Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? – William O. Douglas
Trump’s obsession with painting Clinton as corrupt is looking more and more like a simple case of projection, however. There’s no real evidence that all these Clinton “scandals” are anything but a bunch of desperate right wing conspiracy theories. There is, however, a growing pile of irrefutable evidence that Trump is a straight-up grifter, a man so incapable of nourishing healthy businesses that he turned towards the shadier world of running real estate and “seminar” cons.
The Post has delivered other revelations. At the end of August, Fahrenthold reported that the Trump Foundation had violated tax laws in 2013 by making a $25,000 political donation to Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida. At the time the donation was made, Bondi had been considering whether to launch an investigation of the scandal-plagued Trump University. Democrats accused Trump of having tried to buy off Bondi, but Bondi denied that there was any connection between the campaign donation and her decision not to pursue an investigation. Regardless, charities aren’t allowed to make political donations. Trump’s aides said the payment from the foundation was the result of an administrative error, and that the money was supposed to have come from Trump’s personal account. Earlier this year, the foundation paid a $2,500 penalty to the I.R.S.
The list goes on.
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump said at a campaign rally here. That is probably true in regards Trumps growing pile of malevolent scandals. His supporters are mostly ‘deportables’ as perncious as Trump. In their weird upside down morality Trump can do no wrong, and Clinton taking a breath, wearing sunglasses, shaking someone’s hand is somehow connected to a vast conspiracy. Someone said once that Conservatism is a mental illness, they might well be on to something.
Republicans are hypocrites and liars switch into hypocritical liar mode when discussing Hillary emails.
The non-scandal of Hillary Clinton’s email has been placed in a prominent place in the radical Right’s outrage machine, and yes it is an actual organized smear campaign. Hillary may have made an error in judgement, but that is a matter of pure opinion, not fact. There a very simple test to determine if the radical Right is truly concerned about an individual’s actions or if they are just engaged in their never ending witch hunts. How many people on the list above have Conservatives millions of tax dollars investigating and then created an echo chamber of smears? Did anyone guess one? Four? How about zero. Because as always Republican bull can be a mile high and wide, and stink like raw sewerage, and to Conservatives it smells like roses. On the other hand, a small error in judgment, a small mistake by a Democrat and the anger and outrage is the grand comic opera of politics, the never ending melodrama they have the gull to wrap in patriotism and platitudes.Propagandist attack poodle Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) Says FBI Gave Top Clinton Aide Immunity in Email Investigation. The headline was taken and blown up like the Goodyear blimp by every radical right sycophant and of course leaving out the last bit,
Clinton aide Heather Samuelson, who worked with Mills to sort Clinton’s emails, also received a similar immunity deal.
Beth Wilkinson, the attorney for Mills and Samuelson, said in a statement to ABC News: “As the government indicated in these letters, the DOJ and FBI considered my clients to be witnesses and nothing more. Indeed, the Justice Department assured us that they believed my clients did nothing wrong. At all points my clients cooperated with the government’s investigation, including voluntarily participating in interviews with the FBI and DOJ.”
According to The New York Times, two additional staffers were granted immunity for cooperating with authorities.
The Associated Press first reported the new details of the immunity agreements.
The Clinton campaign criticized Chaffetz’s comments about the immunity deal and investigation, which the FBI closed without recommending charges against Clinton for using a private email server as the nation’s top diplomat.
If you have the money for a good lawyer, anytime the FBI wants an official on the record interview, your lawyer will get you immunity in case you inadvertently say something stupid – which we all know is what people tend to do under stress. After the FBI cleared Hillary of any illegal activity – literally millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of investigation, the State Department also closed its investigation, CNN Reporter Admits Email Hearings Led By Trump Allies In Congress.
A lot of Donald Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are trying to paint her as the one who is reckless by the way she handled her emails. And that’s going to be a big focus on Capitol Hill going forward.
Media are exploiting news that two emails Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department from her time as secretary of state may be retroactively classified as “top secret” to push myths about Clinton’s handling of government information and scandalize her email use. Here are the facts. FACT: None Of The Emails Sent To Clinton Were Labeled As “Classified” Or “Top Secret”
FACT: Emails Originated In State Dept. System, And Questions About Retroactive Classification Would Have Occurred Regardless Of Clinton’s Server Use
FACT: Experts Have Debunked Any Comparison Between Clinton’s Email Use And David Petraeus’ Crimes
FACT: IG Referral To Justice Department Was Not Criminal, And FBI Isn’t Targeting Clinton Herself
Not much has really changed about the Conservative movement and the lies they told about Iraq. Republicans are the radical party of the Big Lie. They repeat Big Lies until they have saturated every part of the delusional echo chamber. Throughout history those political movements that have depended on a foundation of lies – not the white lies and exaggerations all politicians make, have caused incredible to their countries and the world. Worth a read, Clinton’s Fibs vs. Trump’s Huge Lies. The media has been attacking the Clintons since the 90s and Whitewater. Together they might be the most investigated couple in history, yet Hillary has committed not one criminal and the Big Dog made his famous sex lie before a grand jury – which he was impeached. Bush and Cheney with millions of enablers got 4000 American killed in Iraq for multiple lies, yet no criminal charges. Talk about some incredibly lopsided double standards. When it comes down to issues of integrity and leadership, there really is no contest, Trump is utterly without integrity, No Honor Donald: 101 Of Trump’s Greatest Lies
-He is being charged with fraud in connection with Trump University. Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York, who is prosecuting Trump, told CNN, “If you look at the facts of this case, this shows someone who was absolutely shameless in his willingness to lie to people, to say whatever it took to induce them into his phony seminars. Telling people who are in hard economic times — we’re talking about 2008, 2009 — people desperate to hold onto their homes, to make some money, convincing them that he will teach them his entrepreneurial secrets.”
– Trump Tower was built using undocumented Polish laborers to demolish the building that previously stood on the site. At trial, the workers testified they worked without basic safety equipment like hardhats and gloves and they were supposed to earn $5 an hour from Trump’s low-bid contractor.
Trump came into the world of business with the measly sum of $200 million to get started in business. The poor guy then proceeded to screw up dozens of times and have the banks rescue him. The Donald has the kind of safety the vast majority of Americans can only dream of and it’s not because he’s smart, its because he’s a conman and addict of corporate welfare. Today he could be very wealthy and not have such a sleazy corrupt history, one guesses he wouldn’t had as much fun be a decent moral human being.
But even more telling when it comes to Donald Trump’s disinterest in actual policy is what the 2016 Republican Party platform declared about health care and retirement income for future seniors. After a year of promising Americans he would “save Social Security and Medicare without cuts,” nominee Trump looked the other way as his party’s platform endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plans to gut both.
Next week in Philadelphia, Democrat Hillary Clinton will tout her proposal to expand Social Security financing and benefits, a position enjoying growing support in Washington.
That Trump rode the populist wave and promised not to erode two essential programs, and then blew off those promises is historically the kind of thing radical populists do. Bush 43, Mitt Romney and John McCain were all prolific liars, thus the competitive Donald has seen it as a contest to see if he can out do them,
“For our economy, I think the uncertainty of this political leader who clearly has no deep understanding of economics other than knowing how to go bankrupt [is a major problem]. And we can only hope that he won’t bankrupt the country, but he has said things like ‘let’s renegotiate the national debt’ … that’s something that’s almost unimaginable that any leader would say,” he said.
Stiglitz theorized on how Trump would do business in the White House based on the GOP nominee’s statements: “You know you’ve lent us money that was just the initiation of a negotiation, we’ll negotiate whether we’ll pay you back.”
“That’s not the way capital markets work,” he said, “So I guess I say it’s a nightmare. Fortunately, the probability that nightmare coming true is small and hope it’s getting smaller by the day.”
Stiglitz empathized with the middle class and poor people in America, who feel squeezed in the current economy; particularly voters willing to take a chance on some of Trump’s far-fetched ideas just because they want change.
“What we have to do is rewrite the rules of the market economy,” Stiglitz insisted. “We have to, for instance, try to encourage firms to be more long-term, less excessive CEO pay, pay more attention to strengthening workers’ bargaining rights … I don’t think it’s rocket science, but we haven’t paid any attention because we were blinded by the ideology of trickledown economics—that if the top did well everybody would do well, and that has been proven wrong.”
Trump makes new promises every day and changes the details to suit the audience – we used to call people like that ass kissers. But one thing he has pretty much stuck with is trickle down supply side economics with even more tax cuts for millionaires. A large percentage of the blame for the Great Recession of 2007-2008 goes to trickle down Republican policy. Working class and middle class Americans would not have suffered as much if more of the capital they created went into their pockets and savings accounts instead of tax breaks for the Donald Trumps. Speaking of which; it doesn’t matter if you live in Colorado, Ohio, Florida or somewhere in between, you helped pay for Trump’s financial shenanigans, Ask Trump for a Refund, He Received $885 Million in Tax Breaks for His New York Empire
The president is a superior terrorist hunter. He has also neutralized a profound existential threat to U.S. allies in the Middle East, and denied ISIS access to vast storehouses of deadly chemical weapons. So why does he get no credit?
While the GOP convention news focused on Melania Trump’s plagiarism and Steve King’s claim about white civilization being superior, another thing that set it apart was that there was very little traditional GOP red meat. Rather than focus on jobs and economic growth, the convention centered around crime and undocumented immigration, both of which have decreased dramatically in the last several years. Indeed, recent Pew data suggest that the economy and jobs are far bigger concerns for the public than immigration and crime (though terrorism ranks high).That is true for Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Gallup data show that while the economy has declined in importance, is it still ranked far higher than immigration and crime.
Further, numerous studies, using numerous different methods, suggest that Democrats are better for economic growth and jobs than Republicans. In addition, under Democrats, the growth is distributed more equally across income groups.
Mr. Trump, with all due respect to you as the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, you cannot credibly serve as commander in chief if you embrace Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader has repeatedly shown himself to be an adversary of the United States. Putin, during his long tenure, has repeatedly pursued policies that undermine U.S. interests and those of our allies and partners. He has steadily but systematically moved Russia from a fledgling democratic state to an authoritarian one. He is the last foreign leader you should be praising.
In the end, nothing at all was built at Trump Ocean Resort, and Simms lost her money. As did about 250 other buyers, most of them from Southern California.
All told, two years of aggressive marketing yielded $32.5 million in buyer deposits, every bit of it spent by the time Trump and his partners abandoned the project in early 2009 as the global economy was reeling. Most of the buyers sued them for fraud.
To understand how truly bizarre this method of opining is, consider the following: Had polling showed that relatively few Trump supporters believe black people are lazy and criminally-inclined, if only a tiny minority of Trump supporters believed that Muslims should be banned from the country, if birtherism carried no real weight among them, would journalists decline to point this out as they excoriated her? Of course not. But the case against Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” is a triumph of style over substance, of clamorous white grievance over knowable facts.
This is what Andrew Breitbart, and his progeny, ultimately understood. What Shirley Sherrod did or did not do really didn’t matter. White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility
Michael Mukasey, who is advising the Romney campaign although the Journal does not disclose that, claims Obama might release Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Mukasey readily admits to having no real evidence for such a preposterous scenario. So where do these lies get invented? Often they come from the conservative underground echo chamber.
If a genuine truth serum were ever invented and conservative “news” sites and politicians took it, they would literally have almost nothing to say. The Radical Right has been built on a platform of lies and conspiracy theories since the Holocaust deniers of the 1950s.
In addition, The Post’s story found that the Trump Foundation appeared to have defied tax laws. In one case, it made an improper political donation to a group supporting Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi (R), which arrived around the time that Bondi’s office was considering fraud allegations against Trump University
…In fact, Ms. Clinton’s emails have endured much more scrutiny than an ordinary person’s would have, and the criminal case against her was so thin that charging her would have been to treat her very differently. Ironically, even as the email issue consumed so much precious airtime, several pieces of news reported Wednesday should have taken some steam out of the story. First is a memo FBI Director James B. Comey sent to his staff explaining that the decision not to recommend charging Ms. Clinton was “not a cliff-hanger” and that people “chest-beating” and second-guessing the FBI do not know what they are talking about. Anyone who claims that Ms. Clinton should be in prison accuses, without evidence, the FBI of corruption or flagrant incompetence.
Some of Trump supporters claim to ordinary working class Americans who believe he will look out for them. That would mean that Trump would have to stop being Trump. He has been giving working class Americans the shaft for years, What Atlantic City Workers Know About Trump
The second problem for Trump’s Frankenstein economics is that his seemingly contradictory proposals would be a disaster if they were enacted. Moody’s economic forecasting conducted a nonpartisan analysis of Trump’s proposals and concluded that they would lead to a loss of 3.5 million jobs. And they would cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars of lost growth.
Page 11: On January 23, 2009, Clinton contacted former Secretary of State Colin Powell via e-mail to inquire about his use of a BlackBerry while he was Secretary of State (January 2001 to January 2005). In his e-mail reply, Powell warned Clinton that if it became “public” that Clinton had a BlackBerry, and she used it to “do business,” her e-mails could become “official record[s] and subject to the law.” Powell further advised Clinton, “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”
This is important. First, it makes clear that Hillary conversed with Colin Powell two days after becoming Secretary of State, not “a year later,” as Powell has claimed. Second, Powell essentially told her that he had just gone ahead and broken the law by “not using systems that captured the data.” Hillary, by contrast, chose instead to retain everything as the law required.