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

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

the risk there is that if he does release them -- and they are not as crazy as people predict (cf romney turned out to have paid taxes actually) -- then the press looks stupid and like they were "reaching"

meanwhile

https://twitter.com/CNNSitRoom/status/776917646939787264

unchillest bro of all time. i like to think that fallon saw trump as like the white whale of tonight show guests. like, if he could make this guy seem normal and likable, he truly is the rightful heir to carson

Treeship, I disagree. I think the returns would/will inevitably cause problems for his business (the only reason I buy him not releasing them - I don't believe in the theory that he won't release because he's not as rich as he claims to be) and that will prove worthwhile enough to justify making them a big deal.

I just think the press is exhausted by him and his campaign. They have to hold special emergency conference calls about his bullshit, like the hotel tour today. He's worn them down.

xp I see Fallon as more of a "just following orders" kind-of guy. He'd probably be shocked to find out he's alive.

IPSOs/Reuters has Hil back up 4

I think Fallon is a kids' birthday party clown who accidentally made a couple of great choices during his career. Stopped clock.

he's a total airhead

but he is likable enough and he likes to make other people seem likable and that is his job. i am not outraged at how he seemed to have real affection for trump -- he does the same thing for everyone -- but it was weird to watch. fallon is a master at his milquetoast art but i don't respect this art.

uh here it's easy: https://storify.com/hriefs/tannenbaumr-explores-the-donald-trump-foundation

People are getting the shit beaten out of them because Trump, and Fallon's tussling his hair. C'mon. I'm boycotting CBS and NBC for their Trump support, as if I watched that garbage in the first place.

Next in the crosshairs are those Twitter alt left bros who are flabbergasted that people find Trump so appalling. Fuck 'em, too.

ah so a couple polls taken right after the convention showed him barely ahead, I concede this insignificant point

538 and RCP don't poll--they track the average of hundreds of other polls. The poll you posted, NBC/Survey Monkey, that was a single poll. I'm guessing you know this.

Sorry, Οὖτις, but you kind of remind me of Trump when you post something like that. You said something that is factually wrong, I (politely) said so, and then you just dig in your heels.

you kind of remind me of Trump

regardless of the justice of this observation, now that you've made it publically you should be prepared to fight a duel at sunrise with pistols at ten paces

you think people getting the shit beat out of them is bad, just imagine what happened bc of the patriot act

God yr obtuse clemenza. I know rcp and 538 dont poll - and their averages only briefly showed trump ahead because of a couple polls taken over a 3-day period. The significance of which you yourself said was minimal. So i'm glad you pride yourself on being technically correct on this semantic point but wtf.

He joked about her getting assassinated again.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/17/donald-trump-says-hillary-clintons-bodyguards-should-disarm-and/

xp If you don't like people being right, maybe don't specifically contradict them in the first place?

Treeship, I disagree. I think the returns would/will inevitably cause problems for his business (the only reason I buy him not releasing them - I don't believe in the theory that he won't release because he's not as rich as he claims to be) and that will prove worthwhile enough to justify making them a big deal.

Those are the same thing though - his brand (both in business and politics) is about how rich he is, how successful a businessman he is - part of his claimed wealth is the value that his name brings to things.

Mitt Romney had the same expectation of privacy as the rest of is, us what stopped him releasing his mostly-unremarkable tax returns. Trump doesn't have that - when the co-writer of the Art of the Game wanted more access, Trump just hooked him up with a second phone on Trump's phone line:

There was not a single call that Trump deemed too private for Schwartz to hear. “He loved the attention,” Schwartz recalls. “If he could have had three hundred thousand people listening in, he would have been even happier.”

unrelated but well this is happening in my county

http://www.wftv.com/news/local/orange-county-school-district-says-student-must-have-permission-to-kneel-during-national-anthem/446448711

this might finally be the thing that gets the creepy state statute about the pledge in schools repealed, esp given SCOTUS case law (Tinker v Des Moines) on public school speech.

schools can police children p much however they want though