WaPo: By 2025, most of Donald Trump’s tax cuts would go to the wealthiest 1% of Americans

I actually wish there was a little more focus on Trump's proposed tax giveaways, rather than his sexual assault fantasies.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/analysis-by-2025-most-of-donald-trump%E2%80%99s-tax-cuts-would-go-to-the-wealthiest-1percent-of-americans/ar-BBxiLQZ

Donald Trump has called for historic tax relief for the rich, which would likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. Hillary Clinton would ask the wealthy to pay much more than they do now, and she would use the money mostly to lessen the burden on middle-class families with small children.

A pair of new analyses published Tuesday afternoon by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center emphasize the extreme contrasts between the two candidates when it comes to taxes. In a campaign that has been defined by conspiracy theories, racial innuendos and sex scandals from decades past, the new data is a reminder that the election puts serious money at stake for many American households.

Where Clinton would increase taxes on corporations and investors, Trump would drastically reduce them. He has called for eliminating the estate tax, which Clinton hopes to increase. The Democratic presidential nominee would expand the credit for children, while her Republican rival would eliminate an important tax advantage for families.

"They really couldn’t be more different," Leonard Burman, the director of the center, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday. "In almost every meaningful respect, these plans are mirror images."

Ezra Klein - Donald Trump confirmed our worst fears about the kind of president he would be

At Sunday’s debate, Donald Trump revealed that he is not running to be America’s president so much as its dictator.

The debate’s most unnerving moment came early. “If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there's never been so many lies, so much deception,” Trump told Hillary Clinton.

“It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country,” Clinton shot back.

Trump, determined as always to make subtext into text, left no room for confusion. “Because you’d be in jail,” he said.

Vox - Donald Trump’s threat to imprison Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy

I know that there is going to be a lot of focus on sex scandals, but I think Trump's threat to imprison Hillary is far worse. indeed, I think it just builds on themes that the GOP itself has created. Once again, Trump is the GOP's frankenstein monster.

http://www.vox.com/2016/10/9/13222302/donald-trump-jail-hillary-clinton-second-debate

There is no way to sugarcoat this: At Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump threatened to throw Hillary Clinton in jail if he wins the presidency. This — threatening to jail one’s political opponents — is how democratic norms die.

The exchange happened during a discussion of the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Trump began by decrying Clinton’s conduct — which, according to the FBI, was quite bad but not illegal. He then proposed appointing a special prosecutor to investigate her, and warned Clinton that, if he were president now, “you’d be in jail”:

TRUMP: I'll tell you what. I didn't think I'd say this, and I'm going to say it, and hate to say it: If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there's never been so many lies, so much deception … A very expensive process, so we're going to get a special prosecutor because people have been, their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you've done. And it's a disgrace, and honestly, you ought to be ashamed.

CLINTON: Let me just talk about emails, because everything he just said is absolutely false. But I'm not surprised … It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country.

DT: Because you'd be in jail.

New Yorker - "Trump and the Trurth: The 'Rigged' Election" - Spoiler, the GOP Is Rigging It!

Here is the great irony that the Republicans long standing efforts to pain elections as being rigged against them with Donald Trump being the chief conspirator in chief has pretty much painted the GOP in a corner. All the talk from Republicans calling on Trump to resign is just to give establishment Republicans plausible deniability. Otherwise, if the GOP elites are successful in pulling of their coup d'etat, doesn't this prove that Trump was right all along about a rigged election, except that it was not the Democrats who rigged it, but Trump's fellow Republicans. Worse, Pence is the one who was the chief backstabber by refusing to lift a finger to defend Donald Trump during the VP debate, then working with other Republicans to set himself up to step in at the earliest opportunity.

Put another way, the Republicans engaging in a backroom deal to replace Donald Trump would simply confirm the Republican base's wildest accusations about the system being rigged against their popular choice.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-the-truth-the-rigged-election

The election is going to be rigged—I’m going to be honest,” Donald Trump said to a rowdy crowd in August, at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote ten times, maybe,” Trump told an interviewer later. A few days afterward, in Pennsylvania, where Trump was then lagging by nine points in the polls, he warned supporters that “the only way we can lose . . . is if cheating goes on.” That week, a new page appeared on his campaign Web site, inviting concerned citizens to volunteer to be “Trump Election Observers” so that they could “help me stop Crooked Hillary from rigging this election!”

At the first Presidential debate, Trump and Hillary Clinton were asked whether they would accept the ultimate outcome of the election. Trump evaded the question at first, before winkingly conceding that he would. But after the debate he went right back to his routine—more talk of rigging. Those polls that said Clinton had won the debate? They were skewed against him, he said, just like Google was, with its suspiciously pro-Clinton search results. At campaign stops this week, Trump reiterated his claims that Clinton was out to steal the vote. He even told the Times that he was reconsidering whether he’d accept a Clinton victory at all.

As my colleague Amy Davidson has discussed, Republicans have spent years, beginning well before Trump’s campaign, warning voters that devious people were trying to cast illegitimate ballots to swing elections. They gave the problem a tidy, intuitive-sounding name: voter fraud. But, in an especially toxic political gambit, Trump has taken this concept to the extreme: trying to delegitimize a national election even while campaigning for the Presidency.

* * *
Republicans themselves have stoked this paranoia. Over the past decade, Republican officeholders in dozens of states have used the threat of voters casting multiple or illegitimate ballots to justify imposing onerous identification requirements at the voting booth, measures that have often gone hand in hand with efforts to shorten early-voting periods before Election Day. An estimated eleven per cent of eligible voters, more than twenty million people, do not have any form of government-issued photo I.D., and minority and lower-income citizens, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates, are disproportionately represented in that group. (As are college-age voters and the elderly.) A number of Republican Party officials from across the country have actually admitted to manipulating the threat of voter fraud to their advantage.

Imagine if Kaine and Pence Were Switched...

...and Kaine spent the entire debate denying easily verifiable things that Hillary said, refusing to lift a finger to defend Hillary, and started articulating positions that are completely at odds with Hillary's stated views. In so doing, the media take away is that Kaine is positioning himself for a 2020 run and Democrats wish that Kaine not Hillary were the candidate? Finally, what if Kaine's best attribute was to demonstrate by his conduct that he was cool and measured compared to Hillary who was tweeting insults and rants as the debate unfolded?

Would you consider that a win or a betrayal?

Cliff Notes: Glad I Watched The Debate. Tempted To Blow It Off...

...but given the media's spin, it is good to have watched the whole thing. In a nut shell, who won the debate depends on what do you think the objectives of the VP debate are. Are you selling the top of the ticket or are you selling yourself at the risk of distancing yourself from your own candidate?

Pence: Cool and calm. Did not lift a finger to defend Trump. Did not articulate any actual Trump policies. Just offered generalized statements about low taxes and less regulation and strength. Attacked Hillary, but did not really follow through on attacks. Also, made a lot of false denials that will be easily fact checked where I was saying, "Now that is just bullshit, Trump did say that." Also, some of Pence's statements on the importance of allies really departs from Trump's isolationist/anti-alliance/anti-trade views.

Kaine: Very aggressive in both attacking Trump AND defending Clinton. Was overeager at times in terms of interrupting and speaking out of turn. Very detailed and specific, but he simply does not have Pence's RW talk show host voice. Still, Kaine came off as very earnest and sincere with a bit of a voice crack, but maybe a bit overzealous.

Overall: Kaine was a far better attack dog and defender of his nominee. Pence was far better in defending the Pence brand while hanging Trump himself out to dry. So, from a personal popularity/maintain your Presidential aspirations point of view, Pence probably came out better. But, if the job is attack the other party's nominee and defend your own nominee, then Kaine easily came out better.

NYT (1989) - Republicans Settle Suit Over Guards at Polls

Donald Trump is just taking a page out of the GOP voter intimidation notebook.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/25/us/republicans-settle-suit-over-guards-at-polls.html

SANTA ANA, Calif., Dec. 24— The Orange County Republican Party, a Republican legislator and his campaign workers have agreed to settle a lawsuit accusing them of hiring uniformed guards to intimidate Hispanic voters.

* * *

State and Federal agencies are still investigating the posting of guards in a 1988 election at 20 polling places in areas of Santa Ana where Hispanic voters were predominant. Assemblyman Curt Pringle of Garden Grove, the Republican incumbent, defeated his Democratic challenger, Christian (Rick) Thierbach, by 843 votes.

The guards carried signs in English and Spanish warning that non-citizens cannot legally vote.

Hispanic community leaders said the posting of the guards amounted to racially motivated intimidation. Republican Party officials said the guards were there only to monitor the voting.

Book Review - In ‘Hitler,’ an Ascent From ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue - Timely!

Today, many Americans still tend to normalize or minimize the danger of Donald Trump content that our Nation's checks and balances will keep from abusing his power. Likewise, many Republicans think that they can control or limit his excesses while benefiting from his appeals to racism and religious intolerance.



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/books/hitler-ascent-volker-ullrich.html

• Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who “only loved himself” — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a “characteristic fondness for superlatives.” His manic speeches and penchant for taking all-or-nothing risks raised questions about his capacity for self-control, even his sanity. But Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”

• Hitler was known, among colleagues, for a “bottomless mendacity” that would later be magnified by a slick propaganda machine that used the latest technology (radio, gramophone records, film) to spread his message. A former finance minister wrote that Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”

• Hitler was an effective orator and actor, Mr. Ullrich reminds readers, adept at assuming various masks and feeding off the energy of his audiences. Although he concealed his anti-Semitism beneath a “mask of moderation” when trying to win the support of the socially liberal middle classes, he specialized in big, theatrical rallies staged with spectacular elements borrowed from the circus. Here, “Hitler adapted the content of his speeches to suit the tastes of his lower-middle-class, nationalist-conservative, ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic listeners,” Mr. Ullrich writes. He peppered his speeches with coarse phrases and put-downs of hecklers. Even as he fomented chaos by playing to crowds’ fears and resentments, he offered himself as the visionary leader who could restore law and order.

• Hitler increasingly presented himself in messianic terms, promising “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,” though he was typically vague about his actual plans. He often harked back to a golden age for the country, Mr. Ullrich says, the better “to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay.”

Vox - "Donald Trump lies. All the time."

I think this election underscores the failure of modern MSM and the problem of the herd mentality of media outlets pushing all news through a predetermined narrative. Hillary is dishonest. Trump is a straight shooter. Even folks on the left have sometimes accepted the framing of the candidates. Now, at the 11th hour, some media outlets are starting to abandon false equivalency, but it is too late.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/26/13016146/donald-trump-liar-media

When Donald Trump went to Flint, Michigan, the pastor at the Baptist church where he spoke had to defend him from hecklers in the audience: “He is a guest of my church, and you will respect him.”

The next day, Trump got on the phone with Fox News and lied. He said that the pastor ambushed him — while the audience took his side and chanted “Let him speak.”

Never mind that there were dozens of eyewitnesses. Never mind that reporters were present — and had been reporting the story accurately for hours by the time Trump commented. Never mind that one of those reporters had a video camera — and the recording makes it extremely obvious that Trump’s account of events isn’t a misunderstanding but a deliberate lie.

This is the point. Donald Trump lies. All the time.

NY Times - A Week of Whoppers From Donald Trump

If Hillary Clinton just uttered one of these lies, the MSM would be announcing that she had disqualified herself from running for President.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/24/us/elections/donald-trump-statements.html?_r=0

1. He said a supportive crowd chanted, “Let him speak!” when a black pastor in Flint, Mich., asked Mr. Trump not to give a political speech in the church.
There were no such chants.

2. “I was against going into the war in Iraq.”
This is not getting any truer with repetition. He never publicly expressed opposition to the war before it began, and he made supportive remarks to Howard Stern.

3. He said any supportive comments he made about the Iraq war came “long before” the war began.
He expressed support for the war in September 2002, when Congress was debating whether to authorize military action.

4. He said he had publicly opposed the Iraq war in an Esquire interview “pretty quickly after the war started.”
The Esquire interview appeared in the August 2004 edition, 17 months after the war began.