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

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."

The David Roberts piece linked by kingfish is echoed by what Blow said in the Times and what this piece in the Week says:

http://theweek.com/articles/651768/why-donald-trump-even-worse-second-debate

on a more fundamental level, Trump will have to keep himself from acting on what we now understand are very powerful impulses. It isn't just about practicing more or having a few zingers ready. It's about who he is at his very core. Clinton obviously understood that. She knew that just by attacking Trump, she could guide the discussion where she wanted it to go, since he is constitutionally incapable of letting any criticism pass without a counterattack. She also seemed to grasp that with the right kind of bait, she could get him to undermine himself. So she accused him of not paying taxes and he actually admitted it, saying, "That makes me smart." She said he stiffs his contractors, and he insisted that they must not have deserved to be paid. In other words, she knew that Trump absolutely must be seen by others as a shrewd businessman who gets the better of the people he deals with. What are the chances that wouldn't work if Clinton did it again, no matter how many times Trump's aides begged him not to take the bait? And you can bet she has some other stinging attacks all lined up.

So maybe my longed-for "If you're so interested in bringing American manufacturing back, why do you make your ties in China?" thing is coming next time. Maybe even "if you're so gung-ho about American workers, why do your hotels employ so many foreign guest workers?" He'll splutter again about devalued currency, wasting time that he could have been spending on Benghazi or whatever.

keep it up Donald

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/262583859709882369

That's from 2012, idgi

unless he means that Trump's got a truckoad of rancid tweets that even his minions working 24 hour a day can't erase

yes

I hope Trump does try to take on this "I'm a defender of women!" schtick it will backfire so beautifully

Tecate ran a beer advert on Monday featuring a "Tecate Beer Wall" cutting thru the desert, where American dudes and Mexican dudes meet to chug brews from a shared ice cooler.

The narrator intones that “The time has come for a wall, a tremendous wall. The best wall.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bev4NZEFsCQ

https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/how-a-mexican-beer-ad-trolled-trump-and-fox-news-during-the-presidential-debates

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/debate-ad-tecate-turns-trump-s-wall-a-beer-prop/305999/

Hard to imagine their VP not sniggering when he said this:

Asked if the brew was taking a side, Tecate VP Felix Palau said the brand is not trying to get political. Rather, the debate -- and the border issue -- presents a marketing opportunity for the Mexican brand to inject itself in the conversation, he said. "We are totally neutral," he said. "We don't have any political point-of-view or affiliation. We just want to tell a story where people from two bordering countries are united by beer."

They naturally ran it on Telemundo, Univision, and Fox News.

I want to call Trump a half-deflated football filled with dogshit who's going to lose this election like an incontinent septuagenarian loses control over his bladder, but I won't.

lol
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtiVt8tW8AE7FPy.jpg

OMG he's going plotz so hard.

Thoroughly expect him to take some time during the next debate to be all, "The awful, failing New Yorker wants you to believe I'm a fat, ugly beauty queen who cries and wears a dress. Wrong. Wrong."

Pepe The Frog’s creator is voting Hillary, isn’t sure what the hell happened either

As our children will one day read in their history books (in the chapter titled “We’re Sorry”)

chapter?

Yeah, most of history has been pretty chill, iirc.

You're Welcome (We're Sorry): A History of Human Civilization

I'm thinking high school textbook. Sorry Not Sorry: The American Story

If We Did It

lol

The American Sorry

If We Did It

srsly dying

lmao that's gold

unless he means that Trump's got a truckoad of rancid tweets that even his minions working 24 hour a day can't erase

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, September 29, 2016 3:04 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have to believe that the clinton oppo research team has already archived every single trump tweet in a searchable database

on a private server

Breaking: POKER PRO AGREES – Hillary Was Sending Hand Signals to Debate Moderator Holt

lol it's fucking Mike Matusow