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

""Do I think at 70 years old he has a cocaine habit? Probably not," he said. "But it's something that I think would be interesting to ask him, to see if he ever had a problem with that."

hahaha

xps another tactical blunder - decades of polling show a reliable majority of americans are in favor of candy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y44QZNVXzhE&sns=em

not sure what that is.

But Gary Johnson (who for some reason is still getting airtime) wasn't able to name one world leader he looked up to tonight and said he was having an Aleppo moment. He should have just answered "Aleppo" to the question, at least it would have been funny

Aleppo Marx

http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-cuban-embargo-castro-violated-florida-504059

Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corporation. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after-the-fact to a charitable effort.

The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House, seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power.

Sounds really smart!

I love how the press is finally getting to work in these waning weeks, like the slackers they are. "Oh shit, the election is when!? Better start digging!"

"finally"

I wonder to what extent the media has been pulling the ol' rope-a-dope. The memory of the electorate is short, why not wait until the eleventh hour to release the deluge.

Yeah, good luck with that:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/saving-gop-for-capitalism?utm_term=.po56KPVzW#.fggyo3KD6

And to replace religious conservatives in the Republican coalition with low-wage workers, he warned, would require a new set of “tough, and perhaps even odious compromises.”

First, he said, the government would have to intervene in trade policy to force other countries to spend more of their savings on U.S. exports — a system he calls “balanced trade.” In his new book, he lays out a system of import licenses to enforce this — a system, he admitted when he came by BuzzFeed in New York last week, many of his friends on the right will hate.

The second plan is, by the open market standards of the Wall Street Journal and the American business class, even more radical.

“Unfortunately, I think we have to dial down low-skilled immigration,” he said. “No employer is going to go through the effort to employ hard-to-employ workers unless there’s a shortage of labor, and there’s not going to be a shortage of labor in a world where there is a near infinite supply of labor unless we create it. And, if we do create it, it’s going to put pressure on employers to hire those workers and find jobs for them because they’ll be the only workers left to hire.”

Conard offered one bright lining to compensate: a dramatic increase — in immigration at the very high end. Say, 5 million new engineers and scientists and other groups of workers who are hard to find and expensive to pay.

xpost I should specify that, when I say 'the media', I actually mean 'legitimate journalists'. I thoroughly expect the media on the whole to steadfastly maintain their status quo as a horde of worthless pigfuckers.

@dick_nixon
The fellow's whole damn reason for running is the legalization of marijuana yet you are shocked he can't think straight.

I thought it was the jews and psychiatrists who wanted it legal

mocking marijuana users as being dumb is definitely fresh + hot material for which we need a dick nixon twitter feed (and morbius aggregator/automatic posting device).

FWIW, I don't think fresh + hot material is what the Nixon twitter is meant to provide.

It's more: I wonder, what would Laugh In! have to say about this election?

you're a fuckshit dumbass, Mordy

you just can't learn that kind of timing

you can if yer baked

what's the opposite of a zing

a Morbs post

BOOM

here's a good endorsement of Clinton well-worth reading, if you have the time

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/

a good bit on why Trump winning would be a disaster for the GOP:

The interesting thing about this election is that college-educated whites are also moving into the Democratic column. If the latest polls are to be believed, the demographic – which favored Romney by 14 points last election – favors Clinton by 8 points now. The nightmare scenario is that Trump wins, his style of anti-intellectual populism is cemented as Official New Republican Ideology, and every educated person switches to the Democrats.

I’m not 100% this would be bad – maybe educated people who are temperamentally conservative would pull the Democratic Party a little to the right, turning them into a broad moderate coalition which has no problem winning elections and combines the smartest elements of liberal and conservative thought. But more likely, there’s a vicious cycle where the lack of intelligent conservatives guts the system of think tanks that produce the sort of studies and analyses which convince smart people to become conservative, which in turn makes there even fewer intelligent conservatives, and so on. In the end, intellectuals won’t just vote Democrat; they’ll shift their personal views further to the left to fit in. We already have a problem with a glut of leftist researchers and journalists producing evidence why leftists are right about everything, and a shortage of conservative researchers and journalists to fact-check them and present the opposite case. As intelligent people desert the Republican Party, this situation gets worse and we lose access to any knowledge that Vox doesn’t want to write an explainer on. In the worst case scenario, everybody develops a hard-coded association between “conservative” and “stupid people”, even more than they have already, the academies purge the hell out of everyone even slightly to the right of the loudest activist, and the only alternative is The Donald Trump Institute Of Research That Is Going To Be Absolutely Yuuuuuuge, which busies itself putting out white papers to a coalition of illiterates.

Nah, that's pretty dumb. Right wing intelligentsia is already mainly stupid thoughts bought by the Koch brothers from prestigious institutions, his complaint is mainly that Donald Trump wouldn't sell the lies as well.

Conservatism IS stupid :)

Rubio officially "deeply concerned" about Trump doing business in Cuba.

Actually, that was wrong of me. Conservatism is wrong, but that doesn't necessarily make it stupid.

you're a fuckshit dumbass, Mordy

lol that's rich coming from you

WRT to conservative journals, research, etc been wanting to read this guy's book

http://cehdvision2020.umn.edu/cehd-blog/conservative-think-tanks/

I think the rotten core at conservatism's intellectual roots is traceable to its disingenuousness from the late 19th and into the 20th century - you'd have these eloquent, well-educated guys putting forth relatively sophisticated and outwardly principled arguments about states' rights and the benefits of the free market, but they were being put forward in the service of more base, self-serving rationales (white supremacy, self-enrichment) that the proponents knew could not be expressed publicly. This thought is only half-formed tbf...

Haha, even the Detroit News has to endorse Johnson:

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/editorials/2016/09/28/endorse-johnson-president/91254412/

'
Today this newspaper does something it has never done in its 143-year history: endorse someone other than the Republican candidate in a presidential contest.

Since its founding in 1873, The Detroit News has backed a Republican every time it has made a presidential endorsement (three times we have sat on the sidelines — twice during the Franklin Roosevelt elections and in the 2004 Bush/Kerry contest).

We abandon that long and estimable tradition this year for one reason: Donald J. Trump.'

But this is an endorsement of conscience, reflecting our confidence that Johnson would be a competent and capable president and an honorable one.

am i thinking of a different gary johnson here cuz the libertarian gary johnson is a total fucking moron

I assumed they were talking about Lyndon Johnson

(xpost)

Yeah, "smart" conservatives are defined by bad faith argumentation.

Has any paper endorsed Trump besides the paper his son in law owns? And his buddies at the National Enquirer?

lyndon 'gary' johnson, 36th president of the waco magic: the gathering society

An Aleppo moment: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/aleppo-hospital-1.3781938

But more likely, there’s a vicious cycle where the lack of intelligent conservatives guts the system of think tanks that produce the sort of studies and analyses which convince smart people to become conservative, which in turn makes there even fewer intelligent conservatives, and so on. In the end, intellectuals won’t just vote Democrat; they’ll shift their personal views further to the left to fit in.

huh. what a bunch of weak-willed losers.

uh, kingfish - re: http://cehdvision2020.umn.edu/cehd-blog/conservative-think-tanks/

If you follow politics, whether on cable news, newspapers or online, you’ve seen experts from conservative organizations like the Brookings Institute, the Center for American Progress or the American Enterprise Institute commenting on matters of foreign relations, domestic policy and the economy.

So what's this guys definition of conservative, exactly?

voting in iowa started today

'So what's this guys definition of conservative, exactly?'

Beats me. He's gotta define his term somewhere, I'm guessing.

From the WSJ review of the book, it seems he's pretty clear which are conservative and which are not, with the AEI clearly falling into that latter camp.

I liked this David Roberts bit, analyzing Trumpspeech from a functional/linguistic approach:

What he’s doing is trying to establish dominance — to win, in his words. That’s what he uses words for. That’s how he sees every interaction in which he is involved. He is attuned only to what the words are doing, whether they are winning or losing, not to what they mean.

This point helps explain why Trump cannot ever admit a mistake or an error. He can only process accusations — of dishonesty, of cruelty — as social gambits, not as factual claims. To him, the demand that he apologize or admit error is nothing more than a dominance play. Apologizing is losing.

It helps explain why Trump has focused so much on trade, and why he sounds so much stronger and more confident talking about it than on almost any other subject. It’s not that he knows anything about it. He doesn’t. It’s just that he sees all international relations — trade deals, climate deals, NATO, whatever — as zero-sum contests, negotiations in which the only relevant question is who will dominate, who will win. And he gets that. It’s his whole life!

It helps explain why Trump has such a long and rich history of defrauding investors, refusing to pay contractors, using his charitable foundation as a piggybank, and declaring bankruptcy to escape debt. Contracts and promises are just plays in the game, not words that carry meanings or create obligations. You sign them or say them when you need to, to win whatever negotiation you are in, and then they are gone like smoke.

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/29/13086236/trump-beliefs-category-error

^ That seems like a fair assessment of Trump's ethos as revealed by his words and actions.

Scholars & Writers for America

Given our choices in the presidential election, we believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America, and we urge you to support him as we do.

http://amgreatness.com/2016/09/28/writes-scholars-for-trump/

wow, george gilder, callista AND newt gingrich, david horowitz, michael ledeen??? damn

Hey look a nicely put reddit comment. What we already know, but succinct and relevant to the debate because his confident tone is unlikely to waver and that's all much of the population will focus on when they assess how he performed.

[–]HBlight [score hidden] 5 hours ago
He is a salesman first and foremost, and he does not want you to care about the product, he just wants to sell it, he wants you to buy a feeling in order to make the sale. So if he wants you to buy the idea that something is good or bad, he is going to load his speech with everything he can to leave you with the impression that the thing feels good or bad. He speaks bluntly and with absolute confidence even when not making sense, because making sense is not the goal, you buying the feeling is the goal.

― Evan, Friday, September 23, 2016 12:35 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xp

Been waiting for Kaleb Horton's monster piece on the conventions and it's out:

http://www.mtv.com/news/2937584/how-i-spent-my-summer-vacation/

another neat bit on language, and the crowd for whom "truthiness" is an accurate descriptor, since what determines the truthfulness of a statement is its emotional aspect, that it is said with "passionate sincerity" and "sincere passion," rather than its accuracy in corresponding to external reality. Also gets into why fuckheads loudly chafe at "political correctness."