Trump Comes Out During Military Forum, Demonstrates He's a Performance Artist, Not a President

I supposed you watched the Commander-In-Chief Forum, like me. Hillary was good, Trump was not. We expected that. If you're for Trump, you're for his kind of bad.

Hillary, Matt, Donald (nuff said).

Josh Marshall of TPM -- my kind of really smart guy -- puts it together:

7. The last point is I think the big one. You couldn't watch Trump and be under any illusion that he has any idea what he's talking about about really anything. I think we can dispense with any idea that Trump is going to bone up on a handful of policy points and use them during the debates. He totally winged and it showed. Someone I respect greatly said on Twitter that watching the debate we should dispense with the idea that Clinton will mop the floor with Trump in the debate. I've never thought she'd mop the floor with him. But I thought my friend greatly misjudged Trump's performance. The exchange where Lauer kept asking him why he wouldn't discuss his ISIS plans and then asked why he had to ask the generals if he had a plan and then Trump said well, maybe I'll combine the two plans ... this is a case where people are selling Lauer a bit short. That made Trump look like a jackass. People know from a young age when someone is trying to bullshit their way out of question. Trump has no idea what he's going to do about ISIS. It was just nonsense and word salad. I think that was clear in a way that would transcend ideology.

[...]

8. Lauer's devoting a third of Clinton's time to emails was terrible. But on question after question Clinton - clearly by design - tried to bury everyone in policy detail and command of the issues. She was smothering us with experience and we were smothered. You can think she's a liar and a crook and the worst person in the world. But you couldn't watch that segment and not realize she knows basically all the relevant issues inside and out. She's prepared. Whether you support her or like her is another matter. But she's prepared. I think Trump came off as cocky and ignorant. And I don't mean to me - I know he's cocky and ignorant. My best guess is that people who are wary of Trump but open to supporting him will not be reassured by that performance.

Clinton's motherfucking bright. I don't like everything she stands for, but I'll be more hopeful if she's elected. Also, a bunch of Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, etc. are probably breathing easier. And that's a good thing.

For the Record: Mitt Romney Released Only Two Partial Tax Returns, 2010 and 2011.

Everyone says Romney finally released his tax returns. No, he didn't. Coward.

Mitt hemmed and hawed, then toss us a couple of bones.

I keep hearing the media say that Romney was "goaded" into releasing his tax returns. No, he wasn't. as I recall he released two partial filings, one for 2010 and the one for 2011. Mother Jones:

In 2012, Mother Jones pointed out that based on his two years of reports, the taxes Romney paid on his adjusted gross income didn't fully cover all his wealth. Two years later, what do we still not know?

How much does he actually make? In 2010 and 2011, tax filings revealed that Romney made around $22 million each year. The vast majority of his income came from Romney's capital gains and investment interests, and this amount presumably covered the reported total of $374,000 in speaking fees he received in 2010 and 2011. (The two years of tax filings he released did not specify exact sources of income.) Two years after the election, it's unclear how much Romney earns annually, and it's unknown exactly how much sits in his various accounts.

Get that? "The two years of tax filings he released did not specify exact sources of income." Real tax returns would tell all.

Mitt Romney skated. Why does everyone forget?

"Crooked" Hillary? Not So Much. Donald Trump? First Crime Was Illegal Discrimination in 1973.

His apartment superintedents ratted out Trump and his dad for refusing apartments to blacks.

The DOJ sued Trump, who settled with an agreement to be monitored.

Donald Trump was still in his twenties when the feds got wind of his illegal ways:

When an African American showed up to rent an apartment owned by a young real-estate scion named Donald Trump and his family, the building superintendent did what he claimed he’d been told to do. He allegedly attached a separate sheet of paper to the application, marked with the letter “C.”

“C” for “Colored.”

According to the Department of Justice, that was the crude code that ensured the rental would be denied.

Details of this secret system, as well as other practices that the Trump organization allegedly used to exclude black residents from its buildings in Brooklyn, Queens, and Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1970s, were recorded in a lawsuit brought by the DOJ against Trump and his father, Fred, in 1973 for alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act.

They countersued for $100 million ($500 million in today's dollars). Other than you can't sue the federal government (certainly couldn't for that), the Trump move was absurd on its face, but that has never stopped Donald Trump.

Fun fact: The Trump's lawyer was Roy Cohn, whose claim to fame was that he was Sen. Joesph McCarthy's chief counsel during the McCarthy era.

Clinton Foundation Provides Half the World's AIDS Drugs. Trump Foundation Bribes AGs.

The press is finally catching on: Clinton Foundation, good, Trump Foundation bad.

Donald Trump, hanging with FL AG Pam Bondi. Up to no good?

After pounding the Clinton Foundation for days over nothing, the NYTimes finally starts to act like a news operation:

While it hasn’t been proved that Mr. Trump or Ms. Bondi violated bribery law, there’s little doubt that they abused the public trust in 2013, when Ms. Bondi received a $25,000 campaign contribution from Mr. Trump four days after her office announced that Florida was “reviewing the allegations” in a lawsuit filed in New York against his Trump University. Attorneys general in New York and California are pursuing separate class-action suits alleging that Trump University bilked consumers of tens of thousands of dollars they each paid for a worthless real-estate investment course. In the end, Ms. Bondi’s office did not take any action against Trump University.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s contribution from his family foundation to Ms. Bondi violated federal tax law barring tax-exempt charities from engaging in political activity. The Washington Post reported last week that Mr. Trump paid a $2,500 penalty to the Internal Revenue Service for the violation.

News of the fine came as Mr. Trump has spent days accusing Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation of similar pay-to-play schemes. Confronted on Monday, Mr. Trump said oddly that he hadn’t spoken to Ms. Bondi. The Associated Press reported in June that an adviser to Ms. Bondi confirmed that Ms. Bondi had spoken to Mr. Trump and asked for the contribution.

I don't know, maybe I'm a knucklehead, but when an attorney general solicits a contribution, then quickly snuffs an investigation into the donor's doings, there's both smoke and fire. More of this, NYTimes, and less of asking the Clinton Foundation, which is regarded as one of the world's best foundations, to close its doors because of "optics." Just sayin'.

Daniel Dresner explains how this works. So does John Stoeher.

Clinton Email "Scandal" Unravels: FBI Report Shows Possibly No Classified Emails

The last three administrations handled State emails about the same. But only Hillary is attacked.

Colin Powell: I stored my State emails in this vial of Iraqi anthrax.

Okay, no, he didn't store his emails in a vial of Iraqi anthrax. He was more sensible. He deleted them all.

Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Powell responded to revelations that he used a personal email account, rather than a government one, when he was in charge of the State Department. Questions about his email use arose last week when it was disclosed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account during her tenure.

“I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files,” Powell said. “A lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and state.gov domain, but I don’t know if the servers in the State Department captured those or not.

[...]

“When I entered the State Department I found an antiquated system that had to be modernized and modernized quickly,” he said. “I started using [email] in order to get everybody to use it, so we could be a 21st-century institution and not a 19th-century [one]. But I retained none of those emails, and we are working with the State Department to see if there’s anything else they want to discuss with me about those emails.”

The emails he sent were all unclassified, mostly “benign,” he said, and probably not important even if they can be recovered.

This news story was in March of this year. And then the press badgered him endlessly. Wait. No they didn't.

Jump forward until this week when Monday the FBI released its investigation notes along with a lengthy memo. What did these show, according to Mother Jones' Kevin Drum?

Most people the FBI talked to used private email accounts all the time; did their best to keep classified information out of these channels; and didn't believe that any of the emails they sent included classified information. Other classification authorities have disagreed, as we all know by now, and the entire discussion gives you a taste of how subjective the classification process is. Basically, we have lots of experienced people who disagree about whether various things really ought to be classified.

I got a bit of pushback on this that boiled down to: "Classified is classified. It doesn't matter if you disagree. There are strict rules about how you can handle sensitive information, and you have to follow them whether you like it or not."

True enough. But this only applies to documents that are marked classified at the time they're sent. In this case we're talking about documents created by folks at State that hadn't been classified yet. This doesn't let the originators off the hook: they're supposed to know whether anything in their email is sensitive and take appropriate precautions. But it's still a judgment call, and it's quite possible that ten people will have ten different opinions.

In this case, the originators all believed they were phrasing things in such a way that they were safe to send over an unclassified email account. Years later, classification authorities disagreed in a number of cases. So who's right? There's no way for the public to know. We just know that a lot of high-level State employees made judgments that were apparently uncontroversial at the time but were eventually overruled by classification authorities.

Of course, this doesn't include the three emails that were marked classified in the body of the email. Here's what the FBI report had to say about those:

The emails contained no additional marketing, such as a header or footer, indicating they were classified. State confirmed through the FOIA review process that one of these three e-mail chains contains information which is currently classified at the CONFIDENTIAL level. State determined that the other two e-mail chains are currently UNCLASSIFIED.

So two of them aren't classified at all and shouldn't have been in the first place, while the third is obviously something trivial ("Confidential" is the lowest possible level of classification). If that's your case against Hillary—one trivial email over four years that shouldn't have been sent—then go to town with it. The rest of us will spend our time on stuff that matters.

I've pointed this out before, as Josh Marshall has about the Clinton Foundation. In fact, if you read Josh, you'll see that the real scandal are the bribes Donald Trump paid to the attorneys general of Texas and Florida to dissuade them from investigating Trump University. that's a real scandal. But it's not a Clinton scandal? So, bo-o-ring.

Clinton Foundation Provides Over Half the World's AIDS Medicine, but Hillary's a Bad Person!

If you've been wading through the recent "revelations" about the Clinton Foundation and Hillary's emails, it becomes even more apparent that the scandals there are few to none, and yet...

DC press corps to each other: Hillary won't hold a press conference,
so let's fuck her up but good. (You have a better explanation?)

It's hard to figure why the press just can't let up on Hillary Clinton even though most reporting actually proves she was doing it by the book or better with both her emails and the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation during her tenure there.

Thanks to the publishing of these investigations—most of which took many months of dogged effort to produce—we now have a tremendous amount of granular information about the Clinton Foundation’s relationship with the State Department and with the federal government generally. In virtually every case we know of, it’s clear that Hillary and her staff behaved appropriately.

Yet instead of accepting the evidence of their own investigations, much of the mainstream media expresses the attitude that these are still wide open questions. In its recent lead editorial calling for the Clintons to cut their ties to the Foundation immediately (the Clintons have said they’ll do so if she wins), The New York Times concedes that the latest batch of emails does not “so far” show that Hillary gave any special favors to Clinton donors while at state. On the cable shows, even the few journalists who acknowledge the lack of any evidence that Hillary and her staff did anything untoward feel the need to insist that the next batch of emails could prove otherwise.

Yes, there's that business with the private server, but the recent release of her FBI investigation docs shows that it wasn't the private server that defined the problems:

Career State Officials Were Among Those Who Sent Information Later Deemed Classified That Were Received By Clinton. According to the FBI’s memorandum, U.S. government employees “responsible for initiating classified e-mail chains included State Civil Service employees, Foreign Service employees, Senior Executive Service Employees, Presidential employees, and non-State elected officials.” Those emails were sent on unclassified systems either directly or indirectly to Clinton. Even if Clinton had not had a personal server, there would still have been a dispute over the classification of the materials.

...

First, experts say, there's no legal difference whether Clinton and her aides passed sensitive information using her private server or the official "state.gov" account that many now argue should have been used. Neither system is authorized for transmitting classified information. Second, prosecution of such violations is extremely rare. Lax security procedures are taken seriously, but they're generally seen as administrative matters.

I know that if your a Clinton skeptic, you answer might be, "Sure, but she had a private server!" What this makes clear, though, is that if she used a state.gov email address, these classified email chains would still have spent all their lives on unsecured systems, having originated from the unsecured email systems of, in many cases, career governmental officials.

Also, the way email was handled at State during her tenure was consistent with how it was handled in the prior two administrations:

Associated Press: "The Transmission Of Now-Classified Information Across Hillary Rodham Clinton's Private Email Is Consistent" With Past State Department Practice. As reported by the AP, information that may become classified later is frequently shared on unclassified State Department systems, a routine occurrence that predated the current administration. Not only was Clinton's "transmission of now-classified information" over an unclassified system "consistent" with agency practice, according to experts, concerns arise equally whether the retroactively classified information is "carried over the government system or a private server."

Got that? It has nothing particular to do with her private server, which, by all accounts, was pretty damned secure.

How secure? You say, "But Comey said we don't know if it was ever hacked!" But wait. It wasn't about the server, it was about the devices she used to access the server. The LA Times:

Agents, however, said it was difficult to determine whether accounts were compromised because they were not able to examine the 11 mobile devices used by Clinton during her time as secretary of State or some other computers and components. The devices were either destroyed or could not be tracked down.

Yes, older Blackberries were destroyed when no longer used. Nefarious or prudent?

Let's let Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Ian Millhiser have the last word:

Sure, Trump is authoritarian racist, but the Clintons have a foundation that provides health care to AIDS patients, so they're the same.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) September 2, 2016

The Right-Wing Bubble: What Do You Do When the News Feeds You Only Anger and Fear?

Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and other GOP leaders have a problem: Fox News and the emerging alt-right media say you don't belong here anymore.

First they came for your TV sets. Now they're coming for your government.

As a progressive liberal, I'm naturally alarmed at what's happening to our media. Both mainstream and radical right media aren't working they way they told you in civics class they were supposed to. The mainstream media are running on five cylinders, hampered by both-sides-do-it, critics-differ-on-shape-of-Earth, fair-and-balanced news reporting, and the radical right media are running on thirteen cylinders powered by the-sky-is-falling-we're-all-doomed 500-octane fear fuel.

While I think this election cycle will end with Hillary Clinton in the White House and fewer Republicans in Congress, even progressives have to fear what's happening to the Republican Party. They might not run things anymore. In fact, they might not even run their own party:

Over the last few years, as 'government shutdown' went from being a crazy ass thing Newt Gingrich did twenty years ago - never to be tried again - to the top item on the Republican policy agenda, you could hear more and more Republicans saying something like this: We thought it was this great thing that we had our own cable news network as an arm of the GOP or the conservative movement, echoing talking points, spinning the news. But at a certain point we realized Fox News wasn't working for us. We're working for Fox News.

For the Republican leadership in Washington this becomes a come-to-Jesus moment: It was all well and good that Rush Limbaugh served their purposes, but a couple of cycles back, they began to notice that it wasn't wise to cross Rush. They laughed it off and issued a "clarification" saying they agreed with Limbaugh anyway. After all, he was still their boy. But they did look bad when they fawned over him, afraid to take him on.

Now the GOP finds itself outside of its own bubble. What happens when Fox News' Sean Hannity turns on you?

The Fox News host and conservative personality was fed up with Republican leaders in Washington — and he wasn’t hiding it from the millions of listeners tuned into his radio program.

“If in 96 days Trump loses this election, I am pointing the finger directly at people like [House Speaker] Paul Ryan and [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and John McCain and John Kasich and Ted Cruz — if he won’t endorse — and Jeb Bush and everybody else that made promises they’re not keeping,” Hannity exclaimed, later threatening to endorse Ryan’s far-right primary challenger.

Yikes. Here's more from that Washington Monthly post I got the above quote from:

That has left conservatives who oppose Trump in a tricky position when trying to get their message to supporters. No longer can Ryan or Cruz turn to Hannity for a softball interview. They can’t work with Breitbart or rely on Drudge to help with their legislative agenda.

These Republicans have effectively been exiled from the conservative news media, leaving them with a problem.

“They don’t have any place to go. How else do you get your message out? You can’t do it in the mainstream. This is the way you reach conservatives,” Ziegler said. “We have taught conservatives for many years to trust nothing other than what they hear in conservative media. Yet the conservative media has now proven to be untrustworthy.”

So we on the left could snicker if there weren't some deadly side effects here. Fine, it's good to see the opposition in disarray. But what do we do when we want sanity to return? The right has quite nearly stopped looking to the mainstream media "because they're totally liberal liars." Oh my.

One of the chief problems, Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had “basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers.”

“There’s nobody,” he lamented. “Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bulls—.’ There’s nobody — you can’t go to anybody and say, ‘Look, here are the facts.'”

“And I have to say that’s one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there’s no way to break through it,” Sykes continued.

I find this borne out when I read comment sections in mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post that basically say that "all liberals are liars." Where do they come up with such beliefs? Oh, yeah, right.

the bottom line is that the right has long preached an anti-intellectual, anti-science creed, insisting that what current scientists hold as the likely truth in climate science, for example, is not merely wrong but an out and out hoax. That was understandable as a political ploy, but carried too far -- and misinformation has been carried way, way too far by now -- it leads to whole demographic groups who are hopelessly misled on so many fronts. Undereducated, working-class whites think the blacks and the browns are stealing their future, and American seniors believe it's in their interest to put the conservatives in power even when it's they who want to cut their Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, conservative governors like Scott Walker and Sam Brownback are slashing education spending left and right. "But they're pro-life, so that's good!"

Yeah, they're so pro-life that a segment of middle-aged whites are dying early at alarming rates for hard-to-grasp reasons (blacks and Hispanics aren't impacted by that trend).

Willful ignorance and anti-intellectual misinformation campaigns may work for the right for a while, but at some point, when we reach "dumbest advanced country on the planet" status, we may not be an advanced country anymore. But, hell, that might not matter. Because Fox News will be telling us that everything is just fine now that the liberals have been crushed.

Wasn't there a movie about that?