July 28, 2016


Hal Brown’s July blog
My photo blog is here. +++ Links to all the several dozen articles I cross-posted to Daily Kos with comments are here.

Thursday, Day Four, July 28, 2016
Also in the news from N. Korea,
“U.S. has crossed the red line,
relations now on a war footing."

Generally considered the best take-downs of Trump on day three:
“I’m a New Yorker, and I know a con when we see one!" 
“Let’s elect a sane, competent person,” he said.
The normally soft-spoken owner of Bloomberg financial-news service excoriated his fellow New Yorker, labeling him a “dangerous demagogue,” a hypocrite, a con, and—slashing at the core of Trump’s self-worth—a horrible businessman.
“Throughout his career,” Bloomberg said in his prime-time address. “Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits and angry shareholders and contractors who feel cheated and disillusioned customers who feel ripped off. Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s run his business. God help us!” 
“Truth be told, the richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy!”
Bloomberg said America is greater than Trump suggests and needs a better president than Trump could be. “I understand the appeal of a businessman president. But Trump’s business plan is a disaster in the making,” he said. 
“The bottom line is: Trump is a risky, reckless, and radical choice. And we can't afford to make that choice!” 
Michael Bloomberg



Millions of people are seeing the National Enquirer front page (scroll down); but this is what millions of New Yorkers are seeing today on newsstands:
It gets worse, and beyond belief… Trump seemed to back Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea:
Donald Trump’s call on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails Wednesday resulted in widespread criticism. But his comments on Crimea, coupled with ones he made last week on NATO, are likely to have greater significance if he is elected president in November.
The question came from Mareike Aden, a German reporter, who asked him whether a President Trump would recognize Crimea as Russian and lift sanctions on Moscow imposed after its 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian territory. The candidate’s reply: “Yes. We would be looking at that.”
That response is likely to spread much cheer through Russia—already buoyant about the prospect of a Trump victory in November. But it could spread at least an equal amount of dread in the former Soviet republics. In a matter of two weeks, the man who could become the next American president has not only questioned the utility of NATO, thereby repudiating the post-World War II security consensus, he also has seemingly removed whatever fig leaf of protection from Russia the U.S. offered the post-Soviet republics and Moscow’s former allies in the Eastern bloc. The Atlantic

Wednesday, Day Three, July 27, 2016

ON the checkout aisle at Freddie’s: National Enquirer “reveals” Trumps secret plan to defeat Hillary. He will reveal:
1)  her “lesbian shenanigans 
2) that she spent time in a mental hospital after Bill had sex with a woman at their engagement party
3) that Bill has a son from his affair with childhood sweetheart Dolly Kyle Browning named Anthony Peterson
4) more about Monica
5) that the Clintons have a $100 divorce pact that assures they will stay married during the campaign
6) that there are audio recordings of staffers warning Gennifer Flowers to lie
7) that there’s a secret recording and transcript of Bill’s meeting with Loretta Lynch that has him cutting a deal to assure Hillary doesn’t go to prison in return for Lynch remaining on at Attorney General

Full Frontal's Samantha Bee recaps the cringe-inducing lows of the 2016 Election thus far in a scathing stroll down memory lane.




Tuesday, Day Two, July 26, 2016
Some stations cut away from this so you may have missed it:
Featured in the video: Aisha Tyler, Alan Cumming, America Ferrera, Ben Platt, Billy Porter, Chrissie Fit, Connie Britton, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Greene, Esther Dean, Eva Longoria, Garrett Clayton, Hana Mae Lee, Ian Somerholder, Idina Menzel, Jaime King, Jane Fonda, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, John Michael Higgens, Josh Lucas, Julie Bowen, Kathy Najimy, Kelly Jackle, Kristin Chenoweth, Mandy Moore, Mary McCormack, Mary-Louise Parker, Mike Thompkins, Nikki Read, Rachel Platten, Renee Fleming, Rob Reiner, Shelley Regner, Sia, TR Knight..

On the Bernie or busters:
Bernie or bust really means Bernie or Trump. When participants in the Okalhoma Land Rush in 1889 said "Oklahoma or bust" they knew that "or bust" might mean getting killed by the indians whose land they were stealing with government sanction. Now the "or bust" means giving the election to a proto-fascist.
UPDATE: Bernie just told his supporters that it is now “Hillary or bust.” Now somebody has to convince these holdouts that there are two meanings of “or bust.” There's the personal, the “I plan to pack my bags and go home” or bust. And most significantly, there’s the giving the election to Donald Trump “or bust."


 I doubt this hopefully small minority saying they may vote for Trump will ever be convinced to vote for Hillary. It is interesting from a psychological perspective to listen to them. These people aren’t reacting emotionally to Bernie’s losing. They have what they believe to be rational reasons for considering voting for Trump. 
New Yorker article Excerpt (emphasis mine):
From “White Plight” in The New Yorker
For many, the 2008 election of Barack Obama seemed as if it might be an “ending” of sorts. But of what? On a purely demographic level, Obama’s rise embodied an inevitable future: by 2055, the majority of Americans would be nonwhite. He had merely arrived ahead of schedule. Still, one election wouldn’t erase the structures and ideologies that had kept the country’s wealth in white hands. Maybe what was ending was a bit more abstract. There was, in Obama’s manner of carrying himself, something that upended traditional status relations. An early sign of this came while Obama was on the campaign trail. At a meeting with wealthy Democratic donors, he described the plight of the white working class in Midwestern small towns, where “the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” and remarked, “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” This certainly wasn’t the first time an authority figure had spoken patronizingly of the white working class. But now the authority figure was black, and had spoken with the confidence that the future belonged to people like him. Obama, in essence, had given poor and working-class white people the language to think of themselves as outsiders. After all, they weren’t the kind of people who would have been in the room with him that day. Within the more responsive spheres of media and entertainment, of course, Obama’s rise has helped us imagine how America will see itself once “white” and mainstream are no longer synonymous. One might point to cultural touchstones like Beyoncé, “Hamilton,” and “Scandal” as a preview of what this future will look like. In these somewhat rarefied realms, whiteness is, in ways big and small, constantly being treated as a problem, from this year’s #OscarsSoWhite outrage to calls to strip university buildings of the names of their more vexing white forefathers. Whiteness, among those with a title to it, is invoked only in a dance of disavowal. Away from these predominantly liberal arenas, however, white identity has found a more potent form of salience. For poor and working-class whites, skin color no longer feels like an implicit guarantor of privilege. There is a sense that others, thanks to affirmative action or lax immigration policies, have nudged ahead of them on the ladder of social ascent. Their whiteness is, in fact, the very reason they suspect that they are under siege. Marginalized by a black President, as they imagine, and alienated by urbane élites of every hue, they have begun to understand themselves in terms of identity politics. It almost doesn’t matter whether their suspicions are true in a strictly material sense. The accident of white skin still brings with it economic and social advantages, but resentment is a powerful engine, particularly when the view from below feels unprecedented. 
Monday, DNC Convention week, July 25, 2016: Are angry Sanders supporters telling pollsters they will vote for Trump, and will they really vote for Hillary? Let’s hope so.
Latest poll
First take: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz speaks to group in Florida and is booed by Bernie supporters. Is this a sign of what will happen at the convention? Talk is that DWS should not be on the stage at the convention tonight. There are still a number of Bernie supporters who are so angry that they are willing to disrupt the convention with their message of “Bernie or Bust.” Let’s not forget the that the “or Bust” part of this means electing Donald Trump.
EQUALS

Sunday, July 24, 2016 First watch:

….a window into a reality that has a lot of liberals and Democrats just as nervous: thousands of people who gathered in Cleveland this past week — and many more around the country — actually believe the scary rhetoric that spewed from the stage of Quicken Loans Arena. Wherever the ideas originated, they are not just talking points to the millions of Americans who made Donald Trump the leader of the Republican Party. They are “facts.”  “Boy, that’s a scary thought,” said Mike Huey, a bluff, friendly 56-year-old from Illinois who was nevertheless willing to sport a button that read “Life’s a bitch. Don’t vote for one.”He was among many Trump supporters asked by The Huffington Post in Cleveland how they would feel if Clinton wins, and the country becomes Hillary’s America. Many of them expressed fear, and not just your garden variety fear of political disappointment, but more your arm-yourself-to-the-teeth kind of fear. “Well, I would run to the store as fast as I could and get as much ammo as I could and buckle down,” said Pamela Nicolay, a central Californian who last voted for a president when it was Ronald Reagan. HuffPo
First read reaction: On reading these words in a Huffington Post article…
In his first public comments on Roger Ailes’ departure from Fox News following an investigation into alleged sexual harassment, Donald Trump declined to say whether or not the media mogul is helping his campaign.
“Well, I don’t want to comment,” the Republican nominee told Chuck Todd in an interview airing on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday. “But he’s been a friend of mine for a long time.”
Trump goes on to say that Ailes has helped the women who are now “complaining.”
“And when they write books that are fairly recently released, and they say wonderful things about him,” he said. “And now all of a sudden they’re saying these horrible things about him. It’s very sad. Because he’s a very good person. I’ve always found him to be just a very, very good person.”
it hit me that for Trump, and apparently his supporters
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