In other news, you may have read that Melania Trump announced a lawsuit of People for libel. Not because their article claimed that Donald assaulted their reporter, Natasha Stoynoff. Because it claimed that Stoynoff talked to her, which apparently Melania regards as a defamatory accusation. She denied furiously to Anderson Cooper that any small talk had occurred.
You've been following the news enough to know what's coming, right?
Quote:
Six colleagues and close friends who corroborate former PEOPLE writer Natasha Stoynoff’s account of being attacked by Donald Drumpf in 2005 are now coming forward. Among them is a friend who was with Stoynoff when she ran into Melania Drumpf later in N.Y.C.
The wife of the Republican nominee denies meeting Stoynoff after the attack, but Stoynoff’s friend Liza Herz remembers being there during the chance meeting.
“They chatted in a friendly way,” Herz, who met Stoynoff in college, says. “And what struck me most was that Melania was carrying a child and wearing heels.”
The “carrying a child and wearing heels” part in particular seems too credible to be an invented detail.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
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What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
__________________
What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
What exactly would be in the leaked e-mails though?
Clinton only kinda has dirt because she's been in politics for years and is secretive.
Trump on the other hand has 5am twitter tirades. I'm not sure how much there would be to leak that Trump hasn't already leaked all over his phone before he had an intern dangled infront of him just out of grabbing reach while another staffer grabbed his phone and ran.
What exactly would be in the leaked e-mails though?
Clinton only kinda has dirt because she's been in politics for years and is secretive.
Drumpf on the other hand has 5am twitter tirades. I'm not sure how much there would be to leak that Drumpf hasn't already leaked all over his phone before he had an intern dangled infront of him just out of grabbing reach while another staffer grabbed his phone and ran.
Twist: Melania was actually carrying Sasha Obama!
Eh. I'm almost certain that at least one of them contains at least one use of the N-bomb on Trump's part. Also, there's probably strong evidence of illegal business practices.
In other news, Clinton's campaign has been expanding its operations in traditionally red states like UT and TX, while Republicans seem to be panicking about House races, as they have been spending quite a lot more money on races in districts once considered to be safe. Republicans insist that they aren't actually nervous; however, as electoral-vote.com points out, there are plenty of good reasons not to believe them about this.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Maybe but something tells me those that get paid to run his empire know about his insanity and keep important e-mails internal, only forwarding him praise and boob gifs.
For him to not have screwed his empire I assume there are people on the inside who 'handle' him.
Has he not screwed his empire? He's had several bankruptcies with casinos. It takes a special kind of failure to do poorly running those. He claims to have $10 billion, but there is good reason to suspect he has far less than that. Some commentators have suggested that if he had simply taken his inheritance and put it in an index fund, he would be better off than he probably is now. That doesn't speak to me as a resounding success.
There are plenty of other indications that he's in trouble. He's been having difficulty even getting people to stay in his D.C. hotel, despite lowering prices substantially compared to other properties in the area. Apparently there are frequent vacancies. This doesn't seem to be unique to that hotel, either. His brand may already have been in trouble, but it's certainly in trouble now.
More importantly, though, it doesn't necessarily matter what his organisation wants him to do. He has no filter with people like Billy Bush, who, as far as we know, was not even a close acquaintance of his. Why would we expect him to have any more of a filter in emails? Perhaps the people running his org specifically wiped any remotely problematic communications from his server, but I wouldn't consider that to be a complete guarantee.
Leah McElrath's diagnosis of Trump as a malignant narcissist is the best explanation I've seen for his campaign. Bearing this in mind, I doubt there is anyone close to him who is willing to say "no" to him. He has very likely either completely burned his bridges with anyone who would have done so or exhausted them to the point where they no longer bother. Bearing this in mind, perhaps his organisation has people on hand who would be competent enough to clear all the incriminating stuff off their server. But I wouldn't bet on it.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Oh I mean completely. Like zero money into the ground.
Ah, right. According to Ivanka Trump in John Oliver's lengthy piece on Donald, they were $10 billion in debt at one point, though.
Czech police have arrested a Russian hacker wanted by Interpol for acts against the United States (page in Czech; further information via Balloon Juice). The arrest was a joint operation with the FBI.
Additionally, Ecuador has cut off Julian Assange's Internet connection due to his interference in our elections. Buzzfeed claims that the story about the dating site wasn't true.
Finally, James O'Keefe's latest video is almost certainly bullshit and he probably committed a felony by even recording it, since Florida law requires people's consent to being recorded.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Two high level operatives have already been fired ...
__________________
What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. ... The origin of myths is explained in this way.
Donald Trump, flailing desperately and searching for a path to connect to voters, has proposed term limits on Congress. Term limits are a terrible idea. They are probably intended to keep corrupt legislators from fucking things up for too long. One problem is that they don't just get rid of corrupt legislators; they get rid of everyone. Legislating is not rote work. There is a learning curve, and not everyone can do it well. To become really good at it requires understanding complex legal issues, building political coalitions, managing committees, and dealing with political processes that many people do not understand well. A first-term legislator is not going to be as good at their job as a tenth-term one; many of these processes can take more than ten years to get any good at. Trump claims that his proposal is intended to weaken the influence of lobbyists, but since it would weaken the ability of legislators to do their jobs effectively, it would strengthen the positions of career bureaucrats, the executive branch, and, well, lobbyists.
There is also the problem that term limits do not actually address the problem of corrupt legislators. George Carlin put it this way: "If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. And term limits aren't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans." The system that produces corrupt legislators has not actually been addressed. Moreover, there is no sign that removing legislators from office actually stops them from being corrupt before leaving office, either. They will simply prepare for their mandatory retirement and probably cash in with profitable jobs in the private sector when they are done. If anything, this gives them more incentive to prepare for private-sector employment, since they know exactly how long their careers in legislation can last at maximum.
I do understand the reasoning behind term limits: stagnation is not good for a legislative body. The problem is that it's the wrong solution to stagnation. Bad legislators don't stay in office for too long because they don't have term limits; they stay in office for too long because the districts are drawn badly. The solution is to get rid of gerrymandering so that districts are drawn competitively. That way, if someone does a bad job in office, they can actually get thrown out. You want the people who are doing a bad job to be removed, for sure. The problem with term limits is that they remove everyone.
National term limits will never actually happen. For starters, they would require a constitutional amendment. Congress is not going to approve an amendment mandating its own retirement. 3/4 of the state legislatures, many or most of whose members have dreams of careers in Congress, will also not approve such an amendment. There are many national amendments that would be beneficial for the country. This would not be one of them.
Florida has term limits, which is one reason I particularly hate them. Our state Senate president is getting term-limited out this year. He's a Republican, so he supports school vouchers and a lot of other dumb stuff like that. But he's also probably about as good a Republican as you could get in Florida these days. He's set up some good programs for the disabled, he genuinely seems to want to improve people's lives, and he seems to be good at his job. (Florida has also done some good things with mental health in the past few years.) I don't have any hope that his replacement will be anywhere near as well-meaning or as good at their job, particularly since our outgoing Senate president seems to be a member of the vanishing breed of non-extremist Republicans. (He has served his limit of terms in both our state House and state Senate, so if he occupies further office, it will either be as governor, which I would certainly welcome if he were to replace Rick Scott, or at the national level.) I don't expect the Democrats to take our state Senate in this election, so I'm dreading what happens next.
In short, term limits are a bad idea and no one should support them. The fact that Donald Trump supports them should probably be sign enough that they are a bad idea, but in case anyone was inclined to agree with him on this, don't; he's wrong about this, too.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
You surprised me, and in a good way. I was blindly assuming term limits in Congress would be good (possibly assuming that all politicians are bad) - but of course term limits don't make people better, and in fact are likely to make them rush into corruption if they were going to at all.
Had I already heard that Donald Fart supported them I would immediately have questioned them, as you say.
Many voters cannot comprehend how half the country could possibly vote for that terrible, unfit liar the other party has nominated. The answer is simple: partisanship. That determines everything. A WaPo/ABC News poll released this week shows that 89% of self-identified Democrats back Hillary Clinton and 86% of self-identified Republicans back Donald Trump. A tiny slice of each party is up for grabs, as well as an increasingly small number of so-called independents who could go either way. Basically, the race is mostly about getting your own partisans to the polls, rather than convincing undecided voters to join your team. The billions of dollars in ads, thousands of rallies, debates, interviews, and controversies mean almost nothing. It is all about partisanship.
A recent study from Rutgers and the University of Delaware shows that most voters fall into one of four categories:
- Rational voters who consider all the positions of all the candidates and then make a careful choice
- Partisan voters who simply look at the (D) or (R) and vote based on that
- Single-issue voters, for example anti-abortion or pro-gun voters
- Low-information voters who don't follow politics and can be easily swayed
The second and third categories are by far the biggest and also the most partisan. About a third of all voters claim to be independents, but they can be sorted into three categories. First are Democrats who don't want to be called Democrats. Second are Republicans who don't want to be called Republicans. Finally there are the true independents, who represent at most 10% of the electorate. With so few votes really up for grabs, it becomes clearer why neither candidate is likely to fall below 40% of the vote, no matter what disastrous details emerge during the campaign.
I would say I'm a rational partisan voter. It's rare that a candidate would arise that's so awful that I must vote against the Democrat if it means a Republican would win. And in those cases where the Democrat is bad, I would vote against that candidate during the primaries to try to prevent such a match up. But after the primaries, it's very, very likely that the Republican is worse.
You know why? Because it's actually ignorant, not rational, to think that just because some Republican senatorial candidate wants gun control or doesn't want to cut Medicare that their positions on these things matter more than the (R) by their name. Because they mostly vote on party line. And more importantly, they will vote for Mitch McConnell to run the Senate and McConnell running the Senate does far more to undermine gun control and advance entitlement cuts than whatever little compromises a moderate Republican might extract. So I do evaluate the positions of the candidates. It just so happens that whether you'll vote for Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell to run Congress is one of the positions I care about most since it has a huge effect on most of my priorities, and there's a 100% correlation to the (D) or (R) by the candidate's name. An independent candidate, on the other hand, would be evaluated by somewhat different criteria, but whether they would caucus with the Democrats or Republicans would still be my first consideration.
This particularly applies to legislative races. Now, it's a little more likely that a Republican could be acceptable for certain executive positions. Particularly the ones that have little political power, or less ideological weight (for example, Delaware has a state auditor, which is basically an elected accountant, and he's a Republican. He might be good in that role, I don't know). But positions with a lot of political aspects, like governor? The Democrat would need to be truly awful.
The parties have become more homogeneous at this point. If you're in a race where you can't decide which candidate you agree with more, either it's a very strange race or you just have confused political views. Or highly conflicting priorities (I want to respect trans rights, expand abortion access and deport all the Mexicans!).
I would argue that Republicans ought to be voting against Trump at a higher rate though. He is by far the worst presidential candidate I know of, and he seems likely to violate what ought to be values Republicans share. (On the other hand, white supremacists who long for RaHoWa are definitely picking the right candidate if they vote for Trump.)
If you're trying to show me rational evidence that being partisan is reasonable, I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and ignore you. Because I know™ that partisanship is teh EVIL!!!1!
Donald Trump, flailing desperately and searching for a path to connect to voters, has proposed term limits on Congress. Term limits are a terrible idea. They are probably intended to keep corrupt legislators from fucking things up for too long. One problem is that they don't just get rid of corrupt legislators; they get rid of everyone. Legislating is not rote work. There is a learning curve, and not everyone can do it well. To become really good at it requires understanding complex legal issues, building political coalitions, managing committees, and dealing with political processes that many people do not understand well. A first-term legislator is not going to be as good at their job as a tenth-term one; many of these processes can take more than ten years to get any good at. Trump claims that his proposal is intended to weaken the influence of lobbyists, but since it would weaken the ability of legislators to do their jobs effectively, it would strengthen the positions of career bureaucrats, the executive branch, and, well, lobbyists.
There is also the problem that term limits do not actually address the problem of corrupt legislators. George Carlin put it this way: "If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. And term limits aren't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans." The system that produces corrupt legislators has not actually been addressed. Moreover, there is no sign that removing legislators from office actually stops them from being corrupt before leaving office, either. They will simply prepare for their mandatory retirement and probably cash in with profitable jobs in the private sector when they are done. If anything, this gives them more incentive to prepare for private-sector employment, since they know exactly how long their careers in legislation can last at maximum.
I do understand the reasoning behind term limits: stagnation is not good for a legislative body. The problem is that it's the wrong solution to stagnation. Bad legislators don't stay in office for too long because they don't have term limits; they stay in office for too long because the districts are drawn badly. The solution is to get rid of gerrymandering so that districts are drawn competitively. That way, if someone does a bad job in office, they can actually get thrown out. You want the people who are doing a bad job to be removed, for sure. The problem with term limits is that they remove everyone.
National term limits will never actually happen. For starters, they would require a constitutional amendment. Congress is not going to approve an amendment mandating its own retirement. 3/4 of the state legislatures, many or most of whose members have dreams of careers in Congress, will also not approve such an amendment. There are many national amendments that would be beneficial for the country. This would not be one of them.
Florida has term limits, which is one reason I particularly hate them. Our state Senate president is getting term-limited out this year. He's a Republican, so he supports school vouchers and a lot of other dumb stuff like that. But he's also probably about as good a Republican as you could get in Florida these days. He's set up some good programs for the disabled, he genuinely seems to want to improve people's lives, and he seems to be good at his job. (Florida has also done some <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGHWghMfbEU">good things with mental health</a> in the past few years.) I don't have any hope that his replacement will be anywhere near as well-meaning or as good at their job, particularly since our outgoing Senate president seems to be a member of the vanishing breed of non-extremist Republicans. (He has served his limit of terms in both our state House and state Senate, so if he occupies further office, it will either be as governor, which I would certainly welcome if he were to replace Rick Scott, or at the national level.) I don't expect the Democrats to take our state Senate in this election, so I'm dreading what happens next.
In short, term limits are a bad idea and no one should support them. The fact that Donald Trump supports them should probably be sign enough that they are a bad idea, but in case anyone was inclined to agree with him on this, don't; he's wrong about this, too.
By imposing term limits, those more informed and aware representatives who will be able to see through the manipulated 'evidence' being presented by any number of special interests will not be present. Experienced and knowledgeable bullshit detectors will be turned out, willy-nilly. If you limit terms, you reward the lobbyists, who, I will guarantee you, will NOT realize any such limitation on their actions.
Limited terms rewards outside special interest influence a greater hand in the legislative process.
Of course, a representative who has 'sold out' being there for hideous numbers of terms because they hail from some 'safe district' is the worst of all possible worlds...and, it happens all too often. But limiting terms will assure that no experienced, knowledgeable legislator will ever be able to counter the lies and blandishments of the influential special interests.
As an aside, as October wears on, my unhealthy fascination with crap is growing stronger and unhealthier as I read about Trump and his Trumpy ways.
I found myself just before bed thinking about how gloriously shitty Trump is as a person and a candidate, and I revel in all the true and terrible stories here, in the news and on social media.
I'm not asking anyone to stop, I'm just acknowledging my problem.
We got our ballots yesterday. I filled mine out last night and turned it in this morning. Thus has this election has gone from being mostly about the lulz to being all about the lulz.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
Trying to stay relevant, Jill Stein recently published an article debunking John Oliver's hit piece on her.
"When Oliver’s fact-checkers asked if canceling student debt via quantitative easing was the campaign’s current position, we replied that we are considering a range of options in consultation with our economic advisors."
See you gais, A RANGE OF OPTIONS!! That's totally different!!
What are those options?
But something something, crooked bankers, something something rigged two party system. You don't need details.
Jill Stein is like that protester screaming over the megaphone about corruption and then when finally asked "Ok, so what should we do about it?" Repeats her slogan and thinks, 'well that solved that, good job winning the fight Jill!'