August 20, 2016

How do you spell delusional? T-R-U-M-P predicts he can win 95 percent of the black vote

File under things as likely as dinosaurs and humans existing at the same time, as likely as the scenario in that awful movie 'The Day After Tomorrow', or...

Donald Trump promised Friday night that if elected president, he will win 95 percent of the African-American vote in his reelection bid.

<snip>

read:http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-african-american-vote-227218

The first few comments:



Oh, come on, Politico. This is too easy


Hell NAW! TO THE NAW NAW NAW!
He will never get my vote.. #whatthehelldoyouhavetolose @realDonaldTrump Will get my vote when I die but I'm going down swinging. This idiot needs to stop. HE WILL HAVE MORE BLACK PEOPLE TURN OUT TO VOTE AGAINST HIM THAN VOTED FOR OBAMA. I WATCHED HIS LITTLE SPEECH.. I JUST WANT TO SPIT IN HIS GOD DAMN FACE. FUCK A VOTE!



What we know is certain is Trump will lose the African American vote by 95% this election cycle.


Can we all start referring to Trump as a "game show host" instead of "reality TV star"? It's much more accurate.


Good luck with that Trump....

Also, please tell me what his means:

“No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton's policies than African-Americans. No group. No group,”

I wasn't aware of Hilary Clinton's domestic policies....when did this happen? When she was SOS, a Senator, or First Lady? What policies in specific?


I think he's talking about things like CHIP, which gave millions of African-American children access to healthcare for the first time. They might've been vaccinated as a result.


Good luck with that Trump....

Also, please tell me what his means:

“No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton's policies than African-Americans. No group. No group,”

I wasn't aware of Hilary Clinton's domestic policies....when did this happen? When she was SOS, a Senator, or First Lady? What policies in specific?


I think he's talking about things like CHIP, which gave millions of African-American children access to healthcare for the first time. They might've been vaccinated as a result.

August 20, 2016

It’s hard to imagine a much worse pitch Donald Trump could have made for the black vote

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"Look at how much African-American communities are suffering from Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?" he asked. "You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?"

This was not the Teleprompter Trump that we saw in Charlotte, interlacing his prepared remarks with occasional asides. This was Traditional Trump, riffing a bit more on what he wanted to say in a manner that probably didn't do him much good.

Consider: Black Americans are not "living in poverty" as a general rule. A quarter of the black population is, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, about the same as the percentage of Hispanics. In Michigan, the figure is slightly higher. Most black Americans don't live in poverty, just as most white Americans don't.

Consider: The unemployment rate in the black community is higher than that in the white community, as it has been since the Department of Labor started keeping track. Among young blacks, though, the figure is not 59 percent -- unless (as Politifact noted) you consider not the labor force but every young black American, including high school students. Many young black high school students are unemployed. This isn't a metric that Labor typically uses, for obvious reasons, but calculating the rates for young whites gives you about 50 percent, too.


<snip>

There are any number of reasons that black Americans might view Trump unfavorably, starting with his 2011 effort to cast suspicion on Obama's place of birth. Or, probably, starting with his full-page ad calling for the death penalty against five black teenagers in New York City who were accused of rape -- wrongly, as it turned out. Or perhaps thanks to the support his current candidacy is getting from people like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/20/its-hard-to-imagine-a-much-worse-pitch-donald-trump-could-have-made-for-the-black-vote/

August 20, 2016

Let's talk about Syria. It's currently the "hottest" war zone- and the U.S., Russia, Syria, Turkey

appear headed on a collision course.

For instance, this story illustrates that:

U.S. jets scramble as Syrians bomb near American forces

U.S. fighter jets scrambled to eastern Syria this week when Syrian bombers attacked in the vicinity of American and coalition Special Operations forces working with Kurdish and Arab opposition fighters, the Pentagon said Friday.

The unprecedented incident, near the Syrian city of Hasakah, did not result in a direct confrontation or any injury to U.S. or coalition forces.

But it illustrated the increasingly tense and ambiguous Syrian battlefield, where aircraft and ground troops from multiple countries — with multiple agendas and loyalties — are fighting overlapping wars.

Following the initial Thursday incident, the coalition began “actively patrolling the airspace nearby,” a Defense Department official said. Early Friday, “two Syrian SU-24 aircraft attempted to transit the area and were met by coalition fighter aircraft,” which “encouraged” the Syrians to depart “without further incident,” said the official, who spoke on a Pentagon-imposed condition of anonymity.

Pentagon Warns Assad Regime to Avoid Action Near U.S. and Allied Forces

http://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-warns-assad-regime-to-avoid-action-near-u-s-and-allied-forces-1471633476

Turkey to take more active role on Syria in next six months, PM says

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-primeminister-syria-idUSKCN10V0AF?il=0

Yesterday, Russia fired cruise missiles from warships in the Mediterranean into Syria

MOSCOW — Russia flexed its muscles again over Syria on Friday, for the first time launching cruise missiles at targets from warships in the Mediterranean Sea days after beginning bombing runs from a base in Iran.

Taken together, the new military moves appeared to be a demonstration that Russia has the ability to strike from virtually all directions in a region where it has been reasserting its power — from Iran, from warships in the Caspian Sea, from its base in the Syrian coastal province of Latakia and now from the Mediterranean.

The United States also asserted its military might in a new way, scrambling its aircraft to protect its forces, and those it is supporting, from Syrian government airstrikes. The Pentagon issued a blunt warning to the Syrian government after its warplanes struck a Kurdish-controlled region where American military personnel were on the ground.

“The Syrian regime would be well advised not to interfere with coalition forces or our partners,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.

<snip>

read:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/world/middleeast/russia-syria-mediterranean-missiles.html?_r=0

The Syrian Civil War has been raging now for 5 years. It has displaced over 10 million people from their homes. Almost 4 million have become refugees. It has spilled over into Lebanon and Turkey and Iraq. Russia is using Iranian air bases.

It goes without saying that the people in Syria are suffering greatly day in day out, month after month and year after year. There is no accurate count of the deaths incurred; estimates range from around 120,000 to 500,000.

I haven't a clue as to what can or should be done, beyond supporting humanitarian efforts and enabling more Syrian refugees to enter the U.S., but that it's the tensest place on earth, from a geopolitical point of view, seems all too obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war

August 20, 2016

Donald Trump Is a Terrible Politician Some journalists believe he's brilliant and cunning.

They are wrong.


Back when Donald Trump was winning primaries, Mark Halperin, the famously well-compensated political journalist at Bloomberg, went on TV and said Trump is a terrific politician.




“He is one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us have covered,” Halperin opined. “He just is.”


Trump’s skill, he explained, exceeds Barack Obama’s because, unlike Trump, Obama “had David Axelrod and David Plouffe and a squadron of people around him who knew what they were doing.” Trump flies solo, ergo every supporter he counts, every stadium he packs, is somehow more rightfully his.

Halperin has also defended Trump from accusations of racism on the grounds that “Mexico isn’t a race,” and posed for this notorious picture, so unspoken affinities may be affecting his analysis. But to this day, as Trump is losing to Hillary Clinton in every poll, it is still commonly suggested that Trump has mysterious political powers. No matter what he says, his supporters love it! If he’s losing, it might be because he’s “deliberately trying to avoid winning.”

I would like to propose an alternate hypothesis: Donald Trump is bad at politics. He won the Republican primary because he is a bad politician, he is losing today because he is a bad politician, and part of what makes him a bad politician is only doing the kinds of things his supporters love, which can appear to be good politics to incurious journalists, but is actually not.


Case in point: On Wednesday night, Trump returned in characteristically Freudian fashion to Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News and announced he would forcibly remove not just immigrants, but citizens from the U.S. if they’re found to have extremist views. “Whether it’s racial profiling or politically correct, we better get smart,” he said.

<snip>

https://newrepublic.com/article/136153/donald-trump-terrible-politician

August 20, 2016

Early voting starts today. 31 states have early voting. By 11/8, 1/3 of all votes will be cast

That is one fact that makes Donnybrook's path so narrow.

The Trumptanic isn't about to hit an iceberg. It's already hit several. And turning around this listing campaign grows more onerous by the day. Perhaps it's not quite yet a Sisyphean task, but it will be in a few short weeks, barring some miraculous turn of fortune.

October surprises? More of a myth than a reality.

And he now doesn't have a campaign manager. He has a candidate whisperer or handler or something like that. Just compare the experience of Robby Mook and Kellyanne Conway. Yes, Mook is young- 36, but he has a solid background in campaign management going back over a decade- and started political campaigning while still in high school for a teacher running for election to the state house of reps. He managed McCauliff's campaign, worked on Dean's campaign, managed O'Malley's gubernatorial campaign and Cardin's Senate campaign. In other words, he has a solid grounding in contemporary American political campaigns.

Conway, although older, is definitely not as rigorously experienced in running a campaign. In fact, she never has. She's been a pollster for various campaigns. And she's been a ubiquitous "pundit" on TV, but that's it.

As for Bannon, he has zip in the way of campaign experience. Nothing. Nada.

Trump is posed to run his first ad. That I think it sucks is meaningless, we'll see how it plays, but he's playing catchup on the air, despite his endless stream of widely aired pejoratives aimed at HRC, the President and Democrats in general. He's way behind that curve.

He has no coherent or coordinated ground game, meaning field offices (for instance, in FL he has all of one. Hilary has, I believe 24.
If there's a GOTV plan, I've yet to here of it. Hillary's campaign has been working on that for months.

Hillary is surrounded by seasoned professionals who know how to maneuver between Charybdis and Scylla.

August 20, 2016

Donald Trump's First General Election Campaign Ad Is Overflowing with Propaganda

On Tuesday night in Olympia, Washington, a white supremacist stabbed an interracial couple. After his arrest, the man told authorities he wished to "stomp out" members of the Black Lives Matter movement at a nearby Donald Trump rally. According to the official police report and a local account from The Olympian, the perpetrator, 32-year-old Daniel B. Rowe, covered his body in tattoos that read phrases like "skinhead" and "white power," in addition to Confederate flag imagery. Rowe told the police he had taken a "blood oath" to fight on the street.


Two nights after Rowe's arrest, Donald Trump stood onstage in North Carolina and said he "regretted" some of the things he has said over the course of his historic presidential campaign. Trump did not specify which things. He admitted that some of his words "may have caused personal pain." Trump did not specify which words.

Rowe's racially motivated violence was far from an outlier over the past year that Trump has occupied the national stage. Here's a white guy cold-cocking a black guy at a Trump rally this past March. Here's another Trump rally cold-cocking, same month. Here's a black protester getting beat up at a Trump rally in Alabama. Here's violence outside a Trump rally in Chicago. Here's a Trump supporter giving a Nazi salute. Here's Trump telling a crowd he longs for the days when he, himself, could punch protesters in the face.

And here's Trump's first ad of the general election, in which he paints Hillary's America as a dangerous, violent place overrun with Syrian refugees and illegal immigrants, while painting Trump's America as "safe."

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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a47821/new-trump-ad-general-election/

August 20, 2016

New Snowden documents prove the hacked NSA files are real

Newly released documents from former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden confirm what many experts had already believed: The 234-megabyte archive of NSA hacker tools, exploits, and implants that leaked online earlier this week is real.

The key to confirming the leaked files, which was uploaded to various file-sharing sites earlier this week by a group called the "Shadow Brokers," came in a top-secret agency manual published on Friday by Sam Biddle of The Intercept. It instructed NSA hackers on how to track their malicious software by using a 16-character string buried in the code.

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"One of the interesting things about the exploits is they are very professional and they clean up after themselves," Dave Aitel, an ex-NSA research scientist who now leads penetration-testing firm Immunity, told Business Insider. "Not only do they turn things off, but they turn things back on. When you're looking at stuff that's written by a lot of hackers, it will backdoor something but it won't 'un-backdoor' something."

Put simply: Your average hacker will build tools that break in, but a sophisticated hacker — such as those employed by the US or some other nation — will build tools that break in, hide all their tracks, and turn everything off once they get what they need.

"These are the type of tools that are really exclusive to governments," a source who worked for NSA's elite hacker unit, Tailored Access Operations, told Business Insider on condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters.

<snip>


http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-confirm-hacked-nsa-files-2016-8

August 20, 2016

Memo To Donald Trump And Ryan Lochte: Here’s How To Give A Proper Apology

(and to legions of other public figures.)

"Never ruin an apology with an excuse." – Ben Franklin

In less than 24 hours, two of the biggest stories in the world involved some kind of "apology" for offensive behavior and/or lying. Last night in Charlotte, North Carolina, the notoriously unrepentant Donald Trump shocked observers by expressing "regret" for words that "may have caused personal pain." And this morning Ryan Lochte issued a widely criticized apology for "not being more careful" with how he described an incident in which he lied about being held up at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro.


Neither of them qualified as a true apology since they both offered an excuse for their behavior, failed to give a detailed account of what happened, failed to acknowledge or specify the hurt and damage they’d caused, and didn't take responsibility for the situation.

Here is Trump’s "apology":


Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.


<snip>

A proper apology is "an exercise in honesty, accountability, and compassion," says interfaith minister Lauren Bloom, the author of The Art of the Apology. Of course, it's difficult and nerve-wracking and fraught with tension. But it's the right thing to do. So above all, be sincere: "It's the essence of an apology."

And maybe even offer some humility and self-awareness, as exemplified in one of the best examples of an apology in modern history. Several months after Jesse Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies" and New York City as "Hymietown" during his presidential run in 1988, he gave a speech at the Democratic convention that moved the audience with its sincerity and spiritual depth (h/t The New Republic):

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http://www.fastcompany.com/3063034/memo-to-donald-trump-and-ryan-lochte-heres-how-to-give-a-proper-apology

August 19, 2016

Clinton and Trump to engage in National Security forum prime time NBC, Sept. 7

It's sequential, not one on one, but it should be interesting.



Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump will appear at a Commander-in-Chief forum to discuss national security, military affairs and veterans issues in a primetime event announced Thursday by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

The presidential candidates will appear back-to-back in the one-hour event on September, 7, hosted by the IAVA and simulcast by NBC and MSNBC. The two candidates will answer questions from NBC News and an audience that includes military veterans and active service members.

"IAVA members world-wide, 93% of whom say they'll be voting in November, and many deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, are ready to hear from the candidates and hold them accountable," Paul Rieckhoff, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of IAVA, said in the announcement.

http://www.nbcnews.com/card/clinton-trump-agree-first-2016-presidential-forum-focusing-veterans-national-n633741

August 19, 2016

this is the pill that cures Hepatitis C. This is that pill on big Pharma