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

And Clinton ain't dropping out

are there identifiable masterminds? i want to read a like 8000 word NYRB piece about the consistent names behind the ginned up conspiracies, how the PACs connect, whodunit basically. it's too consistent to be random

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/the-dirty-trickster

lol at the dropping out talk - these conspiro agitators are pretty effective huh

xpost YES thank you

if anything, i'd rather see her chill out for a week and bounce back and say "yeah i get sick, i'm human."

guys, it was one sodding columnist i've never heard of

Several of Trump's advisers must be taking turns sitting on his head, keeping him from tweeting.

Sounds like something Ailes could have suggested.

hate this election so much tbh

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Monday, September 12, 2016 2:20 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea it is awful

the trump/pence campaign makes me long for the measured civility and intelligence of the mccain/palin campaign.

it does absolutely leave one afeared for 2020

The Washington Post has just discovered that the Trump Foundation hid the illegal contribution to Pam Bondi as a fake gift to a different charity. How the hell can news talk about anything but this?

i'm not looking forward to an HRC presidency and i hope to god she gets elected

xpost Because Shrillary is in the midst of setting up hundreds of illegal servers in Bingazoo while she's dying of advanced leprosy, is why.

It has been known for about two weeks iirc - the new news is that they have found four other donations to charities who say they never received the money.

@tinyrevolution
I assumed the GOP would impeach Clinton the second she took office, but National Review says that's waiting too long

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439715/impeach-hillary-clinton-congress-has-power-do-it

yeah it's amazing, if the Clinton Foundation had 5% of the shadiness going on that the Trump foundation does, that would be the end of her campaign. Trump is literally using his charity money to buy Tim Tebow footballs and giant portraits of himself and nobody seems to care.

Every Democrat who has run for President since Clinton has received this sort of conspiracy treatment.

Right, but Hillary Clinton has been Hillary Clinton all that time - she's been the target of a lot of attempts to damage Bill Clinton (who is probably not the default "Clinton running for president" at this stage?) and there's been a long campaign to paint her as someone the facts about whom are unreliable - she can make inconveniences disappear, either through poli-tical powersss, or just getting some guys to kill you and frame it as a suicide. So if the facts are unreliable you may as well dig in the dark places of your soul to determine what you believe about her, right?

There's also an aspect where she's been fairly clear from very early on that she had no fucking time at all for the wifey aspects of being the First Lady.

Again, news that Trump's "charitable foundation" is a corrupt sham is totally "dog bites man" territory. Jay Rosen's "cult of savviness" idea is useful to understanding why only one guy at the WaPo cares about the Trump Is A Corrupt Scuzbag storyline (and also understanding perhaps why the NYT's Public Editor thought it was even remotely appropriate to suggest that because WaPo is writing about Trump, that means if the NYT were to stop talking about Clinton's shadowy clouds, it would be "false balance" - lolwtfnyt)

Whereas I think that the real — and undeclared — ideology of American journalism is savviness, which is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in — their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including master operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness — that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political — is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it.

It Trump even savvy though? You can make the argument that a lot of sharp operators in the upper echelons of American capital are, but the interesting thing about Trump is how inept his cockamamie scams are and how often he's caught. He has hundreds of millions, if not billions, in the bank and still gets caught scamming charities for $20k portraits of himself.

when Hillary gave that long speech directly tying Trump and his associates to white supremacists and lunatic conspiracy theorists and Trump responded with "oh yeah? well I think she's a BIGOT" and the media reported on it as "BOTH CANDIDATES TRADING JABS TODAY!!", that's when I knew the media was actively trying to throw this to Trump

xp Though i guess there's less journalistic capital in pointing out the obvious.

btw now is a good time to point out that 41% of Trump supporters wanted to bomb the fictional country from Aladdin

Right, it's not about Trump's savviness or lack thereof. It's that by treating Trump's incompetent corruption as material worth writing about you are illustrating un-savviness, because come on who cares that's not news.

And of course for the NYT in particular the most savvy position possible in all political reporting is always that the rest of America hates us, we're wrong, and we deserve it. The NYT loves to be told how disconnected they are from real American life and how real Americans think. It's confirmation bias all the way.

NYT secretly wants nothing more than a good hard spanking from Joe the Plumber.

Can't say I empathize about media "unfairness" to Clinton, i.e. the same candidate that they catapulted into the democratic nomination while nearly ignoring her rival. The reality is that the Clinton Foundation deserves more scrutiny than "a charity" because it is not just "a charity," but a charity tied to an ex-President and, for several years, a sitting Secretary of State expected to run for president. So even if the "corruption" at play ultimately turns out to be minor at best, the reason for concern is much greater.

The "corruption" at play has been examined in exhausting detail by the AP and the NYT and it... doesn't exist

His willingness to blatantly and shamelessly lie about basically every single thing that's happened in his life has got to be a big part of it too, I've never seen anything like it. To me the most alarming part of that old John Oliver bit was the clips of Trump claiming that he'd been asked to appear on LWT even though nobody from the show ever contacted him and the show doesn't really feature guests - to me it's clear that Trump has never seen Last Week Tonight nor has any idea who John Oliver is but has no problem immediately pegging him as another sad person who just wants a piece of Trump. I talk to people about this and they usually say, "so what, all politicians lie" and it's like, no, this is like if one of 'em told you "the moon is made out of cheese, I know because I've been there". And of course the media is too afraid of getting blacklisted or being accused of bias that they just let it all pass. And we're 2 months away. Fuck this election forever.

The selling of access with the Clintons pretty much hides in plain sight. There is no clear "corruption" in the sense of quid pro quos, there's just a modus operandi.

yeah i can't believe the clintons helped poor people

yeah they sure helped a lot of poor people in Haiti

Can't say I empathize about media "unfairness" to Clinton, i.e. the same candidate that they catapulted into the democratic nomination while nearly ignoring her rival.

Hillary's been in the public sphere for three decades while Bernie was basically an unknown who wasn't even a Democrat until very recently, so I don't know what you expected. Besides they spent half their time talking about her email server and Benghazi so it's not like it was very favorable coverage. The problem here is that Trump is routinely getting away with things that Hillary would be raked over the coals for - this email thing is being treated like an unforgivable sin by a large part of the electorate because the media treats it as such, while repeated corruption and scams by Trump are given barely any coverage at all. It's infuriating.

yeah they sure helped a lot of poor people in Haiti

The U.S. Agency for International Development supported the commission’s efforts, and Hillary Clinton led the U.S. response in Haiti as secretary of state. The Clinton Foundation raised more than $30 million for Haiti relief projects.

But there is no evidence that Hillary Clinton, through the Clinton Foundation, raised “hundreds of millions of dollars” for a hospital that was never built. We consulted groups that have been critical of recovery delays in Haiti, but they could not point to a specific Clinton Foundation-funded hospital project, either.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/06/13/did-the-clinton-foundation-raise-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-for-a-hospital-in-haiti-that-was-never-built/

yeah i can't believe the clintons helped poor people

lol v clearly their priority in abolishing AFDC

versus Trump, who uses charitable donations to buy portraits of himself

And the big scandal in the AP story was Clinton meeting with the guy who got a Nobel prize for doing micro loans to poor people.

thread restart was an attempt to stop it and kudos for the intention but we are slowly becoming the election

and the election is contentious

The real election would have 40% of thread participants huffing paint thinner

I'm doing my part, but few have the courage to join me

@joanwalsh
Why doesn't media dog Trump Foundation like they dog Clinton Foundation?

@DougHenwood
Does the Trump foundation raise hundreds of millions from Boeing and Saudi Arabia?

https://imgflip.com/s/meme/Creepy-Condescending-Wonka.jpg

thread restart was an attempt to stop it and kudos for the intention but we are slowly becoming the election

― thrusted pelvis-first back (ulysses), Monday, September 12, 2016 10:06 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Slowly" lol. The US politics threads have reflected the election and the dire state of America for over a year now. A heartfelt "Good look USA" doesn't even cut it any more.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Too soon!

xp

fine, spit on Wonka's grave with yr non sequitur, nomar

‏@tinyrevolution
The funniest thing about Trump's endless grifts is that they're so consistently smarmy and smalltime

In a few cases, Trump seemed to solicit donations only to immediately give them away. But his foundation has also received a handful of bigger donations — including $5 million from professional-wrestling executives Vince and Linda McMahon — that Trump handed out a little at a time.....

But in many other cases, his biggest donors have not wanted to say why they gave their own money, when Trump was giving none of his.

“I don’t have time for this. Thank you,” said Richard Ebers, a ticket broker in New York City who has given the Trump Foundation $1.9 million since 2011.

“No. No. No. I’m not going to comment on anything. I’m not answering any of your questions,” said John Stark, the chief executive of a carpet company that has donated $64,000 over the years.

Vince and Linda McMahon declined to comment.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html?

Yeah, because clearly Trump has never raised money from suspicious people. I bet Doug Henwood is all up in arms about the ties to Russian investments, right?

Is it too soon to point out that two separate ILXors are both running around with "cumstaun" as their display name

There's literally no area where Trump isn't massively worse than Clinton. None. You think she's too secretive? He won't even release tax records. You think she endangered national security? He called on Russia to hack her email. And so on and so on and so on. Not that Clinton is any good. But come on!

The inside story of Clinton's sick day

headline at politico right now

did she go to Wrigly Field and jump on a float during the Von Steuben Day parade?

Yeah, because clearly Trump has never raised money from suspicious people. I bet Doug Henwood is all up in arms about the ties to Russian investments, right?

― Frederik B, Monday, September 12, 2016 3:20 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do liberals like you every jack off to anything besides "hypocrisy"? There's better porn out there.

Quick:

https://mobile.twitter.com/jackallisonLOL/status/784515366995099648