U.S. Electile Dysfunction 2016

[ewmayer]

Trump is an idiot blowhard, but I see him as a useful idiot blowhard, in that he has no qualms about getting 'truthy' not just about the media-beloved 'wedge issues', but about his fellow Republicans, who richly deserve any odium that comes their way for being a pack of cheating, lying, hypocritical scoundrels. LOL, his dissing McCain a couple days ago for being "a war hero only because he was captured ... I just prefer guys who weren't captured" [I paraphrase] was classic Trump. Now personally I would prefer taking McCain to task for being a psychotic warmonger and financial crook (Keating Five, anyone?), but any dissage that comes his way is OK by me.

[Xyzzy]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

LOL, his dissing McCain a couple days ago for being "a war hero only because he was captured ... I just prefer guys who weren't captured" [I paraphrase] was classic Trump.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borow...staying-in-u-s

[ewmayer]

Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You? - The Onion - America's Finest News Source

The mere sight of the muskrat-pelt-like hairdo must make McCain grip his 'stress relieving pen' so tightly as to cause tennis elbow.

Speaking of the war hero, an NC reader posted this snip from an old piece on McCain by the late Alexander Cockburn, "The Horrors of John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?":

McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam, each averaging about half an hour, total time ten hours and thirty minutes. For these brief excursions the admiral’s son was awarded two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three Purple Hearts. US Veteran Dispatch calculates our hero earned a medal an hour, which is pretty good going.

I bet that kind of medal-a-minute heroism even puts Chuck 'I single-handedly refought and won the Vietnam war' Norris in the shade.

[ewmayer]

Pando's Mark Ames on The Donald - I had subscription to Spy for a couple years back in the 90s, but in the end it was simply too New-Yawk-upper-crust-insiderish for me:

Pando: The short-fingered vulgarian cometh

That one is worth reading all the way through - some hilarious satire in there. But Spy is long gone, the Donald's fortunes have been revived thanks to reality TV and a flood of central-bank-mandated cheap credit intended to inflate precisely the kinds of asset bubbles Trump projects peak during, and The Donald is left forever wondering 'Why that bankrupt satyr [sic] magazine called me a Bulgarian.'

[only_human]

One Email That Proves Campaign Finance Laws Are A Joke

WASHINGTON -- Carly for America, the super PAC backing former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, invited supporters to join a conference call on Thursday with -- Carly Fiorina. Think this required any "coordination" between the supposedly independent super PAC and the candidate?

Hmm, but the FEC enforces election laws, right? Well...

The problem is that federal campaign coordination laws ban only certain types of cooperation and association between candidates and supposedly independent groups. A candidate cannot have input on the content -- text, video, imagery or other materials -- or the conduct -- strategy, timing or payment -- of a communication. This leaves a lot of other activity open to the interpretation of the Federal Election Commission, which rarely enforces the anti-coordination rules in particular and at this moment is deeply divided on how to enforce its regulations overall.

FEC gridlock is just one of many reasons why the 2016 presidential campaign has seen a complete meltdown of the notion that candidates don't work with the super PACs and nonprofits supporting them.

Few have gone as far as Fiorina, whose campaign is essentially being run out of the super PAC. The joint conference call with supporters featuring Fiorina but hosted by the super PAC is just one example of this. Staffers at Carly for America -- which has raised $3.4 million so far and will report its donors on Friday -- have taken on such core campaign functions as managing rapid response to press questions, rolling out endorsements of the candidate, funding grassroots organizing and organizing advance work for Fiorina’s appearances.

This is all a far cry from 2012 when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney distanced himself from attack ads made by Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting his bid, by stating that he would go “to the big house” if he so much as urged the super PAC to stop running the ads.

This year, people are talking to each other. Just as Fiorina will speak on her super PAC-organized conference call, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry delivered his anti-Donald Trump speech at a July 22 event hosted by his super PAC, Opportunity and Freedom PAC.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by only_human

One Email That Proves Campaign Finance Laws Are A Joke

Hmm, but the FEC enforces election laws, right? Well...

Maybe Carly can get more potential donors to listen in the call by offering to give them a bunch of high-end telecom gear, no payments or interest until they get their eyeball-metrics-based eCommerce site up and running, by which is meant 'losing money at internet speed'. Hey, that visionary strategy worked really well for the company she was starring in back around 1999-2001, didn't it?

BTW, the initialism FEC is properly pronounced not letter-by-letter but rather like the singular of 'feces.' Important to know the things - ya just never know when such factoids might come up as the question in Final Jeopardy.

[Xyzzy]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...o-you-live-in/

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...o-you-live-in/

L: None of the above.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by xilman

L: None of the above.

Methinks the right honourable gentleman from East Tidewater doth protest too much.

[ewmayer]

o Dilbert creator Scott Adams blogs on Trump and the art of persuasion, and makes a bold prediction: Clown Genius:

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics, focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I don’t think he put much effort into it. Imagine what he could do if he gave up golf.

As far as I can tell, Trump’s “crazy talk” is always in the correct direction for a skilled persuader. When Trump sets an “anchor” in your mind, it is never random. And it seems to work every time.

Now that Trump owns FOX, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public, I’m going to predict he will be our next president. I think he will move to the center on social issues (already happening) and win against Clinton in a tight election.

o Sometimes the article is less important than the edit notes - from the LA Times op-ed GOP's Trump problem will fade, but Democrats' Bernie Sanders troubles are just beginning:

FOR THE RECORD

An earlier version of this column said that Hillary Rodham Clinton makes five times the average American’s annual income. She makes that amount per speech.

[ewmayer]

Corrupt & Ruinous Political Dynasty Update:

HillBillary Clinton of the NYArkAtherton Clintons:

o “@ Hillary Clinton: How does your student loan debt make you feel? Tell us in 3 emojis or less.” | naked capitalism

[There were multiple NC readers who suggested 'three middle-finger emojis' by way of reply to this condescending invitation]

"I want every hard-working parent out there to get the chance to see his or her child cross a stage — or to cross it themselves. America should be a place where those achievements are possible for anyone who’s willing to work hard to do their part."

Notice the dual points of emphasis here:

[1] 'Kodak Moment' feel-good-ishness is what it's all about, not "whether one's college education was a sound investment, justifying the multidecadal trend of such an education doubling in price roughly every 10 years, at the same time actual academic tenure and salary trends are in full-blown 'race to the bottom' mode as administrative bloat, corporatist graft and the rentier model of education metastasize";

[2] "Hard-working" - As hard-working as Hillary is when she gives each of those quarter-million-dollar speeches, presumably.

Hillary's proposals need to be viewed in light of the fact that she takes big money from the banking and debt-slavery-peddling sector. At the same time she does her usual double-talking 'triangulation' BS when it comes to policy: Consider her bizarrely all-over-the-map voting & advocacy history with respect to the 2005 bankruptcy reform act, which - among other bank-subsidizing things - made student loan debt into 'odious debt', that is, non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She says she 'would have voted against' the final version of the bill, but as she was the only senatorial abstainer, we'll never know. In any event, like her husband, it's clear that her only guiding 'principle' is avarice for money and power - she will say and do whatever she thinks will further her accumulation of same. We can only hope that the Team Clinton's ongoing efforts to obstruct justice in re. private-email-server-gate eventually rise to such flagrancy that even the DO(in)J will have choice but to indict, in classic Nixonian "it's less the initial crime than the ever-more-desperate attempts to cover it up" fashion.

JawjHDubya JebBush of the FlorConnTexifornia Bushes:

o Jeb Bush’s Appalling Idea of a “Good Deal” | The American Conservative

Jeb also has been trying to pin the blame for the 'cowardly withdrawal of U.S. troops from iraq' (I paraphrase) on Obama and Hillary, when it was his own unindicted-war-criminal elder brother who signed the status of forces agreement which set the timeline for said withdrawal before he left office. With warmongering complete-ignoramuses like this representing the 'serious Republican presidential candidates,' no wonder Trump is dominating the polls. He may be an own-ego-masturbating blowhard, but at least he has the faintest glimmer of a frickin' clue, rather than an invisible set of neocon/bigbiz/oligarch hands working the ventriloquist dummy's mouth, as all the 'serious' candidates do.

And more on (moron?) Jebbie, since he has done so much to deserve the odium: From 'the definition of insanity' files - in DC, in foreign policy as well as economics, proven-bad ideas never die, they simply get spun as 'no one could have foreseen' or 'the policy was correct, it simply wasn't implemented properly/with-sufficient-aggressiveness/by-me-and-my-team' by the next generation of corrupt pols:

o Bush Identifies Wolfowitz as Advisor: Jeb Bush on Friday identified Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, as one of his foreign-policy advisers.

Mother Jones has more - 17 of 21 ashcan-of-history rescuees! Good grief:

The Jeb Bush Adviser Who Should Scare You: Paul Wolfowitz not only championed the Iraq War—he obsessively promoted a bizarre conspiracy theory

In February, his campaign released a list of 21 foreign policy advisers; 17 of them served in the George W. Bush administration. And one name stood out: Paul Wolfowitz, a top policy architect of the Iraq War—for the prospect of Wolfowitz whispering into Jeb’s ear ought to scare the bejeezus out of anyone who yearns for a rational national security.