The Clinton camp has just come out with a sharp attack ad.
The sad thing is that the Republicans will vote for him anyway.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The Clinton camp has just come out with a sharp attack ad.
The sad thing is that the Republicans will vote for him anyway.
To be fair to the republicans…
Ugh, excuse me… I’m not used to being fair to republicans. In the American politics sense anyway – I am a republican in the “what the word means” sense.
To be fair, there are definitely some republicans who won’t vote for him. I don’t know the numbers, probably not a huge number – to be unfair to republicans, they’re not very thoughtful – but it’s a non-zero number.
The trouble is that the very things that should knock Trump out of any possibility of contention – his misogyny, his racism, his immature school boy antics, his know-nothing posturing buffoonery – are the very things that have played so well to the Republican base. The more obnoxious he is, the more support he gains.
Here’s hoping that, come the Presidential election proper, the general American public will see him for the poisonous influence he manifestly is, but given the unpopularity of the Democrat front runner Hilary Clinton and the rising groundswell of reactionary misogyny that is already being mobilized against her campaign (thanks so much Bernie-bros), the prospect of President Trump is terrifyingly credible.
I would say I knew one republican who wouldn’t, but she’s independent now.
If they’re reaching out to republicans, why highlight how Trump is a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot”? That’s what they like about him.
I mean, from a Republican point of view, that’s the “good” part.
It’s possible that the men who love Trump might be put off of him by a line of attack that shows just how much of a whiny, tiny, thin-skinned baby he is. Anytime he’s criticized he whines and blabs and brags. Someone has to be clever enough to gather all this material and show how easily hurt he is.
Oh, not all of them:
Twitter conservatives cry bitter tears over Trump.
WATCH: Outraged Republicans set registration cards on fire after Trump all but secures nomination.
It’s going to be a non-stop firehose of sexist attacks on Hillary. They’ve had eight years to store up their “Hitlery Hate” and they’re going to dump it on us like a gorram tankerload of chum.
“Entertaining” is not a word I’d use to describe it.
Already the KKK is out and proud about him. http://crooksandliars.com/2016/05/david-duke-celebrates-trumps-victory-over
carolineborduin @ 6;
While the notion of using toxic constructions of masculinity against a misogynistic prat like Trump appeals to me a great deal, a major part of Trump’s electoral shtick is that he is the ‘outsider’ – an anti-establishment candidate who is sticking it to the Republican party leadership, and indeed to the entire US political class. Attacks against him originating, or perceived as originating, from the political establishment may actually serve to help his campaign, since he can characterize them as symptoms of his supposedly inexorable march to the White House making the established political power brokers nervous.
The fact that his fascistic ‘make America great again’ spiel is as old as the hills and a truly ancient device of nationalistic movements and the Far Right everywhere has clearly sailed right over the heads of his supporters. He is selling them the oldest and most frayed of political rope but – like the slippery, snake oil salesman con artist he is – he has convinced millions that it is something fresh and new. That patter has to be undermined if he is going to be beaten, since appealing to the tolerance and decency of the electorate seems to be a high risk strategy at this point.
Trump will not win. The electoral map isn’t kind to Republican candidates, and the only hope they have is to find a way to appeal to enough women, Latin@s, and/or blacks to peel off a couple of bluish states. Rubio or Bush might have done that, but from that perspective Trump is the worst candidate the goppers could have chosen.
The real danger of the Trump campaign is that he is moving beyond the usual dog whistle tactics of the gop and bringing the hatred and bigotry to the surface in a mainstream campaign. If someone smarter and savvier than him comes along to channel that hatred we are truly fucked.
I think the real danger of Trump is yes, what What A Maroon said @10, but also who’s greasing the wheels behind him.
You have a twisted idea of “entertainment,” PZ.
its really really REALLY weird when they couch the current circumstance as an aberration that is somehow disconnected from Reagan and the Bushes. What the fucking hell do these asswipe bastards expect from decades of their continuously vomiting forth disinformation? How disingenuous can putative political leadership be? These assholes have THEMSELVES spent months variously nixing their two grand front-runners, Drumpf and Cruz, in the most absolute terms, and now they turn around as the unethical and untrustworthy bastards they are, to rally their pathologically ignorant party followers to place their support behind the biggest jackass their idiocy spawned…and they behave as if its ok and good.
Never mind they continue to behave precisely like the opposition party has always characterized them: untrustworthy bastards bent on winning control rather than achieving the aims of an authentic democratic society operating under a Constitution.
Unfortunately, I can’t exclude Hillary from that very same despicable category that describes the worst of the Republican party: She plays by that same decrepit game. She’s just smoother at covering over just how good she is at keeping the wealthy safe.
In other words? This election is just another in a long series of similar farces, What makes this one stand out over the others is the internet: that the voting public has been enjoined to embrace the idiocies these campaigns have fostered, that spending horrendous amounts of their money on the peculiar myth that political ads actually changes any minds…
In the meantime, the respective campaign managers take deep bows over how effective they have been at obtaining money for nothing.
Pardon me while I take a moment of reflection that rejects the idea of suicide.
But really? Is this a country I was taught about? Is this a country I want to live in? Is this additional bullshit piling onto my day to day problems really necessary? I’m thinking that whatever people like me think no longer matters, and that the upper echelon call the fucking shots.
That’s not a world I want to live in.
So long.
Nobody seems to notice that the feverish attempts by the parties to acquire money
@11
I thought that the donald might have shady connections but jesus that smells !!
the thing I worry about is what will the turn out be?
will Hillary be good for the republican turn out (they have been trained to hate her for a long time now). How will Hillary being the candidate effect the democratic turn out? Hillary is getting the votes but she is not getting a movement.
uncle frogy
I don’t know…that ad goes awfully easy on Trump. He’s much worse than that, really.
Not all of them. My parents usually cancel each other out. My father always (for reasons that are beyond me) votes Republican, my mother always votes Democratic. This year my mother says she refuses to vote for Clinton, and if she votes at all she’ll write in for Sanders (I guess that makes her a Bernie Bro). My father was unhappy with the Republican slate in general and absolutely despises Trump in particular. He was already considering staying home on Election Day, and now certainly will.
I like whoever it was who called him a “know nothing”. I hope they were specifically making a reference to the Know Nothing Party from the 1850s who were also extremely xenophobic. However, in their case it was German and Irish Catholics and not Hispanic Catholics they were railing against.
I love Jeb Bush’s expression when he says, “he needs therapy.”
Mostly what I’m afraid of is that Bernie’s (likely) loss will lead to progressive democrats being so apathetic they won’t show up and vote for the progressives on the down-ballot slots.
Or, worse yet, enough *democrats* won’t show up for the down-ballots and the GOP’s stranglehold on state legislatures/governors will continue.
“The sad thing is that the Republicans will vote for him anyway.”
Almost as sad is that Democrats will vote for Clinton anyway. And therein lies the whole reason American politics is such a cesspool: by allowing two and only two people on the national ballot, we guarantee that the best we can do is to have one who is less evil than the other.
A bit dated, but Rowan Atkinson’s “Not the Nine O’clock News” sketch seems even more appropriate now:
It’s smart. Clinton can keep her hands clean by just showing what his own party has to say about him. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
First there is no national ballot, the voting is done under the rules of the states. Second, there will be many names for president on most ballots. I expect to see 4-6 parties offering a candidate for president on my ballot in the fall. The other parties are right/left fringe parties.
However, I acknowledge only two parties offer viable (meaning electable by the general populace) candidates at the end of the day.
A real possibility, if they are selfish and not looking out for the country as a whole if they do that. Those who say they staying away will pull the democrats to the left are delusional fools. There is no evidence that would happen.
Too bad they fail to see the problems with a President Trump, like SCOTUS replacements coming from the Heritage Foundation approved lists, essentially Scalia type jurists. That alone should get them to show up and vote to prevent that from happening.
This crazy election is about to get much crazier, this just dropped:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/04/romanian-hacker-guccifer-breached-clinton-server-it-was-easy.html?intcmp=hpbt1
Now the content isn’t that earth shattering, anyone who has been paying attention pretty much assumed that an email server sending messages cleartext for the first few months (during which she emailed from China), then with only a self signed cert, that also had VNC and RDP ports open to the whole internet could’ve been hacked by your average middle school script kiddie.
What makes this a bombshell is that Guiccfer, patient zero on loan from the Romanian prison system, was interviewed in Federal prison.
Fed BOP rules regarding interviewing a prisoner in federal custody who has not been convicted of a crime:
https://www.bop.gov/policy/progstat/1480_005.pdf
The DOJ DAs who are responsible for indicting and prosecuting the case let Fox News come in and interview the person who instigated the entire investigation. The DOJ and BOP rarely grant press access to even normal cases that have already been decided.
This is a shot across the bow not only for Hillary, but for the FBI for taking so long. There is probably an inter-departmental struggle going on whether she should be indicted before the convention or after with the DOJ coming down on before.
Hillary can’t count on Obama’s Justice Department covering for her and squashing the whole thing. She is well and truly fucked.
Both former President Bushes have confirmed that they will not endorse Donald Trump.
John McCain said that Trump has alienated Latinos so much that he sees a negative effect on his own reelection campaign in Arizona. Link
Bill Kristol is still floating a third-party candidate solution. Kristen says in an interview that Trump would make a terrible president.
Mitch McConnell issued a tepid endorsement of Trump.
Trump announced that he will soon be willing to accept donations from Republican megadonors. (He self-funded, but not really, his primary campaign, but he is not self-funding the general election campaign.)
The Koch brothers and the Koch-funded political groups are considering supporting someone other than Trump, someone who is “able to garner support from the public with a positive message in support of the issues we care about, and did not engage in personal attacks and mudslinging.” Or, the Koch brothers may sit out the election this year.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trump-megadonors-koch-222825b
The Rolling Stones told the Trump campaign to stop playing their music at rallies.
I know at least 3 Republicans (meatspace) who are voting Clinton over Trump. Who can’t stand him, or what he represents for their party.
@MassMomentumEnergy
You believe anything Fox News has to say about any Democrat, much less Hilary Clinton? I sure as fuck don’t.
Is NBC good enough for you (they are also doing an hour long special on the issue Sunday)?
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hacker-guccifer-i-got-inside-hillary-clinton-s-server-n568206
But the NBC interview comes from before Guiccfer went to Romanian prison and was subsequently extradited to the US. If you bothered to read what I said, what Guiccfer said isn’t nearly as interesting as the fact that the DOJ DAs in charge of the investigation allowed the interview to happen. That Guiccfer was interview in federal prison is far more earth shattering than what he had to say (which itself is pretty damning on its own right).
Regarding the comments about the hacker “Guccifer” [Marcel Lehel Lazar] in comment 24, yes Fox News is reporting that he hacked Clinton’s personal email server. Fox News is unreliable.
Other sources say that the Guccifer-leaked emails came from a hack of Sidney Blumenthal’s account. Those emails were sent to Clinton, but the hack did not involve her server.
Guccifer also hacked emails exchanged by Colin Powell and Corina Crete. He hacked the emails and social media accounts of a lot of high profile victims.
From Media Matters:
From the International Business Times:
MassMomentumEnergy, it is too early to tell if Clinton is “well and truly fucked,” as you claim. In fact, the evidence is leaning the other way.
More “Guccifer” hacker coverage from NBC news:
Guccifer claims to have two gigs of pilfered data from her server that he kept secret because they were too hot for even him. I’m sure the FBI has that by now along with those 30k emails she thought she deleted but had a cloud backup. Oh and they have had cooperation from the IT guy in charge of the whole setup in exchange for immunity since October.
Guccifer might not have given reporters hard evidence from his prison cell, but I doubt he would refuse the FBI and DOJ anything.
The evidence you gave amounts to:
1) Guccifer would have publicly released everything he ever snagged.
2) Guccifer hasn’t given concrete proof of his claims to reporters.
3) An anonymous leak from a generally leak free FBI investigation says they found no evidence of hacking.
Well, if you are a hacker:
1) You keep the juicy stuff for yourself for bargaining power.
2) You are bargaining with the DA not the press.
And if you are pathetically unsecured server:
3) You don’t keep the kind of logs that would leave evidence of hacking.
Your ‘evidence’ is lacking.
Again, the breaking news isn’t what Guccifer said, that shit has been known for months, it is that the DOJ DAs in charge let him say it to Fox News from within federal prison.
It is a fact that Fox interviewed him in prison, they have audio and everything, and I’m sure if you cared enough you could get visitor logs from the prison.
It is a fact that interviewing someone in federal custody who hasn’t been convicted requires the written approval of the DAs in charge of the case.
It is well known that press interviews are rarely allowed with federal prisoners, and it is even rarer for non-convicted inmates.
The DOJ DAs’ actions are what is news here, and since they are privy to information that is not public, and since they are the ones who will indict and prosecute, their actions are more important than the words of a thousand bloggers and journalists crying “the kind of information needed to convict in the court of law is not public, therefore she is innocent, everybody move along, nothing to see here.”
Now, if this was only about Hillary’s laughable unsecured electronic communications being used for classified information, it would have been resolved by January. With just public information it is a pretty slam dunk case, and if you had the deleted emails and the cooperation of the IT guy in charge it would be even easier.
So what is taking the FBI so long?
They probably found evidence in those emails of other crimes not related to the handling of classified documents. If you are going to be building a RICO case over pay-to-play politics against the former Secretary of State and presumptive democratic nominee for President plus her former President husband, you are going to need to do some deep digging and get an air tight case. That could take years to do it right.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/wall-street-whistleblower-turns-scrutiny-clinton-foundation/
You don’t think the FBI has forensic auditors every bit as good as this guy who have been digging through the paper trail for months now?
I stand by my well and truly fucked statement.
And here in the Netherlands Geert Wilders, the racist xenofobic fucktard leader of the biggest (sigh…) party in the polls has announced to fly to the US when Trump is elected, to show his respect and support. You would not believe the similarities between these fucks. So for what’s it’s worth: you’re not the only country that might be FUBAR…
when you use words like probably you are saying you don’t know but you think so for no other reason than because.
I will agree though in electoral politics the truth of a statement is not as important as the doubt it flings about to discourage votes. The republicans have been campaigning against Hillary Clinton for a very long time and doubt and suspicion is all they have been able to make stick.
You are saying that this time is different because probably……..?
uncle frogy
“Probably” as in there is plenty of public domain evidence pointing that way, the FBI has way more data than has been made public, and FBI agents are actually competent at their jobs.
probably because reasons
uncle frogy
Um, yeah.
Did I not spell out my reasons enough?
Did I not make clear that I am not a member of the FBI investigation and thus can’t speak to the internal workings of such with 100% confidence?
“Probably because reasons” seems quite apt.
We’ll find out one way or the other soon enough. Huma has already been grilled, which means only Clinton herself is left. After she is interrogated, the FBI will likely release their findings within a week or two.
@MassMomentumEnergy
So basically, you’ve gone from the speculation that the “FBI is taking so long” (compared to what? Why do you think they should be doing anything any faster?) to the idea that Hillary has committed RICO worthy crimes, to the idea that, either way, she is well and truly fucked.
And all this from the original made up BS that the “FBI is taking so long”. There are absolutely no other facts in your entire theory. Only speculations built up from your original speculation about the slowness of the FBI’s investigation (of course, if the FBI is indeed taking a long time, the idea that this will obviously be a highly scrutinized case so they are being extra careful to cross their t’s and dot their i’s never occurred to you. It MUST BE RICO!).
Talk about conspiracy theory mongering….
so MassMomentumEnergy
about vaccinations…
Taking so long in reference to the political timeline. Ideally this should have been dealt with one way or another before Iowa. Things get messier the closer to the convention or election you get.
And evidence of charity fraud isn’t evidence? Always follow the money, and most of the money is being routed through the Clinton Foundation. That will be the lynchpin of any case bigger than “by trying to hide your communications from FIOA, you opened them up to every country in the world with halfway competent hackers on their payroll.” (That alone should put you in prison or at least disqualify you from ever holding an office of import ever again)
But hey, it is all just a vast right wing conspiracy right? The Clintons are as pure as freshly driven snow, a dozen plus FBI agents digging through their private communications and finances will never find anything sketchy.
look people have been looking at the Clintons for some time now I even remember a very long investigation and one thing stands out they while getting very close and maybe even stretching the ethics they managed to stay within the letter of the law. The things that were done with the e-mail were not unique to them nor was it against policy and procedure at the time. That the policy was not as good as it could have been at the time is a different subject it was what it was.
Stretching ethics and staying within the letter of the law as interpreted by your lawyers is what they all do the republicans as well as the democrats. nothing that is “suspected’ here is any where close to the “war crimes” that were accused of the previous bunch. what is the definition of torture?
uncle frogy
Just because she might beat the rap doesn’t mean she’ll beat the ride, and that is enough to sink her chances at being President.
Are you betting on “FBI won’t find enough to recommend indictment” or “DOJ squashes the FBI recommended indictment”?
I am not privy to all of the “evidence” nor do I have any inside information all I have are “press releases” as does anyone else. I am not going to spin a story out of the incomplete information to conform to my “feelings” about what will happen or should happen nor who I “like or dislike”, unlike some. it will probably only effect those who already made their choice and will not change many minds.
uncle frogy
You seemed pretty confident that nothing would come of it. That is spinning a story all its own.
well after about 25 years they ain’t got much I see nothing that seems likely to change that. Like I said though I do not know “there is many a slip betwixt the lip and the cup”.
uncle frogy