Who's The World-Class Liar, Donald?

Click here for a short video from PoltiFact entitled "Fact-checking Donald Trump's speech calling Hillary Clinton 'a world-class liar.'" In his speech, Trump said:

1. "I was among the earliest to criticize the rush to war (in Iraq), even before the war ever started." Rating: "FALSE. There is no record to support this claim."

2. "For the amount of money Hillary Clinton would like to spend on refugees, we could rebuild every inner city in America." Rating: "PANTS ON FIRE. Trump's numbers are off by a huge margin. It would cost much more to rebuild inner cities than admit refugees."

3. "... or her phony landing in Bosnia, where she said she was under attack, and the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers." Rating: "TRUE. Trump is correct. Hillary Clinton was welcomed without incident and has since retracted her statement."

4. "(Ambassador Chris Stevens) was left helpless to die as Hillary slept soundly in her bed." Rating: "FALSE. Clinton was not asleep when the attacks unfolded. [It was 3 p.m. Washington time.] Email records show she worked until 11 p.m."

So the Donald accused Hillary of four lies; only one of them could be even remotely considered to be a "lie," or she could have been misremembering the event, or confusing it with another.

If you continue to watch the clip, it starts a new video from PolitiFact entitled "The top 10 biggest falsehoods from the year of Trump (in no particular order)." These are:

1. The Mexican government forces many bad people into our country. (PANTS ON FIRE) 2. The number of immigrants in the United States is 30 million, or maybe 34 million. (PANTS ON FIRE) 3. Mexico can afford to build a wall because of their billion-dollar trade deficit with the U.S. (FALSE) 4. Ted Cruz's father was with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of JFK. (PANTS ON FIRE) 5. Crime is rising. (PANTS ON FIRE) 6. We're the highest taxed nation in the world. (FALSE) 7. Thousands of people in New Jersey cheered as the twin towers fell. (PANTS ON FIRE) 8. He was totally against the war in Iraq for many years. (FALSE) 9. There is no system to vet refugees from the Middle East. (FALSE) 10. The unemployment rate is actually 42 percent. (PANTS ON FIRE)

And Hillary Clinton is a "world-class liar"?

This Is Racism, Folks. Plain And Simple.

This is quoted from an open thread by Frances Langum on Crooks & Liars:

When a faithfully married black president who's the son of a single mother, the first black editor of Harvard Law Review and a professor of constitutional law is considered unintelligent, immoral, and anti-American by the Right while a xenophobic, misogynistic, serially philandering trust fund kid who quotes from the National Enquirer, peddles conspiracy theories, routinely calls women ugly and fat, calls John McCain a loser for having been a prisoner of war, and who has advocated torture and the bombing of women and children has captured the hearts of a majority of Republicans, this is racism, folks. Plain and simple.

Comprehensive Takedown Of Trump

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Jon Perr entitled "Donald Trump and the 53-inch penis." The article name is a bit nonsensical, but the article itself is long -- and devastating. It's the best takedown of Trump I've read yet.

Charlie Pierce Responds to a Trump Speech (Sad.)

Click here for Charlie's response to an extended Trump attack on Hillary Clinton.

The article is titled "Let's Parse All the Bullsh*t in Trump's Speech About Hillary," with the subheading "Anyone in the mood for some barefaced non-facts?​"

Some takeaways:

There were some lines of attack that, were they not being delivered by a self-evident public charlatan, might have proven effective. Like most politicians of the past 30 years, and like most people operating within the current financial elite, HRC really has been cozy with some unsavory people and regimes around the world. In fact, one of them was Donald Trump.

HRC did not "singlehandedly destabilize the entire Middle East." She had a lot of help in the years between 2001 and 2009, when somebody nobody mentions anymore was running things.

He concludes, concerning Trump's statement that "Americans are the people that tamed the West, that dug out the Panama Canal, that sent satellites across the solar system, that built the great dams, and so much more. Then we started thinking small. We stopped believing in what America could do, and became reliant on other countries, other people, and other institutions. We lost our sense of purpose and daring":

How did we abandon our dreams of greatness that we demanded of our self-governing Republic? We didn't dig the Panama Canal; our government did, after it stole the land from Colombia. We, as individuals, didn't tame the West; our government did, with railroads and homesteading and the U.S. Cavalry. We didn't ourselves build the Hoover Dam; our government did. We didn't create our own private space exploration; our government did.

How could the country have come to such a sorry pass? Perhaps a clue can be found in a speech given from the U.S. Capitol by a newly elected president on a cold, clear January morning in 1981.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

Sad.

Indeed.

Filmmaker Ken Burns' Commencement Address at Stanford

Click here for a transcript of the speech. Burns speaks in the usual generalities for a while, but then he drops the hammer:

"For 216 years, our elections, though bitterly contested, have featured the philosophies and character of candidates who were clearly qualified. That is not the case this year. One is glaringly not qualified."

Speaking of that (unnamed) candidate, he warns about

"... the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises, and terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter; who has never demonstrated any interest in anyone or anything but himself and his own enrichment; who insults veterans, threatens a free press, mocks the handicapped, denigrates women, immigrants and all Muslims; a man who took more than a day to remember to disavow a supporter who advocates white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan; an infantile, bullying man who, depending on his mood, is willing to discard old and established alliances, treaties and long-standing relationships."

He further warns: "We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong. These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past. But they now loom in front of us again – all happening at once."

I think he may not be a Trump supporter.

Donald Trump - Business Genius? Not So Much

Click here for an article in The New York Times Magazine by Adam Davidson entitled "Behind the Gold Curtain of Donald Trump's Résumé." Quite a takedown.

No One Can Stand Ted Cruz

Samantha Bee's takedown of Ted Cruz (NSFW, of course; it's Samantha Bee).

Governance, Republican Style

This is a portion of a post from Daily Kos, "Spotlight on Green News," on June 8, 2016, by Meteor Blades:

Raúl Grijalva writes - Anti-Government Extremism and Protecting the Grand Canyon:

“This week marks the 110th anniversary of the Antiquities Act, a landmark law allowing presidents to designate national monuments on land owned by the federal government. Its signing by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 began the modern era of conservation, allowing Roosevelt to designate nearly twenty national monuments and protect natural and cultural resources that have come to define our country.

Many of the monuments he established, including the Grand Canyon in 1908, are now among our most popular national parks. The Antiquities Act, by any measure, has been a tremendous and popular success.

Despite that, the law is under constant attack by Congressional Republicans who mischaracterize the authority granted by the Act as a ‘land grab.’ House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) was recently recorded at a public event saying that anyone who likes the Antiquities Act should ‘die’ so as to get ‘stupidity out of the gene pool.’ The Chairman went on to describe the law as “the most evil Act ever invented.’”

Words of wisdom from the Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.

This is what Republicans do. On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan made his inaugural speech, which included the following words:

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

Along the same lines, Grover Norquist:

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

Republicans seek to cripple the federal government. When they've defunded and otherwise hamstrung a government department, they point their finger and shout: "See? It doesn't work!"

A key aspect of this is to appoint committee chairmen and agency heads who are committed to disabling the body to which they're appointed. They appoint staunch anti-environmentalists to the EPA; they place coal and oil executives at the head of agencies intended to curb pollution and act as watchdogs on the fossil fuel industry.

How do these bomb-throwers get elected?

Don't Forget The 2016 GOP Clown Car!

Samantha Bee recaps the runup to the selection of Trump as the Republican nominee. (NSFW; it's Samantha Bee.)

Prognostication By The Donald

"I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is."

That's the Trumpian worldview.

Sorry to burst your bubble, Donald, but in November 2016, that is going to come to a crashing end, and you will be known forever more as the biggest loser in the history of U.S. politics.

Tehran Tom Cotton Wants To "Inflict Pain" On Obama

Click here for an article by Karoli Kuns at Crooks & Liars entitled "'Tehran' Tom Cotton Held up Nation to 'Inflict Pain' on Obama."

There's statesmanship for you. Cotton, Junior Senator from Arkansas, held up the nomination of Cassandra Butts, a personal friend of Obama's from his law school days, for no reason other than the fact that denying her appointment as Ambassador to The Bahamas would "inflict pain" on Obama. (While her appointment was being delayed, Butts died of natural causes last week at the age of 50.)

Cotton had held up a number of Obama's nominations for ambassador trying to make a political point, but when that situation was resolved, he dropped his opposition to all of the others but Butts.

When she met with him to ask why the hold remained on her nomination, Cotton told her "that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president."

Well Done, Buzzfeed

[Update: The RNC ad buy in question was for $1.3 million.]

Click here for a full explanation at Crooks & Liars, in an article by Sarah P. entitled 'Buzzeed Tells RNC To Take Their Ad Money And Shove It."

In April, when there were still several Republican candidates in the primary race, Buzzfeed arranged to take a significant amount of money from the RNC (Republican National Committee, run by "obvious anagram Rience Priebus," (h/t Charlie Pierce at Esquire), to run ads for the Republican candidate in the fall. Buzzfeed takes ad money from both sides, as most major media organizations do.

That was then, this is now. Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee, Buzzfeed has cancelled the arrangement. Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti sent an email to employees explaining the decision. He finished with the following words:

We certainly don’t like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company. However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don’t run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won’t accept Trump ads for the exact same reason.

Whoa -- Mika? Pro Hillary?

I detest "Morning Joe" Scarborough, and I've never had a high opinion of his sidekick, Mika. But here she is (for some reason Joe's not there to treat her condescendingly, as he usually does), speaking plainly and powerfully about her agreement with Hillary Clinton in rejecting the craziness of Donald Trump. Play it; it's about a minute and a half.