Trump Is Coming Back in Polls Because Too Many People Are Afraid To Take a Stand

Here is Trump just freely lying and pushing conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/29/politics/donald-trump-fbi-doj-corruption-james-comey-hillary-clinton-emails/index.html

In the closing weeks, the media has once again taken to giving Trump softball interviews, including this one by Mark Halperin who himself chastised other journalists for refusing to press Trump on his failure to disclose his tax returns:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/28/mark-halperin-s-donald-trump-interview-even-fails-mark-halperin-test/214179

Finally, putting party over country, the GOP has stood by even as Trump has cozied up to Russia even when they themselves have said that Russia has taken an active role in trying to influence the election.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/mike-mccaul-trump-russia-hacks-230286

This is how we descend into facism. When people are afraid and intimidated to do what is right.

Hypocrisy - Daily Beast - "GOP Blocks Probes Into Trump-Russia Tie"

While Russia, Er, Republicans go on television and complain about Hillary's use of personal e-mail constituting a security threat, watch the MSM ignore Republican efforts to kill any examination of ties between Trump and Russia.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/30/gop-blocks-probes-into-trump-russia-ties.html

Suspicion is mounting about Donald Trump’s ties to Russian officials and business interests, as well as possible links between his campaign and the Russian hacking of U.S. political organizations. But GOP leaders have refused to support efforts by Democrats to investigate any possible Trump-Russia connections, which have been raised in news reports and closed-door intelligence briefings. And without their support, Democrats, as the minority in both chambers of Congress, cannot issue subpoenas to potential witnesses and have less leverage to probe Trump.

Privately, Republican congressional staff told The Daily Beast that Trump and his aides’ connections to Russian officials and businesses interests haven’t gone unnoticed and are concerning. And GOP lawmakers have reviewed Democrats’ written requests to the FBI that it investigate Trump before they were made public.

But the lawmakers in both chambers have declined to sign on to them. Republicans have no appetite to launch inquiries into their party’s presidential nominee, and they continue to believe the FBI flubbed its investigation into Clinton and her aides, who should have been charged with mishandling government secrets, the staffers said.

Instead Republican lawmakers appear far more interested in probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, nearly three months after the Justice Department declined to press charges against her or her aides. FBI Director James Comey has been called to testify to Congress three times about the email investigation, and Republicans have launched a separate inquiry into whether the former secretary of State committed perjury when she testified before Congress about her unorthodox communications system. As a result, Clinton is likely to face relentless grilling on Capitol Hill from now until Election Day, but Trump can rest assured that his fellow partisans will go easy on him.

Reminder - Vox - The media's 5 unspoken rules for covering Hillary

This reminds me of the media's rush of Clinton Foundation stories.

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/6/8900143/hillary-clinton-reporting-rules

1) Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the "vast right-wing conspiracy," and mainstream media outlets

2) Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world.

3) The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise.

4) Everything is newsworthy because the Clintons are the equivalent of America's royal family

5) Everything she does is fake and calculated for maximum political benefit

Vox - Last year, no candidate got more negative media coverage than Hillary Clinton

While Donald Trump bases his whole campaign on how the media is so unfair to him in reporting the things he says and does, the MSM ignores the ongoing negative narrative by which it has framed Hillary Clinton.

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/20/11949860/media-coverage-hillary-clinton

Fox News ran 330 stories about Hillary Clinton in 2015. About 300 of them were overtly negative, according to new research.

Fox News may have hit Clinton harder than any other news outlet, but it’s hardly been alone in treating her candidacy with extra scrutiny. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy released a report this week that says the top news outlets hammered Clinton in 2015 far more than any other presidential candidate.

According to the report, eight of America’s most influential news outlets wrote coverage "negative in tone" about Clinton 84 percent of the time — compared to just 43 percent for Donald Trump, and 17 percent for Bernie Sanders.

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5nrYxuiAeMEeuqstBuNEmL0Tgnw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6679779/figure-7_2.0.jpg

In every month of 2015 but one — October, when Clinton was widely praised for her handling of the Benghazi hearings — those eight outlets devoted far more negative than positive coverage to Clinton, the report found.

Donald Trump Has Irrevocably Changed How We Will Grade Our Presidential Candidates

Nice article that illustrates how Trump and the MSM have conspired to lower the bar regarding what we expect from Presidential candidates.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-mitt-romney_us_580f9bede4b0a03911ef1e1c

Close your eyes for a second and go back to October 2012. Mitt Romney, engaged in a pitched fight to unseat President Barack Obama, is campaigning hard as the election closes, drawing major crowds and inspiring Republican visions of a White House takeover.

Now imagine, as Romney campaigns, that a story breaks detailing how his onetime company, Bain Capital, took $17 million in insurance money for business damages that it very likely had not incurred. It would be a scandal. Romney’s ethics would be questioned. The campaign would come to a halt for a bit.

OK, ignore the insurance fraud. Let’s say as Romney was campaigning down the stretch, a story broke that his super PAC, Restore Our Future, was caught discussing how to secretly funnel illegal donations from a Chinese source into its coffers. Watchdog groups would be in an uproar. Obama’s campaign would pounce and Romney would be forced to condemn the group immediately, lest he seem like he was benefiting from foreign money.

Let’s say that neither the Chinese donations nor the insurance fraud happened in our re-imagining of the 2012 election. Instead, an article was published in the closing days of the race saying Romney had held parties with underaged girls and cocaine. OK. That’s impossible to imagine. Let’s say the article reported that he’d openly discussed trying to pick up John Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, just days after the couple’s 16-year-old son had died. You’re right ― again, impossible to imagine.

Kansas Tax Cuts: A Closer Look

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s trickle-down economics experiment is so bad the state stopped reporting

Trump's scandals are grabbing all the air time, but what is ignored is a tax plan that would make Sam Brownback proud.

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/25/kansas-gov-sam-brownbacks-trickle-down-economics-experiment-is-so-bad-the-state-stopped-reporting-on-it/

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, the Republican responsible for the state’s business-friendly tax policies, is now trying to erase any evidence of just how wildly unsuccessful his Reaganomics experiment has proved.

Last month the state’s Council of Economic Advisors, which Brownback created in 2011 and still chairs, quietly discontinued quarterly reports originally intended to showcase the state’s rapid economic growth. (During Brownback’s re-election campaign in 2014, the reports were scrubbed from the internet and subsequently available only upon request.)

The council issued what ended up being its last report in May.

Brownback “specifically asked the council to hold him accountable through rigorous performance metrics,” Heidi Holliday, executive director of the Kansas Center for Economic Growth, told The Topeka Capital-Journal. “Five years later, the metrics clearly show his tax experiment has failed while business leaders and local chambers of commerce across the state openly ask him to change course.”

* * *
Brownback ran for governor in 2010 on an archaic small-state economic platform that promised widespread tax cuts for business owners and high-income earners. These cuts — amounting cents on the dollar, essentially, for individuals — went into effect in 2012, and subsequent years of revenue losses have gutted public infrastructure and diminished quality of life in the state.

Trump Tax Plan Gives 47% Of Cuts To Richest 1%, New Analysis Finds

The one thing that the media continues to push is the idea that Trump is some sort of populist. Just because Trump appeals to the white working class by making appeals to racism does not make him a populist.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2016/10/11/trump-tax-plan-gives-47-of-cuts-to-richest-1-new-analysis-finds/#5ec0819959fc

A new analysis of tax proposals from the major Presidential candidates shows Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump have moved even farther apart in their approach to taxing the rich.

According to the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Trump’s latest proposals would cut taxes by $6.2 trillion over the next decade, with 47% of all cuts in 2017 going to the top 1%. Clinton’s plans, by contrast, would raise taxes by a net $1.4 trillion over a decade, with 92% of the increase in 2017 extracted from the 1%. (By TPC’s definition, it takes expanded cash income in excess of $699,000 to be part of the 1%.)

TPC director Leonard Burman described the Trump and Clinton tax plans as “mirror images.”

The tax cuts that Trump is now proposing are smaller than the $9.5 trillion in cuts he floated last year, but are also more tilted in favor of the wealthy. In his initial plan, by TPC’s figuring, the 1% got 35% of the tax cut. When Trump revamped his tax plan in August, he made cuts for most types of individual income less generous and those for corporate income (as well as business income reported directly on individual returns) more generous. In calculating the distribution of tax burden and tax cuts, TPC includes individual, payroll, estate and corporate taxes, and assumes that 80% of the corporate tax burden is borne by the generally wealthier owners of capital and 20% by workers. In addition, the think tank assumes that Trump’s lower rate for business income–a top 15% rate, versus 33% for salary —will lead half of high wage workers to take steps to convert salary into business income.

WHERE THEY STAND: Clinton, Trump on the Issues (Often Ignored)

It is really too bad that the media rarely discusses the vast differences between the campaigns on the issues. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the subject of climate change, which no moderator has mentioned during any of the debates. Instead, Hillary Clinton had to bring it up during the first debate.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/10/24/us/politics/ap-us-campaign-2016-where-they-stand.html?_r=0

CLIMATE CHANGE

It's as if Trump and Clinton live on two entirely different Earths: one warming, one not. Clinton says climate change threatens us all, while Trump repeatedly tweets that global warming is a hoax.

Measurements and scientists say Clinton's Earth is much closer to the warming reality. And it is worsening.

From May 2015 to August 2016, 16 months in a row set records globally for heat, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The world is on pace to break the record for hottest year, a record already broken in 2010, 2014 and 2015. It is about 1.8 degrees warmer than a century ago.

But it's more than temperatures. Scientists have connected man-made climate change to deadly heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours. Studies say climate change is raising sea levels, melting ice and killing coral. It's making people sicker with asthma and allergies and may eventually shrink our bank accounts.

Trump's Threats Not To Accept Election Results Are NOT Unprecedented - Like 1860 Election

We also have to consider the possibility that Trump truly believes that he should win, and that the election is rigged, thus he should lead some sort of revolt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860

In their campaigning, Bell and Douglas both claimed that disunion would not necessarily follow a Lincoln election. Nonetheless, loyal army officers in Virginia, Kansas and South Carolina warned Lincoln of military preparations to the contrary. Secessionists threw their support behind Breckinridge in an attempt either to force the anti-Republican candidates to coordinate their electoral votes or throw the election into the House of Representatives, where the selection of the president would be made by the representatives elected in 1858, before the Republican majorities in both House and Senate achieved in 1860 were seated in the new 37th Congress. Mexican War hero Winfield Scott suggested to Lincoln that he assume the powers of a commander-in-chief before inauguration. But historian Bruce Chadwick observes that Lincoln and his advisors ignored the widespread alarms and threats of secession as mere election trickery.

Indeed, voting in the South was not as monolithic as the Electoral College map would make it seem. Economically, culturally, and politically, the South was made up of three regions. In the states of the "Upper" South, also known as the "Border States" (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri along with the Kansas territories), unionist popular votes were scattered among Lincoln, Douglas, and Bell, to form a majority in all four. In four of the five "Middle" South states, there was a unionist majority divided between Douglas and Bell in Virginia and Tennessee; in North Carolina and Arkansas, the unionist (Bell and Douglas) vote approached a majority. Texas was the only Middle South state that Breckinridge carried convincingly. In three of the six "Deep" South, unionists (Bell and Douglas) won divided majorities in Georgia and Louisiana or neared it in Alabama. Breckinridge convincingly carried only three of the six states of the Deep South (South Carolina, Florida, and Mississippi).[23] These three Deep South states were all among the four Southern states with the lowest white populations; together, they held only nine-percent of Southern whites.[24]

In the states that would become the Confederacy, the three states with the highest voter turnouts voted the most one-sided. Texas, with five percent of the total wartime South's population, voted 80 percent Breckinridge. Kentucky and Missouri, with one-fourth the total population, voted 68 percent pro-union Bell, Douglas and Lincoln. In comparison, the six states of the Deep South making up one-fourth the Confederate voting population, split 57 percent Breckinridge versus 43 percent for the three pro-union candidates.[25] The four states that were admitted to the Confederacy after Fort Sumter held almost half its population. These voted a narrow combined majority of 53 percent for the pro-union candidates.

In the eleven states that would later declare their secession from the Union and be controlled by Confederate armies, ballots for Lincoln were cast only in Virginia,[26][27] where he received only 1.1 percent of the popular vote.[23][28] In order to distribute ballots in a state, candidates needed citizens in that state who would pledge to vote for the candidate in the Electoral College. In ten southern slave states, no citizens would publicly pledge such support for Lincoln.