primary campaign of 2008 signaled that America was at a pivotal moment in its history. As the vehicle for social progress and the home of most racial minorities and women, the Democratic Party was naturally the institution that would advance two breakthrough leaders in succession. The time had come, the country had changed and I naively thought it would be easy.

As it turned out, there was an immediate, fierce backlash against the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the presidency called the Tea Party. It was portrayed as a revolutionary anti-government movement but when scholars studied these folks, it turned out that they were simply garden-variety conservatives after all — and they were very, very angry. Harvard’s Theda Skocpol, author of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” with Vanessa Williamson, explained to Salon in 2013 that Tea Party attitudes about taxes and government reflected something deeper:

There’s no question that at the grass roots, approximately half of all Republican-identifiers who think of themselves as Tea Partyers are a very conservative-minded old group of white people, some of whom do go all the way back to [Barry] Goldwater and the [John] Birch Society. They are skeptical of the Republican Party as it has been run in recent years. But they both hate and fear the Democratic Party and Obama. We argued in many ways that anger comes from alarm on the part of these older conservatives that they’re losing their country — that’s what they say. That they’re the true Americans, and they’re losing control of American politics.

Nothing symbolized that “loss of control” more than the African-American president sitting in the White House. Sadly, it turns out that these older, more affluent conservatives weren’t the only ones who felt that way. White working-class Americans, particularly men, were growing more and more angry about losing their place in the hierarchy of privilege. These two groups make up the Republican coalition that is now expressing the right-wing backlash in the form of explicit white nationalism.

After dealing with a black president and his family occupying the White House for eight long years, accepting a woman taking the job immediately thereafter is more than they can bear. As the National Rifle Association’s president, Wayne LaPierre, quipped, “I have to tell you, eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.”

The right-wing opposition’s response to the “demographically symbolic” female candidate has been to nominate a famously crude misogynist to restore white male authority once and for all. Rebecca Traister memorably explained it in this Hillary Clinton profile in New York magazine a few months back:

There is an Indiana Jones–style, “It had to be snakes” inevitability about the fact that Donald Trump is Clinton’s Republican rival. Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America. . . . Of course a woman who wants to land in the Oval Office is going to have to get past an aggressive reality-TV star who has literally talked about his penis in a debate.

Because, of course, conservatives on the right was not going to be able to tolerate yet another living symbol of progress that they see as forcing them further back in the line.

This explains to some extent why we don’t see the kind of rapturous excitement at this “first” that we saw in 2008 for Obama. The sense of violence and hostility that was bubbling just under the surface then and that churned throughout the Obama years has now exploded. It’s frightening and disorienting and it forces optimism to the down-low. The atmosphere is more like a war than a movement.

Clinton’s ad campaign shows the terrain on which this war is being fought. There have been plenty of standard issues ads and character studies, but her most effective spots are those that simply use Donald Trump’s own words against him, showing him insulting people and expressing himself in crude, bullying fashion. They’re presented from the point of view of kids, veterans, seniors, individuals with disabilities, people of color and women who can see how this man who tells his voters, “I am your voice” talks about them.

The ads are not about Clinton and they aren’t really about Trump. They are about us and what Trump’s followers really think of us.

This one, called “Mirrors,” is one of the most powerful:

Many fathers who see the ad are appalled that their daughters have to live in a world where someone like Donald Trump is an acceptable leader. That’s why the experience of Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe who has come forward with her story of being humiliated at Trump’s hands, has such resonance with women and Latinos.

It’s why people with disabilities and their families are frightened by Trump’s cruel mockery of a reporter. It’s the reason that African-Americans feel a chill down their spines when they hear Trump say that the way to achieve racial healing is “law and order” and “stop-and-frisk.” It’s why millions of Americans of all races and creeds were stunned at his blithe dismissal of Khan family members and their sacrifice. These are the people on the other side of all that angry white grievance.

It’s not a coincidence that the first African-American president may be followed by the first woman president. Progress requires that you let the momentum carry you when you have it. But it also shouldn’t be a surprise that the first would enter office on a high note of inspiration and the second would face the inevitable backlash. We should have seen it coming. I get the feeling that Hillary Clinton did.

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