Trump's Big Nothing Burger in Mexico

Trump attempted a "do over" in Mexico today.

Trump said he didn't talk about building his wall in Mexico and making Mexico pay for it.

Trump didn't tell President Peña Nieto that he's sending 11 million illegals back to Mexico but will let only the "good ones" back in, did he.

Trump didn't tell President Peña Nieto that Mexicans are murderers and rapists, did he.


Trump said he didn't discuss the wall with President  Peña Nieto, but that is a lie.


This is the tweet Mexican President Peña Nieto made after the Nothing Burger Trump meeting:

Translation:

"At the start of the conversation with Donald Trump, I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall."

Trump lied.  Again.



Donnie tried a "do over" today, but he can't undo the insults to Mexico he's tweeted over the last year. The Mexican people still detest the short-fingered vulgarian.  

Here are his insulting tweets:

And … 

Wednesday is Trump Hump Day

These things are all over the intertubz:

R.I.P. Gene Wilder

A Skunk Can't Change His Stripes...

UPDATE BELOW

Trump's deluded supporters keep thinking he's going to have some sort of Damascene conversion in the next 74 days; that he'll stop uttering racist statements; that he'll stop changing his mind on major policy issues every 5 minutes; and that he'll stop being the short fingered vulgar bigot that he is.

A Trump supporter came to this blog earlier today and claimed that there are thousands, if not millions of underground Trump supporters who do not answer poll takers because they don't want their opinion to be counted in order to upset what the mainstream pollsters are predicting for November's election: A Clinton landslide. 

The commenter actually believes this fantasy -- just like the Goopers believed Romney was going to beat President Obama in 2012. As I said, compared with Trump, Romney is a saint, and people like the Trump supporter think the repulsive Trump will attract MORE voters to him than Mitt Romney did?  They believe that somehow Trump will become the next Ronald Reagan and attract enough people to vote him into the White House?

This is what happens when people hitch themselves to a rotten candidate -- a candidate they know is everything they detest in a politician and human being, but are too blinded by party loyalty and Clinton hatred to do the decent thing and reject him.

Let Trump Supporter come back on November 9 and explain to us where all those hidden-from-pollsters Trump supporters went.

Meanwhile, here is a compilation of bigoted and racist statements from Trump over the years. 

We can start with this two-fer bigoted comment from the 1970s:


"Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control." Trump at first denied the remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that "the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true." 

From Vox:Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2016, explained 

Trump regularly tells reporters that he’s "the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered." But his record tells another story. Here are some of Trump's repulsive racist actions and statements: 

1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to black tenants and lied to black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to discriminating before. 

 1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the "Central Park Five" — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!" The teens’ convictions were later vacated, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement to the teens. But Trump argued that because they were probably, according to him, involved in other criminal activity that night, they were treated too well. 

 2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a "record of criminal activity [that] is well documented." 

 2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he "wasn't particularly happy" with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering "an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world." 

 2011: Trump played a big role in pushing false rumors that Obama — the country’s first black president — was not born in the US. He even sent investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama's birth certificate. Obama later released his birth certificate, calling Trump a "carnival barker." 

 At the Republican convention, he officially seized the mantle of the "law and order" candidate — an obvious dog whistle playing to white fears of black crime, even though crime in the US is historically low. 

In a pitch to black voters, Trump said, "You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?"


How do people like Trump Supporter and other Goopers stick with someone as blatantly bigoted and mean-spirited and rotten and against every American ideal as Trump most certainly is?

Trump's supporters will invariably answer with this:

BENGHAZI!  BENGHAZI! BENGHAZI! and EMAILS! EMAILS! EMAILS!





UPDATE:

Here's Donald Trump retweeting a repulsive tweet. Donnie apparently doesn't understand that presidential candidates don't degrade themselves by doing that. He just doesn't get it; and he just can't be classy -- he's rich trailer trash:

Here’s the original, including the “she smells” part, which should have been a clue that this is not something to be elevated by a presidential candidate:

26 Aug

Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

New polls - join the MOVEMENT today.http://www.DonaldJTrump.com #ImWithYou pic.twitter.com/numII7W99T

 Follow

Patrick Nowlen @PMNOrlando

@realDonaldTrump I know of NO ONE voting for Crooked Hillary! Her rallies are held in port-o-potties & she still has room. She Smells!

11:06 PM - 28 Aug 2016

 
•  2323 Retweets
 
•  4949 likes

Here's Donnie's retweet with the port-o-potty and "She Smells" part left out:

Trump’s edited RT (and this is just one reason why someone needs to teach Donald Trump how to RT properly):

 Follow

Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

"@PMNOrlando: @realDonaldTrump I know of NO ONE voting for Crooked Hillary! Her rallies are held in (blank) & she still has room.

9:17 AM - 29 Aug 2016

 
•  1,9751,975 Retweets
 
•  6,4126,412 likes

Sunday Thoughts

A Bit of History of Trump's Father and the KKK

This is for the various self-labeled members of the Stupid Party. 

You know, the ones who've been pushing the story on the intertubz about Hillary's friendship with Senator Robert Byrd, former KKK member, who vociferously and regularly apologized and denounced his membership in that vile organization.

Senator Byrd, it is true, was a member of the KKK, and even voted against Thurgood Marshall for SCOTUS. But Senator Byrd did something that the Evangelical conservatives find ennobling, he redeemed himself by rejecting everything the KKK stands for and personally apologized many times over for his association with that terrorist organization. 

For the rabid radicals on the right to smear the late Senator Byrd (and indirectly Hillary Clinton for her association with him) for something he strongly and unequivocally renounced is to reveal their hypocrisy, because as Christians they supposedly believe in the power of redemption through forgiveness and God's grace, but apparently that applies only to Republican Christians. Hypocrites of the worst sort.

The radical rabid right wingers gloss over the truth of Robert Byrd's rejection of the KKK, hoping others, as intellectually lazy and uninformed as they, will swallow that slander the way they swallow every other slander against Clinton they find in their crazy uncles' emails.

I'll bet they delete this email below when someone who tries to enlighten The Stupids sends it to their email addresses:

by digby

Just a little reminder for all the Trump defenders out there who are trying to say Clinton is racist for being friendly to Robert Byrd years after he had repudiated his KKK affiliation.

This is from a piece by Rick Perlstein about Trump's "urban avenging angel" form of conservatism:

No history of modern conservatism I’m aware of finds much significance in the 22,000 Nazi sympathizers who rallied for Hitler at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, presided over by a giant banner of General George Washington that stretched almost all the way to the second deck, capped off by a menacing eagle insignia.

Nor the now-infamous Ku Klux Klan march through the streets of Queens in 1927, when The New York Times reported “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all,” in which according to one contemporary news report all the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire, and that one of those arrestees was Donald Trump’s own father.

Has Trump disavowed his father's KKK affiliation or are his current associations just a continuation of his family's tradition? It seems fair enough to ask since it doesn't appear that his father, unlike Robert Byrd, ever apologized for his youthful membership in the Klan or unlike Byrd ever did one thing to make up for it.  And neither has his son.

Saturday Funnies

Hitler finds out Trump Supports Amnesty:

Donald Trump Changes His Immigration Policy

The central piece of Donald Trump's candidacy is how he'll tackle immigration reform. As you recall, his plan is to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it and to deport 11 million illegals, and then let the "good ones back in." 

How he'd accomplish this Herculean task is anyone's guess, including Donnie's, but those two issues got him the Republican nomination for the presidency, and now he's CHANGED HIS POSITION! Even though his spokespeople say he hasn't.  But in Donnie's world anything he says is subject to change and reversal if his poll numbers require it.

And yes, as Eugene Robinson noted below, Donnie's followers have been duped.



From around the Intertubz:


Pierson: "Trump Didn’t Flip-Flop on Immigration, He Just ‘Changed the Words That He Is Saying"

Source: Mediaite 

Donald Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson had a unique response to the charge that her boss flip-flopped on immigration Thursday, saying that his position hasn’t changed, but his words have. 

“He hasn’t changed his position on immigration, he has changed the words that he is saying,” she insisted. 

 That elicited laughter from the other panelists. “That would be a change,” responded contributor Amanda Carpenter.





Eugene Robinson, WaPo:



Donald Trump’s supporters can pretend otherwise, but deep down they must know the truth: Trump has been playing them for fools all along. [...] 


 I realize that most of Trump’s ardent fans do not take kindly to being lectured by the likes of me. But it is with a certain degree of genuine sympathy that I say what has to be said: Your candidate is a flake. A fraud. A bag of air. A con man. A joke.




And finally from FiveThirtyEight:

Chance of winning

Hillary Clinton

83.0%

Donald Trump

16.9%

HAPPY FRIDAY!

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them -- Part Gazillion

The lying loons on the rabid radical right are at it again -- sending around an email with a video about Hillary defending a man who raped a 12-year old girl and, get this! HILLARY LAUGHED ABOUT IT!

There are some facts to this contrived email:  When Hillary was a young lawyer, she was assigned, against her wishes, the case as the defense lawyer.  There was laughing--years later when, in an interview, she recalled certain aspects--not having to do with the child involved--of the case.

So what did the loons on the right do? They took pieces of this story; and in their best Breitbartian way, turned it into a smear campaign on Hillary Clinton. When it comes to dirty politics, gutter tactics, and outrageous slander, the loons on the right have no equal.

Here's the truth about what happened:



Q: Did Hillary Clinton volunteer in 1975 to defend a rapist, who was found not guilty, and laugh about it in an interview in 1980? 

A: Clinton defended an accused rapist, but she did not volunteer. He pleaded guilty to a lesser offense. She laughed when recalling unusual aspects of the case. 

 In 1975, Hillary Clinton — then known as Hillary Rodham — taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law, where she founded the University of Arkansas School Legal Aid Clinic. It was during this time that she defended Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. In her book “Living History,” Clinton recalls that Mahlon Gibson, a Washington County prosecutor, told her that the accused rapist “wanted a woman lawyer” to defend him, and that Gibson had recommended Clinton to Judge Maupin Cummings. 

“I told Mahlon I really didn’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but Mahlon gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.” Gibson corroborated Clinton’s story in a 2014 interview with CNN. 


CNN, June 25, 2014: Gibson said Clinton called him shortly after the judge assigned her to the case and said, “I don’t want to represent this guy. I just can’t stand this. I don’t want to get involved. Can you get me off?” “I told her, ‘Well contact the judge and see what he says about it,’ but I also said don’t jump on him and make him mad,” Gibson said. “She contacted the judge and the judge didn’t remove her and she stayed on the case.” 


 In a separate 2014 interview, Clinton said she had an “obligation” to represent Taylor. “I had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did,” she said. In her book, Clinton writes that she visited Taylor in the county jail and he “denied the charges against him and insisted that the girl, a distant relative, had made up her story.” 

Clinton filed a motion to order the 12-year-old girl to get a psychiatric examination. “I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing … [and] that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body,” according to an affidavit filed by Clinton in support of her motion. Clinton also cited an expert in child psychology who said that “children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences and that adolescents with disorganized families, such as the complainant’s, are even more prone to such behavior,”Clinton wrote in her affidavit. 

Ultimately, expert testimony from a scientist “cast doubt on the evidentiary value of the blood and semen the prosecutor claimed proved the defendant’s guilt in the rape,” Clinton writes in her book. Clinton negotiated a plea deal and Taylor was charged with “Unlawful Fondling of a Child Under the Age of Fourteen” and was sentenced to one year in a county jail and four years of probation, according to a final judgment signed by Cummings. 

In 2014, the Washington Free Beacon published the audio of an interview that Arkansas reporter Roy Reed conducted with Clinton in the 1980s. In the interview, Clinton recalls some unusual details of the rape case, and she can be heard laughing in three instances, beginning with a joke she makes about the accuracy of polygraphs. 

Clinton: Of course he claimed he didn’t. All this stuff. He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs. [laughs] 

At another point, Clinton said the prosecutor balked at turning over evidence, forcing her to go to the judge to obtain it. 

Clinton: So I got an order to see the evidence and the prosecutor didn’t want me to see the evidence. I had to go to Maupin Cummings and convince Maupin that yes indeed I had a right to see the evidence [laughs] before it was presented. 

Clinton then said that the evidence she obtained was a pair of the accused’s underwear with a hole in it. Clinton told Reed that investigators had cut out a piece of the underwear and sent the sample to a crime lab to be tested, and the only evidence that remained was the underwear with a hole in it. Clinton took the remaining evidence to a forensic expert in Brooklyn, New York, and the expert told her that the material on the underwear wasn’t enough to test. “He said, you know, ‘You can’t prove anything,'” Clinton recalled the expert telling her. 

Clinton: I wrote all that stuff and I handed it to Mahlon Gibson, and I said, “Well this guy’s ready to come up from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice.” [laughs] "

**********

The truth doesn't matter to the rabid radicals on the right -- look at the guy they're supporting to understand why.

I saw this performance last night at A.R.T. in Cambridge. Don't miss it!

Anna Deavere Smith is a force of nature. Her almost two hour, one-woman performance, "Notes From the Field - Doing Time in Education, " accompanied by Marcus Shelby on bass,  was astounding.

"Part of the power of Anna's work is her insistence that we move beyond the perspective of passive spectatorship. By placing herself inside the stories, voices, and physicalities of individuals with conflicting perspectives, Anna demonstrates --and urges us to cultivate--a radical openness to the experience of others." -- Diane Paulus
In ‘Notes From the Field’ at ART, Anna Deavere Smith intends to educate and engage

Based on about 250 interviews Smith conducted around the country, the show tackles a phenomenon that’s been called the school-to-prison pipeline: the often disproportionate punishments meted out to minorities, and how such treatment can nudge children toward a lifetime of involvement with the criminal justice system.

Wednesday is Trump Hump Day

Hitler interviews Trump:

An American Tragedy

To all the right wingers -- and you damn well know who you are -- who refer to all Muslims/Moslems as "vermin," and who believe all Muslims are enemies of this country, this tragic story is the consequence of that hatred -- your hatred :




The Killing Of Khalid Jabara Is An American Tragedy


"Stanley Vernon Majors, a 61-year-old ex-convict from California who repeatedly harassed and threatened the Jabaras, largely because they were Arab-American. Two weeks ago, on the evening of Aug. 12, Majors allegedly shot and killed the family’s youngest child, 37-year-old Khalid Jabara. 

“They escaped from the war, from the horrific situation in Lebanon and then they end up in tragedy like this in a country they adore,” Khalid’s cousin, Tania, told the Tulsa World. 

 Police have yet to establish a clear record of what happened the day of Khalid’s death. But from everything we know, it seems that Vernon Majors hated the Jabara family, and that he harbored baseless and destructive anti-Muslim beliefs ― ones that plenty of other Americans also subscribe to.

(Just read any of the rabid radical right wing blogs to confirm this. -- SK) 

Majors’ hate did not and does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a country where openly Islamophobic political speech is on the rise, and where Muslims ― or, as in the case of Khalid Jabara, people perceived to be Muslim ― are being targeted more and more for their faith, their dress and the color of their skin. If Majors is a monster, he’s an American one."


The Killing 

 Majors, a Los Angeles native, moved next door to the Jabaras in 2011. He soon developed what a police captain would later describe as an “unusual fixation” with the family. 

 He terrorized them, leaving menacing letters in crude handwriting on the Jabaras’ property. There were threatening voicemails and emails too. 

Most telling, perhaps, were the slurs he allegedly hurled at the family: “dirty Arabs,” “Aye-rabs” and “Mooslems.” “Fuck you Arabs, Fuck you bastards,” he allegedly told the family once. “I want to kill you all.”

That is the sort of language directed at Muslim-Americans you will find any day of the week on right wing blogs, and no one commenting on those blogs sees anything wrong with that sort of toxic hatred. Donald Trump's candidacy has further inflamed this demonization of Muslims, and his supporters, instead of denouncing him, feed into the mob mentality. And that's exactly what they are -- a mob of thugs who would cheer people like Stanley Vernon Majors on and encourage more of the same barbarity.

Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds

h/t to Ducky's Here:



Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds 

As the Republican-led state legislature has slashed funding to reproductive healthcare clinics, the maternal mortality rate doubled over just a two-year period


"The rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014, a new study has found, for an estimated maternal mortality rate that is unmatched in any other state and the rest of the developed world. 

 The finding comes from a report, appearing in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, that the maternal mortality rate in the United States increased between 2000 and 2014, even while the rest of the world succeeded in reducing its rate. 

Excluding California, where maternal mortality declined, and Texas, where it surged, the estimated number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births rose to 23.8 in 2014 from 18.8 in 2000 – or about 27%. But the report singled out Texas for special concern, saying the doubling of mortality rates in a two-year period was hard to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval."








Texas Pregnancy Related Deaths SKYROCKET 66% After GOP Killed Women’s Health Services


Just wondering where all those right wingers are who claim Democrats are committing genocide on the African-American community because a majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are in the black communities (false) and that PP is conducting the genocide (false).

Here's a story -- a factual story-- of how the Republican policies in Texas have contributed to a 66% increase in maternal death rates because of GOP cuts to clinics and other health care facilities for  poor women.  Unlike the conservative charge that Planned Parenthood is deliberately killing black fetuses --a damned lie -- what's happened in Texas is real and verifiable.

What do those phony family values Goopers have to say about this appalling story?


**crickets**




"In 2011, the state of Texas had a sudden and startling increase of pregnancy-related deaths. That same year, the state aimed toward getting rid of grants for family-planning clinics in particular, cutting services by 66 perccent across the entire state.

In 2011, the state of Texas had a sudden and startling increase of pregnancy-related deaths. That same year, the state aimed toward getting rid of grants for family-planning clinics in particular, cutting services by 66 perccent across the entire state."


So the political party that blamed liberals and Planned Parenthood for a black genocide -- that same political party, in the state of Texas, is actually responsible for the skyrocketing maternal deaths in poor girls and women?

Who could have guessed  that cutting funding to clinics for poor girls and women would result in such a tragedy?

Well, the liberals who fought against the Republican smear machine that demonized Planned Parenthood -- that's who.  

Do these people ever get anything right?