I've had people say it's a hardening, actually ~ US presidential election 2016 part 9/11 never forget

like the NYT and WaPo headlines both changed from "Trump Says Obama was born in US" to some variation of "Trump lies and manipulates stuff"

the times has the word "lie" on the front page for what seems like the time this campaign (ever?)

yup

what did he say after that? xxp

Congressional Black Caucus had a moral-witness rally covered by CNN in the last hour. Such events will be easier for them once Charlie Rangel is consigned to oblivion in about 100 days.

I fully expect the Trump campaign to start using this new Attila song as their theme in the run-up to the debates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H1I63FkUeY

doesn't matter if they call what he says it's a lie, it's the new york times, they're totally biased remember

it's true they don't write good

some people have a way with words and others... oh, not have way, I guess

Im impressed that after arguably trumps best week he wraps it up with this cock up of an event and pissing off his press pool

doesn't seem like a smart move if he aspires to extend his constituency beyond white people

p.s. he's a racist liar

nyt has been a fucking shonda this election

Im impressed that after arguably trumps best week he wraps it up with this cock up of an event and pissing off his press pool

― carthago delenda est (mayor jingleberries), Friday, September 16, 2016 1:25 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's totally in character. He is perpetually his own worst enemy. 99% of everything that has hobbled his chances of winning this election is directly attributable to something he himself has said or done or not done. So, to that extent, god bless him.

I am curious about the wider effect on his polling this will have - can see it being interpreted as a "see, he's reasonable!" moment (a la McCain dressing down crank lady at that Q&A) by GOP fence-sitters. It does strike me as likely that the alt-right will just see this as sleight-of-hand/he's still one of US! So maybe good for him...? idk

i actually figured trump was going to do his birther reversal at the first debate for maximal presidentialness. the press would have wet itself

http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/57dbf7231800006c32bd1db6.gif

Trump is seriously that funny, the asshole.

smh what a simp

I had one more thing about Twitty City, the other thing besides the airbrushed jeans jacket was a HUGE book, like old school Indiana Jones dictionary sized, that purported to be a complete list of everyone in the world even distantly related to Conway Twitty (this being before the days of Ancestry.com etc)

are the roots no longer fallon's house band? what did they play when trump walked on?

Taibbi on the Clintonista media whining:

The giveaway in this latest "false balance" debate is the language. There are people wailing about a "weaponized" media that just this once needs to be leashed a bit, given the circumstances. This is classic "information is dangerous" rhetoric.
There are even people in our business using this high-pressure situation to argue for less access and transparency, in the name of keeping future generations of politicians safe from the prying eyes of the public! Most reporters view their jobs as being basically the opposite of that.

In truth, the media landscape is massive and there's room to cover everything. It's worth noting that the exploration of Trump's iniquities and unfitness for office in the last year has been truly awesome, both in terms of raw volume and vehemence of tone.
Anyone who tries to argue that there's insufficiently vast documentation of Trump's insanity is either being willfully obtuse or not paying real attention to the news. Just follow this latest birther faceplant. The outrage is all out there, in huge quantities. It's just not having the predicted effect.

So media consumers are reduced to blaming the closeness of the race on a species they've practically made extinct with their choices over the years: investigative reporters.

The irony is, the Clinton Foundation thing is a rare example of an important story that is getting anything like the requisite attention. The nexus of elite connections that sits behind tales like Bill Clinton taking $1.5 million in speaking fees from a Swiss bank (and foundation donor) while that same bank is seeking relief from Hillary Clinton's State Department is exactly the kind of thing that requires the scrutiny of reporters....

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/stop-whining-about-false-balance-w440228

found this:

So what did the Roots crew play for Trump? *Drum roll, please.*

Erykah Badu’s “20 Feet Tall.” The lyrics include the following:

Then you, you built a wall
A 20 foot wall
So I couldn’t see
If I get off my knees I might recall I’m 20 feet tall

fallon is such a little twerp

kimmel went one hundred times harder at leno for the conan o'brien shit.

Thank you for reminding me of that beautiful moment in broadcast history. And that was just directed at a dude who kinda stole a show from another dude.

Regardless of what you think of Mark Cuban I really wish someone would do this:

http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/296336-mark-cuban-offers-trump-10-million-for-interview

That is, force Trump to actually explain fucking anything in detail.

Trump currently calculating how many self-portraits he could buy with that $10 million

How many do you think he'd need to wallpaper the WALL?

We all know this is impossible

Mark Cuban ✔ @mcuban
2) @realDonaldTrump groundrules are that you cant mention the Clintons or discuss anything other than the details and facts of yr plans and

Paraphrasing a post from a friend covering the Trump campaign: "What it's like to cover the Trump campaign. Gave up on getting credentials for the Friday DC event. This morning finally get confirmed for credentials two minutes before the security sweep is done, then also confirmed for an Austin event I didn't request that is nowhere on his posted schedule."

"What did we expect Jimmy Fallon to do with Donald Trump, anyway?"

http://www.avclub.com/article/what-did-we-expect-jimmy-fallon-do-donald-trump-an-242733

Well, for starters, he could have punched him in the face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIkZK-Z21Pw

Nauseating listening to the Buffalo guy (who now, after excoriating him during the primaries, is in full swoon over Trump) go on about Trump putting one over on the media today (i.e., get everyone to cover the birther press conference, spend one minute on that in exchange for a free half-hour commercial). If Trump announces a half-hour press conference, it's going to be covered no matter what (by CNN, at least)--he doesn't need to put anything over on anyone.

If this does end up being close, I would love for some exit poll to suggest that all the birther nonsense cost Trump the election. (I don't know how that would work--just fantasizing.) Live by the sword, etc.

What do we want from Jimmy Fallon, anyway? This is a man who’s built his entire talk-show career on being blandly inoffensive. He’s precluded so much as the potential for coming off as challenging by all but replacing the act of asking questions, for God’s sake. Did we really expect Fallon to challenge Trump here to anything more than a lip-sync battle?

This is confusing things, imo. The first question is normative, the second one is predictive.

Question about Trump tax returns: obviously you file with the IRS, and the IRS is the government. So the government (as such) has his returns. To what legal extent, if any, is a presidential candidate, let alone a president, entitled to privacy? Could a President Trump still keep his finances totally private while explicitly enjoying the power to exploit his position for personal gain? That is, can a US president go full kleptocrat if he (or she!) wanted to? If congress demanded he reveal his taxes, would he have to, under threat of ... contempt? Something like that? Or would there first have to be indication of something illegal going on?

I don't believe the birther stuff will cost him. He's somewhat successfully bullshitted his way out of it so that the media is actually treating it as a debate over "who started it".

Rick Perlstein on how Trump is not Nixon, or Reagan, or Wallace, or whoever else.

https://www.makeminecount.org

this is a good if somewhat depressing glimpse from the past:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060212111358/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aaronson/nadertrader2.html

"Let's see what happens"--you'll hear this phrase for the next few days.

Just saw a BMW SUV with a Carson sticker peel out, race around traffic on the shoulder, cut off someone in the right lane and get back into traffic in the left lane as the right lane continued to pass him. I don't know what this means. Just reports from the field.

Sounds vaguely like everyone's entrance at that one Republican debate.

i wish we lived in the alternate dimension where carson was the republican nominee

Lads did we not get this sorted

not until nov sadly

Just saw a BMW SUV with a Carson sticker peel out, race around traffic on the shoulder, cut off someone in the right lane and get back into traffic in the left lane as the right lane continued to pass him. I don't know what this means. Just reports from the field.

― how's life, Friday, September 16, 2016 6:11 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sounds vaguely like everyone's entrance at that one Republican debate.

― clemenza, Friday, September 16, 2016 6:13 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This makes as much sense as anything that's happened this year.

America hasn't made sense for years, all those jobs got shipped overseas years ago.

eh alot of the older angry trump voters are 50+ year olds who got fucked over by the great recession. I feel like the titanic productivity gains from the 90s on made alot of these poor people's jobs obsolete and the recession gave their employers the cover to axe all of them.. at least thats what it seemed like at my old workplace - everyone who was canned was kinda shit at their job and 50+.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/if-you-want-donald-trumps-tax-returns-start-asking-now-1786671720

"There is supposedly a consensus across the entire mainstream press on what the terms here are. It is unacceptable for any candidate to conceal their financial situation. To be a candidate, a person must disclose their tax returns.

Yet reporters continue to ask Donald Trump questions about subjects other than his missing tax returns. When they do this, they are conceding that Trump can be a presidential candidate, after all, despite refusing to release his returns. It is a losing strategy.

Yes, there are dozens of other issues that Donald Trump ought to be asked about. Many of them are, in the abstract, more important than mere IRS paperwork—his ongoing appeals to white supremacists, his cavalier attitude about nuclear war, his ignorance or confusion about the basic mechanics of domestic or foreign policy.

But those are all complicated matters, and asking about any of them opens up a new sequence of claims and counterclaims and self-contradictions. Letting Trump jabber about serious policy is of minimal value, when he just makes up his plans on the spot and will say something else about them later. Catching Trump in those inconsistencies is so easy it’s essentially pointless. Even Trump doesn’t care.

What Trump does care about is hiding his tax returns. This is the one thing he is consistent about. Focus on it. It’s a very simple and binary issue: Releasing tax returns is a basic duty of being a candidate, and Trump has not done it."

eh