Trump's Big CON: He Stops Nothing

"President-elect Donald Trump claimed credit on Thursday for keeping a Ford plant in Kentucky from moving to Mexico. But the company never planned to move the entire plant, only one of its production lines.

Ford has never announced plans to move to Mexico either its Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, which produces the Lincoln Navigator, or the Louisville Assembly Plant, which produces the Lincoln MKC and the Ford Escape."

Read the Washington Post, Trump just took credit for stopping Ford from moving a plant to Mexico. But it wasn’t planning to.

Trump's next feat of narcissistic vainglory: sunrise!

Trump's Big CON: He Will Continue Obama's Immigration Plan

Trump plans regarding undocumented immigrants is not all that different from Obama's.

Read the Washington Post, This is pretty awkward for people who criticize Donald Trump’s immigration plans. 

A 2009 Told Ya So: Remortgage America

Remember in 2009 I promoted an economic stimulus program like Remortgage America.

Read the Washington Post, How President Obama might have stopped Donald Trump.

UNBELIEVABLE!!! (Was It a 'Yuge' CON Job By The Donald?)

UPDATE VIII:  "An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. . .

The answer is, anyone who was paying attention. Look at the people Trump is considering for his Cabinet, and you won’t find any outside-the-box thinkers burning to work for the little guy. It’s a collection of Republican politicians and corporate plutocrats — not much different from who you’d find in any Republican administration.

And it isn’t just personnel. What are the priorities Trump and the Republican Congress will be pursuing right out of the gate?

[Trump will cut taxes for the wealthy, gut regulations, and destroy programs for poor and middle class Americans, and in doing so] Trump is going to be little different from any other Republican president . . .

But one thing it will not be is a threat to the establishment, or the system, or whatever you want to call it. The wealthy and powerful will have more wealth and power when he’s done, not less. There’s a lot that Trump will upend, but if you’re a little guy who thinks Trump was going to upend things on your behalf or in order to serve your interests, guess what: you got suckered."

Read the Washington Post, If you voted for Trump because he’s ‘anti-establishment,’ guess what: You got conned.

UPDATE VII:  First it was the promise to balance the budget, then the ban on Muslims, now Trump is reneging on trade.

Read the Washington Post, A Trump policy adviser is already walking back tough talk on trade.

Trump's election may be the world's biggest CON.

UPDATE VI:  Read the Washington Post, Why Donald Trump can’t govern like a traditional Republican.

Read also, the Washington Post, Is there a parallel between Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger?

UPDATE V:  "I retain faith in another powerful tool: democracy. By which I mean democracy as defined by H.L. Mencken: 'the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.'" (Emphasis added.)

Read the Washington Post, Americans have voted for Trumpism. Let them have it.

UPDATE IV:  That didn't take long, the election results are not even official and the Republi-CON are already changing their 8-year old tune on the evil of federal budget deficits and government debt, as well as banning Muslims.

"Over the last eight years, the Republican establishment has repeatedly excoriated President Obama for plans that don't immediately balance the budget.

Yet Trump's proposals -- which include an unprecedented $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan over 10 years and trillions more in tax cuts -- would grow the debt far more than under current law."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans look like they could change their tune on debt under a President Trump.

Read also Daily Mail, Has Trump dropped the Muslim ban already? Statement on controversial policy disappears from website shortly after election.

The Republi-CON party is a CON job!

UPDATE III:  As I said earlier, when I initially supported The Donald, I'm still open to the possibility that The Donald is Trump-Brilliant (© NoBullU.com)!!!!

The Donald didn't get & remain rich believing the $@#% he says.

It is possible that his campaign was all a CON job to get elected, that The Donald brilliantly used  Republicans' fears, anger & hatred to win their votes. 

Remember, he is no social conservative, and many of his economic ideas are  heresy to traditional Republi-CON orthodoxy.

("In a brief victory speech early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump devoted only a few words to his specific priorities for policymaking in the next administration. At the top of the agenda was a new investment in infrastructure.

'We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,' the president-elect said after making a few introductory remarks. 'We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.'

Infrastructure is a major Democratic priority," something Obama has wanted for 8 years."

Read the Washington Post, Paul Ryan might not be happy about the first item on the agenda in Trump’s victory speech.)

Trump hates failure, and doing the things he promised in the campaign would make him a big FAILURE.

And if he goes along with the Republi-CON party orthodoxy, his supporters will realize they have been conned and will turn on him, making him a big FAILURE.

So did The Donald know that it was impossible to talk reason to Republi-CONs, so he used their fantasies and delusions to control them and win their votes?

And now that he has been elected, will he return to being the brilliant negotiating pragmatic moderate he has always been, in it for nothing more than the challenge of succeeding? "Trump has no clear ideology – only a belief in his own ability to solve problems. He could surprise a lot of people by being a pragmatist who cuts deals with fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer, to the great chagrin of his base."

The Donald's fear of failure will limit his stupidity, his success will be the country's success.

The Donald may be Trump-Brilliant (© NoBullU.com)!!!!

So it is ironic isn't it, "Trump's candidacy was premised on the idea that everyone — politicians, reporters, corporations — is lying to you, and lying to you to to feather their own nests."

Yet The Donald's only way to avoid failure is to be a liar also.

UPDATE II:  Ok, climb off the ledge.  It will get better.

President Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com) & his delusional supporters can't avoid reality forever. (BTW, not all Trump voters are delusional, some just wanted to shakeup DC, and Clinton wasn't the candidate to do that.)

As I have said many time before, call the Republi-CON bluff.

First, balance the budget, NOW!

This has been a Republi-CON fantasy for years. But Obama knew better, he would have taken the blame for the ensuing economic collapse. It can't be done without doing substantial harm to the economy. The people who will be hurt the worst live in red states. (FYI, 44% of Louisiana's state budget is funded by various federal government programs.)

Next, in the bill to repeal Obamacare (which was originally a Republi-CON idea), include a provision that ends all federal government funding of health care.

Currently, about half of all health care spending is paid for by the federal government, probably more in red state. Individual health care is not a federal government responsibility, but federal law requires treatment. Let the states take care of people who are not responsible enough to get health care insurance. Soon people will be dying in the streets, many in red states. (Read my many posts that try to explain Obamacare.)

These are just two ideas that might wake up the American people. Don't let Trump abandon his impossible and unwise campaign statements and lies.  There can be no excuses, Republi-CONs own government — both houses and the presidency.

Triple dog-dare Trump and his Republi-CON supporters to fulfill his many wild promises NOW: build the wall and make Mexico pay for it, abandon NATO, deport foreigners, put Muslims in internment camps, cancel trade agreements and engage in trade wars with China and others, start jailing his political rivals and cracking down on the free press, abandon our allies and encourage them to get nuclear weapons of their own, and more.

If done right, crushing Republi-CON delusions these next four years could be fun!

Remember: "the voters will have the opportunity for more 'change' elections in 2018 and 2020."

UPDATE:  Remember, Trump is a fraud.

"Donald Trump ran against himself and won. The Manhattan billionaire who for decades boasted of his playboy lifestyle, stiffed contractors and vendors, hired illegal immigrants, eschewed churchgoing, embraced liberal causes, and counted Hillary and Bill Clinton as friends and allies pulled off one of the most brazen pivots in American history, selling himself to American voters as a populist hero who understood their frustrations and guaranteed a blizzard of wins. . .

Trump called himself a 'blue-collar billionaire,' and although he had lived a fairly isolated life, working and sleeping in Trump Tower, with no close friends and few trusted advisers, he believed that he had so completely won the hearts of many Americans that, as he put it, 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.' . .

Trump believed that through creative use of media, he could build an image that would inspire ordinary people to want to be like him. He believed that if he crafted that image well enough, he could become rich and powerful and ultimately rise to the highest office in the land. On Tuesday, he reached that final step in his half-century-long ascent.

What he will do with it, even he does not know. Asked earlier this year if he has spent much time preparing to actually be president, Trump admitted that his focus had been solely on the campaign. “I’m all about the hunt and the chase,” he said. 'When I get something I really wanted, I sometimes lose interest in it.'"

Read the Washington Post, How Donald Trump broke the old rules of politics — and won the White House.

So play the CON man's game against him, force people to remember who they elected.

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series & Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com) was elected president.

Soon We Shall Know Ourselves

UPDATE: "I’m going to attempt to demonstrate this with a chart — it is below — that, I believe, objectively captures the sum total of Trump’s arguments, and why those arguments, taken on their own terms, compellingly demand a vote against him.

At the heart of Trump’s case for the presidency lies two components. The first is a hyper-exaggerated narrative of national decay and decline — skyrocketing crime, rotting inner cities, decaying factories, a festering terror threat from within, a border that is being breached by dark hordes of invaders. The second is the notion that our elites are both fecklessly responsible for that perilous state of national decline and too corrupted to fix it — they’ve rigged the system against you, undermining American sovereignty to enrich themselves, while allowing American identity to be degraded by immigrants who are at best parasitic and at worst a lethal threat.

But Trump’s diagnosis runs deeper than that. His argument is not simply that elites are ripping you off from above while enabling those subgroups to rip you off and threaten you from below. Rather, the truly pernicious component of Trump’s argument is that our institutions and our democracy have themselves grown so hopelessly corrupted and compromised that they are no longer even capable of arresting and turning around that decline via conventional democratic processes. The only outcome that can change this state of affairs is electing him president. Any other result would only confirm that our system has been so corrupted that it is fundamentally no longer capable of producing legitimate political outcomes.

Trump sometimes expresses this idea explicitly, and sometimes implicitly. But it is the thread that runs through everything he has been saying and promising for months . . ."

Read the Washington Post, A final plea: The case against Trump’s dangerous authoritarianism — in one chart, which includes this chart:

"Trump would be elected on the promise of fighting, rounding up, jailing or humbling any number of personal and political opponents. Take away this appeal, and there is nothing left but grasping, pathetic vanity. . .

The undercurrents of economic anxiety and cultural disorientation that Trump exploits are real, deserving both attention and sympathy. But Trump has organized these resentments with an unprecedented message: The United States is weak and broken, a hell of crime, terrorism and expanding misery, beset from within and without, and now in need of a strong hand — his strong hand — to turn things around.

The single most frightening, anti-democratic phrase of modern presidential history came in Trump’s convention speech: 'I alone can fix it.' A Trump victory would be a mandate for authoritarian politics. . . a Trump administration would be a concession to the idea that America needs a little more China, a little more Russia, a little more 'so let it be written, so let it be done' in its executive branch. . .

Every constitutional conservative should be revolted. Those who are complicit have adopted a particularly dangerous form of power-loving hypocrisy. . .

It is almost beyond belief that Americans should bless and normalize Trump’s appeal. Normalize vindictiveness and prejudice. Normalize bragging about sexual assault and the objectification of women. Normalize conspiracy theories and the abandonment of reason. Normalize contempt for the vulnerable, including disabled people and refugees fleeing oppression. Normalize a political tone that dehumanizes opponents and excuses violence. Normalize an appeal to white identity in a nation where racial discord and conflict are always close to the surface. Normalize every shouted epithet, every cruel ethnic and religious stereotype, every act of bullying in the cause of American 'greatness.'"

Read the Washington Post, One final election plea, on the behalf of U.S. ideals.

Read also 1 Corinthians 13:12.

Countdown to Birther Fools Day 2016

UPDATE III:  It is just days before the election. What better time to release those 'universe-shattering' revelations.

It would guarantee a Trump election!

But don't hold your breath, it was all a CON job!!!



I triple dog-dare the Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang to prove me wrong.

UPDATE II:  We are fast approaching 1,000 days (December 26, 2016) since the First Birther Fool's Day.  The election is fast approaching, and Arpaio is being prosecuted for criminal contempt.

And still no 'universe-shattering' revelations.

When will the so-called Pastor admit he was lying? When will 'Gallups' gullibles' realized it was a con job?

UPDATE: To Gallups' gullibles:  Happy Birther Fool's Day 2016!

Another year, another Birther Fool's Day.


On Friday, March 11, 2016, we learned that Pastor Gullible-Gallups got a cute little Special Deputy badge, then got to look at the binders, with dividers, and was told about the "international forensic analytical laboratory" report, which he can't disclose because he's now a "Special Deputy".

Really, is there anyone who still believes anything Arpaio, Zullo and Gullible-Gallups said?  Only fools!

Remember, how much time has past since the 2014 promised 'universe-shattering' revelations:


That sound you hear is the growing laughter at the Birther delusions.

Anyone who gave money to these bozos should sue!  (I think Zullo and Gullible-Gallups are stringing people along until the statute of limitations on fraud has expired.)

P.S.

Birther Fool's Day was first celebrated in 2014 on the first day after the month that the universe 'shattered', as promised by the "Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang" to 'Gallups' gullibles' on 'fellatio Friday' in mid-December 2013 (the 'universe-shattering' twist was being promoted elsewhere in late November).

It is no coincidence that Birther Fool's Day is April 1st.

Republi-CON Racism and Sexism

There’s no doubt that if she becomes president Clinton is going to get a lot of sexist vitriol spewed her way. But the comparison with how race has functioned during the Obama presidency is an important one as we consider how it will function and what the effects might be. . .

[L]et’s think about the purposes race has served during the Obama presidency and how things might be different if Clinton were president. First, birtherism was always a way of declaring Obama’s presidency inherently illegitimate. An African-American could not possibly be the president; if he got elected, the whole thing must have been a fraud because he is an alien. Conservatives will have a harder time making a similar argument about Clinton based on her identity, though they may try to say that the 2016 election was stolen, and there are ways they’ll treat her presidency as illegitimate even if they don’t call it that.

But race was also the organizing theme for much of the anger and resentment directed at Obama. If you’ve been a consumer of conservative talk radio or Fox News over the last eight years, you know how often right-wing complaints about Obama are cast in racial terms. It was only six months into his presidency that Glenn Beck proclaimed that Obama had 'a deep-seated hatred for white people.' Whatever policy initiative Obama was pursuing at a given moment was cast as 'reparations,' by which he was supposedly stealing money from hard-working white people to give it to undeserving black people in an attempt at exacting racial vengeance. It’s no accident that at the end of his term you saw the Republican Party nominate a white nationalist candidate essentially promising to restore the old order.

That’s about race, but it’s also about gender. The people who make up the core of Trump’s support are unhappy about the social changes that have displaced them from their position atop the social hierarchy. That loss of privilege, the idea that as a white man you’re no longer granted respect and deference — and even worse, people seem to be constantly telling you you’re being insufficiently respectful of those you consider your lessers — is for many people painful and disorienting.

For many of those voters, no one embodies that change and the threat it represents more than Hillary Clinton. . . If you’re wondering why conservative evangelicals are so strongly behind Trump despite his multiple divorces, adultery, generally libertine history and lack of religiosity, the answer is that Trump is promising a return to the patriarchal order of the past, where men will be restored to their place of honor and uppity women like Hillary Clinton will get the smack down they deserve.

Race and gender are both integral parts of the alienation many (especially older) conservative men feel. As Bill O’Reilly says, 'If you’re a Christian or a white man in the U.S.A., it’s open season on you.' But it’s easy to see how the relative emphasis on race during the Obama years could be turned just 45 degrees, so that the grievance industry run by people like O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh puts more of its focus on gender complaints than racial complaints.

While during the Obama years they were always on the lookout for anecdotes that could be spun into sweeping tales of the oppression of whites for which Obama was at fault, the Clinton years might feature a similar emphasis on gender, as Drudge and Limbaugh and Fox promote one story of oppressed males after another to their audiences, for whom this becomes a framework to understand whatever is going wrong in their lives. . .

[T]heir base will be fed a daily diet of misogynistic bile directed at the president, and “reaching out” will not be what that base is interested in. And that will leave them in the same quandary they’re in now.

Read the Washington Post, If Clinton wins, get ready for an outbreak of conservative male grievance.

How Big is Your Pumpkin?

Repost:

UPDATE V: Is this a scary pumpkin? It depends on your party affiliation:




UPDATE IV: What is your all-time favorite horror flick? Vote at the Washington Post, Halloween is nigh: What's the scariest movie?


UPDATE III: And what to do with all those pumkins, how about shooting some out of a cannon. Read The New York Times, Smasher, Smasher, How Do Your Pumpkins Throw?

Boys will be boys.


UPDATE II: Just 1,531 pounds. That's puny by comparison. Rea The New York Times, 1,810-Pound Wis. Pumpkin Named World's Heaviest.

And check out these other Guinness World Records other astounding Halloween-themed records this season.


UPDATE: You could always buy an ugly pumpkin.

At the "Pumpkinville" (Ellicottville, NY) pumpkin festival the winning pumpkin weighed 1,531 pounds.

That's a 'Great Pumpkin:'

Happy Halloween!!

Repost:

Nana - Nana - Nana! I got you first! and you can't get me back!

You've been mooned!!

One rule to this game.... You can NOT get someone who has already gotten you! Now go out there and get as many people as you can, before they get you!

And remember, we do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.

Halloween Light Show

Repost:

"4 singing pumpkin faces, tombstones, hand carved pumpkins, strobes, floods and thousands of lights":

Why Dogs Hate Halloween

Updated and reposted:

For other photos, click here.

Happy Halloween!

Repost:

"Hundreds of years ago, ignorance about decomposition and disease sparked fears that the dead returned to drink the blood of the living."

Read Slate, What Vampire Graves Tell Us About Ancient Superstitions. 

Dems Thank The Republi-CON Media CONplex

UPDATE:  Worse yet, Obama told ya so also!

He "has hit the trail for Hillary Clinton with an elan that recalls his days as a swaggering presidential candidate in 2008. . .

Obama is repurposing a critique he’s been making for years, in public and in private, directed at Republican officeholders themselves. His retooled stump speech is crafted not just to fire up Democratic voters against Trump, but to overwhelm other Republican politicians with a sense of dread by making them recognize the huge mistake they made by not listening to him.

Some of these Republicans are only now realizing that Obama was right all along. But it’s too late. Obama’s taking his argument to the voting public, and Trump is precisely the totem he needs to make it stick.

On the stump, Obama now regularly links Trump’s candidacy, and the bind he’s created for down-ballot Republicans, to a greater theory about the way the right has practiced politics throughout his presidency.

'For years,' Obama said in Las Vegas, 'Republican politicians and the far-right media outlets have pumped up all kinds of crazy stuff about me, about Hillary, about Harry [Reid]. They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away.'

Obama went on:

    '[T]here are a lot of politicians who knew better. There are a lot of senators who knew better. But they went along with these stories because they figured, you know what, this will help rile up the base, it will give us an excuse to obstruct what we’re trying to do, we won’t be able to appoint judges, we’ll gum up the works, we’ll create gridlock, it will give us a political advantage. So they just stood by and said nothing. And their base began to actually believe this crazy stuff.

    So Donald Trump did not start this. Donald Trump didn’t start it. He just did what he always did, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it, and promote it. That’s what he does. And so now when suddenly it’s not working, and people are saying, wow, this guy is kind of out of line, all of a sudden, these Republican politicians who were okay with all this crazy stuff up to a point, suddenly they’re all walking away. “Oh, this is too much.” … Well, what took you so long? What the heck?

It should be alarming to Republican strategists that the outgoing Democratic president has a better handle on what’s happened to their party than GOP politicians and conservative intellectuals—many of whom blame Trump’s rise on the media, or liberal dirty tricks.' . .

But the content of Obama’s argument shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention, because he’s been making it for practically his entire presidency. . .

It is gratifying, in some ways, to watch Obama take this final victory lap. There can be no more fitting repudiation of the the massive resistance strategy Republicans deployed against him than to leave office a political giant, with high approval ratings, and a list of substantive achievements to rival the greatest presidents in U.S. history—while the opposing party’s nominee, the embodiment of the Republican id, loses ignominiously."

Read the New Republic, Obama Was Right About Republican Extremism All Along. 

Another I told ya so!

In November 2008 just after the 2008 presidential election, I asked: "Did Obama win because FOXNews and talk radio, a constant source of right-wing fantasies, promote obsessions that are not the issues that are important to American voters?" See Dems Thank FOXNews.

Now, eight years later, others are realizing that "Trump's rise was no accident; rather, it was a natural outgrowth of a growing and influential faction of conservative media that for years fed the Republican base a steady diet of fringe theories masqueraded as news.

And Republicans allowed it to happen, as Obama noted.

"They just stood by and said nothing, even though they knew better, while their base actually started believing some of this stuff," he said. . .

Trump did not create the conditions ripe for his candidacy. The conservative media industrial complex and apprehensive Republican leaders were responsible for that.

Years before the real-estate tycoon entered onto the political stage, the conservative press — made up of a handful of websites, talk radio, and Fox News opinion programming — started to move the center of gravity in the Republican base further and further right. . .

Perhaps more important, however, the conservative media industrial complex successfully managed over the years to lock the Republican Party away from access to its own base. Those who consumed conservative media were taught not to trust politicians or, even worse, the mainstream media.

As a result, party leaders were beholden to a handful of individuals who controlled the conservative media and, thus, held the keys to their voters. Elected officials and candidates seeking office dared not criticize the conservative media’s most powerful members, for fear of the wrath that would ensue if they did.

The power the conservative press held allowed its members to decide who was accepted by the base and who wasn’t. . .

Republicans instead allowed their base to be held captive by a conservative press that moved their base further right, pushed conspiracy theories about Obama, and set unrealistic exceptions for them while in office.

So it should not be surprising that when Trump came along in 2016 and aggressively echoed this rhetoric, a significant portion of the base accepted him. . .

Questions about what the Republican Party will do in the aftermath of yet another presidential-election defeat are already buzzing in political circles.

"There is no autopsy this year that does not include dealing with the right-wing media," Sykes said. "There is none."

There is a reason, however, that this issue has been ignored for so long.

The Republican base still remains largely unreachable, locked away in a space in which only figures like talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, Fox News host Sean Hannity, and internet titan Matt Drudge hold the keys.

[And] those 'who were wrong' this year [have] 'an enormous power to control the narrative.'

'Drudge, Breitbart, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, [Laura] Ingraham — those people are completely invested in another false narrative to cover up the first false narrative, . . . 'and if there's one thing I have ever learned in life, it is far easier to dupe people than to convince them that they have been duped.'"

Read Business Insider, The GOP must do something about the conservative media industrial complex if it wants to survive.

There are many such articles being written, including in the Washington Post:

• How the conservative media is taking over the Republican Party,
• Republicans are paying the price for their addiction to their own media,
• Who will hold the right-wing media charlatans accountable?,
• The lap dogs of democracy who didn’t bark at Trump and
• Want to save the Republican Party? Drain the right-wing media swamp.

Don't Vote Hate, Your Vote Must Humiliate & Repudiate

If "Trump is to be denied in his bid to subvert democratic institutions by claiming a rigged election, he needs to be defeated resoundingly, removing all doubt. Clinton needs to run up the score.

The need to deal Trump a humiliating defeat has a sociological basis in the 'degradation ceremony' in which the perpetrator (Trump) is held by denouncers (officeholders and others in positions of influence) to be morally unacceptable, and witnesses (the public) agree that the perpetrator is no longer held in good standing.

Psychologist Wynn Schwartz, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, explained to me that what’s needed to have a successful degradation of Trump is an epic defeat. 'If it is lopsided enough,' he said, 'you don’t have critical masses of people who feel disenfranchised” or “who feel justified in saying that it was stolen.'

But if Clinton’s victory is narrow, the degradation ceremony fails, because a large chunk of the population feels swindled and remains loyal to Trump. 'The margin matters a lot,' Schwartz said.

Trump’s recent actions — talking about a 'rigged' election while laying the foundation for a Trump TV network — suggest that he will attempt to defy the degradation ceremony that a loss typically confers. Hence the importance of a landslide."

Read the Washington Post, Trump can’t just be defeated. He must be humiliated.

Read also the Washington Post, Americans are repudiating Trump’s ‘rigged election’ lies. By voting., which notes that "[o]ne good way for Americans to repudiate Trump’s efforts to shake faith in our democracy — and let’s be clear, this is exactly what he is trying to do — is by voting."

It's HER Fault

"It is time someone got to the bottom of everything that people say about Hillary Clinton. Who is she? More importantly, WHAT is she? . . .

[In 2016 s]he activates a spell cast on Donald Trump decades before at his wedding, which causes everything that comes out of his mouth to sound like the racist, sexist ramblings of a deranged conspiracy theorist. Trump tries valiantly to lay all her activities bare to the American people, but people cannot hear his truth through Hillary Clinton’s powerful cloud of witchcraft, which she uses to summon women everywhere whom he has wronged. "

Read the Washington Post, The hideous, diabolical truth about Hillary Clinton, which has compiled a full "timeline of her life by combining all the actual theories about her. When lined up together, they form quite a biography."

NO NEVER MEANS YES: The Republi-CON Moral Hypocrisy, Debasement & Obscenity in Defense of Donald Trump

 The Republi-CON Party claims it is the paragon of family values.

In the past, I have used examples of Republi-CONs hypocrisy when it comes to those so-called family values they claim to hold in such high regard.

Now, in defense of the indefensible, in order to win the election, none other than the Republi-CON's leading media cheerleader is excusing and condoning rape.

"Rush Limbaugh addressed what he called the 'Donald Trump sex-talk scandal' on his radio show Wednesday, mocking liberals and how, he said, they view the concept of consent.

'You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing,' the conservative commentator said, according to audio released by Media Matters for America. 'You can do anything — the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything — as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent.

'If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation, then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.' . .

In 2014, Limbaugh expressed frustration about the definition of consent.

'How many of you guys, in your own experience with women, have learned that 'no' means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?' he said on his radio show, according to the Huffington Post. In modern times, Limbaugh said, 'that is simply, that's not tolerated. People aren't even going to try to understand that one. I mean, it used to be used as a cliche. It used to be part of the advice young boys were given.

'See, that's what we've got to change. We have got to reprogram the way we raise young men. ... Are these not lawsuits just waiting to happen?"

Read the Washington Post, ‘Here come the rape police’: Rush Limbaugh reacts to Trump’s ‘sex-talk scandal’. 

As an attorney (& father), let me be clear, NO NEVER MEANS YES, no matter how rich or famous you think you are!!

Will You Be Voting for Moral Bankruptcy?

UPDATE III:  "It’s no longer a question of who is going to win; that’s a foregone conclusion. The issue is whether a party and individuals want to be remembered for defending a moral monster. And even if those calling for Trump’s head do want Clinton as the lesser of two evils, it’s hard to argue with that assessment. They’re entitled to more credence, not less. They knew months ago he was manifestly unfit." (Emphasis added.)

Read the Washington Post, The 7 dumbest arguments in defense of Trump.

UPDATE II: "Trump continues to display the symptoms of narcissistic alexithymia, the inability to understand or describe the emotions in the self. Unable to know themselves, sufferers are unable to understand, relate or attach to others.

To prove their own existence, they hunger for endless attention from outside. Lacking internal measures of their own worth, they rely on external but insecure criteria like wealth, beauty, fame and others’ submission.

In this way, Trump seems to be denied all the pleasures that go with friendship and cooperation. Women could be sources of love and affection, but in his disordered state he can only hate and demean them. His attempts at intimacy are gruesome parodies, lunging at women as if they were pieces of meat.

Most of us derive a warm satisfaction when we feel our lives are aligned with ultimate values. But Trump lives in an alternative, amoral Howard Stern universe where he cannot enjoy the sweetness that altruism and community service can occasionally bring.

Bullies only experience peace when they are cruel. Their blood pressure drops the moment they beat the kid on the playground."

Read The New York Times, Donald Trump’s Sad, Lonely Life.

UPDATE: It appears some Republicans may not be.

"The Republican Party tumbled toward anarchy Monday over its presidential nominee, as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) cut Donald Trump loose in an emergency maneuver to preserve the party’s endangered congressional majorities.

Ryan’s announcement that he would no longer defend or campaign with Trump prompted biting condemnations from within his caucus and from Trump himself, who publicly lashed out at the speaker.

It was an extraordinary display of personal animus just four weeks before the election, destroying any semblance of party unity behind a nominee who many GOP leaders said they could no longer stomach because of his character traits and tawdry campaign tactics.

New national and battleground-state polls showed Trump sliding since Friday’s publication of a 2005 video of him bragging about sexual assault, putting Clinton in position for a possible electoral landslide. Clinton surged to an 11 percentage point lead nationally in an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll conducted over the weekend."

Read the Washington Post, The GOP tumbles toward anarchy: ‘It’s every person for himself or herself’.

"Over the weekend, Donald Trump did what he always does when things go south for him. He walked away. He announced he is not the man at 70 he had been at 59 when he had boasted of sexual assault, and he pledged “to be a better man tomorrow.” With that, he effectively declared moral bankruptcy, paying about a dime on the dollar of sincerity.

It was, of course, what Trump had done six times in business, only this time the crisis was not about his finances, but his character. He had been caught talking trash about women. He has been caught boasting about committing the sort of sex crimes transit cops are always on the lookout for. He said he had hit on a married woman soon after he himself had been married. For all of that, he had “regret.”

Then, like the angel he thinks he is, he took flight. . .

Trump’s diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump’s mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take responsibility for what they’ve done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is."

Read the Washington Post, Trump files for moral bankruptcy.

SNL's Takedown of The Donald

It's lengthy, but hilarious. Watch it:

The Republi-CON Media CONplex, CONtinued

"This election year is memorable for many reasons but among the most important is showing Republicans the cost of their infatuation with 'alternative' news sources.

The rise of the conservative alternative media can be traced back to the founding of the newspaper Human Events in 1944, Regnery Publishing in 1947 and National Review in 1955. But it did not become a mass phenomenon until the debut of Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show, in 1988, followed in 1996 by the launch of the Fox News Channel and the Drudge Report. Those still remain three of the most popular outlets on the right, but they have been joined by radio hosts such as Mark Levin and Michael Savage, authors such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza, and websites such as Breitbart News, TheBlaze, Infowars and Newsmax.

The original impetus for these outlets was to offer a different viewpoint that people could not get from the more liberal TV networks, newspapers and magazines. But soon the alternative media moved from propounding their own analyses to concocting their own 'facts,' turning into an incubator of conspiracy theories such as 'Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster' and 'Barack Obama is a Muslim.'

This might have been dismissed at one time as a fringe phenomenon. But it has moved into the mainstream now that the Republican presidential nominee has turned over his campaign to Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart . . .

Where might Trump get [many of his] nutty ideas? . . . ”

You can and should blame Trump for believing so much of the nonsense that is spouted by the alternative media, but the deeper problem is with the outlets themselves. The right wing has created its own echo chamber which is increasingly disconnected from reality. There are millions of Americans who share Trump’s outré beliefs — which helps to explain why his presidential campaign has done better than expected.

But in the long term, the right’s addiction to its own news has become destructive — it promotes the election of tea party absolutists to Congress and the nomination of presidential candidates who have trouble appealing to swing voters. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence but in the 28 years since Limbaugh was syndicated, Republican presidential candidates have won a popular majority only once (2004); in the 28 years before then, Republicans won the popular vote five times (1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988). Whether Trump wins or loses, conservatives need to re-evaluate their infatuation with 'alternative' news sources that tell them what they want to hear and join a more mainstream conversation that includes different points of view."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans are paying the price for their addiction to their own media.

Where's The Donald?

UPDATE:  "There is no new Donald Trump. What you see is what you get. Trump is a living, breathing example of how all of the best-laid plans go out the window after you get punched in the face. Even if he knows what he should do — or at least what people like his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway need him to do — in this second debate, Trump's performance in New Hampshire on Thursday night shows that he is simply incapable of executing a plan that runs counter to his freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness approach.

He just doesn't have it in him. To expect a different Trump at this point in the campaign is to believe something against mountains of evidence to the contrary."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s debate prep is going great!!!

Say good bye to old narcissistic, egomaniacal, religiously bigoted, misogynistic, racist, xenophobe (did I miss anything?) The Donald

Say hello to new & improved The Donald.

Read the Washington Post, Trump just said he won’t attack Bill Clinton’s affairs, after all. Here’s why.

Is anybody really fooled?

And how long will it last?