This was the scene at 10:00 am in North Hollywood, California, where a long line snaked around Amelia Earhart Park for early voting, — set to “Dialogue, Pts. 1 & 2”, a classic song by Chicago. The mood was decidedly pro-Hillary. And it’s no wonder, since Hillary is projected to thump Trump in the Golden State by a margin somewhere around 30%.
But take nothing for granted my fellow Californians.
Get out and vote.
This Tuesday, Election Day, get out and vote.
And vote for Hillary Clinton.
If you’re a Democrat, of course, vote for Hillary.
If you’re a Bernie Sanders fan (as I was), reject Susan Sarandon’s third-party nihilism and vote for the only woman who can defeat the abomination that is Donald J. Trump.
If you’re a woman, please — have you been listening to Trump? Vote for Hillary.
If you’re married to a woman, or just in love with a woman, or you simply like women – vote for Hillary out of respect for the women you appreciate and respect.
If you’re Latino, vote for Hillary in droves. He has made you and your parents his scapegoat.
If you’re African-American, vote for Hillary. After all, says Trump, what do you have to lose?
If you’re Muslim, or any religious minority with a history of persecution in this country, vote for Hillary. (This, unfortunately, includes all of us blue collar Irish and Italian Catholics.)
If you believe in science and the salvation of our planet, vote for Hillary. Trump says climate change is a hoax perpetrated by China. (I don’t know that he actually believes this – but that’s what he says to get the votes of West Virginia coal miners and Oklahoma oil workers.)
If you call yourself a Christian, vote for Hillary. How many of The Beatitudes would Donald Trump agree with? Can you image Trump saying, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth?”
If you’re a parent, vote for Hillary. Do you want your children to grow up in a pro-bully culture?
I could go on.
But, really — this isn’t even close.
Vote for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday.
We must send Trump down to a landslide defeat.
If you’re sane…
If you’re reasonable…
If you’re a rational human being…
Vote against Trump.
And make Hillary Clinton the next President of the United States.
It’s actually long past time for beleaguered GOP Vice Presidential Candidate Mike Pence to repudiate his great orange running mate’s toxic campaign.
But now that Donald Trump sees the writing on the wall (and the polls), his destructive attack on the integrity of the American election process itself leaves his Veep pick with no other way to save his dignity, credibility and reputation than to jettison the flame-throwing narcissistic demagogue at the top of the ticket.
For the good of our democracy, Pence must dump Trump.
Now.
Mike Pence says he’s a follower of Jesus Christ. What is there in the four Gospels that give any indication that the Prince of Peace would approve of Donald J. Trump? Not a thing. Re-read the Sermon on the Mount – especially the Beatitudes. Nowhere does Jesus say, “Blessed are the whining sore losers, for theirs is the right to torch the landscape in their wake.”
In 1960, when Richard Nixon lost by the thinnest of whiskers to John F. Kennedy, even the man who would become infamous for campaign “dirty tricks” and Watergate respected the vote of the American people, despite unproven claims of election fraud in Illinois and West Virginia.
In 2000, when Al Gore lost by a few hanging Florida chads (and one dubious Supreme Court decision) to George W. Bush, Gore went before the cameras after the Florida recount was halted to put the nation first and acknowledge the legitimacy of his defeat.
And now comes Donald Trump. He’s not even waiting for his eventual (and much deserved) defeat to cast doubt on the fairness of our American democracy.
Trump incites his angry followers to show up at the polls to watch out for the mass voter fraud he assures them will take place. Especially in those “inner cities” filled with, well, you know, those people…
And then there’s all those illegal immigrants Trump claims are pouring across our border to vote for Hillary. Because, of course, tens of thousands of desperate Central Americans are surely lining up to risk their lives and fortunes on a dangerous and expensive U.S. border crossing so they can put Hillary in the White House. (If you believe that, I have a bankrupt casino I’d like to sell you.)
Trump indicts the dishonest media for its part in rigging the election against him. Really? Is that what FOX, CNN and MSNBC were doing for a solid year when they covered just about every one of his rallies from start to finish? When they would put Hillary or Bernie Sanders in a little box in the corner of the frame while The Donald held court full screen? The truth is that the cable news networks were major enablers of Trump’s candidacy.
Yet even though all of Trump’s talk of a rigged election is absolute crap – millions of his followers believe him.
And that’s why Mike Pence – who surely knows better – must take a stand by standing down.
If Mike Pence doesn’t repudiate Trump’s claims of a rigged election in the strongest terms — and quit the Trump ticket now — he will have forfeited his credibility as a future candidate in our American democracy.
Trump is calling for torches and pitchforks, Governor Pence.
What would Jesus do?
Finally. Finally.
The mainstream media is starting to point out something about Donald Trump that’s been clear from the moment he formally announced his campaign for the Presidency on June 16, 2015: the man is a serial liar.
Those of us who have spent too much of the past year screaming at our television as a prostrate press allowed The Donald to spew lies, damned lies and bogus statistics are heartened to see that fact-checking Trump has recently become the latest journalistic fad.
Hopefully, this fact-checking fad will catch on like Pokémon Go.
And what was the final straw that aroused the media to finally challenge Trump’s truthiness?
Was it when the nation’s print journalists, television anchors, reporters and pundits realized there was actually a chance that an unqualified, incurious, racist, thin-skinned demagogue could wind up with access to the nuclear launch codes?
Hardly.
It was when Trump embarrassed the media by suckering them into flocking to his newest hotel on September 16. The Trump campaign promised a press conference to clear the air after The Donald’s disastrous refusal to acknowledge Obama’s citizenship in an interview with The Washington Post.
But the press did not get their promised press conference.
Instead, they all devoted precious airtime to what turned out to be an extended promotional event for Trump’s newly opened luxury hotel in Washington, plus a string of testimonials from a collection of retired military figures –followed by a few words from Trump on the birther issue.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it, you know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”
Burned by the great orange con man into investing network and newspaper resources on Trump’s shameless promotional bait & switch, the media did something they’d rarely done before: they all pointed out that most of what Trump has just said was a lie.
And then they actually started using the word “lie”.
They noted that the Clinton campaign did not start the birther thing.
They made it clear that Trump did not “finish it”. In fact, he’d fanned it. Right up until that Washington Post interview.
Headlines announced that Trump had traded one grudging truth for two falsehoods. The New York Times began calling it “the birther lie” – and said things like this:
So, as we await the first Presidential Debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, everyone in the media is now talking about fact-checking – and, surprise, Trump and his surrogates are howling like stuck pigs.
That’s because Donald Trump is a big fat liar.
It’s the truth.
I finally read it in The New York Times.
This is one of the few times I’ve ever posted an article written by someone other than yours truly – but today’s Newsweek takedown of Donald Trump must be trumpeted (sorry for the pun) far and wide.
Here it is:
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-national-security-498081.html
For those with limited time to read — here’s a key segment of the opener:
The Trump Organization is not like the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the charitable enterprise that has been the subject of intense scrutiny about possible conflicts for the Democratic presidential nominee. There are allegations that Hillary Clinton bestowed benefits on contributors to the foundation in some sort of “pay to play” scandal when she was secretary of state, but that makes no sense because there was no “pay.” Money contributed to the foundation was publicly disclosed and went to charitable efforts, such as fighting neglected tropical diseases that infect as many as a billion people. The financials audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global independent accounting company, and the foundation’s tax filings show that about 90 percent of the money it raised went to its charitable programs. (Trump surrogates have falsely claimed that it was only 10 percent and that the rest was used as a Clinton “slush fund.”) No member of the Clinton family received any cash from the foundation, nor did it finance any political campaigns. In fact, like the Clintons, almost the entire board of directors works for free.
On the other hand, the Trump family rakes in untold millions of dollars from the Trump Organization every year. Much of that comes from deals with international financiers and developers, many of whom have been tied to controversial and even illegal activities. None of Trump’s overseas contractual business relationships examined by Newsweek were revealed in his campaign’s financial filings with the Federal Election Commission, nor was the amount paid to him by his foreign partners.
Bold emphasis mine.
Are you listening, corporate news media? Are you ready now to make Trump and his surrogates answer the tough questions? Not about his silly circus sideshow with Dr. Oz – but the far more important questions raised by Newsweek.
And, if you need any more questions, Keith Olbermann has 176 reasons to grill Trump right here:
http://video.gq.com/watch/176-reasons-donald-trump-shouldn-t-be-president
Starring (top row, left to right) Roger Ailes, Rudy Giuliani, Trump, Christie & Coulter — and (bottom row, left to right) Sen. Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Tony Perkins, Roger Stone and David Duke.
Can’t wait for this awful movie to end.
Filed under Comedy, History, Politics, Random Commentary, Uncategorized
Are you in need of a refreshing new perspective on this Presidential campaign? My good buddy Craig Tomashoff has written a book about the Presidential candidates you’ve never heard of – from Vermin Supreme to Sydney’s Voluptuous Buttocks.
Craig with an actual candidate. No he’s not Vermin Supreme…
Craig is a freelance writer and producer who blogs regularly at Huffington Post.com. For many years, he served as Executive Editor of TV Guide, and has also worked as Associate Bureau Chief for People. Speaking of people, the “can’t-idates” he met while working on this book are some of the most colorful and eccentric people you’ll ever meet.
Craig spoke with more than 100 ordinary Americans attempting to get elected to the Presidency without any political experience. Out of all those interviews, Craig focused on the 15 men and women profiled in his book — traveling 10,000 miles in three weeks to meet them. So, the least you can do is go the extra mile to buy his book and read it!
What is it about Donald Trump’s vulgar, shameless, fact-free Presidential candidacy that appears to suck the intelligence, discernment, fairness, judgment and journalistic integrity out of our callow cadre of TV news anchormen and women?
It’s as though Donald Trump is some sort of insidious political vampire with the power to mesmerize, fascinate and overpower his overpaid, under-researched and ratings-infatuated newsreader victims.
With about eight weeks to go until Election Day, it’s long past time for television news anchors, interviewers and, hopefully, the moderators of the upcoming debates to get tough with Trump.
It was hard enough to watch the weak performance of NBC’s Matt Lauer in the recent Commander-in-Chief Forum, as he let Trump tell lie after lie with impunity — especially his whopper about opposing the Iraq War from the start. But much worse is the spectre of what we can expect from FOX’s Chris Wallace in the third Presidential Debate on October 19. Consider this exchange with Howard Kurtz.
KURTZ: …as they go at it, let’s say Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, what do you do if they make assertions that you know to be untrue?
WALLACE: That’s not my job. I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad.
Getting at the truth is not Wallace’s job? What would his father, the late CBS News and “60 Minutes” stalwart, Mike Wallace, have said if he heard his son say such a thing?
And is there any doubt how Mike Wallace’s mentor, the legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow — the man who stood up to Joe McCarthy’s lies — would have answered Kurtz’s question?
Then again, maybe I should just set FOX News aside. After all, it’s little more than the unofficial cable channel of the Republican Party. Sure, there are elements at FOX that share some in the GOP’s ambivalence about Trump’s rogue candidacy – but it’s also clear that FOX News will not seriously challenge the rise of the Great Orange Hope.
However, we should expect much more of CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and MSNBC.
So, why do so many supposedly professional newsmen at these major media outlets fail to ask the most obvious follow-up questions when Trump and his clownish parade of lying, low-ball, blowhard surrogates mislead viewers by misstating the facts?
Are they simply unaware of the facts? Is it a research problem? Not enough time in their busy day to pursue the truth?
Of course, I’m not a professional journalist. I’m just another blogger. But I read the newspapers. (Seriously. One gets tossed onto my driveway every morning.) And I spend a little time every day surfing the news through the Internet tubes. I’m a lifelong history buff and a concerned citizen. So, it’s clear to me that our television news anchors are in dereliction of their journalistic duty.
Why else would they allow Trump and his cohort to perpetuate the calumny that Hillary Clinton is the dishonest, untrustworthy person in this race? Do they fail to challenge this relentless lie because they have no access to the fact checking by PolitiFact?
Here’s how PolitiFact analyzes Hillary’s relationship to the truth…
Just in case Chris Wallace is too busy to do the math – 72% of Hillary’s assertions range between true and half-true. She’s been caught tell a lie only 2% of the time.
Trump’s pants, on the other hand, are en fuego 18% of the time. And a full 71% of his statements range from mostly false to flaming pantaloons.
No wonder Chris Wallace doesn’t want to fact-check The Donald during his debate. Wallace would have to interrupt Trump at least 71% of the time. And nobody likes to watch a football game where the referees are throwing a flag on every 7 out of 10 plays. It would be unwatchable.
Unwatchable perhaps. But it sure would be enlightening.
Going back to Matt Lauer’s pathetic Commander-in-Chief Forum performance, it should be noted that Lauer did try to challenge Trump by confronting him with a Tweet that suggested The Donald was blaming the presence of women in the military for incidents of military sexual assault.
However, had Lauer done a least the ten minutes of research I just did he wouldn’t have been caught slack-jawed and flat-footed when Trump doubled down on his ignorant, erroneous notion that military sexual assault is a problem created by putting men and women together in uniform.
Lauer could have pointed out that the majority of military sexual assault victims are men.
In 2014, the Pentagon estimated that 20,300 servicemen and servicewomen were assaulted that year. Of those attacks, roughly 10,600 of the victims – more than half — were men.
And since investigations have found that, for instance, 1 in 5 females in the U.S. Air Force report assault — but only 1 in 15 males report having been sexually assaulted — we can assume that the number of male victims in the military is much higher than current estimates.
Yet, Trump and his surrogate minions are allowed, unchallenged, on network after network, to continue to frame this particular debate as an issue that’s all about women in the military.
That’s because TV news has become a lazy, undisciplined, unfocused and ill-informed show-biz circus.
The great Edward R. Murrow is surely rolling over in his grave.
With the truth under constant attack and undefended by the wretched watchdogs of TV journalism, all I can say is, “Good night, and good luck.”
C’mon, you TV newsreaders!
It’s not too late to do a little research, grow some balls — and make Mr. Murrow proud.
Whether you support former First Lady, New York Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Vermont Senator (and gasp!) self-avowed Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, there is no doubt that the vote in the Michigan Democratic Primary has turned the 2016 Presidential nominating contest into a hotly contested race.
Tonight’s results from the great state of Michigan haven’t changed my mind. I’ve always loved me some Bernie Sanders. (I still remember “Brunch with Bernie” on Thom Hartman’s radio show – and all of his appearances on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program.)
To be sure, I’m feeling the Bern all the way to the Democratic Convention. But if Hillary somehow ultimately prevails in the delegate count – I’m 100% with her against whatever monstrosity the GOP nominates: whether it’s Trump or Cruz or some lousy, GOP establishment option they manage to cobble together at a brokered (okay, “open”) convention.
So, my progressive friends – this was a great night.
Those of us who are progressive Democrats are in a great position. Bernie Sanders is leading in the right direction. If Hillary Clinton hopes to compete for the Democratic nomination, she must embrace Bernie’s populist, idealistic, progressive platform – and outflank him on the left.
Either way, we win.
Go ahead, GOP. Give us Trump or Cruz.
Can’t wait.
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Paul's Voyage of Discovery & Etc. 
Too Little Too Late, Mr. Birther!
And then let’s hear him tell us what the hell this nonsense (or pack of shameless lies) was all about 5 years ago:
(CNN) Possibly-serious Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is giving few details about the investigation he claims to have launched in Hawaii to get to the bottom of where President Obama was born, but the business mogul told CNN Thursday Americans will be “very surprised” by what he has found.
******
C’mon mass media! Don’t let Trump skate on this one. What specific “interesting things” did he find out about Obama’s citizenship five years ago?
Trump said all this crap.
The media must get Trump to say that Obama is a citizen with his own lips – and then ask the follow-up questions.
Make Trump back all his old statements up.
Or admit it was all a lie.
I’m talking to you, Wolf Blitzer, Brian Williams, Lester Holt, Anderson Cooper, Andrea Mitchell – and maybe, just maybe, the last honest journalists on FOX News.
Hoist the Great Orange Demagogue by his own petard.
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Filed under History, Politics, Random Commentary, Truth
Tagged as 2016 Presidential Election, birtherism, citizenship, Democrat, Donald Trump, Election 2016, GOP, Hillary, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Trump