trump is serious!!!!!

[Lord Jim]

"What's The Deal?"

[RayThom]

Keywords: The Art of the Spiel.

Page after page of glistening generalities brought to you by Donald J. Trump. Yet so many being spoon-fed his shit and loving the flavor of the day.



And the list keeps getting longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_D ... ents,_2016

[Bicycle Bill]

Who are these people?  The link is to Wikipedia, which — shall we say — is not always a neutral, unbiased, authoritative source.  Since it is publicly-edited, any Trump supporter (like wesw) is likely busily listing anybody who might have a vaguely recognizable name, regardless of their actual influence (and as an aside, if someone is a retired racecar driver/football/basketball/baseball player, let alone someone who is described as a "former college basketball player", do they really belong in the "sports and celebrity" category?)

And then of course, someone who is anti-Trump could go in and add organizations such as the American Nazi Party, what's left of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Flat Earth Society as being in support of Mr. Mouth too.

-"BB"-

[Lord Jim]

I bet you're either a Muslim, illegal, or living off the government"....

No, I'm a white, college educated, upper middle-class Republican, who can recognize a con artist when he sees one...

[Econoline]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/05/11 ... ing/210328

Veteran Campaign Reporters: “The Stakes Are Too High” To Let Trump Get Away With Constant Lying
Blog ››› May 11, 2016 9:17 AM EDT ››› JOE STRUPP

Veteran campaign reporters are calling on media outlets to sharply increase their fact-checking of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, telling Media Matters “the stakes are too high” to let Trump get away with peddling conspiracy theories and near-constant falsehoods.

In the week since Trump’s win in the Indiana presidential primary essentially clinched the nomination for him, the candidate has faced criticism from media critics and fact-checkers for his continued embrace of outlandish conspiracy theories. CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday called on journalists to confront Trump “head-on” over his misinformation. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler hit a similar note in a May 7 article, writing that outlets have “no excuse” to let Trump get away with falsehoods.

In conversations with Media Matters, Kessler and several veteran presidential campaign reporters highlighted the sheer tonnage of misinformation from Trump, with several arguing that outlets need to be more aggressive when challenging the Republican.

“The Trump lies are so many and they come out at such a rapid fire, Gatling-gun fashion, it is hard for the reporters to keep up in May. I can just imagine what it will be like in October,” said Walter Shapiro, who covered nine presidential campaigns dating back to 1980 for The Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon and others. “The most important thing is that you don’t put the fact checks in some separate envelope done by the fact-check expert. You have to put as many fact checks as you can in the story of the speech, in the story of the assertion and if necessary don’t resort to euphemisms, like ‘misspoke.’ He did not misspeak, he did not obfuscate, he did not miss the meaning -- he lied.”

Trump’s falsehoods and conspiracies have piled up over the course of the campaign, running the gamut from his repeated (and often unchallenged) boast that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning to more bizarre claims like his recent embrace of a National Enquirer conspiracy linking Sen. Ted Cruz’s father to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

“These are totally different problems than we have ever faced before,” Shapiro said about covering Trump. “I give lots of news organization in the months ahead a lot of latitude because we have never dealt with someone for whom truth is as dispensable as Kleenex in politics.”

He said part of the problem is when news outlets carry Trump speeches and rallies live, which by nature prevents immediate fact-checking.

“The problem is if the networks are going to give you one hour of unedited access a night, there is no way for the fact checks to catch up,” he said. “There are dictators who control the media who have less access than he does.”

David Yepsen, a former top political reporter for the Des Moines Register for 34 years, said news outlets need to “double-down on fact-checking” as the campaign continues.

“News organizations can take each one of these statements apart,” Yepsen said via email. “They can't be blown off or dismissed. The tone has to be calm, factual, but dispassionate and methodical. Reporters need to keep the focus on Trump and his statements.”

He later added, “It is also going to be critically important to get this debate out on social media. It's more important than a lot of reporters want to admit because more and more people are getting information about the campaign in this way.”

Adam Clymer, a former New York Times campaign reporter from 1977 to 2003, said the lack of scrutiny in the past is due to time pressures and poor editing, but that cannot continue.

Asked how journalists can counter him going forward, Clymer said, “By repeating after every time he says it that ‘Mr. Trump has offered no evidence of his theory that has been debunked by X, Y, or Z.’”

“Somebody’s got to be responsible,” Clymer urged. “Everything about his substance becomes more important when someone may be the nominee.”

He added, “Since Trump makes more stuff up than most people, he becomes a particularly glaring example of the press’ shortcomings. Do the basic job, which is different than what they have been. But it is not just reporters, don’t let editors off the hook at all levels.”

“He is off the charts,” said Kessler, who writes The Fact Checker column for The Washington Post.

Of the 34 fact-checks done on Trump in the column, nearly 70 percent have resulted in four Pinocchios, which is the site’s worst rating, Kessler said. “Your average politician gets 10 percent to 20 percent of their ratings as four Pinocchios.”

At PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, 62 percent of Trump comments that were reviewed received either False or “Pants on Fire,” its worst rating.

Angie Holan, PolitiFact editor, says no other 2016 presidential candidate even comes close.

“The results are the results, he’s wrong pretty regularly,” she said. “He gets small details wrong, too. He said the trade deficit with China is $500 billion. It’s not, it’s $300 billion. That’s quite a bit to be wrong. You add up wrong on big things and wrong on little things and that’s how he gets such a bad record.”

Kessler agreed the answer is for reporters to increase their scrutiny as they would any unreliable source.

“He says this stuff and keeps saying it,” Kessler said. “There is little excuse for not saying something to him when, for instance, he says he was against the war in Iraq or that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement -- things that have been fact-checked and found to be bogus.”

And Trump’s falsehoods are nothing new, according to people who covered him in the 1980s when he was a rising real estate mogul and New York gossip page regular.

Among those was Susan Mulcahy, former editor of the New York Post’s Page Six from 1983 to 1985. She recently penned a piece for Politico recounting his history of lies.

Her advice to today’s campaign reporters who must cover him through Election Day: “Every statement that he makes has to be checked. Even mundane, innocuous things.”

She suggested treating him as a lawyer would a witness on the stand, saying “be prepared for answers to some of the questions ahead of time,” later adding that lying “doesn’t bother him, he has been doing this for so long.”

Walter Mears, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Associated Press campaign reporter, said the challenge is for journalists to scrutinize him more than most candidates because of his poor factual record.

“It requires more homework covering a guy like this, and the trouble with Trump is you never know what he is going to make up next,” Mears said. “It is not argumentative to say that Trump is lying, it is not argumentative if you state the actual fact.”

Clark Hoyt, a former reporter and editor for Knight Ridder and McClatchy -- who covered presidential races in 1968, 1972, and 1976 -- said Trump’s level of dishonesty is unprecedented in American politics and requires a demand for truth.

“If he says something that is demonstrably false it should immediately be called that. We have an obligation to even point out the history of these things, that this has been a pattern with Trump and not to let readers or viewers forget it. The stakes are too high,” said Hoyt, also a former public editor for The New York Times. “You have to be prepared to say what he says and then say what the truth is. That puts a great burden on news organizations to be really fast on their feet with research and the resources to dig into some of these things.”

Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at The Poynter Institute, said reporters need to stick to the basics and not let lies pass by unchecked.

“He does seem to say a lot of things that just simply are not true,” said Tompkins. “He has a very high negative and part of that negative seems to be his demeanor, but also whether or not he can be trusted.”

Media Matters recently highlighted several other examples of journalism experts and veteran reporters calling on the media to fact-check Trump more effectively.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/05/11 ... ing/210328

[Lord Jim]

“The Trump lies are so many and they come out at such a rapid fire, Gatling-gun fashion, it is hard for the reporters to keep up

That is at the heart of his strategy...

news outlets need to “double-down on fact-checking”

That won't come close to doing it. They'll need to quadruple or quintuple down...

Other politicians lie; Donald Trump is waging a scorched earth, take-no-prisoners war against the very concept of truth. He is seeking to completely breakdown the barriers between fact and fantasy. He wants to flood the zone with so many falsehoods, that people will give up trying to tell the difference.

(When he is called on a lie, his response is frequently call the person telling the truth a liar, or to smear them in some other way that is a new lie. When Trump praised Mike Tyson after Tyson endorsed him, and Cruz pointed out that Tyson is a convicted rapist, Trump lied by accusing Cruz of lying: "That's why we call him 'Lyin' Ted'" )

He's counting on most people, (especially most people who support him) to be both so ignorant of the facts and so distrustful of the news media that they will believe anything he says.

And he's trying to wear down the opposition to what he's doing through sheer volume. ("Volume" both in terms of quantity and in terms of sound level.)

[Lord Jim]

The U.S. presidential election may turn out to be one of the world's biggest un-popularity contests.

Nearly half of American voters who support either Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump for the White House said they will mainly be trying to block the other side from winning, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday.

The results reflect a deepening ideological divide in the United States, where people are becoming increasingly fearful of the opposing party, a feeling worsened by the likely matchup between the New York real estate tycoon and the former first lady, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

"This phenomenon is called negative partisanship," Sabato said. "If we were trying to maximize the effect, we couldn't have found better nominees than Trump and Clinton."

Trump has won passionate supporters and vitriolic detractors for his blunt talk and hardline proposals, including his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, his vow to force Mexico to pay for a border wall, and his promise to renegotiate international trade deals.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-e ... SKCN0XX06E

ETA:

Mr. and Mrs. Unpopular

Trump and Clinton are currently the two most unpopular likely presidential nominees in the history of the NBC/WSJ poll.

Thirty four percent of registered voters have a positive opinion of Clinton, versus 54 percent who have a negative opinion (-20) — a slight uptick from her minus-24 score last month.

Trump's rating is even worse than Clinton's: Twenty nine percent have a positive opinion of him, while 58 percent have a negative opinion (-29) — an improvement from his minus-41 score in April.

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/c ... bc-n577726

[Lord Jim]

(Yes, I realize that this will be three posts in a row, but they are on completely different subjects, and this one is too long to put in an "ETA", so deal with it.... )

Key G.O.P. Donors Still Deeply Resist Donald Trump’s Candidacy

A powerful array of the Republican Party’s largest financial backers remains deeply resistant to Donald J. Trump’s presidential candidacy, forming a wall of opposition that could make it exceedingly difficult for him to meet his goal of raising $1 billion before the November election.

Interviews and emails with more than 50 of the Republican Party’s largest donors, or their representatives, revealed a measure of contempt and distrust toward their own party’s nominee that is unheard of in modern presidential politics.

More than a dozen of the party’s most reliable individual contributors and wealthy families indicated that they would not give to or raise money for Mr. Trump. This group has contributed a combined $90 million to conservative candidates and causes in the last three federal elections, mainly to “super PACs” dedicated to electing Republican candidates.

Up to this point, Mr. Trump has embraced the hostility of the Republican establishment, goading the party’s angry base with diatribes against wealthy donors who he claimed controlled politicians. And he has succeeded while defying conventions of presidential campaigning, relying on media attention and large rallies to fire up supporters, and funding his operation with a mix of his own money and small-dollar contributions.

But that formula will be tested as he presents himself to a far larger audience of voters. Mr. Trump has turned to the task of winning over elites he once attacked, with some initial success. And he has said he hopes to raise $1 billion, an enormous task given that he named a finance chairman and started scheduling fund-raisers only this month.

Among the party’s biggest financiers disavowing Mr. Trump are Paul E. Singer, a New York investor who has spent at least $28 million for national Republicans since the 2012 election, and Joe Ricketts, the TD Ameritrade founder who with his wife Marlene has spent nearly $30 million over the same period of time, as well as the hedge fund managers William Oberndorf and Seth Klarman, and the Florida hospital executive Mike Fernandez.

“If it is Trump vs. Clinton,” Mr. Oberndorf said, “I will be voting for Hillary.”

The rejection of Mr. Trump among some of the party’s biggest donors and fund-raisers reflects several strains of hostility to his campaign. Donors cited his fickleness on matters of policy and what they saw as an ad hoc populist platform focused on trade protectionism and immigration. Several mentioned Mr. Trump’s own fortune, suggesting that if he was as wealthy as he claimed, then he should not need their assistance.[Yeah, what about that Donald?]

Among the more than 50 donors contacted, only nine have said unambiguously that they will contribute to Mr. Trump. They include Sheldon G. Adelson, the casino billionaire; the energy executive T. Boone Pickens; Foster Friess, a wealthy mutual fund investor; and Richard H. Roberts, a pharmaceutical executive. Mr. Friess wrote in an email that Mr. Trump deserved credit for inspiring “truckers, farmers, welders, hospitality workers — the people who really make our country function.”

Many more donors declined to reveal their intentions or did not respond to requests for comment, a remarkable silence about the de facto nominee of their party.

Asked how Mr. Trump intended to win over major donors, Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, responded in one sentence. “There is tremendous support for Mr. Trump,” she said. [Gee Hope, that really isn't, uh, you know, an answer...]

Some major donors have not explicitly closed the door on helping Mr. Trump, but have set a high bar for him to earn their support, demanding an almost complete makeover of his candidacy and a repudiation of his own inflammatory statements.

“Until we have a better reason to embrace and support the top of the ticket, and see an agenda that is truly an opportunity agenda, then we have lots of other options in which to invest and spend our time helping,” said Betsy DeVos, a Michigan Republican whose family has given nearly $9.5 million over the last three elections to party causes and candidates.

But others simply believe Mr. Trump is unfit to serve in the Oval Office. Michael K. Vlock, a Connecticut investor who has given nearly $5 million to Republicans at the federal level since 2014, said he considered Mr. Trump a dangerous person.

“He’s an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard,” Mr. Vlock said. [Come on Michael, don't sugar coat it...]

Mr. Vlock said he might give to Hillary Clinton instead, describing her as “the devil we know.”

“I really believe our republic will survive Hillary,” he said.

At a dinner of the Manhattan Institute in New York earlier this month, Bruce Kovner, a New York-based investor who has given $3.1 million to national Republicans in recent years, argued to a collection of influential conservatives that Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were both unacceptable choices.

“When I talk to my colleagues and friends in similar positions, they have the same degree of discomfort,” Mr. Kovner said in an interview.

Unless Mr. Trump can win over more benefactors, he is likely to become the first Republican presidential nominee in decades to be heavily outspent by his Democratic opponent, and may find it difficult to pay for both the voter-turnout operations and the paid advertising campaigns that are typically required in a general election.

Both President Obama and Mitt Romney raised over $1 billion in 2012, and Mrs. Clinton is expected to exceed that figure easily.

Charles G. and David H. Koch, the country’s two most prolific conservative donors, are not expected to back Mr. Trump, and their advisers have been scathing in private assessments of Mr. Trump’s candidacy and his policy agenda.

The Kochs, who command a vast network of conservative donors, have scheduled a conference of their allies in Colorado in late July, where much of their 2016 spending may be determined.

A spokesman for the Kochs, James Davis, said they were chiefly focused on helping Republicans retain control of Congress, and many of their allies, along with other Republican givers, indicated in interviews that they were focused exclusively on the same goal.

Even among the handful of big donors Mr. Trump has won over, doubts persist about both his abilities as a candidate and the political apparatus supporting him.

Mr. Adelson, the most important donor who has endorsed Mr. Trump, has indicated that he will cut big checks to aid his campaign only if there is a credible advocacy group set up for that purpose.

But Mr. Trump still has no sanctioned “super PAC” able to raise unlimited sums to support his campaign. A gathering next month at Mr. Pickens’s Texas ranch that was to be sponsored by one of the pro-Trump groups, Great America PAC,[A PAC named after an amusement park; how appropriate...] has been called off because Mr. Pickens was not sure he was hosting Mr. Trump’s preferred super PAC.

At a Republican Governors Association donor retreat last week in New Mexico, there was a debate on the sidelines about whether to support Mr. Trump. Mr. Friess argued that the Supreme Court vacancy made it imperative to rally around Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Friess acknowledged in an email that enthusiasm for Mr. Trump was limited among his fellow major donors. If some agreed there was “no sensible choice other than to rally around Trump,” Mr. Friess said, many contributors viewed that prospect with “the same enthusiasm as a root canal.”

Walter Buckley, the founder of a Pennsylvania financial management company, said he decided to support Mr. Trump after Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey endorsed him. Predicting that Mr. Trump would shake up Washington, Mr. Buckley, said, “This political system needs a shaking like it’s probably not had in 100 years.”

But Mr. Buckley, who said he would be willing to contribute to the Trump campaign or to a super PAC supporting him, said he remained upset about Mr. Trump’s mockery of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for having been captured in Vietnam.

“I don’t think anything that anybody’s ever said on the political front has bothered me more than that,” Mr. Buckley said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/us/po ... ising.html

[RayThom]

Hey, $6M, maybe $2.9M -- who can keep an accurate count when it comes to our veteran heroes? I'm sure Trump means well and those nasty media types need to back off and allow him to state what he really means.

One thing for sure, after he's president we'll have a balanced budget for the next eight years... maybe twelve once he tweaks the Twenty-Second Amendment.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/20/politics/ ... index.html
God bless Donald Trump.

[TPFKA@W]

You Dems are responsible for Trump being ahead in the polls. If you had gone with Bernie instead of the Hildabeast we wouldn't be this pickle. This is just a manifestation of the overwhelming dislike there is for her.

[Crackpot]

Bernie would get trounced in the debates with trump. He can't handle temps brand of discourse.

[Lord Jim]

I think Team Clinton has a valid point when they say that Sanders polling better against Trump than she does (and he polled better against the other GOP candidates too) has a lot to do with the fact that he hasn't gotten the kind of focused well financed negative campaign tossed at him that a Socialist running for President would get in a general election campaign...

This fact makes his poll numbers somewhat misleading...

I believe Trump is pretty much peaking in his poll numbers. The GOP race is over, so he no longer has intra-party opponents hammering at him, and a lot of Republicans and Independents who don't like him but dislike Hillary even more have at least for the time being reluctantly decided to support Trump. (Albeit without much enthusiasm)

While in the Democratic race, Hillary continues to get hammered by both sides, and Sanders has kept his supporters amped up to the point that a third of them continue to say they won't support her.

If this were a normal election, (ie a non- Donald Trump nominated election) I would be the happiest camper in the camp grounds about what's going on in the Democratic party now...

I'd be delighting in Sanders refusal to withdraw, and cheering him and his followers on to drive Hillary further to the left and make a big temper tantrum scene at the Philadelphia convention...

But since the Trump nomination has put me in the surreal position of actually supporting Hillary Clinton, and I see just how damaging this can be, I want him to tone it down against her and withdraw after California...(I'd prefer he'd withdraw now, but that isn't going to happen)

Once Hillary is no longer fighting a two front war, she'll be able to start pulling in the reluctant Democrats and Democrat leaning Independents who dislike her but dislike Trump even more, and her numbers will improve...

But how soon she's going to be able to start to do this, and how difficult the task is going to be, is to a large extent in Bernie Sanders hands...

As I said before, this campaign is going to be all about two very disliked and mistrusted candidates trying to convince the electorate to dislike and mistrust their opponent more...

In every campaign, there is a part of the strategy that involves driving up your opponents negatives. But these two start out with positive levels that are so low, that is going to be just about ALL this campaign is going to be about...It's going to be a non-stop shit storm of negativity...

Actually more like Cat 5 Shit Hurricane...

Anyone looking for a campaign of uplifting visions or appeals to "the better angels of our nature", would be well advised to go into a medically induced coma till after Nov. 8th...

As the historian John Meacham noted on Morning Joe yesterday, "This isn't going to be a 'Shining City On A Hill' election"...

To say the least...

[Big RR]

IMHO, I think the idea of "likeability" is overrated; I want to elect someone who can do the job (or at least some of it) and reflects my political view (or at least some of it); I am not electing a friend. FWIW, I think most of the presidents I saw as fairly nice guys who would be fine to have a drink with are people I politically disagreed with and would not have voted for (these include Reagan and W); the ones I would have voted or did vote for (Clinton, Obama, Carter) are people I don't think I'd care for all that much (indeed, I went to college with guys like Clinton and couldn't stand them--they were just manipulators; my guess is that Carter was pretty cranky and Obama wouldn't be happy unless he believed he was the smartest person in the room). So whether I personally like Hillary or not is immaterial, I want someone who can do the job and not sell us down the river (FWIW, I don't think Bernie is a guy I'd particularly like either--my guess is he's a crank like Carter).

[Burning Petard]

Endorsements. My main reason for voting for Jimmy Carter was Hunter S Thompson. He wrote about the Carter campaign as a journalist we now call 'embedded' with the Carter crowd. Thompson's reflections on Carter in the moments behind the scenes, or moving around when he was not directly under the eye of the big name media persuaded me that Carter was a man of honor. (Now in the age of every smart phone is a video and sound recorder, there are no such moments). As David Weber wrote in one of his many novels, "Integrity's a much deadlier weapon than cunning, in the end." Carter had integrity. And frequently he WAS the smartest guy in the room. Yet he was defeated by an attack rabbit.

Clinton may be short of my ideal on integrity, but the Donald has none. Both are well endowed with cunning.

snailgate.

[Big RR]

I agree about integrity, but I don't think integrity and likeability go hand in hand; I would think many people with integrity could well be boors--probably self-righteous ones. But integrity ins important in positions of trust.

I add to that the requirement that a president must know how the system works and how to work within it. I watched a movie on Showtime recently dealing with LBJ's first term, and it detailed how he got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed and how he dealt with the threatened walkout of the Dixiecrats at the 64 convention. It brought back a lot of memories, and highlighted how he dealt with the Dixiecrats and forged alliances to shepherd the bill through both houses; it didn't sugar coat it--he was shown to be the SOB that he was, but he knew the system and the rules and got things done (with a Congress and a convention that had a sizeable faction that was a prickly as the tea partiers). He's not someone I think I would have liked at all, but I'd want him on my side. I don't know how much experience Hillary had working within the system, but I am pretty sure Trump has none.

[Burning Petard]

The whole practice and philosophy of national politics has changed drastically since LBJ.

The job of Congresscritter or Senator is a part-time job now. Their real job is sucking up money for the next election. That begins the day after the election. Actually getting anything done for the common good of the nation is way down on the priority list of congressional leadership.

snailgate

[Big RR]

Perhaps, but then the job of president involves understanding how to navigate this new system, not just throwing one's hands up and blaming everyone else. Sure it's difficult, but if anyone wants to be president, that's what they have to do.

[Lord Jim]

Donald J. Trump...

Champion of the little guy, and expert economic prognosticator:

[TPFKA@W]

Bernie burned the beast in Washington. I hope he contnues to spank her wrinkly old ass.

[Econoline]

... her wrinkly old ass.

In contrast to Bernie's smooth, tight, sexy, young ass?