2016 elections - because it's never too early

[garbon]

With poor drag?

[jimmy olsen]

I'm annoyed that the press is not persuing the evidence that Trump bribed the attorney general of Florida with nearly as much rigor as they are Clinton's emails.

[Ed Anger]

A serious political post for Val:

Finally saw my first Clinton/Kaine yard sign. Took their organization long enough to get them out. Still outnumbered by the Trump signs and the hilarious LOCK HER UP signs.

[CountDeMoney]

Somebody's been climbing power poles and posting handmade "Hillary 4 Prison" signs on the road my sister lives on, way up high near the pole cans, so you can't get to them without a bucket truck.

I'd like to think whoever is doing it learns about the nature of electricity soon enough--but like so much of Trump's campaign and his supporters, not only are they oblivious to science, they are impervious to it. 

[jimmy olsen]

Instead of touring deep blue and deep red states like the Donald, Hillary has campaigned in swing states. It seems to have paid off, who'd have thunk it!

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/hillary-clintons-month-of-quietly-touring-swing-states-has-paid-off/25967/

Hillary Clinton's diligent month of quietly touring swing states has paid off

By Bill Palmer | September 4, 2016 | 14 

Even as Donald Trump has spent the past month embracing constant turmoil in the name of making himself the center of national media attention even if it meant settling for negative attention, his opponent has taken an entirely different tack. Hilary Clinton, apparently sensing that Trump was intent on harming himself for attention and that the media was at least partly willing to knock him for it, decided to let him have that spotlight – even as she put her head down and spent the month quietly plugging away with events in swing states. The numbers say it's paid off.

If Clinton had continued pushing her way onto cable news over the past month, and if she had sent her surrogates to make similar television appearances, it would have been them swinging away at Trump. But instead, by pulling back from that arena, it put the TV talking heads in the position of having to be the ones to take the shots at Trump – and that's a more powerful message. So instead she pulled back from the cable news arena, and has instead been holding one rally after another in the states that are on the line in this election.

The results: Hillary Clinton is now winning in Ohio by four points, winning in Pennsylvania by seven points, winning in Virginia by six points, winning in Michigan by eight points, winning in New Hampshire by nine points, and also winning in North Carolina and Florida, according to the current polling averages from RealClearPolitics. In fact she's now leading in every state which is traditionally considered to be a swing state. If the current numbers hold, she'll win in an electoral college blowout.

Meanwhile Donald Trump is running in a different race altogether, the one in which he competes to see who can get the most cable news airtime, whether that attention be helpful or harmful to his cause. He's winning the airtime battle – but it's becoming increasingly clear that it's not helping his election chances in any way shape or form.

It's possible that Trump doesn't understand how general elections work, and mistakenly believes that all the free media coverage is helping him. After all, he continues to brag about how well he's doing in the polls, even though the polls say he's on his way to a humiliating defeat, so perhaps the headstrong political rookie truly doesn't understand how elections works.

But it's equally possible that Donald Trump doesn't care that all the middling-to-negative media attention isn't helping his chances of winning; after all, it's boosting his ego, which appears to be more important to him. Meanwhile, as Hillary Clinton continues to lose the cable news airtime battle, she continues to win the election

Trump has taken to falsely claiming that Clinton isn't on the campaign trail at all, perhaps because he hasn't spotted her on cable news much lately and can't be bothered to check her actual campaign schedule. But Hillary and her surrogates will reemerge on the cable news scene when the time is right, likely a week or two before the first debate, in order to remind the nation that she is indeed the frontrunner – and to remind them why. In the mean time she's largely staying out of Trump's way while he digs himself a deeper hole.

[Ed Anger]

Somebody's been climbing power poles and posting handmade "Hillary 4 Prison" signs on the road my sister lives on, way up high near the pole cans, so you can't get to them without a bucket truck.

I'd like to think whoever is doing it learns about the nature of electricity soon enough--but like so much of Trump's campaign and his supporters, not only are they oblivious to science, they are impervious to it. 

The Alt Reich doesn't acknowledge "electricity" or other fancy c u c k talk.

They only dream of their anime wife.

[Phillip V]

Somebody's been climbing power poles and posting handmade "Hillary 4 Prison" signs on the road my sister lives on, way up high near the pole cans, so you can't get to them without a bucket truck.

I'd like to think whoever is doing it learns about the nature of electricity soon enough--but like so much of Trump's campaign and his supporters, not only are they oblivious to science, they are impervious to it. 

Pics plz.

[Legbiter]

I'm annoyed that the press is not persuing the evidence that Trump bribed the attorney general of Florida with nearly as much rigor as they are Clinton's emails.

That's not going to be very effective. She's finally running a good persuasion campaign with her low visibility, black-tie fundraising and painting Trump as crazyracistHitler who will kill us all in a nuclear war, personally and through her surrogates in the media. She's the favorite now and Trump is the scrappy underdog.

Her handlers need to be careful though because if there are more visuals like yesterday of her hacking out a lung, it'll scare the normies like Dukakis on that tank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apuA5CACTfs

[garbon]

I'm annoyed that the press is not persuing the evidence that Trump bribed the attorney general of Florida with nearly as much rigor as they are Clinton's emails.

Isn't it 'old' news?

But yes, it is amazing the narrative that Clinton is the not truthful, shady one when Trump is the one who never sticks to any stance and is actually doing the shady things that Clinton is accused of perhaps, maybe, possibly doing.. Krugman's take.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/opinion/hillary-clinton-gets-gored.html

Hillary Clinton Gets Gored

Americans of a certain age who follow politics and policy closely still have vivid memories of the 2000 election — bad memories, and not just because the man who lost the popular vote somehow ended up in office. For the campaign leading up to that end game was nightmarish too.

You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.

Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore's mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.

And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it's happening again.

True, there aren't many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon of honesty. But it's hard to escape the impression that he's being graded on a curve. If he manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he's being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn't round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he's moving into the mainstream. And many of his multiple scandals, like what appear to be clear payoffs to state attorneys general to back off investigating Trump University, get remarkably little attention.

Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.

Step back for a moment, and think about what that foundation is about. When Bill Clinton left office, he was a popular, globally respected figure. What should he have done with that reputation? Raising large sums for a charity that saves the lives of poor children sounds like a pretty reasonable, virtuous course of action. And the Clinton Foundation is, by all accounts, a big force for good in the world. For example, Charity Watch, an independent watchdog, gives it an "A" rating — better than the American Red Cross.

Now, any operation that raises and spends billions of dollars creates the potential for conflicts of interest. You could imagine the Clintons using the foundation as a slush fund to reward their friends, or, alternatively, Mrs. Clinton using her positions in public office to reward donors. So it was right and appropriate to investigate the foundation's operations to see if there were any improper quid pro quos. As reporters like to say, the sheer size of the foundation "raises questions."

But nobody seems willing to accept the answers to those questions, which are, very clearly, "no."

Consider the big Associated Press report suggesting that Mrs. Clinton's meetings with foundation donors while secretary of state indicate "her possible ethics challenges if elected president." Given the tone of the report, you might have expected to read about meetings with, say, brutal foreign dictators or corporate fat cats facing indictment, followed by questionable actions on their behalf.

But the prime example The A.P. actually offered was of Mrs. Clinton meeting with Muhammad Yunus, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who also happens to be a longtime personal friend. If that was the best the investigation could come up with, there was nothing there.

So I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something "raises questions," creates "shadows," or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

And here's a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate's character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump's record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he'd act as president; Mrs. Clinton's speaking style and body language aren't. George W. Bush's policy lies gave me a much better handle on who he was than all the up-close-and-personal reporting of 2000, and the contrast between Mr. Trump's policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton's carefulness speaks volumes today.

In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can't afford another election tipped by innuendo.

[DGuller]

The media, or the system it has to operate in, will be the death of democracy in US.  Instead of enlightening, it turns the politics into a circus for the sake of ratings.

[Legbiter]

The media, or the system it has to operate in, will be the death of democracy in US.  Instead of enlightening, it turns the politics into a circus for the sake of ratings.

I don't envy you American languishbrahs who're stuck inside the bubble. 

Haven't seen the US media this utterly deranged and shill-ridden since the 2002-2003 runup to the Iraq war. 

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2016/sep/06/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-us-election-campaign-polls-live

For the first time since 1964, The Dallas Morning News won't endorse the Republican nominee for president, declaring that Donald Trump "does not deserve your vote" and is not a true conservative nor Republican.

Its editorial today reads:

It's not easy to offer a shorthand list of such tenets, since Trump flips from one side to the other, issue after issue, sometimes within a single news cycle. Regardless, his ideas are so far from Republicanism that they have spawned a new description: Trumpism.

We have no interest in a Republican nominee for whom all principles are negotiable, nor in a Republican Party that is willing to trade away principle for pursuit of electoral victory.

Trump doesn't reflect Republican ideals of the past; we are certain he shouldn't reflect the GOP of the future.

Donald Trump is not qualified to serve as president and does not deserve your vote.

[Barrister]

I'm annoyed that the press is not persuing the evidence that Trump bribed the attorney general of Florida with nearly as much rigor as they are Clinton's emails.

I'm annoyed there hasn't been more attention that the FBI's info dump on the Clinton email investigation was released Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

[garbon]

I'm annoyed that the press is not persuing the evidence that Trump bribed the attorney general of Florida with nearly as much rigor as they are Clinton's emails.

I'm annoyed there hasn't been more attention that the FBI's info dump on the Clinton email investigation was released Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

Well, it has been what...2 years of hearing about these emails and we are still waiting for a shocking revelation?

[Razgovory]

I'm annoyed that the press is not persuing the evidence that Trump bribed the attorney general of Florida with nearly as much rigor as they are Clinton's emails.

I'm annoyed there hasn't been more attention that the FBI's info dump on the Clinton email investigation was released Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

How would things be different if they released those documents today?