kimmy

I think they're totes adorbs together! But I agree with Argus: if anybody had anything concrete, they'd have published it by now. I doubt that Trump has the sense of decorum to hold back on something like that, and even if he did, his alt-right allies sure don't. If they had anything, Steve Bannon would have it front page on Breitbart each and every day. Rudy Giuliani already accused her of cheating on Bill without any evidence, so there's no reason to imagine that they wouldn't "go there" if they had any ammunition to "go there" with. Gennifer Flowers says that Hillary gets more pussy than a whole NFL team and Bill knows and doesn't care. Maybe she's right. But that's just hearsay, and one would think that if Hillary had this long history going all the way back to when Gennifer and Bill were an item I can't help thinking that somebody would have come forward by now. Something that might be relevant here: the "other" worst-kept secret in Washington is Condoleeza Rice's personal life. The opinion I read (and I can't recall whose it was) was that the media have let her maintain her privacy because she's not running for office... but if she did decide to run for office, her personal life would be fair game. Hillary is running for office, and her personal life is fair game. -k

I doubt anybody cares about the latest round of the email saga. The email server story has been in the public eye for ages, and voters have already had plenty of time to make up their minds about it. Anybody who hasn't already dumped Hillary over the email server probably isn't going to decide to now. Kind of like anybody who didn't dump Trump over the first 11 sexual assault claims isn't going to change their mind when #12 comes forward. -k

I am not arguing to shut down anyone's right to free speech, August. I simply point out that the large number of willfully ignorant people poses a great challenge to the notion of "an informed citizenry" that lies at the heart of all functional democracies. You called these hapless rubes "the Mark Twains of this world", but nothing could be further from the truth. Mark Twain was famed for skepticism and cynicism. Your "Mark Twains" find anything equally credible. "Your polls say Hillary is winning, but Breitbart says Trump is winning and I believe them because everybody else is biased against our Donald!" "Your science books say the earth is round and spinning, but I found this website that says the earth is flat and stationary, and I believe it because I don't feel the earth spinning at all." "I read that If Hillary wins it's because George Soros owns the voting machines and black people vote 8 times each! It's rigged!" I don't know what "debate" can be had with such people. -k

I bolded the part that I thought was most important... I think this is something that has been overlooked or ignored in the rise of not just Trump, but also Bernie Sanders and the Brexit. People talk about the economy in aggregate terms. People throw around ideas like "net benefit" and "creative destruction" to describe the overall benefit that supposedly comes from trade agreements and globalization. "Sure, jobs will be lost in some sectors, but jobs will be created in others!" "Sure, there will be losers, but there will also be winners!" "Overall, the economy will receive a net benefit." Which is well and good, except for the people on the losing side of the ledger. Until policy-makers find a better way of sharing the "net benefits" with the people who are on the receiving end of the "creative destruction", the anger and resentment isn't going to go away. If you're a 55 year old British factory worker who got put out of work by cheap Romanian laborers who came into the country, why not vote to leave the European Union? "Bad for the economy" doesn't mean a whole lot if you're out of work with no skills and no future prospects. "Bad for the corporations" and "bad for the stock markets" doesn't mean much to you if you don't have a job and don't own any stocks. The powers that be gave the average Brit a chance to voice their feelings about how they feel about the results of globalization and the "net benefits" they've seen from it, and they were stunned by how negative the reaction was. And now in the US people have been likewise stunned by how much support Bernie Sanders had, and how much support Donald Trump has. And the first thing Hillary needs to do on November 9 is talk to the disenchanted millennials that supported Bernie and the angry rust-belt workers who supported Trump, and articulate how she's going to do a better job of sharing the "net benefits" than her predecessors. -k

Ok. A KKK Grand Wizard, a Holocaust-denier crazy street preacher... I'll get on that. Any other sources you want me to check out? Rense.com? Alex Jones? Stormfront? -k

Trump said so himself, on the Howard Stern show. Although, you can't trust anything that comes out of Trump's mouth. Plus, Stern could be a Jew so maybe you wouldn't trust anything Trump said on his show anyway. -k

I don't dismiss the problem, August. I don't know what can be done. In the short-term, those who intend to engage in armed revolt after Trump loses may come to a tragic end. In the longer term, Breitbart and similar will just be back at it, as is their right. There are rumors that Mr Trump's family are considering considering entering the media fray as well. Look forward to Trump TV, an exciting new outlet for Obama conspiracy theories and Trump's factually inaccurate drivel. I claim no such thing, August. I was just laughing at your suggestion that Trump's supporters are "the Mark Twains of this world", when nothing could be further from the truth. Mr Clemons would be rolling with laughter in his grave. I think a much more apt comparison is Twain's contemporary, PT Barnum. Trump, like Mr Barnum, knows that "every crowd has a silver lining", and Mr Trump's crowds are YUUUUGE. It seems that ignorance will always be with us... and people like Mr Bannon and Mr Trump will always be around to profit from their gullibility. As Mr Barnum said and Mr Trump knows, there's another one born every minute. Conservatives aren't going anywhere either. Rest assured, however, that Mr Trump's "movement" has nothing to do with conservatism. There's nothing conservative about following a buffoon off a cliff. There's nothing conservative about a fiscal plan that can only work if the economy experiences astronomical growth. There's nothing conservative about placing your faith in an oft-bankrupted businessman to create this astronomical growth. He may have hung a few social-conservative trappings on his campaign to appease that segment of the supporters-- "no to gays! no to abortions! Yes to Jesus! Yes to America!"-- but that's just part of the con. There are still intelligent conservatives. And they all have one thing in common: they wouldn't be caught dead on the Trump train. There will still be Republicans in the future as well. What that actually means remains to be seen. As John Kasich said, the party has to evolve or it will die. They can't survive if they continue to be the party that hates gay people and alienates non-white people. Their support will quite literally die off. They may be popular with angry old white people, but that segment of the electorate is shrinking. The party polls extremely poorly with younger voters, and with non-Christian voters, and with non-white voters, and those are all growing demographics. If the Republicans can't figure out how to communicate conservative ideas to those groups, how does the Republican party stay relevant? This will be the 3rd presidential election in a row they've lost, and if they don't change course, the future won't get any brighter for them. After the 2012 election the RNC did a thorough post-mortem and produced a big report on all the things that cost them the election. And clearly they didn't even bother to read it, because for the 2016 election they doubled down on all the things that cost them in 2012. And as long as the traditional conservatives have to share a "big tent" with the Tea Party yahoos, things aren't going to change. John Kasich said that if the party can't change, he won't be part of it any longer. If that's the case, it might be up to guys like him to create a new home for thinking conservatives and leave the Republican loony-bin to the inmates who are now running the asylum. -k

So basically you're saying you want Trump to win because he's fighting to save the world from being taken over by a global Jewish conspiracy? -k

I think that's the bulk of it... there's just nothing very exciting to come out so far. Anti-Hillary people talk about THE WIKILEAKS~~! as if it's some kind of silver bullet that's going to strike down Crooked Hill... but they can't actually articulate anything that's come out that's so damaging. ...well, I wouldn't say everybody. There's been some vocal critics of Assange here, right from day one. Argus in particular. I agree with some of your point here. There's obviously a great potential for damage if Wikileaks were to release information that contained current data of strategic value. Obviously that could put lives in danger and undermine ongoing matters of national interest-- military operations and so on. I don't believe that Wikileaks has ever actually release anything that contained current strategic information, although I could be wrong. I believe that they've erred on the side of caution in deciding what to release. But alongside the potential for harm, I also believe there is a need for something like this... an avenue for whistleblowers to release information that's in the public interest. Despite promises of more transparency and accountability and openness and less secrecy, Obama has been harder on whistleblowers than any president in history. The idea that people of conscience who come forward with information in the public interest will receive protection is clearly on shaky ground, and I think that the existence of WikiLeaks provides at least one way for such information to be put in the public eye. Whether emails from John Podesta and the other Democrat backroom types are in the public interest is somewhat debatable, but I think there's an argument to be made that it is. I was certainly interested in the "Guccifer 2.0" email hacks during the Democratic primaries. DNC staffers and Hillary's team cried about "the Russians!" at the time too, but be that as it may... the Russians didn't write those emails. DNC staffers did. Some of them were fired when their words were exposed. And deservedly so. You may have a point here. -k

Not for long. The Trump name has become so toxic that they're rebranding as "Scion" to get rid of The Donald's stench. -k

Who risks their money on Trump, now that American banks don't trust him? Russians, it turns out: ... Desperate? I don't think anybody here is "desperate". I think most of us are very confident in how the election is going to turn out. However, I think many of us are very fascinated that so many continue to support Trump, to believe that he'd be a good president in spite of all of his many glaring shortcomings. -k

It's not a question of illegal. His only supposed qualification for being president is that he's a "successful businessman". But there's clearly some doubt about how successful he actually is. -k

I believe the "85%" figure is coming from Nate Silver, not from "the mainstream media". Unlike "the trustworthy media", Silver has some skin in this game: his reputation. Silver has built his reputation based on results. During the 2012 election, his predictions were accurate to within a few counties. He doesn't do polls himself, he analyzes groups of polls and builds his analysis from a composite of the results. In 2012 "Morning Joe" Joe Scarborough mocked Silver. Said he seemed "kinda fruity" and suggested Silver must be some kind of partisan for suggesting the race wasn't a toss-up. Silver bet Scarborough $1000 on the results. Scarborough waived his hands in the air and doubled down on "kinda fruity", and Silver doubled down and offered a $2000 bet. Silver's publisher-- I think he was with Washington Post at the time-- made him apologize and withdraw the bet... but when the results came in, Morning Joe Scarborough had to apologize and concede that Silver knew what he was doing. People visit Silver's website because they believe that Silver knows what he's talking about. I have little doubt that Silver's personal bias is towards the Democrats, because as an openly gay man, it seems almost inevitable that Silver would hope that the party that hates gays would lose the election. But Silver has built a professional reputation as being THE guy to look to for analysis of polls. To me, that track-record of success and his personal stake in being right makes him more believable than anybody else out there right now. I was thinking of that just today. In 2012 the right-wing web-media and blogosphere hyped these outlier polls to the moon. They somehow convinced themselves that there's no objective information and you can live in whichever reality you believe in. The LA Times poll has been a consistent outlier for weeks, and the Breitbart audience can believe in it if they want, but they're just setting themselves up for crushing disappointment... much like they did 4 years ago. -k

Guys, knock it off. -k

It's highly disingenuous to suggest that Trump is simply waiting to see whether there will be recounts. He and his boosters and surrogates have been talking about voter fraud and rigged machines since long before the voting even started, talking about dead people voting, talking about people in "inner cities" who are "going to vote 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 times", urging Republicans to go out to the polls and "monitor" them to prevent fraud. (when black dudes in Black Panther costumes go out to "monitor" polls, that's scary voter intimidation. when white dudes in militia-man costumes go out to "monitor" the polls, that's democracy in action!) Trump and his surrogates and his allies in the alt-right media have been at it for months, explicitly encouraging their voters to doubt and disregard the results of the vote. Trump called for revolution and urged people to "march on Washington" after Obama beat Romney in 2012, and now after spending all this energy convincing his followers to believe that the election results have been created by large-scale fraud, there is genuine reason to wonder if he will once again reject the results of the vote. And I suppose that in this little dichotomy the Trump supporters are "the Mark Twains of this world"? If that's what you're suggesting, I think it's hilarious an laughable. Mr Clemens would have a field day making light of this campaign in general and of Trump and the rubes who've bought into his granfalloonery. If Mark Twain were alive today, we would probably get an amazing work of satire out of this campaign. Instead the best we can probably hope for is a Parker and Stone Broadway musical. -k

The damaging allegation from the O'Keefe video seems to be that a Democrat-affiliated group hired provocateurs to cause violence at Trump rallies. Are there other things in the O'Keefe video that we should hear about as well? edit to add: the addition of the O'Keefe video to this thread seems to be making this the "general Democrat corruption" thread... are people ok with the two things being intermixed? -k

I don't think there was a clear winner in the debate tonight. Not enough to make a difference either way. Trump got in a few zingers on Hillary's record in Syria, Haiti, and with with the alleged dirty tricks video going around. Hillary hit Trump with some shots regarding his record with women, his nutty economic ideas, and the nukes. Trump needed some kind of game-changer, and he didn't get it. I think probably the biggest event of the debate was Trump's response to the question of whether he would accept the results of the election, and he went back to his "it's rigged" whining, which isn't a winner for him. He wants to project this tough-guy image, and whining is at odds with what he's pitching. Although, the line of the night was probably when Hillary mocked him for tweeting that the Emmy awards were rigged 3 years in a row, and he quipped "should have won". -k

Journalism is dead. If they had been doing their job, they'd have exposed Trump for what he is long before it ever got to this point. Instead they gave him massive amounts of free publicity, turned him into a political rock star, and helped propel him to the Republican nomination. Instead of covering his campaign like journalists, they fawned over him like Billy Bush did, using his fame to create ratings. The media were willing partners in playing Trumps game. Team Trump didn't mind a bit. You guys loved it. I suppose that's not what you're complaining about, though. You feel there needs to be "balance". You want there to be a positive Trump story to balance each negative Trump story, or you want a negative Hillary story to on the TV for each negative Trump story on the TV. That's not really what "balance" means. When they cover a NASA mission, they don't give equal time to members of the Flat Earth Society to claim that NASA is a hoax. Their obligation is to the facts, not to the false notion that they have to be equally fair to NASA and to the Flat Earth Society. And the idea that to be "balanced" they shouldn't report the crap that comes out of Trumps mouth, or try to find something negative to say about Hillary each time Trump says something stupid is false as well. Their role is to report the facts, not to pretend that each candidate has equal merit. -k

As I mentioned earlier, it's absurd to claim he had any reasonable expectation to privacy when he's wandering around wearing a live microphone in view of TV cameras. The idea that anything was taken out of context is also laughable. We have the full conversation and have the full context for what he said. Nothing has been taken out of context. -k

"b-b-b-but ... Bill Clinton!" -k

Oh yeah, but the deep south bible-thumpers have such a live-and-let-live outlook for people who don't share their views. -k

WikiLeaks reveals Hillary Clinton to be more reasonable than her critics had claimed. -k

This is some of the most absurd brain-scrambled stuff you've come out with yet to prop up your ridiculous hero. Trump's freedom of speech has never been in doubt. Nobody has questioned his right to brag about grabbing women by the pussy. Trump's right to privacy has not been violated either. Neither Canada nor the United States have any express right to privacy in our constitutions. Both of our countries provide citizens legal protection against unjustified search and seizure, security of person and property, and protection against unjustified surveillance by agents of the state. I'm not sure how you could think any of this applies to the Trump tape situation. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your own home. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy when you're wandering around in public with a TV interviewer wearing a live mic in full view of TV cameras. It's moronic to suggest that Trump had any reasonable expectation of privacy in these circumstances. As for the people who were hurt by the release of this tape? BOO HOO. Trump dug his own grave here. Billy Bush comes off almost as creepy as Trump, given his attempt to pimp out Arianna Zucker to Trump during the tape. If Trump's comments about Nancy O'Dell were hurtful to her or her family, maybe she shouldn't have gone furniture shopping with the notorious adulterer. If Trump's comments were hurtful to his wife and children, maybe he shouldn't have "moved on that like a bitch" or "grabbed them by the pussy". I'm not sure how any of this reflects badly on Arianna Zucker; she did about as well as a woman could have, after being put in such an awkward situation by Bush and Trump. The release of this tape isn't a violation of anyone's legal rights. The release of this tape is journalism in the public interest. -k

I really don't care much about native protestors, and don't really have a problem with pipelines. However, I think it's pretty disturbing that in this case the state prosecutor set out with an agenda to silence a journalist and punish her for bringing public attention to these protests. Regardless of how you feel about pipelines and oil, that should upset you. The law is not supposed to be used as a tool of the state to silence journalists. One would hope that prosecutor Erickson will face punishment for misconduct, malicious prosecution, or whatever applicable charges can be brought against this kind of abuse of office. -k

I'm certainly aware that there's allegations of impropriety against the Clintons. Lots of things to question in her record. And if she were running against a real candidate, those would be getting a lot of scrutiny. But running against the most absurdly bad candidate a major party has ever offered to the American people, Hillary's problems seem minor in comparison. You continue to operate under the misconception that people are unaware of Hillary's warts and blemishes. Not true. People are aware of her flaws, it's just that compared to the guy she's running against, she is so much better. It's not that people think Hillary is perfect, it's that Trump is such a gigantic clown that he makes Hillary look like a great choice by comparison. Republicans could not have picked a worse candidate. He's ridiculously unqualified. He's got a slimy history as both a businessman and as a human being. He's a clown, a buffoon, a used-car salesman, . And the constant stream of deranged crap that comes out of his mouth and his Twitter account raises a serious question about whether his brain is beginning to succumb to dementia or senility. Are you serious? One need only look at how he's used his presidential campaign to funnel money from donors and the Republican Party into his own businesses to know what kind of president he'd be. Republican donors have paid for millions upon millions of dollars to Trump businesses for venues and accommodations, air travel, food and drink, merchandise, and even copies of Trump's book. Or you could look at his charity, where charitable donations have paid for sports memorabilia, portraits of Trump, legal expenses, and bribes to politicians, as discussed earlier. Or you could look at his business history, where people who bought shares in Trump's publicly traded company were rewarded with plunging share prices while Trump funneled money from the business into his own pocket and offloaded his own debts onto the business. You've got all the evidence you need to know what kind of guy Trump is, you're just trying your hardest to ignore it. -k