Month: October 2016

 
From :

When a 15 year-old at a town hall event asked Hillary Clinton how to fight Donald Trump’s body-shaming, the right-wing media sprang into action, attacking the girl as a liar and a “plant” because she is an actress and the daughter of a state legislator. Her father is fighting back.

A young woman named Brennan Leach stole the show at Hillary Clinton’s town hall event in Haverford, PA, with a question about Donald Trump’s habit of body-shaming. Fifteen year-old Brennan asked Clinton how she plans to undo some of the damage that Trump has done with his relentless denigration and objectification of women. She got a huge and positive reaction from the candidate and the crowd.

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From Last Of The Millenniums:

Here are two men apologizing –

Bill Clinton takes responsibility, apologizes and talks about his family.

Donald Trump apologizes and blames Bill and Hillary for abusing women.

Not a single word from Donald Trump about his family – the hurt he has caused them.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

On Wednesday, President Obama announced that enough nations had ratified the December 2015 agreement on stopping global climate change to make it go into effect next month. It required enough nations to represent 55% of greenhouse gas emissions. After the European Union ratified the agreement recently, that total had climbed to 56.75%. Currently, 72 out of 195 countries have ratified the agreement, and the agreement will go into effect next month. The president said:

“This gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got.”

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From Pharyngula:

It’s the only way I’m going to be able to survive this debate.

First question to both: do you think you’re a good role model for children? Clinton answers with her goal to bring people together; Trump babbles like a man on quaaludes about the trade deficit, people getting shot, fixing the inner city. HE DOESN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION. Weird.

Asked about the #trumptape, his answer is it was just “locker room talk”, but look! Over there! ISIS is chopping off people’s heads! ISIS, ISIS, ISIS.

Good god, he’s awful and incoherent.

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From Green Eagle:

What is happening to Trump right now reminds me of a story I would like to relate about Richard Nixon.

I was a research student at Cambridge University in the early eighties. Obviously, my fellow students were intelligent and well informed people. On a number of occasions they asked me if, as an American, why, with all of the abominable things Nixon had done in his political career, this seemingly insignificant episode was the one that destroyed him. After thinking about it, here is my explanation:

There were always two narratives about Nixon. One, the Republican party line, involved Nixon, the brilliant politician and statesman who could be counted on to deal with any crisis, domestic or foreign. In the other narrative, Nixon was, not to beat around the bush, a crook. The evidence on the Watergate tapes, much of it coming directly from Nixon and spoken in his own voice, was simply irreconcilable with the first view of Nixon, and left the vast majority of Americans with no understanding of him except the second.

Sad to say, things on the right side of the aisle have deteriorated since those days, and today the Republicans are willing to tolerate leaders who are far beneath Nixon, but still we end up dealing with a similar situation. There are again two narratives about Trump.

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From Dave Dubya at Freedom Rants:

Commentary by humorists such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert has given us clear insight and keen observations of the insanity and nonsense entwined in our nation’s politics. The American tradition of political satire has been on the cutting edge since the nation reached its first centennial, when Mark Twain noted, “We have the best congress money can buy”.

Later Will Rogers witnessed the onset of the Great Depression. Like our present situation, humor was a vital antidote to the toxic devastation wrought by deregulated capitalism and government servitude to the predations of Wall Street and greed of the economic elites.

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From Infidel753:

The substance of Trump’s just-revealed 2005 paean to groping is so appalling that no commentary I could offer would really contribute anything. Its concrete effect on the political landscape, however, may have a positive side.

For some time I’ve been concerned that when Trump lost, large numbers of Trumpanzees would refuse to recognize the result, claiming the election was rigged or stolen in some way.

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From Jonathan Bernstein at BloombergView:

General-election debates rarely cause major changes in voters’ choices. That’s what political scientists believe for the most part. Yet after the first presidential debate, on Sept. 26, Hillary Clinton moved back into a strong lead over Donald Trump. Indeed, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, her chances of winning bottomed out on that very day (at 55 percent), and have increased steadily ever since.

So was the first debate a true game changer?

Probably not.

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• Last Of The Millenniums reacts to the now famous tape by offering a few brief, compelling videos and a short summary to suggest that Donald’s attitude toward women was already knowable.
   
• nojo at Stinque runs counter-point to Kübler-Ross applying Seven Stages of Joy to contemporary politics.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged, reacts to the unusual argument by third partyite Gary Johnson that his ignorance on everything in the world will make him a great President.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post can find no other realistic option than voting for Hillary.
   
• Capt. Fogg at Human Voices has become impatient with comparisons of Hillary’s Wall Street utterances with Donald’s plans for regulation.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors listens as Republicans explain what they will do to vulnerable citizens in the event, however diminished the likelihood, that Donald Trump wins.
   
• Corruption investigations into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have been ended by a conservative state supreme court, and that ruling has been quietly affirmed by the US Supreme Court. So now, Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson wants an investigation into leaks about the investigation.
   
• T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, has been a harsh critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, considering it an example of distructive identity politics. But he is greatly impressed by a forceful defense of BLM by ATT CEO Randall Stephenson. So perhaps words and ideas matter when accompanied by a willingness to listen.
   
  Personal note: T. Paine is a friend who has offered reassurance and prayer when we were told that our own young Marine had been under fire in Afghanistan.
   
• When Vincent at A wayfarer’s Notes rambles a little, straying from his topic, he often produces incidental brilliance that offers unexpected insight. He does that a little this time, as he considers how decisions are often made by the absence of choice, and decides that what is demonstrated is the distinction between a hope and a plan.
   

Donald and the Dish

Can a cartoon character from 6 decades ago, catching falling plates on black and white television, explain the strange personality of Donald Trump?

Transcript

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