trump is serious!!!!!

[MajGenl.Meade]

Maybe it's Lush Rimbaugh?

[wesw]

it only takes about thirty seconds to get the feel.....

[BoSoxGal]

An hour of Donald Trump?

I'll put that on my watch list right under the 3 hour Bernie Sanders video...

I'm glad you'd prefer 3 hours of Bernie over one of Trumpty Dumpty!

[Long Run]

For one thing, she's definitely not going to go after Rubio on personal finances...

Just like she would never tweet that all sexual abuse accusers deserve to be believed . . .

[font=]The world is full of surprises and that keeps things interesting.[/font]

[oldr_n_wsr]

Washington (CNN)Donald Trump on Thursday called for the creation of a national database to register all Muslims living in the U.S. to protect the country against terrorism.

"I would certainly implement that. Absolutely," Trump told NBC News during a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa.

There was some kind of database (list?) back during WWII on Germans. My grandarents and their sisters and brothers here in the USA were frequently "visited" by the FBI (or some gov agency ike that). Didn't matter that they had been in the country since the mid 1920's or that a few of them were already citizens. They came around often enough that my grandmother (and my Tante Maria) got to know the and gave them coffee and homemade doughnuts. Don't know if it was because they were in the Original Enzion group or just because they were from Germany.

So the idea of tracking certain "groups" during a war/conflict is not new.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Trump is less than a douche - those are useful. Trump is dangerous and should never be president of anything other than his own bathroom.

What's almost worse than he might really mean there should be a national database of Moslems, is that he didn't pay any attention to the question and he just tossed off an answer to what he assumed (without bothering to listen or to think) was the question.

I have no doubt that he was thinking of refugees from Islamic countries (who are in any case going to be registered and in a database) but he doesn't get a pass on that. We can hate him for wanting to register refugees; we can hate him for wanting to register immigrants (again, already registered and in databases) - but let's hate him even more for being so sloppy, slap-dash and unremittingly stupid.

It is not so much malice as sheer arrogant carelessness that makes him unfit to be anything other than semi-sentient.

[Econoline]

Trump is dangerous and should never be president of anything other than his own bathroom.

[Lord Jim]

For one thing, she's definitely not going to go after Rubio on personal finances...

Just like she would never tweet that all sexual abuse accusers deserve to be believed . . .

[font=]The world is full of surprises and that keeps things interesting.[/font]

Oh-My-God...

Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported. http://hrc.io/SexualAssault

http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/22/backf ... r-husband/

(Some of the response tweets are spot on...)

Talk about chutzpah...

This got almost no coverage in the liberal mainstream press...

I guess that means she'll be conveying her "support" to:








And those are just the ones we know about...

[BoSoxGal]

It may seem hypocritical, and perhaps coming from Clinton it is, but honestly in general the idea that women (or men) asserting they've been victim of sexual assault should be as believed as any other victim presenting assertions of victimhood to law enforcement is perfectly sound.

After all, when somebody reports a home burglary or other crime, the first response of law enforcement is not to be doubtful.

Statistics show that sexual assault claims are not asserted falsely at a higher rate than any other kind of crime . . . yet victims are almost always met with skepticism from LEOs. That's not cool.

[Lord Jim]

I deliberately did not include Monica Lewinsky...

There was an obvious power imbalance there, but she was a willing participant...

The strongest, (and also the worst) case is that of Juanita Broderick...

She had nothing to gain by coming forward, (she hasn't written a book, she hasn't tried to capitalize financially)

She told people contemporaneously what happened, and the timeline matches; where he was, where she was...

She was almost certainly raped by the then Attorney General of Arkansas...

That having been said:

asserting they've been victim of sexual assault should be as believed as any other victim

Yes, but there are also some very celebrated cases (see the Duke Lacrosse Team case, or the accusations made against a fraternity at my alma mater, UVA) where a psychologically troubled person, egged on by someone with their own agenda, (see Sharpton, Al, Tawana Brawley) can "misremeber" the facts...

So, there's a high bar in cases like this for a reason...

A false accusation, even if unfounded, can be devastating and destroy an innocent person's life...

So, while I have no doubt that there are far more woman who have legitimate claims of abuse than those who do not, a lot of the anger should be directed towards those who make false claims...

[Scooter]

I stand to be corrected, but I don't think there is another major crime that has as much of a drop off from incidence to reporting to charges to trial to conviction, such that convictions represent a quite small percentage of sexual assaults. It's obvious a challenging enough process to dissuade or block a large proportion of victims from getting that measure of justice. Estimates of sexual assaults that go unreported are in the range of 75% to 90%. This article cites statistics that sexual assaults are four times more likely than other serious crimes to be determined to be unfounded by police, sometimes based on disliking or blaming the complainant, or by infringing on the prosecutor's role and screening out cases not believed to be winnable at trial. Prosecutors then either refuse to file charges or withdraw them after filing in over half the cases reaching them.

People can be wrongly accused of any number of serious crimes, which if believed about them can be very devastating. The stats on false accusations of sexual assault are all over the map, like from 2% to 60%, depending on the methodological weaknesses of the study and whose ox is being gored. Recantations are a major, but not exclusive, determinant of false reports, but recantations are made for many reasons that have nothing to do with the truth of the accusation, including pressure by police who have an interest in disposing of cases they judge to be dogs to make their stats look better. And contrary to perceptions of their motivations (revenge, cover story, etc) those who make false rape allegations are disproportionately younger than 21, mentally ill, and alleging rape by an unidentified stranger.

I'm not saying there is not an issue, if for no other reason than the ammunition it gives to the "men's rights" crowd to paint most rape victims as vindictive liars. And the disproportionate attention paid to false accusations of this crime, often to support the contention that rape victims should be subjected to greater scepticism than other crime victims, makes me wonder if this is just a new rationalization to justify an old attitude.

All of which is to say, that a statement that survivors of sexual assault have a right to be heard and believed should not be any more controversial than the same statement made about any other victim of crime.

An anecdote someone posted told the story of a business owner who was charged with arson and insurance fraud after an investigation into the second time that his building burned to the ground. People in town were outraged when they found out, of course, for having been deceived. But, he said, no one reacted to the FIRST fire with suspicious gossip about whether he torched it; everyone assumed that he was the victim of a great misfortune and acted accordingly, until evidence said otherwise years later. And so, too, for the victims of any other crime. Except rape, apparently.

And we wonder why so many rapes go unreported,

[BoSoxGal]

So, LJ, now your party's leading candidate is mocking the disabled:



When is the Republican party going to give him his marching orders? Don't they have the power to push him out of the race???

eta: I'm not intending to single you out as though you are responsible, as I know you don't like Trumpty Dumpty anymore than we do. But you do know Republican party politics, and I'm seriously curious about what the party can do to control this fiasco. Are they powerless because he can self-finance? Are we stuck with this anti-intellectual bigot until the bitter end?

[RayThom]

Don't be surprised to start hearing Mitt Romney's name being bandied about more and more by the Grand Old Party -- "OLD" being the operative word. That gang of D.C. old farts is getting desperate.

Romney / Gingrich... 2016

[BoSoxGal]

LJ? How do we get rid of Trumpty Dumpty?

[Lord Jim]

Exorcism....

[rubato]

By whipping up hatred for immigrants and intolerance for Muslims and selling the lie that illegal immigration is the worst problem we have (although the net flow has been close to zero for 6 years) the GOP has created Trump. His followers appear to be naive racists, people who absorbed the rhetoric and believed it but never bother to fact-check it. Simple people in both positive and negative senses of the word.

Barnhill is wearing a button he just bought from a vender outside the convention center. It says “TRUMP 2016: FINALLY SOMEONE WITH BALLS.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... mp/417870/





yrs,
rubato

[BoSoxGal]

I found that article to be quite chilling, frankly.

I'm beginning to think that Trump can get elected in this climate; Trump/Cruz could even have a shot at running this country, I fear. And what a mess will come of that! Especially since he's playing straight to fear and anger.

This is the thing Trump knows: You can stand around fretting about truth and propriety and the danger of pandering to baser instincts.

Or you can give the people what they want.

[rubato]

I found that article to be quite chilling, frankly.
... "

I'm glad to hear it.


yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2015/11/do ... ut-he.html

Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path

People who have studied the extremist right as a historical and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth: America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements.

And now, with the arrival of the Donald Trump 2016 phenomenon, that luck may be about to run out.

Nor is this phenomenon just a flash in the pan. Trump is the logical end result of an endless series of assaults on not just American liberalism, but on democratic institutions themselves, by the American right for many years. It is the long-term creep of radicalization of the right come home to roost.

Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America’s DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars – particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.

Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And indeed it was.

Despite the long-running presence of these elements, though, America has never yet given way to fascism. No doubt some of this, in the past half-century at least, was primarily fueled by the natural human recoil that occurred when we got to witness the end result of these tendencies when given the chance to rule by someone like Hitler – namely, the Holocaust. We learned to be appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism, because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced, and fled in terror.

Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon: in one sense, it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s comprised of a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence and importance rise and fall according to the stages of development it goes through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human id upon the rest of humankind.

That’s where Donald Trump comes in.

In many ways, Trump’s fascistic-seeming presidential campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is the one component that has been utterly missing previously in American forms of fascism: the charismatic leader around whom the fascist troops can rally, the one who voices their frustrations and garners followers like flies.

Scholars of fascist politics have remarked previously that America has been fortunate for most of its history not to have had such a figure rise out of the ranks of their fascist movements. And in the case of Donald Trump, that remains true – he has no background or history as a white supremacist or proto-fascist, nor does he actually express their ideologies.
... "

The Southern Strategy keeps producing children even more evil than itself.


yrs,
rubato

[BoSoxGal]

And in the case of Donald Trump, that remains true – he has no background or history as a white supremacist or proto-fascist, nor does he actually express their ideologies.

I thought Trump's dad had KKK ties? I think there is some record linking him to the Klan.

Anyway if Trump grew up with a proud NYC German dad (like the one I had), there is good reason to believe that he grew up with bigotry in the household ideology by which he was shaped.

If he's only playing a bigot because it plays, isn't that worse, anyway? He is willing to foment hate to obtain power.