Leave Them Behind

The presidential election of 2016 can really be summed up in one way: it's the last stand of the white non college educated male voter. 

Consider that in less than four years, white people in this country will be in the minority. For the white non college educated male voter, this is the fucking apocalypse. And it really explains the appeal of Donald Trump. His talk of walls and bans are a direct appeal to the fear that white males feel when they see the world changing around them. His anti-trade rhetoric and stated reluctance to help other countries fits perfectly into the mindset of this demographic. After all, these are the people who have lost jobs and are being left behind in the age of globalization.

In this election cycle, pundits have declared that the Democrats have to reach out to this voter and connect with them. They have to show the non college educated white male that Trump is a charlatan who would actually be worse for them. They've been hammering Trump on his failure to pay contractors and his fraud with outfits like Trump University. Hillary herself implored an audience just yesterday to talk to their friends and relatives about just how bad Trump would be for the middle class.

None of this will help. Why?

The Trump voter is a lost fucking cause. Consider that they are supporting a man who by all rational thought in reality is a total disaster of a person. Is there anything even redeeming about him at all? The simple fact that they are supporting him says to me that there is no hope of changing their minds. They are lost to all that anger, hate and fear.

So, leave them behind. History is filled with demographic groups that the march of time waved buh-bye too. I haven't seen any significant numbers in the Egyptian Gods demographic of late. Nor have I seen the Roman emperor followers clamoring for a return to that empire. In our own country, the Whigs and their supporters never made it out of the 19th century. Progress and new ways of thinking left all of these groups and their ultimate failures behind.

The attention should be focused on getting out the vote from all other demographic groups. This is where the election is going to be ultimately won or lost for the Democrats. White college educated voters (male and female) and minority voters need to make a statement this election.

It's their country now and we're not going back.

If Trump Can't Run an Elevator, How Can He Run a Country?

Donald Trump just got himself trapped in an elevator:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had to be rescued from an elevator that was stuck between the first and second floors of a resort Friday, the Colorado Springs Fire Department said.

In a statement released Saturday, the department says that it was called at 1:30 p.m. Friday to rescue about 10 people, including Trump, trapped inside the elevator at The Mining Exchange, A Wyndham Grand Hotel & Spa resort.

The department says the firefighters opened the top elevator hatch and lowered a ladder into the elevator. Trump and the others used the ladder to climb out of the elevator to the second floor. The department says no injuries were reported.

I'm impressed that Trump was able to waddle up a ladder and fit through the trap door of an elevator.

How did this happen?

“The parties that lease the hotel also wanted to control of the elevators and I assume that happens when you get to a certain level of security, and so they were given a key to actually control the elevators and the elevator apparently in the course of being controlled by somebody other than in the course of the normal operations, the elevator stopped and consequently Mr. Trump was, I understand rescued by the fire department from that within a matter of five minutes or less,” Sanders said.

Trump insisted that the hotel give him the key to the elevator, and he somehow managed to screw up pressing a button to go to another floor. After the fire department rescued Trump, the Republican cry baby blasted the fire marshal for trying to enforce crowd capacity limits at his rally. Because nothing could possibly go wrong at a Trump event, right?

And some people think Trump can be trusted with the codes to America's nuclear arsenal?

Examine the Parallels

The Hilz Brings It Home

The speech that Hillary Clinton gave on Thursday night was the finest one of her career. Let's remember that she's not a natural orator like Barack Obama or her husband. This is tough for her and the television audience sure noticed it in the first few minutes of the speech. She was a little overly cautious.

But then she got into the groove and never looked back. She outlined her plan and vision for our country in the next four years and it was magnificent...that is, of course, if you are someone who lives in the real world, not the made up one. Offering a stark contrast to the darkness dispatched a week ago at the GOP convention, the Hilz reminded us all that there isn't one person that can solve all of our nation's problems. This is especially true if that one person is a mentally deranged psychopath suffering from narcissistic personality disorder.

The systematic take down of Donald Trump was truly a beautiful thing to behold all week and Hillary put an exclamation point on all of it. Her best line was this...

A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man you can trust with nuclear weapons.

No shit. We're not electing a right wing blogger to run our country. We're electing a president.

Here is her full speech.

Do You Understand The Constitution?

Before I get to Hillary, I want to turn the spotlight on this guy. Mr. Khan represents what our country is all about. This was the ultimate mic drop moment to the people who are now running the GOP. Their hatred looks more ugly now than it ever has...

 

DNC Stars Shine Brightly

The first two days of the Democratic National Convention were pretty darn good. Michelle Obama was extraordinary. Bill Clinton was uncharacteristically humble. There also wasn't much mentioned about Donald Trump and his various problems. Clearly, they were saving that for last night.

Beginning with Joe Biden, then Michael Bloomberg, then Tim Kaine, and finally the president, the Democratic stars shined brilliantly last night. Joe Biden's speech spoke directly to white working class, non college educated voter and, man oh man, was he brilliant.


This was the beginning of the evisceration of Donald Trump. "He doesn't have a clue about anything." was most certainly the best line of Biden's speech. He went on detailing just how poorly qualified Donald Trump is to be president.

Michael Bloomberg spoke to the independent voter and described how Donald Trump was a fraud.


Unlike Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg is an actual billionaire.

Next up was Tim Kaine, who was more or less ripped on Twitter for being that awkward dad that no one wants around. Being an awkward dad, I thought Kaine was fantastic and you can bet Hillary and her people did as well. They can use that boring and awkward whiteness to resonate with a voting demographic they need. And, yeah, his Trump impression was kinda bad but he completed the trifecta on the Trump take down. Trump is a liar.



The president the arrived for his prime time spot and reminded everyone just how fucking awesome he is and what a great job he has done as president.


I am really going to miss this guy.

Tonight, the attention turns to Hillary. It seems damn near impossible to top all of the speakers before her. This is especially true considering that she isn't as talented of an orator as all that have gone before her, self admittedly. But does it really matter? I think the USA needs to finally see President Grandma come out and talk about her life that has been dedicated to helping people. We've had far too much of the "made up" Hillary in the news these last few weeks. It's time to see the real one.

Russia's Hacking Department

Trump Wants Russia's Help

Donald Trump just called on Russia to help out with Hillary's missing emails.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, staring directly into the cameras. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Wow...

Big Dog Nails It

Bill Clinton could have talked a lot about himself last night but he didn't. Pundits complained that he didn't mention any of the various #Clintonscandals in a sort of mea culpa. But that would have been the same thing as making the speech about himself.

Instead, he spent 42 minutes talking about why the Hilz is the right person for the job. He focused quite a bit on her early career which not many people know about. And he had the line of the convention in which he stated that there are two Hillary Clintons. "One is real, the other is made up."

Brilliant. Here is the full speech.

My United States of America

Compare this speech and its theme and content with what conservatives have said over the last couple of decades. What country do you want to live in?

Good Words

From Frank Foer at Slate....

The DNC dump may not have revealed a conspiracy that could end a candidacy, but it succeeded in casting a pall of anxiety over this election. We know that the Russians have a further stash of documents from the DNC and another set of document purloined from the Clinton Foundation. 

In other words, Vladimir Putin is now treating American democracy with the same respect he accords his own. The best retaliation isn’t a military one, or to respond in kind. It’s to defeat his pet candidate and to force him to watch the inauguration of the woman he so abhors.

Conservatives Heart Russia

Conservatives like to foam at the mouth when it comes to big government and how we are becoming like Russia. Right wing bloggers, especially the gun bloggers, are constantly referring to the liberals leading us into a Soviet style autocracy, still seeing that commie boogieman just around the corner. Remember this?

Given all this, their rush to support Trump, even as a hold your nose candidate, deeply perplexes me. Because it's becoming quite clear that Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to be president.

Franklin Foer has been writing about their relationship for several months now. Trump's continued call to not necessarily back NATO allies  seems very suspicious indeed given this information. More interesting is the recent evidence that the release of DNC emails was perpetrated by Russian intelligence.

Given all of this, we can now develop a working theory and must proceed in gathering more evidence. Donald Trump is basically in league with Vladimir Putin, likely through various business dealings (hence the reason why he won't release his tax returns), and would like to model his presidency on the Russian leader's reign. He has continually praised Putin in various interviews, calling him "very bright" and a "strong leader."

In short, he wants to be the US Putin and conservatives are helping him achieve this goal. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that we see how incredibly hypocritical these dickehads are but this seems far more d baggy. They continually caterwaul and fear monger about our country becoming Russia and they are mindlessly flocking to the guy who is going to do just that.

Wow...

The Most Powerful VP in History

Over the course of the last week or so there have been some seriously disturbing reports that Trump's vetting process for VP essentially boiled down to one question.

How would you like to be the most powerful VP in history?

Essentially, Mike Pence took the job knowing that he would run all foreign and domestic affairs while Trump's job would be to make America great again (see below for the meaning of this). This gibes with the larger story that has been gaining a great deal of traction in which Trump doesn't really want to be president. He just wants to win and then let someone else do all the work. He gets to be the authoritarian figure and spew edicts but not actually do any work.

Of course this raises another issue that has been bothering me for the last few weeks. Donald Trump has managed to become the candidate that has captured the dark heart of American nationalism. The people that support him want an authoritarian leader who is going to bring us back to the time when the blacks knew their place, the gays were in jail, and women had dinner ready on time. That's what "Make America Great Again" really means and it's surprising to me that the same people who fret over Nazi like takeovers of the government are cheering for this one to happen.

That's what I saw on display all last week at the GOP convention and this latest story about who will actually run the country pretty much nails what Trump is all about.

The National Enquirer?

Less than one day after delivering a fairly normal for Donald Trump speech accepting the GOP nomination, Trump reverted to his old ways with renewed comments about how Ted Cruz's dad was involved in the JFK assassination.

“I don't know his father. I met him once. I think he's a lovely guy,” Trump said at a morning-after rally in Cleveland. “All I did is point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast.”

But here's the kicker...

“This was a magazine that, in many respects, should be well respected,” Trump said. “I mean if that was The New York Times, they would have gotten Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting.” 

This explains so much, doesn't it? Think about the demographic that reads the National Enquirer and fucking believes it. That's the Trump voter to a tee! Zero facts, anger-hate-fear, innuendo, gossip, childish tittering, and bizarre conspiracies heard from "somebody."

In fact, now that I think about it, isn't that the right wing blogger to a tee as well? :)

The Safe Bet

As many political pundits predicted, Hillary Clinton chose Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. A collective yawn went up around the country but the pick is a lot more exciting than people think. It tells me that she thinks she has the election in the bag.

If the Hilz were worried at all, she would have picked Sherrod Brown or Tom Vilsack to shore up support in two states that I currently rank as dead nut even. The choice of Kaine shows me that she thinks she has those states more or less locked up and wants to take Virginia off the board for Trump. It more or less already is but with Kaine now in the VP slot, Trump won't win there now given demographic reality. She has basically forced him into a path where he has to run the table in the Rust Belt. Kaine also helps her in Florida where their first event will be held today. Kaine is fluent in Spanish and that will go over very, very well in this Sunshine State.

The Times has a predictor model that shows that if Virginia is taken off the board for Trump, along with the likely Dem win of Nevada, he only has 5 ways to win and Hillary has 251 ways to win the presidency. If Hillary wins Florida, it's over and that's even if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire (along with the likely Trump wins now in Arizona and Georgia which were in play briefly).

The other big thing about the Kaine pick is that it shows how conscientious Hillary Clinton is. Tim Kaine is the best choice of all of them if she is incapacitated to be president. He has the most experience and the right temperament to serve as commander in chief.

So, I think Kaine is a great choice and will help her out tremendously going forward in this election.

Just Fun

It's Boring (And Dark) In America

Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the 2016 GOP convention somehow managed to be both boring and dark at the same time. It also completed the picture of a man who views himself as the one man solution to all the "problems" we face as a nation.

I put those quotation marks around the word problems because most of what he said last night in terms of the state of our country was just flat out lies. Of course, that doesn't really matter to the folks in the GOP. It's all about feelings right now and it's the same three we've seen for the last two decades: anger, hate, and fear. These feelings, combined with Trump's narcissism, make the perfect mix for fascism.

As Trump went on and on (and on and on) last night, his dark vision of our country. All the fear that was ginned about over the last four days struck me as terribly frightening. People out in our country actually think this stuff? Why? What kind of a place do US citizens have to be in to think any of this stuff is true? If the world is such a scary place for them, that would at least explain the need for guns, I guess.

Even with all of this, I found his speech to be way too long and quite dull. 70 minutes? I truly hope that Hillary Clinton doesn't go that long. 30-40 minutes is just fine. More importantly, the Hilz needs to take the lessons from this week and focus on getting the vote out in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and possibly Wisconsin. Florida is also of paramount importance. The white vote in the rust belt is going to decide this election. She is not going to change the feelings of these folks who are firmly buying into Trump's vision of a white and authoritarian America. She needs all the Obama voters to turn out as massively as they did in 2012.

Here's my map as of today given both Nate Silver's data and the Times' model.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Note how her lead has softened or moved to pure tossup. She has to have a good convention and do more than present herself as a clear alternative to Trump. The key is the Rust Belt because that's the focal point of Trump's fear peddling.

Can she do it?

A Firing Squad

Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire representative who serves on Trump's veterans' coalition and as a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, said in an interview with a Boston talk radio host that Clinton should pay for the 2012 Benghazi attack.

"She is a disgrace for any, the lies she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi," he said on the Jeff Kuhner Show Tuesday. "She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting back up security. Something's wrong there."

"Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason," he continued.

As I have been saying all along, these people are an acute threat to our national security. They need to be put in jail now.

Profile in Courage: Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz stands for everything that I am against. He's truly a frightening man whose religious like devotion to conservative ideology borders on pure evil. He's such an asshole that most Republicans don't like him. In fact, they fucking hate him. But what he did last night at the GOP convention was a profile in courage and I have to admit it. He refused to endorse Donald Trump and rolled the dice for 2020.

Cruz is betting that Trump is going to lose and lose big. If this indeed comes to pass, Cruz will look like a conservative hero, a genius even, who stayed pure to conservative values (because Trump surely hasn't) and will have laid the groundwork perfectly for his next presidential bid. If not, however, his career may be over.

Suppose Trump loses but by a small margin. It's still Trump's party and his supporters will be running the party for years. Indeed, that may well be the case anyway because the people that support Donald Trump, like many conservatives, have no regard for reality.

Regardless, Cruz did something that the people want politicians to do all the time and often fail to do. Take a risk and stand your ground.

Arms up, laying down, no gun...still shot by police.

Oh, yeah...and he was trying to help an autistic patient from the home where HE WORKED HELPING PEOPLE.