kimmy

I'd suggest that first off, the Republican Party, pre-Obama and pre Tea-Party, were more moderate and willing to compromise than the ones who've come onboard in 2010 and later. And also that they weren't fighting "the culture war" to the extent they are today, because at that time they were happier about the overall state of "the culture war". It's not a question of the world ending, it's just a matter of a lot people being hurt for no good reason. Trump will just smile and wave; it'll be Congress and state legislatures that undo all the legal progress gay people have made in the past decade. Well that certainly wouldn't appease Mike Pence, or the Republican Congressmen, or the Republican Senators. Likely what'll happen is that 5 minutes after Trump's new Justice is sworn in, some state is going to introduce a law that says life begins at conception (Mississippi Personhood Amendment v2.0, perhaps) with the express hope of ending up in front of the Supreme Court so that Roe v Wade gets overturned. -k

I just can't picture why Trump would stick his neck out for a guy like Chris Christie. Christie brings this awful baggage with him, and doesn't bring any benefit to offset it. His approval numbers are roughly the same as Ebola, Boko Haram, and dealcoholized beer. -k

The plan is for medical savings accounts! These will be great for all those underemployed Rust Belt workers who put Trump in the White House, because with all their disposable income, they'll easily be able to save enough to cover catastrophic medical expenses! -k

I think Trump would be wise to cut ties with Chris Christie ASAP. One of the items that went overlooked in the week prior to the election was the conviction of Christie's top aide Bridget Kelly and New York And New Jersey Port Authority exec Bill Baroni on all charges relating to the George Washington Bridge closure scandal. Kelly and Baroni both testified that Chris Christie knew full well what was going on. Another Port Authority official, David Wildstein, plead guilty and rolled over on Christie earlier. For people who might have forgotten, the G.W. Bridge closure scandal (known as "Bridgegate" because people aren't very creative) was a plan concocted to reduce the world's busiest bridge to just a couple of lanes, deliberately intended to cause traffic gridlock in Fort Lee because the mayor didn't endorse Christie's re-election campaign. People couldn't get to work, schoolbuses spent all day stuck in traffic, the damage to workers and businesses from the resulting absenteeism must have been enormous, people probably lost jobs, emergency vehicles were unable to move, and an old lady died because her ambulance was stuck in traffic jams. This was all done in the name of a bogus "traffic study" which they had planned in advance. Bridget Kelly's email "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee!" became infamous. During the trials, all three of them testified that Christie knew what was going on with the bridge before, during, and after. Inflicting this kind of punishment on the people of a city for no reason other than you're mad at the mayor is utterly despicable. Doing so by misusing state resources is utterly despicable plus criminal. Christie himself may or may not face charges himself, but if you're Trump and you just campaigned promising to "Drain the Swamp!", why would you want somebody tainted with this kind of scandal on your team? If Trump does insist on keeping Christie, I hope he at least has the decency to make him Secretary of Transportation, because that would be hilarious. -k

Yes... Trump called himself "Mr Brexit" at one point, and this was really Brexit all over again. As you say "the average guy" doesn't see the benefit from immigration or trade deals. He sees manufacturing jobs leaving the country, he sees immigrants arriving to compete for what jobs remain... and he asks "why should I support this?" I was watching NBC streaming coverage last night, and Tom Brokaw kept saying "you know, we really underestimated how angry people are..." but after Brexit, and after the Bernie Sanders and Trump campaigns in the primaries, they really shouldn't be surprised. Hillary said "being angry isn't a plan!" but she didn't actually offer any actual plan for "the average guy". -k

Angry American houseguest. I honestly have no idea what she's doing here, to be honest. -k

Demagoguery was a big part of Trump's pitch, A lot of people bought in, and they've got high expectations. I don't think Trump can deliver the 5% growth he promised, or the millions of Rust Belt jobs he promised, or make ISIS vanish, or most of the other stuff he promised. But with the White House, Congress, the Senate, and soon the Supreme Court, he can definitely deliver some socially conservative red meat to appease his constituency. I'd definitely be worried if I was on the other side of the border. -k

Tanya not taking this well. I locked my Bowie knives and kitchen knives in the gun cabinet when Wisconsin started going Trump. Lots of stuff getting thrown around here tonight, but luckily most of it is soft and I won't have to replace anything too expensive. She's vowed to start working on her Canadian citizenship ASAP... I imagine that'll be as soon as she regains consciousness, which will probably be next week sometime. Trump, Pence, Republican Senate, Republican Congress... this is unmitigated disaster for gay people and non-Christians in America. The next Supreme Court justice will no doubt make Archie Bunker look like a pinko liberal. -k

She dead. -k

One simple tidbit from the past week sums up why Donald Trump isn't fit to be President: Kellyanne Conway took away his Twitter account. He doesn't have the sense or the restraint to stop shooting his campaign in the foot with his inane Twitter ramblings. So she took it away. A guy who hasn't even got enough sense and self-control to have his own Twitter account is not fit to lead a country. We saw this early on, during the primaries. Trump was mad at Megyn Kelly so he was up until 3am making angry tweets about her, and ranting about her for the next week... "blood coming out of her ...whatever." Then we saw after the first debate. Trump mad! Trump angry! Trump up until 3am making angry tweets about a woman who was Miss Universe 20 years ago, and went on a week-long temper-tantrum over that too. Trump went to Gettysburg to have his own Gettysburg Address to lay out a plan for his first 100 days in office. It was supposed to show everybody how Presidential he could be. Instead, he delivered a speech about how he was going to "get" the women who'd accused him of groping them, how he was going to sue everybody after the election. He's got the temperament of an angry toddler. Melania Trump herself said "Sometimes I say I have two boys at home -- I have my young son and I have my husband." Marla Maples calls him: "The little boy that still wants attention," explained Marla Maples, Trump's second wife. Ivana Trump says: "He wants to be noticed," said Ivana Trump, wife No. 1, who recalled sending [Trump] into a fit of rage by skiing past him on a hill in Aspen, Colorado. Mr. Trump stopped, took off his skis and walked off the trail."He could not take it, that I could do something better than he did," she recalled. And Trump says of himself: "When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different." His current and former wives, and Trump himself agree. He's just a little boy. And as we've seen during this campaign, he's an angry little boy who has loud public tantrums when he doesn't get his way. And Kellyanne Conway has taken away his toys because he can't behave. -k

I don't think Trump wins either the popular vote or the electoral college. I am expecting Ivanka's comments tonight to be something like this: "I respect the will of the people. Look for Ivanka Kushner fashion products, by Ivanka Kushner, at fine retailers everywhere!" -k

Call it. It's over. He who wins Dixville Notch wins the presidency. Hillary has won bigly. Bigly. Bigly. -k

Mayor Rudy has been trying to walk back those remarks almost since he made them. He is now selling a version of events in which he only heard from former FBI agents who only told him about general discontent within the FBI, not from any source that had any active knowledge of the investigation. Which contradicts Rudy's own statements from earlier, and makes his boast of "a big surprise" on the way just prior to the Comey letter difficult to explain. I suspect that he got strongly "told" by someone, either Kellyanne or one of his FBI buddies or maybe both-- to STFU about his ties with the FBI, since it was going to: (1) make it look like this was a politically motivated hatchet job, and (2) cause an FBI internal investigation that would probably get somebody axed or worse. The FBI have already launched an internal investigation regarding the dormant FBI Twitter account that suddenly came alive and started tweeting info about the long-closed Bill Clinton-Marc Rich case, which has an obvious appearance of political motivation. Mayor Rudy's boasting also has contributed to the perception that this was a political hit. -k

And pretty much ending there as well. Trump hates abortions, Pence hate gays, and that's all the Evangelical Christian voting block cares about. -k

They were widely criticized from a variety of sources, not just Democrats, for their announcement. One of those sources was Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, who had her own political campaign torpedoed by a similar announcement. Nonetheless, I am surprised that Comey and crew had the decency to perform this review and announce the findings before the election. I had predicted earlier that they would wait until *after* the election to announce that they didn't find anything significant in the Weiner laptop. Resolving this issue before the election was a stand-up thing to do, although probably comes too late to mitigate the damage done. I imagine Rudy Giuliani is very upset right now. And I imagine Trump is going to completely ignore this announcement. -k

My bet for tomorrow's NY Post headline: FBI's GIANT WEINER PROBE GOES FLACCID. -k

Well said. -k

That's a fair response, and more reasonable than the one I was expecting. So is it reasonable to hold Hillary Clinton personally accountable for the deaths at Benghazi? The State Department is an organization with tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of facilities all over the world. Is it reasonable to expect that she would have personal knowledge of the security situation at each of them, or the security expertise to assess whether each facility's security was adequate? How many other facilities were also asking for additional security? Is it reasonable to assume that the State Department could have provided more security anyway, given that the security budget they'd been given by Congress was well below the funding level they'd requested? Ultimately as head of the State Department, she was in charge. But to put personal blame on her for security arrangements at Benghazi seems like expecting an unrealistic level of detail from a senior executive... somewhat akin to blaming Stephen Harper for not being personally aware of Mike Duffy's expenses. -k

While I'm being slightly facetious in suggesting Ted Nugent and Allen West, it's not that far-fetched, is it? Based on the decision-making process we saw this year, I think it's fair to conclude that the primary voters in the Republican party weren't motivated by conservatism at all. They didn't want conservatism, they wanted demagoguery, and by golly they got it. Ted Nugent is a great demagogue who Tea Party types love despite his shady moral character, so he seems ideally poised to carry on the Trump legacy. He's a straight talker! He's not politically correct! He's mad as hell! And of course Allen West is another Tea Party favorite who checks the right boxes: military service! Evangelical street cred! Bonus points: he's black! Trump didn't win the nomination because he's conservative, and he sure didn't win because he's Christian. If it were merely a test of religious conviction, he'd have finished last in the field. Trump won for one main reason, which is that he expressed the anger that a large number of Republican voters feel. They didn't want somebody to promote conservative principles, they wanted somebody to "get" Hillary. Somebody to call her a crook and a liar and tell the world he'd put her in jail. They didn't want conservatism, they wanted somebody to rant about how illegal immigrants are taking the jobs and committing crimes. They wanted somebody to rant about how the trade deals shipped all the jobs to China and Mexico. They wanted somebody who hates Obama as much as they do. They don't love Trump because he stands for anything conservative-- he really doesn't. They love Trump because he stands on a stage and gives voice to all the anger and grievance they feel. And if that's the criterion for picking the next Republican nominee, I think Ted Nugent has as good a shot as anybody. -k

I'm aware of what happened at Benghazi. What I'm curious about is what you think happened there and why Hillary is to blame for the ambassador's death. There is this trend that we see over and over where people make these vague claims about Clinton, but when challenged for details respond with "oh, if you don't already know, it's not worth explaining it" or "oh, you'd never accept my sources so what's the point?" And I have the hunch that you guys are purposefully vague because you know that as soon as you say something specific you'll get caught. Like Hal 9000's claim that the Clinton Foundation only spends 6% of its revenue on charity. Everybody on "the right" and "Team Trump" seems to accept this as common knowledge... but it's a flat-out lie. I have a strong suspicion that "Hillary killed the heroes of Benghazi!" is similarly another right-wing claim that just doesn't stand up to facts. -k

I'm aware that you guys like to shout "Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi!" and everybody in your media-bubble knows that somehow it's all Hillary's fault, but for those of us on the outside of the bubble, please explain how the ambassador's death was Hillary's fault. -k

How so? -k

Certainly he did say that. Giuliani was on Fox And Friends yesterday bragging about his FBI contacts and saying he's known this was coming for weeks. And he was on Fox two days before Comey's announcement bragging that they had a big surprise coming. He changed his story later, saying that he only hears from retired FBI agents, but that's at odds with his earlier statements, particularly one in which he claimed he does hear from active agents. Perhaps he will dismiss it as "just locker-room talk". http://www.mediaite.com/online/giuliani-denies-having-advanced-knowledge-of-comey-letter-contradicting-earlier-statement/ -k

This is typical of the kind of deceptive half-truth the Trump supporters peddle. It's true that only 6% of Clinton Foundation revenue was spent as charitable grants. Would would be utterly damning, if grants were the only thing that the Clinton Foundation does. But it isn't. In short, the Clinton Foundation gives such a small amount of money out as grants to other charities because they spend most of their revenue on charitable programs they run themselves. -k