A Blistering Critique Of James Comey's Partisan Career

Click here for an article by Digby (Heather Parton) at Salon entitled "So much for the “upstanding” James Comey: The FBI director’s long career as preening partisan hack."

Some of us are anything but surprised [at Comey's Clinton-damaging letter regarding the Weiner/Abadein emails]. Liberals who lived through the ’90s and the endless Whitewater probe that went nowhere met President Barack Obama’s appointment of James Comey as director of the FBI with a primal scream of “Are you kidding me?” It was inconceivable that, just as former president Bill Clinton had foolishly appointed a Republican FBI director, Louis Freeh, who saw it as his primary duty to investigate a president he did not respect, a Democratic president was appointing a GOP lawyer to the same job 20 years later in an even more toxic political environment.

And:

Comey is the first FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover to flout institutional processes, ignore scientific data and independently wield his authority however he chooses ....

Comey doesn’t resemble Hoover in temperament or background. But law enforcement and justice officials have for years worried that his independent, authoritarian style was dangerous, making him politically unassailable in the same way that Hoover was back in the bad old days. Legal luminaries like longtime Department of Justice official Philip Heymann, ex-attorney general Eric Holder and numerous other former federal prosecutors and law enforcement officials have objected to his latest action.

Bush White House "Lost" 22 Million Emails - From A Private Server

Click here for an article by Charlie Pierce at Esquire entitled "Does Anyone Know What Happened to Those 22 Million Emails From the Bush White House?"

You recall the furious scrum among the elite political press over these revelations, right? I mean, 22 million e-mails? Lost? And from a private server, too. Jason Chaffetz must have been leaking like the Andrea Doria over this because of his principled devotion to governmental transparency. And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

The Alt-Right, Again

Click here for an article at The Daily Beast by John Avlon entitled "When Trump Met Mr. Brexit—the Alt-Right Coalition Goes Global." It was written on August 24, not long after the departure of Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon having been named "campaign CEO."

Donald Trump’s inner circle resembles nothing so much as a Bond villain casting call. There’s the exiled Paul Manafort, steely-eyed, hair-dyed, and bathing in blood money. His replacement Steve Bannon is ruler of the alt-right trolls, fanning the flames from his fortified Hollywood villa, known as the Breitbart Embassy. Off in the wings sit Roger Ailes and Roger Stone, the O.G. dirty tricksters, unrepentant Nixonistas still running the “positive polarization” play almost five decades later.

A couple of relevant quotes: Donald Trump tweeted “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” And Bannon said “Let the grassroots turn on the hate because that’s the ONLY thing that will make them do their duty.” This campaign knows about turning on the hate.

Donald Trump is a symptom of the problem, not its cause. Those Republicans hoping that this election cycle can be dismissed as a bad dream are missing their own culpability in shrinking their base through RINO hunt purges and the elevation of hyper-partisan, smash-and-grab media outlets like Breitbart, which now essentially runs their nominee’s campaign. Partisan media now controls the party.

The Alt-Right vs. The GOP, Illustrated

Number Of Presidential Executive Orders

It's hard to cut and paste tables.

George Washington 8
Thomas Jefferson 4
James Madison 1
James Monroe 1
John Quincy Adams 3
Andrew Jackson 12
William Henry Harrison 0
John Tyler 17
James K. Polk 18
Zachary Taylor 5
Millard Fillmore 12
Franklin Pierce 35
James Buchanan 16
Abraham Lincoln 48
Andrew Johnson 79
Ulysses S. Grant 217
Rutherford B. Hayes 92
James Garfield 6
Chester Arthur 96
Grover Cleveland 113
Benjamin Harrison 143
Grover Cleveland 140
William McKinley 185
Theodore Roosevelt 1,081
William Howard Taft 724
Woodrow Wilson 1,803
Warren G. Harding 522
Calvin Coolidge 1,203
Herbert Hoover 968
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3,721
Harry S. Truman 907
Dwight D. Eisenhower 484
John F. Kennedy 214
Lyndon B. Johnson 325
Richard Nixon 346
Gerald R. Ford 169
Jimmy Carter 320
Ronald Reagan 381
George Bush 166
William J. Clinton 364
George W. Bush 291
Barack Obama 256
The only presidents in the modern era to write fewer executive orders than Barack Obama were George Bush (Sr.), Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and John F. Kennedy; before that, you have to go back to William McKinley. All of them were one-term presidents; all of them were on track to write more than Obama's 256 if they had served a second term.

Joe the Plumber has apparently found a wingnut-welfare spot as Vice President of PR at the right-wing Liberty Alliance site. He's come out with this bit of wingnut wisdom: "Reverse the thousands of Executive Orders put in place by President Obama." Bozo.

Trump v. Cruz

Click here for an article by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic entitled "The Nasty Rise and Fall of Donald Trump (With the candidate flailing in the polls, some on the right are wondering if a better version of the man wouldn’t be winning. But that kinder, gentler Trump would’ve lost in the primaries)."

On the right, Ted Cruz saw back in 2010 that political conflict mattered most to a key faction of the Republican base. He was hated by colleagues in Washington, D.C. in large part because, time and again, he would shamelessly pick public fights with the GOP establishment to show off for the conservative base even when there was no substantive purpose to the fight.

Cruz’s performances won him many votes.

But he couldn’t compete with Trump, who had even less shame, and was prone to lashing out by instinct in addition to strategy.

(Slapping Forehead) Of Course! Billy Bush Was CIA!

No comment.

ALEX JONES (HOST): Gerald Celente’s coming up today, he hasn’t been on in months, I’m told that he’s wound up he has a big presentation he wants to put on showing Michelle Obama and her lauded speech against Trump for an edited 11-year-old tape which the Bush nephew admitted he goaded him into. Over an hour conversation. Had it snipped together into 3 minutes. Goading him and goading him, and tell me sex stories, tell me sex stories, it was all a set up folks. Him losing his job and all that’s just a foil to divert. That guy is CIA just like the sun came up this morning.

A Marco Rubio (Little Marco) Campaign Speech

Little Marco gave a speech (in Spanish) to an overwhelmingly Latino crowd in Orlando:

"I'm going to introduce a man who represents Latinos, no matter where you're from," the emcee boomed in Spanish. The boos grew louder still. "Ladies and gentlemen, the senator for the state of Florida, a Latino like you and me ... his name is Marco Rubio! Applaud!"

Instead, the boos rained down on the senator, drowning out what appeared to be a handful of supporters in the crowd.

"Thank you for having me today," Rubio said, also in Spanish. "I want you to enjoy this day. We're not going to talk about politics today. Thank God for this beautiful day, and for our freedom, our democracy, our vote, and our country. God bless you all, thank you very much."

At which point Little Marco scuttled off the stage.

Republicans Can't Escape By Calling It "Trumpism"

Click here for an another article at Crooks & Liars by Frances Langum entitled "Morning Joe Digs The Memory Hole: 'We're Calling It Trumpism.'" She reproduces a couple of tweets she made earlier this year:

Betcha MSM will be rebranding the Republican Party as "Not about Trump, who was an outlier" 6 months or less after this election.

And:

Watch particularly for the Beltway media to question Hillary Clinton's "mandate" after the election because Trump was such an "outlier." He wasn't. He was what the Republican voter chose to represent them, enthusiastically and overwhelmingly.

Sure enough, in the first video in Langum's article the panelists on Morning Joe try to pass off what's happening as an aberration they call "Trumpism." Then noted goat enthusiast Erick Erickson tweets:

On Nov 8, Clinton's claims of a mandate will fly in the face of reality. She only won by not being Trump.

Alex Jones, Trump Supporter

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars by Frances Langum entitled "Hey Everybody, Let's Watch Alex Jones Lose His Marbles!"

Here are the two video clips in the article:

Obama Reads Mean Tweets

I needed a break from plumbing the depths of the Internet, so click here for "President Obama Reads Mean Tweets on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!'"

Telegony

While Dumpster-diving into alt-right sites on the Internet, I came across the concept of "telegony." The word appears to be derived from the name of Odysseus's son, Telegonus. According to Wikipedia:

The idea of telegony goes back to Aristotle. It implies that the signs of the individual, not only inherited from his parents, but also from other males, from which his/her mother had a previous pregnancy [sic; that's ungrammatical].

Wikipedia goes on to say:

... the myth of telegony is fundamentally incompatible with our knowledge of genetics and the reproductive process. Encyclopedia Britannica stated "All these beliefs, from inheritance of acquired traits to telegony, must now be classed as superstitions."

Nevertheless, telegony influenced late 19th-century racialist discourse: a woman who had once had a child with a non-Aryan man, it was argued, could never have a "pure" Aryan child again. This idea was adopted by some Nazis for propaganda purposes.

And now it's being adopted by some alt-rights for propaganda purposes. The stuff I've read is much too vile for me to reproduce here. This campaign is going to get even uglier, folks.

*****

Oh, by the way, the alt-rights have adopted new slang terms so they can avoid having their rants blocked by online filters. Muslims are "Skittles," as used in Donald Trump Jr.'s tweet about a few Skittles among many being poison; Mexicans are "Yahoos"; Chinese people are "Bings"; Jews are "Skypes"; African-Americans are "Googles."

ATTENTION: TRUMP'S BASKET OF DEPLORABLES

There's an article, which I am not going to link to, at The Daily Stormer by Andrew Anglin entitled "A Normie's Guide to the Alt-Right." Here's Anglin's definition of "Normie":

“Normie” is a term used to refer to individuals who have not yet joined the Alt-Right, remaining trapped in the mental-prison of the Jewish system. These people are viewed as being incapable of objectively processing information, and will instead revert to programmed slogans whenever they are presented with ideas that conflict with their synthetic value system.

I've bookmarked The Daily Stormer. I have a bookmark tab I call "Wingnuts," which I check now and then to see what the extreme right are up to. It includes Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Drudge, PJ Media, World Net Daily, and other far-right sites. Under "Wingnuts," I have a subfolder I call "Beyond Wingnuttery," which includes The Daily Stormer and other nauseating, repellent sites. Anglin claims that The Daily Stormer gets more traffic than all other alt-right sites combined.

I've searched the article for the word "Trump," and here are the occurrences in the article, with some context:

The short story is that although the term [alt-right] could refer to a lot of different people saying a lot of different things, the people that it is being used to refer to by the media – Trump-supporting White racial advocates who engage in trolling an other activism on the internet – are the core of the movement, with any other groups and figures being peripheral.

The core concept of the movement, upon which all else is based, is that Whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred, and that the Jews are at the center of this agenda.

And:

I am going to layout [sic] here these various factions, and what ultimately led them toward this center-point where we have all met. The campaign of Donald Trump is effectively the nexus of that centerpoint.

And:

“White Genocide” refers to the idea, often supported by the UN’s Genocide Convention, that flooding White nations with non-Whites amounts to a form of calculated genocide against a racial group.

The Daily Stormer poster WhiteGenocideTM, who was cited in Hillary Clinton’s Alt-Right speech, was retweeted by Donald Trump, thus propelling the term into popular consciousness. Regrettably, there seems to be some confusion as to what the term means, with some (Clinton included, apparently) seemingly believing it is a call for Whites to commit a genocide(s), rather than drawing attention to the fact a genocide is being committed against us.

And:

If Trump wins, we are going to have an opportunity to directly influence his administration, if we organize ourselves properly and develop a cohesive constituency (the latter we already have, I’d estimate numbering at 4-6 million people).

If Trump loses, we are going to have an opportunity to very vocally blame the Jews for his loss, which will serve our purposes nearly as much as a Trump win.

Either way, the future is very bright.

UPDATE: Anglin quote from June 2016: “If The Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.”

Here's the "Pepe the Frog" image that fronts the article. There are other images that are so loathsome I'm not going to reproduce them:



The article is vile, disgusting -- and frightening. (And as always, if you think the article is disgusting, you'd be wise to avoid reading the comments.)

The alt-right is a thing, people, and it's aligned itself firmly with Trump. Sit up and pay attention.

This Is Getting Out Of Control

It's safe to elect Trump because if his alt-right followers judge that he has indeed gone all Hitler on us, they'll rise up and kill him? Seriously? This is America today?

I love Dilbert, but after following Scott Adams's blog for a while, thinking him to be a bit eccentric, I stopped when he got too far out for me. He's absolutely gone over the edge, as is shown in this article by Hunter at Daily Kos entitled "Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams: Elect Trump, and I'll 'help kill him' if he turns out 'Hitler-ish'." The article is short, so I've reproduced it here in full:

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams is a Trump supporter. Like most Trump supporters, he's quite certain Trump has been getting an unfair rap, what with people reacting negatively to all those things he keeps saying out loud.

So Adams would like to put your mind at ease about Trump in the most Trump Supporter way ever. Fine, let's hear him out on this one:

To me, those illusions about Trump are ridiculous on face value. I can’t change anyone’s mind if they see Trump as a monster. So instead I will make you a promise.

My promise: If Trump gets elected, and he does anything that looks even slightly Hitler-ish in office, I will join the resistance movement and help kill him. That’s an easy promise to make, and I hope my fellow citizens would use their Second Amendment rights to rise up and help me kill any Hitler-type person who rose to the top job in this country, no matter who it is.

So we can take a chance and elect Trump, and if Trump's white ultra-conservative supporters agree later on that he's gone out of control and is doing bad things According To Them? Why, they'll just rise up in armed revolution and topple the American government and everything will be fine again, you Trump-hating babies.

Yeah, let’s just leave that there. Not gonna touch that one. We’re out.

It certainly does give Trump's What have you got to lose? motto a bit of extra zing, though.

Trump's Incoherence

Trump is an astonishingly poor speaker. As pointed out on Quora by Kelly Martin, here's a Trump response during the third debate:

President Obama has moved millions of people out. Nobody knows about it, nobody talks about it. But under Obama, millions of people have been moved out of this country. They've been deported. She doesn't want to say that, but that's what's happened, and that's what happened big league. As far as moving these people out and moving ­­ we either have a country or we don't. We're a country of laws. We either have a border or we don't. Now, you can come back in and you can become a citizen. But it's very unfair. We have millions of people that did it the right way. They're on line. They're waiting. We're going to speed up the process, big league, because it's very inefficient. But they're on line and they're waiting to become citizens. Very unfair that somebody runs across the border, becomes a citizen, under her plan, you have open borders. You would have a disaster on trade, and you will have a disaster with your open borders.

Martin goes on to point out that the president must be diplomat-in-chief; diplomats don't talk like that. Good lord, what a rambling, disjointed word salad -- and it's typical Trump.

Rocky Road Ahead For Paul Ryan

A Breitbart article quotes Jonah Swann writing at The Hill:

A right-wing website closely tied to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is taking its war against House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to new levels.

Breitbart News on Saturday published as its lead story an article written by Julia Hahn, headlined: “He’s with her: Inside Paul Ryan’s months-long campaign to elect Hillary Clinton president.”

Accompanying the story is an image of a grinning Ryan beside the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign slogan, “I’m with her.”

The piece is brutal even by the standards of Breitbart’s proudly scorched-earth approach to journalism, asserting that Ryan “leads the pro-Islamic migration wing of the Republican party.”

The 2,800-word attack on Ryan comes amid a concerted strategy by the pro-Trump nationalist wing of the GOP to ensure Ryan isn’t re-elected Speaker in January.

Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and the rest of the alt-right boys want blood -- Ryan's.

Who Would Have Guessed?

Disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker to his TV audience:

“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he said. “But I have eyewitnesses. Donald Trump is a very tender man and he weeps. He wants to please God more than anything else.”

He also said:

“God has called, I believe, Donald Trump."

Poll Predicts Clinton Blowout, 52% To 35% Over Trump

Click here for an article at -- the Daily Caller, of all places? (I wouldn't normally encourage people to visit The Daily Caller.) The author is Eric Owens.

The clickbait teaser at the Daily Caller site is "This Presidential Poll Has Forecast Every Election Since 1960. The 2016 Winner Is..." I clicked, assuming it would forecast Trump to be the winner. Surprise, surprise!

The poll seems goofy: It samples "About 153,000 students ranging from kindergarten through 12th grade ..." It's called the Scholastic News Student Vote, and the kids' votes are probably strongly influenced by views their parents hold.

Scientific and credible? No -- but:

Scholastic has conducted its national presidential poll among students every four years since 1940. Since it was introduced, the poll has been wrong only twice. In 1948, America’s students picked Thomas Dewey, who lost to Harry Truman. In 1960, students picked Richard Nixon, who lost a very close election to John F. Kennedy.

Picking Nixon over Kennedy and Dewey over Truman are not exactly outlandish picks; those were two of the closest elections in American history (and there are credible allegations that the election was fraudulently won with the help of Joseph P. Kennedy's political cronies, like the notoriously corrupt Richard J. Daley in Chicago.

Anyway, the poll predicts a 52% victory for Clinton; Trump draws 35%. Clinton not only wins Florida and Ohio, but takes Republican strongholds Georgia, Texas, and Alaska. Out of the mouths of babes? Let's hope!

"President Trump's First Term"

Click here for an excellent article in The New Yorker by Evan Osnos entitled "President Trump’s First Term."

It's a long read, but well worthwhile. It simply covers too much -- and has too many great parts to quote -- to begin to do it justice. Read it!

Unequal Senate Representation

According to 2015 estimates, the population of the U.S. is 320,746,592.

The five biggest states, by population, are California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois. Combined population: 119,540,990. Number of U.S. senators: 10. Each senator represents approximately 12 million people.

The five smallest states, by population, are Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Combined population: 3,565,977 (about the population of Connecticut). Number of U.S. senators: 10. Each senator represents approximately 350,000 people.

*****

Adding the five next-most-populous states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan, the ten most populous states have a combined population of 174,137,154. Number of U.S. senators: 20. Each senator represents approximately 8.5 million people.

The five next-least-populous states are Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Maine, and New Hampshire. The ten least populous states have a combined population of 9,261,094 (about the population of New Jersey). Number of U.S. senators: 20. Each senator represents approximately 460,000 people.

*****

So 350,000 people have the same senate representation as 12,000,000 people; 460,000 people have the same representation as 8,500,000 people. This imbalance obviously gives greatly outsized political power to rural (mostly white) voters, at the expense of urban voters, more diverse in ethnicity.

U.S. Racism - Massacre In Ocoee, Florida, 1920

Click here for a thoughtful, penetrating essay on racism in the U.S. today by Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida in Gainseville, FL., entitled "Ocoee, Florida: Remembering 'the single bloodiest day in modern U.S. political history'." There's a great deal more to the article, but in relation to Ocoee (about 15 miles northwest of Orlando), it says:

In the midst of a national euphoria of forgetting, a town called Ocoee, Florida has taken the bold step of remembering an event in the nation's history that many had tried to cover up. On Election Day, November 2, 1920 African Americans in Ocoee and in other parts of Florida sought to cast their ballots for President.

...

State and local officials -- along with the Ku Klux Klan -- understood that white supremacy was in trouble. They responded mercilessly. African Americans who tried to go to the polls were attacked, driven out of the state, and assassinated. In several counties, armed Klansmen surrounded courthouses on Election Day to ensure that black Floridians did not vote. In Ocoee, a well-organized group of paramilitaries killed and drove African Americans out of the town. Houses were torched, and refugees streamed out of western Orange County for days.

Ocoee shared much in common with the thousands of other places in America that author James Lowen refers to as "sundown towns." These were areas where white residents colluded to drive African Americans out through coercion and violence in order to steal their land and resources.

Sundown towns were found in every state of the union and most of them were located outside of the South. Some of these all-white municipalities posted signs reading "'n----r' don't let the sun go down on you here," for generations. A resident of Ocoee wrote in 1969, "As recently as ten years ago a sign admonished the Ocoee visitor as he approached the city limits that Negroes and dogs were unwelcome."

Orange County kept the Election Day Riot under wraps. "The position among the old core of the community was: `Let's just not talk about it. What good will it do?'" remembered Rev. Bryan Stamper, the minister of St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in Ocoee. A critical step forward was taken when area resident--and future mayor -- Lester J. Dabbs pierced the veil of silence by writing his 1969 Stetson University M.A. thesis on the 1920 conflagration. Dabbs's work was titled, "A Report of the Circumstances and Events of the Race Riot on November 2, 1920 in Ocoee, Florida."

And:

Florida's Election Day in 1920 was the single bloodiest day in modern American political history. African Americans throughout Florida who were trying to register as well as to vote were beaten, driven out of their home counties, and assassinated.

Another quote from the essay: "I'm sorry, but anyone who claims we live in a post-racial era is a damn fool."

More From The Right-Wing Fever Swamp

Click here for more delusionary fantasy from Breitbart's Julia Hahn.

Anti-Ryan Screed On Breitbart

Click here for a Breitbart article by Julia Hahn setting out the alt-right's (and therefore Trump's) vitriolic enmity tward Paul Ryan.

Trump According To His Biographers

Click here for an outstanding article at Politico, October 12, 2016, by Susan B. Glasser (editor) and Michael Kruse (senior staff writer) entitled "I Think He’s a Very Dangerous Man for the Next Three or Four Weeks."

It's an interview with five Donald Trump biographers: Wayne Barrett, Gwenda Blair, Michael D’Antonio, Harry Hurt and Timothy O’Brien. Between them, they had written 2,195 pages on Trump.

... the biographers were unanimous in their assessment of what we are seeing: They are not surprised. Trump is who they thought he was. This, they said, is not a show. It is not an act. This is the man they wrote about. In 1992. In 1993. In 1999. In 2005. In 2015. This is a man who has been one of the most famous people in America for going on 40 years. Only now, though, are many people, finally, really, getting to know Donald John Trump.

He is, the biographers said, “profoundly narcissistic,” “willing to go to lengths we’ve never seen before in order to satisfy his ego”—and “a very dangerous man for the next three or four weeks.” And after that? “This time, it’s going to be a straight‑out loss on the biggest stage he’s ever been on,” one biographer predicted. And yet: “As long as he’s remembered, maybe it won’t matter to him.”

None of them were surprised by the Billy Bush tape; they all thought Trump was a sexual predator, although none of the women they dealt with (including Ivana and Marla, the ex-wives) were willing to go on the record.

At a Vanity Fair party in the ’90s, Trump was seated next to Vendela Kirsebom, a Swedish model: "And about halfway through the dinner, she comes running up to him quasi-hysterical because she can’t handle sitting next to Trump any longer because of all of his lewd behavior."

Kruse: Do you all think he is driven more by lust or by fame?

Barrett: I think this is almost nothing to do with lust. This is subjugation.

O’Brien: Right. It’s acquisition.

Barrett: This has almost nothing to do with sex. This is a total power move if you’re talking about “I can plunge my tongue down any mouth I see. I just make my move quickly.”

O’Brien: After doing a round of power Tic Tacs.

Blair: As we all know, he is popping Tic Tacs all the time, but it’s just the analog behavior to how he is with men in any room—looking to dominate, being competitive, looking for a way to be in charge. And for women, I think for him, there’s really only one way to be in charge, and that is to dominate, and if possible, you know, some physical aggression isn’t off the table.

Barrett: I think we’ve got a very good preview of what the next several weeks will be like in the debate last night. I thought when he literally prowled the platform or the stage last night, we got a picture of what it’s like in his bedroom while he’s tweeting at 3 a.m. He was barking in the ugliest fashion, saying the ugliest things. And from the moment he got out there, he played the role of a victim. He now considers himself a victim of the national media, primarily, and a bit of the Republican establishment that abandoned him overnight, and I think he’s a very dangerous man for the next three or four weeks.

We have seen what kind of polarization he can evoke over the course of 15 or 16 months, but I’m afraid that he’s going to attempt to deepen that in profound ways in the coming weeks. As recently as the convention, he tried to cool down those who said “lock her up,” and now he’s saying he would lock her up and even describing the way in which he would do it.

So I think that what is really dangerous is, over the course of the next few weeks, he’s going to push every button he can, and the primary button that he can push is racism. That’s been the undercurrent of the campaign throughout. Believe it or not, you can be more explicit about it than he has been so far, and he may well go down that path. And it’s a very dangerous time because he has still a substantial number of Americans who support him, and where he takes them is really quite threatening.

Tere's much, much more; very interesting reading.

The World According To Alex Jones

Click here for a long, straight interview of Alex Jones by John H. Richardson for Esquire magazine.

You may be interested to know that Hillary is actually, literally, a demon:



Here he is being interviewed on BBC. It's about 9.5 minutes; jump forward to the 8-minute mark or so; he really goes off the rails at about 8:55:

Dave (The Coach) Daubenmire Goes Over The Edge; Klingenschmitt Close Behind

He's not the only right-wing religious flake that believes Hillary is coming to kill them all:

Click here for an article about how another lunatic from the same asylum, a Colorado state representative named Gordon Klingenschmitt, tells everyone he's in great health, so if anything happens to him, people should know it's Hillary.

Insisting that he was not alleging that her campaign had Scalia murdered but was simply providing the information so that viewers could draw their own conclusions, Klingenschmitt then dedicated the following segment to reading off a list of names of 53 people with supposed ties to the Clintons who have allegedly died under mysterious circumstances.

After reading the list, Klingenschmitt insisted that he was not drawing any conclusions and was simply reporting the “facts” that dozens of people with ties to the Clinton have wound up dead … and then proceeded to speculate that Clinton was tied to the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Scalia.

“It is interesting that John Kennedy Jr., his plane exploded in mid-air just before Hillary Clinton announced that she was running for senator in New York,” he said. “What’s the timing on that? And now Justice Scalia? What’s the timing on that? Three days after Hillary’s campaign manager talks about ‘wet works’ and the reply comes, ‘Buckle down for the weekend’ and then Scalia dies with a pillow over his head? Interesting. How do they know about these things?”

10 Megadonors Donate $200 Million To Super PACs

Click here for an article by Stephen Wolf at Daily Kos entitled "Just 10 mega-donors are responsible for one-fifth of all super PAC donations in the 2016 elections."

A recent Washington Post report finds that a mere 10 mega-donor individuals or couples are responsible for a staggering 20 percent of the $1.1 billion that super PACs had raised in the 2016 election cycle by the end of August. Following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, these groups have been able to raise unlimited sums from individuals and corporations, but this fundraising total far exceeds the $853 million that Super PACs raised for all of 2012—and it doesn’t yet include the last two months of this year’s campaign.

While the donations were mostly to the Republican party, billionaire Tom Steyer donated $38 million to the Democrats; Michael Bloomberg split his $20.2 million in donations between the two parties and various ballot measures. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were the largest Republican donors, giving a total of $21.5 million. The Koch brothers are noticeably absent from the list, though it's unclear how much they may have contributed through their massive fundraising network.

Citizens United isn’t responsible for everything wrong with our politics, but letting the ultra-rich dominate the conversation has done a lot of damage when their policy views are far out of sync with the general public’s. If every citizen’s voice should matter equally in a democracy, that simply cannot happen when one donor can write a check for tens of millions while most voters don’t—and many can’t—donate at all. Fortunately, if Democrats win the presidency and Senate in 2016, they are poised to install a new Supreme Court majority that could overturn Citizens United and allow us to start passing some meaningful new campaign finance restrictions.

WaPo Fact-Checks Third Presidential Debate

Click here for an article by Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Leein the Washington Post entitled "Fact-checking the third Clinton-Trump presidential debate." It analyzes 24 statements made by the two candidates. It's not easy reading; they get out into the weeds quite a bit in complicated explanations. Short form: Trump lies a lot.

Here's another take, from Max Boot at USA Today, in an article entitled "The GOP may not survive the Trump takeover":

No, Donald, the State Department did not “lose” $6 billion; it is missing paperwork, not money. No, you did not oppose the Iraq War in advance. No, we do not take better care of illegal immigrants than we do of veterans. No, NATO members are not spending more on defense because of your threats to leave NATO; it’s because they fear Russian aggression. No, NAFTA has not been a “disaster”; it’s been an economic boon for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. No, the numerous women accusing you of groping them have not been “largely debunked”; they’ve been defamed by you and your surrogates, which is not the same thing. No, it’s not an open question as to “whether it is Russia, China or anybody else” that is hacking into Democratic Party emails; the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia is responsible. No, Aleppo has not “fallen”; that embattled Syrian city continues to resist an onslaught from the Assad and Putin regimes.

#Trump'sBookReports

Trump's clueless answers to questions he obviously knows nothing about (see triad, nuclear) have spawned a treasure trove of satirical tweets. One such answer is set out at Daily Kos by Mark Sumner:

For example, here’s Trump discussing the D.C. v. Heller case—and keep in mind that Trump has already been given the name of the case, knows that Hillary didn’t like the outcome, that the subject was the Second Amendment, and that Scalia was involved:

"Well, the D.C. versus Heller decision was very strongly, and she was extremely angry about it. I watched, and she was very, very angry when upheld, and Justice Scalia was so involved, and it was a well-crafted decision, but Hillary was extremely upset, extremely angry, and people that believe in the Second Amendment, and believe in it very strongly, were very upset with what she had to say."

Click here for an amusing article by Aja Romano entitled "Good times, bad times: #Trump'sBookReport's hilariously simplified reading list," a compilation of people's tweets suggesting how Trump would write a book report for a book he hadn't written, inspired by tweets like the one from a St. Louis city alderman, Antonio French, saying:

Trump's foreign policy answers sound like a book report from a teenager who hasn't read the book. "Oh, the grapes! They had so much wrath!"

Some of my favorites:

A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. I NEVER SAID IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES!

A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens.This guy ... crazy. He couldn't even work out if it was the best of times or the worst. Total loser. Sad.

Noah's Ark: Noah was so bad. I'll deport the animals. All the animals love me. I'll build a beautiful ark. God will pay for the ark.

To Kill a Mockingbird: Hillary had 30 years To Kill A Mockingbird, and she failed. A disaster! I know mockingbirds, I'll launch a sneak attack.

To Kill A Mockingbird: To Kill a Mockingbird? Nobody kills Mockingbirds better than me. I will kill the families of Mockingbirds. Believe me.

Hamlet: Hamlet was weak, so weak. He couldn't make up his mind. I can, believe me. I've made up my mind very much better than him.

The Hunger Games: The Hunger Games are rigged, folks. Everyone knows Katniss won because she played the woman card. Nasty woman. Very rigged.

War and Peace: I didn't support the war and there's no evidence Russia is involved in this story.

Romeo and Juliet: Juliet. Such a nasty woman. She made Romeo kill himself. And believe me he could have done better. Look at her.

The Great Gatsby: You're telling me that Gatsby is great? Wrong. Terrible driver. Weird parties. No, he's not great. Trust me folks.

Dracula: Dracula never attacked those women. No proof. Did you see what they looked like. Anemic for sure.

Green Eggs and Ham: do not like green eggs and ham. They bring drugs, they bring crime. They're rapists. I do not like them, Sam I Am.

There are more at #TrumpBookReports. For example:

Sleeping Beauty: The Prince just started kissing her. Didn't even ask. When you're a prince they let you do it.

Moby Dick: I never said you could call me Ishmael. Total lie. We've got top people on the Pequod. Whales are no problem.

Harry Potter: Voldemort. Great leader. Winning temperament. Respected by the Wizardly world other than that LOSER Harry & friends.

Anna Karenina: I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.

Little Women: Should have called it Little Pigs. All of them disgusting, SAD

Pinocchio: He's a liar. A li-ar. Crooked Pinocchio calls me a puppet. I'm not a puppet-- no puppet. You're the puppet.

Winnie the Pooh...don't get me started. Low energy. Lazy. Overweight & no stamina. Always eating. He should be drug tested.

The Odyssey: I was against the war in Troy. Ask Hannity. And Helen was maybe a 6. She wouldn't have been my first choice, believe me.

Waiting for Godot: I'm telling you folks, if I were in charge, we wouldn't have waited for Godot. I would've found him in 5 minutes.

Wuthering Heights: Those poor heights. They were wuthering. Wuthering so bad. Bigly wuthering. I'll make them great again.

Third Debate: Trump TV Launches

Click here for what Mother Jones says appears to be the launch of Trump TV:

There's a "news crawl," broadcast graphics, pretty decent audio, campaign ads, and a 200,000-plus audience.

It has video of the debate, and then there's a whole bunch of "discussion" and "analysis" by Trump toadies crowing about how Trump was completely victorious. (Two scientific polls score it 52:39 and 49:39 for Hillary.)

Trump's Malign Influencers

Click here for a horrendous, unbelievable article about the insanity of some of Trump's advisers on the wingnut fringe.

The first video clip is a 33-minute interview of Trump by Jones. But the rest of the article points out some of the insanity of Jones, and then discusses, with video clips, other lunatics associated with Trump: Michael Savage (real name, Michael Weiner; fifth-largest talk radio host in the country), Ann Coulter, Carl Gallups, Robert Jeffress, and James David Manning. (Yeah, I know; some of them are new to me too. But they make interesting reading, for sure.)

Trump's Empty Boasts

Click here for an article by Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune entitled "Nobody is more skeptical of Donald Trump's boasts than I am."

In chronological order, Zorn presents 13 of Trump's boasts, in the primaries or the general:

"I know more about ISIS (the Islamic State militant group) than the generals do. Believe me." — Nov. 12, 2015

"Nobody knows jobs like I do." — Jan. 8, 2016

"I know more about foreign policy than anybody running." — Feb. 9, 2016

"Nobody reads the Bible more than me." — Feb. 24, 2016

"Nobody knows more about trade than me." — March 3, 2016

"Nobody knows the (visa) system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me." — March 10, 2016

"I've studied (the Iran deal) in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anyone else." — March 21, 2016

"I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth." — April 13, 2016

"Nobody knows more about taxes than I do — maybe in the history of the world." — May 11, 2016

"There is nobody who understands the horror of nuclear more than me." — June 15, 2016

"I understand money better than anybody," — June 21, 2016

"Nobody knows debt better than me." — June 22, 2016

"Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump." — July 16, 2016

In the words of Bugs Bunny: "What a maroon. What an ultramaroon."

Don't Ignore The Alt-Right: They're Dangerous

Click here for an article by Sarah Posner at Rolling Stone entitled "Meet the Alt-Right 'Spokesman' Who's Thrilled With Trump's Rise."

The "Spokesman" in the title is "... Richard Spencer, a trim and tidily dressed 38-year-old with grandiose ambitions to usher in a white "ethno-state." Spencer was appearing with "... Jared Taylor, the founder of the website American Renaissance, which promotes faux science claiming that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, and Peter Brimelow, who once wrote for Forbes and National Review before founding VDare, an anti-immigrant site ..."

Spencer's views on women:

Spencer says he guesses women comprise only about a fifth of the Alt-Right – an imbalance that's obvious at the gathering, where there appears to be only one female follower amid the dozen or so men who cycle in and out.

No matter. Spencer tends to see women as manipulative figures who are best when submitting to Alt-Right virility. Women, he tweeted during the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump, "should never be allowed to make foreign policy. It's not that they're 'weak.' To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds."

Over drinks, he suggests that most women secretly crave Alt-Right boyfriends because they want "alpha genes" and "alpha sperm."

...

More recently, in a podcast recorded after the exposure of the so-called Trump tape, Spencer scoffed at the "puritanical" criticism of Trump, saying it's "ridiculous" to call what Trump was talking about sexual assault. "At some part of every woman's soul," he said, "they want to be taken by a strong man."

Spencer loves Donald Trump:

Spencer has become more enthused as Trump has ramped up his claims about how his campaign represents an "existential threat" to "global special interests." After Trump's widely criticized speech in West Palm Beach last week, during which the GOP nominee alleged a "conspiracy" against the American people led by a "global power structure," Spencer tweeted, "The shackles are off, and Trump is getting radical. We've never seen a major postwar politician talk like this." He later amplified his appreciation of what he characterized as Trump "demystifying 'racism' and the financial power structure," concluding, "No matter what happens, I will be profoundly grateful to Donald Trump for the rest of my life."

He also loves Putin (and, apparently, Napoleon):

He also discusses why he supports Trump, and their shared respect for Vladimir Putin. "I admire Putin too," he says. "Who wouldn't?"

"I love empire, I love power, I love achievement," he goes on, growing animated. Spencer loves imperialism so much, he says, that he'll sometimes "get a boner" reading about Napoleon.

Spencer reveals the true, pustulent heart of the Republican party:

Trump, Spencer believes, has exposed the Republican Party's id. "The Trump phenomenon expresses a fundamental truth," he says. "It's an unspoken truth, and that is that the Republican Party has won elections on the basis of implicit nationalism and not on the basis of the Constitution, free-market economics, vague Christian values and so on. Even a leftist would agree with that statement. Like, Trump has shown the hand of the GOP. The GOP is a white person's populist party." Unlike Trump, though, the party is "embarrassed of itself."

Some more of the philosophy of the alt-right:

The Alt-Right, Spencer says, "opposes the basic ideas behind the Civil Rights Act." He's called Martin Luther King Jr. "the god of white dispossession," the latter being one of the Alt-Right's major obsessions. True "shitlords" [a term of high praise among the alt-right] are gripped by the fear that white people in America are being "dispossessed" by immigration and multi-culturalism, to the point that they face an imminent "white genocide." Spencer has called anti-discrimination laws "the enemy of all tradition, not just the Anglo-Saxon American society it has helped destroy."

Finally, Spencer's vision for the future:

Building a movement strong enough to reshape American politics by organizing anonymous racists on Twitter would be without precedent – but Trump's rise to the top of the Republican presidential ticket makes it seem, to Spencer, deliciously plausible. "It might not happen in my lifetime," Spencer says, "but yes, people like me are going to define the civilization. Because we've done it in the past, and we're the ones who want to rule."

Infowars: Alex Jones' Insane Raving

Click here for an Alex Jones rant on Monday, October 17. This is the kind of stuff Donald Trump listens to.

Trump DOES Have A Basket Of Deplorables

Click here for an article at Mother Jones by Sarah Posner and David Neiwert entitled "How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream." It's said to be "the full story of his connection with far-right extremists."

Trump rode down the escalator and into the presidential race in June of 2015, whereupon: "

I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President," wrote Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, 12 days later. Anglin, a 32-year-old skinhead who wears an Aryan "Black Sun" tattoo on his chest and riffs about the inferior "biological nature" of black people, hailed Trump as "the only candidate who is even talking about anything at all that matters."

Other Trump supporters prominent in the alt-right world include Kevin MacDonald, "a 70-year-old silver-haired former academic who edits the Occidental Observer, which the Anti-Defamation League calls "online anti-Semitism's new voice," and Peter Brimelow, editor of the anti-immigrant site VDare.com. "The thing that delighted us the most," [Brimelow] wrote, was Trump's plan to close "the 'Anchor Baby' loophole," denying citizenship to the American-born children of immigrants—a policy that Brimelow said he had been advocating for more than a decade. Another is Jared Taylor, "who runs a white nationalist website called American Renaissance and once founded a think tank dedicated to "scientifically" proving white superiority." Taylor says that "Trump was the first presidential candidate from a major party ever to earn his support because Trump 'is talking about policies that would slow the dispossession of whites. That is something that is very important to me and to all racially conscious white people.'"

There are others: "Don Black, a former grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the neo-Nazi site Stormfront; Rocky Suhayda, chair of the American Nazi Party; and Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, the successor to David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Richard Spencer, an emerging leader among a new generation of white nationalists known as the "alt right," declared that Trump "loves white people."

"The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions," Pendergraft told us. "They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will."

There's much more; it's a long, interesting read.

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Mark Sumner entitled "Donald Trump has turned the GOP into the racist alt-right." It includes the following quotes:

"I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President," wrote Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, 12 days later. Anglin, a 32-year-old skinhead who wears an Aryan "Black Sun" tattoo on his chest and riffs about the inferior "biological nature" of black people, hailed Trump as "the only candidate who is even talking about anything at all that matters."

And:

Trump "may be the last hope for a president who would be good for white people," remarked Jared Taylor, who runs a white nationalist website called American Renaissance and once founded a think tank dedicated to "scientifically" proving white superiority. Taylor told us that Trump was the first presidential candidate from a major party ever to earn his support because Trump "is talking about policies that would slow the dispossession of whites. That is something that is very important to me and to all racially conscious white people."

Trump's Infowars-type Conspiracy Theory

I copied this from Daily Kos, but couldn't make out the source:

At a rally in Florida yesterday, he [Trump] stated, "Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plan the destruction of global sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers."

A Good Article By Thomas Friedman (?!)

I'm not a Thomas Friedman fan. However, his article in the October 13 issue of The New York Times made some points I agree with. I chuckled at his opening: "If only our national election had been pay-per-view for the rest of the world, we could have wiped out the national debt." Then he asks if America is going to get effective government as a result of this election; I fear the answer is no.

If we will have indulged in almost two years of electoral entertainment and pathos just to end up back where we were, only worse, with even more venomous gridlock in Washington, it won't just be emotionally depressing, we'll really start to decline as a nation.

I'm sad to say that that may indeed be the outcome.

For starters, this version of the Republican Party has to die.

Well, well -- maybe Friedman gets it! The toxic state of affairs in Washington today is not a both-sides-do-it, 50:50 proposition, where both Republicans and Democrats are to blame: The Republican party is the problem. In the words of political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their 2012 book "It's Even Worse Than it Looks":

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Friedman says:

We have known that ever since the G.O.P. speaker of the House John Boehner quit, not because he couldn't work with President Obama but because roughly a quarter of House Republicans, the so-called Freedom Caucus, were simply not interested in governing and had made his job impossible.

That's a true statement; Boehner was forced out by a recalcitrant mob of bomb-throwers in his caucus. His relationship with "the so-called Freedom Caucus" was fraught from the beginning, when the bomb-throwers were elected in the Republican wave election of 2014. The problems came to a boil over the extremists' determination to defund Planned Parenthood on the issue of horrific -- and fraudulent -- anti-abortion videos; the result was likely to be yet another fruitless Republican-engineered shutdown of the government. Paul Ryan became Speaker and was able to mollify the "Freedom Caucus" and get them to drop their demands. However, the phrase "not because he couldn't work with President Obama" air-brushes the fact that Boehner couldn't -- or rather wouldn't -- work with President Obama. From the evening of Obama's inauguration, the Republicans saw obstruction to be their most effective strategy against the new president. They proceeded to attempt to thwart Obama's every move; some members even voted against bills they themselves had introduced, simply because Obama expressed approval for them. Friedman continues (and I must express my approval):

For the sake of the country, this version of the Republican Party has to be fractured with the extreme far right going off with the likes of Donald Trump, the Tea Party, Ted Cruz -- along with all the right-wing TV and radio gasbags who thrive on chaos -- leaving behind a moderate center-right bloc, which, one hopes, one day would become the new G.O.P.

To Friedman's list, I would add David Duke and his buddies in the KKK, the neo-Nazi/white supremacist/white nationalist/Pepe the Frog alt-right -- might one call them a "basket of deplorables"? Friedman goes on to stress that for the good of the country, it is imperative that Clinton win in a landslide, along with majorities in the Senate and the House. Trumpism must be completely and utterly crushed, so that its sad, malicious, anti-American proponents are conclusively shown to be outside the American mainstream. I'd love to see a Clinton presidency with a Democratic majority in the House and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate; then a lot of good things could be accomplished. As Friedman puts it:

... putting in place common-sense gun laws, like restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, requiring universal background checks [eliminating the gun-show and Internet loopholes] and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun; borrowing money at near-zero interest rates to rebuild our infrastructure; replacing some income and corporate taxes with a revenue-neutral carbon tax to stimulate more clean-energy production; fixing Obamacare [which can't be done under present circumstances, since Republicans have no interest whatever in improving Obamacare; they do not want to see it succeed]; and implementing sensible immigration reform and responsible tax and entitlement reforms [like lifting the $106,000 Social Security Wage Base limit].

Friedman again:

The nightmare scenario -- ruling out, God forbid, a Trump victory -- is that Clinton wins with a slim majority and the G.O.P. holds the House and the Senate. The Democratic left would have a stranglehold on Clinton [?] while Trump, who would start his own TV network and movement, would keep the Republican base in a state of permanent anger, intimidating every Republican lawmaker who contemplated compromise [in other words, the status quo for the past seven years]. If that happens, America will be adrift.

In his final paragraphs, Friedman covers the strange and unsettling Trump/Putin bromance and the apparent Russian attempts to manipulate the election in Trump's favor. Good work, Tom.

Click here for an article in the Washington Post by Ishaan Tharoor entitled "Trump and Pence's opposition to Syrian refugees is based on a huge lie." Trump and Pence are conflating the situation in Europe, where there is far less opportunity to vet the flood of refugees pouring in, to that in America, where there is a very thorough vetting process.

The Strange And Terrible Saga Of Police Chief Mark Kessler

WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK! (Obscenities)

Watch this video for an introduction to the 2nd Amendment world of Mark Kessler (aka "the shooty shouty sheriff"), police chief of Gilberton, a small town in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia:


And here's a Youtube video posted by the good sheriff:


And here's a followup he posted some time later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UubTrNKYf-8

There's a whole bunch more interesting stuff on the Internet about the shooty shouty sheriff; Google it.

But he was actually working undercover to attract and expose militia groups!

Worst Week In Politics - For Anyone, Ever?

 Click here for the article by Think Progress editor-in-chief Judd Legum entitled "Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week."

Just before the first debate, legendary pollster Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight was giving Trump 50:50 odds of winning the election; it had been a steady decline for Clinton, who hit a high of 85:15 after the terrible Republican and tremendous Democratic conventions. Team Trump were downright giddy. Then came this:

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

4:45 PM: Washington Post releases report raising questions about the Trump Foundation.

9:00 PM: First presidential debate begins.

9:35 PM: Trump effectively admits paying no federal income taxes, brags about it. [Trump pays no federal taxes? "That makes me smart."]

10:21 PM: Trump gets cornered after repeating lie that he opposed the Iraq War, begs media to call Sean Hannity.

10:35 PM: Trump defends calling Alicia Machado, former Miss Universe, “Miss Piggy.” [And "Miss Housekeeping" -- she's Latina.]

11:44 PM: CNN poll shows viewers overwhelmingly thought Clinton won the debate. [62:27]

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

12:34 AM — 2:23 AM: Trump dismisses CNN poll, promotes unscientific internet polls showing him winning the debate. [They're "fan polls," where you can literally vote ten, a hundred, or a thousand times; or at the very least, you can vote from your iPhone, your iPad, your notebook, your desktop, and the computer at the library -- and really, a poll conducted on the Breitbart site? How many Hillary supporters are ever going to see that poll?]

7:09 AM: Trump renews his attack on beauty queen Alicia Machado, says she “gained a massive amount of weight.” [Phoning it in to his airhead buddies on the curvy couch at "Fox & Friends" -- you can see the consternation on their vapid faces -- why is he doing this?]

11 AM: White Nationalist leader David Duke defends Trump’s debate performance, calls him “our candidate.” [He has Pepe the Frog and the Basket of Deplorables vote wrapped up.]

9:07 PM: The Arizona Republic, which has never endorsed a Democrat since it began publishing in 1890, endorses Hillary Clinton.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

8:30 AM: Forbes reports that Trump’s net worth has fallen by $800 million in the last year.

8:07 PM: Trump continues his attacks on Machado: “It is a beauty contest. They know what they are getting into.” [He just can't leave it alone: Trump will be Trump.]

9:00 PM: Trump accuses Google of suppressing “bad news” about Hillary Clinton. [Searches at Yahoo.com, for instance, auto-complete "Hillary Clinton cr" to "Hillary Clinton criminal"; Google doesn't. Turns out Google's algorithm is programmed not to auto-complete any search with disparaging terms such as "criminal"; it has nothing to do with Clinton favoritism.]

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29

5:42 AM: Newsweek reports that Trump violated the Cuba embargo. [A Trump company secretly did business in Cuba; illegal, of course.]

8:22 AM: LA Times reports that Trump tried to fire women who worked at his golf club who weren’t pretty enough.

11 AM: Trump’s campaign manager accidentally confirms that Trump did violate the Cuba embargo. [Thank you, Kellyanne Conway, who said it wasn't fair to go back to 1988.]

11:15 AM: Marco Rubio, Republican candidate for Senate in the key state of Florida, says he’s “deeply concerned” about reports Trump violated the Cuba embargo. ["Little Marco" still supports him, though -- while twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.]

4 PM: Trump falsely accuses the FBI of giving “immunity” to Hillary Clinton.

7:34 PM: A member of the Wall Street Journal’s notoriously conservative editorial board endorses Hillary Clinton. [Dorothy Rabinowitz says of Hillary: "She alone stands between America and the reign of the most unstable, unfit president in U.S. history." The Wall Street Journal editorial board? Et tu, Brute?]

7:45 PM: Days after renouncing birtherism, Trump tells New Hampshire reporter he’s “very proud” of it.

9:15 PM: Trump says Angela Merkel is the foreign leader he most admires. He’s spent much of the campaign trashing Merkel and comparing her to Hillary. [He pronounces it "Anjela"; he has said she is "ruining" Germany.]

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30

12:54 AM: USA Today’s editorial board, which has never taken sides in a presidential election, declares Trump “unfit to be president.” [That's the newspaper with by far the biggest circulation in the country, almost double #2, the Wall Street Journal.]

5:30 AM: Trump calls Machado “disgusting,” encourages his supporters to search for her “sex tape.” [There is no Machado "sex tape" -- but check out The Donald's sex tape, referenced below.]

2:39 PM: Trump defends early morning tweets, says they show he’s ready to be president. [Because when that famous 3 a.m. call comes and he's faced with a nuclear emergency, he'll be up and ready with his phone in his hand!]

5:39 PM: BuzzFeed reports that Trump appeared in a softcore porn movie. [He breaks a bottle of champagne on a Playboy-branded limo while several of the Playmates are visiting New York City. "Other scenes from the film feature fully nude women posing in sexual positions, dancing naked, touching themselves while naked, touching each other sensually, rubbing honey on themselves, taking a bath, and dressing in costumes." No actual nudity by The Donald himself, apparently -- which is just as well, considering his small hands.]

6:30 PM: Trump says election could be rigged, tells supporters to monitor polling places for voter fraud.

6:45 PM: Trump releases ad featuring Ivanka Trump to appeal to women. It includes the line: “The most important job a woman can have is being a mother.” [That'll win the working women's votes, for sure.]

7 PM: Trump demands Obama promise not to pardon Clinton, which would be impossible since Clinton has not been charged with or convicted of a crime.

8:30 PM: Washington Post releases another damaging report about the Trump Foundation. [The Trump foundation is ordered to stop soliciting money.]

9 PM: Trump calls New York Times, promises to get “nasty.” [Does the word "Monica" ring a bell? And Donald, have you heard of glass houses?]

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1

9:15 PM: The New York Times reveals Trump’s 1995 tax return, which shows $915 million loss. [Which could allow him to pay no federal income tax for the next 18 years.]

9:45 PM: Trump mocks Hillary Clinton’s bout with pneumonia, pantomimes her stumbling into her car. [Remember him mocking the disabled reporter?]

10:15 PM: Trump says Hillary Clinton “could actually be crazy.” [Do you know the meaning of the word "projection," Donald?]

10:30 PM: Trump accuses Hillary Clinton of cheating on her husband. [Without a shred of evidence, or even rumor; I haven't seen this suggested on the slimiest of wingnut sites -- and I hold my breath and check on them from time to time, then immediately shower.]

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2

9:06 AM: Trump adviser Chris Christie says the report of him not paying taxes is “a very good story” for Trump. [Great stuff, Chris! Keep it coming!]

9:08 AM: Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani calls Trump a “genius” for not paying taxes. [Great stuff, Rudy! Keep it coming!]

8 PM: LeBron James, a hero in the key state of Ohio, endorses Hillary Clinton. [He's "King James" in Ohio.]

MONDAY, OCTOBER 3

3:26 AM: The AP releases detailed report on Trump’s pattern of sexual harassment while filming The Apprentice.

Thus endeth The Donald's weekus horribilis -- and Nate Silver pegs Hillary's chances at 75:25.

Mike Pence Is Stupid, Says Matthew Yglesias

Click here for an article entitled "Mike Pence" by Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress from September 26, 2008.

And yes, Yglesias -- a respected journalist -- says Pence is stupid:

And I can tell you this about Mike Pence: he has no idea what he’s talking about. The man is a fool, who deserves to be laughed at. He’s almost stupid enough to work in cable television.

And:

He didn’t know anything at all, in short, about investing, financial markets, or, seemingly, the basic terms of public policy. And yet there he was speaking on the topic at Heritage. He’s a total fraud.

The reference to "Heritage" is to the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank -- and when former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint was appointed president of the Heritage Foundation a few years ago, my hero, Prof. Paul Krugman, said "Well, that takes the 'think' out of 'think tank.'"

Must Read: Trump v Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair)

Click here for the article in Vanity Fair by Graydon Carter entitled "Donald Trump: The Ugly American." Carter has had a 30-year-plus (deteriorating) relationship with Donald Trump, and his story makes very interesting reading.

4.5-minute video: Trump v. Political Correctness

Here are the lyrics to "Old Man Trump" -- Woody Guthrie was a tenant in one of "Old Man Trump's" apartment blocks, Beach Haven, when Donald's father Fred (Old Man Trump) was sued for racially discriminating in his anti-black rental policies:

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project

Beach Haven ain't my home!
No, I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

I'm calling out my welcome to you and your man both
Welcoming you here to Beach Haven
To love in any way you please and to have some kind of a decent place
To have your kids raised up in.

Beach Haven ain't my home!
No, I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!