Saturday, August 27, 2016

Last Call For Dump Trump

Republicans, smelling a Goldwater-style electoral bloodbath in November, are so desperate now that they're actually putting money into swing state ads calling for Trump to step down as the Republican nominee.

The ad, titled "Keep Your Word," features footage of Trump during the Republican primary in which he suggested he'd drop out if he saw his poll numbers decline.

"Number one, I'm not a masochist, and if I was dropping in the polls where I saw I wasn't going to win, why would I continue?" Trump said in an October NBC interview featured in the ad. A graphic displaying political handicappers' predictions of a landslide Trump loss accompanies his remarks. The ad ends with a plea: "Resign the nomination. Let the RNC replace you so we can beat Hillary."

The 30-second spot is marked for a limited run on broadcast networks in suburban Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Michigan, according to Regina Thomson, a Colorado Republican activist and leader of Free the Delegates, the organization that failed to stop Trump's nomination at last month's national convention. All four states are central to Trump's path to the White House, though he's trailing in most polls of those states.

The ad is backed by a five-figure buy, according to Thomson, but the group is hopeful to eventually expand its run to Fox News Channel. It's initially set to air on broadcast news channels beginning on Tuesday. It's marked for the four states' suburban media markets, according to Free the Delegates, because they're areas that typically lean Republican but appear to be tilting in Hillary Clinton's favor this year.

Of course by now you've figured out the real plot here: the plan is to try to help vulnerable Republicans in the House like Carlos Curbelo and David Jolly in Florida and Senate Republicans like Ohio's Rob Portman to be able to keep their seats amid a Trump iceberg in the path of the GOP ship this year.  They're trying to plug the cracks in the dam before the river wipes them out of down-ticket races completely.

In other words, we're in sheer panic mode. It's no longer a question of whether Trump loses, but by how badly and if he will take the GOP Congress with him.

That all depends on how much the Dems can run up the score in November, and that means getting out the vote.  We'll see.

The Other SIde: That GOP Outreach

Let's get something straight here: when Republicans say they are reaching out to people of color, specifically black voters, what they are actually doing is pitching to nervous white voters what white Republicans think black people should be doing, and then blaming "evil racist Democrats" as to why black people aren't doing it (because what black America needs is white America telling us how to live, if only we were open-minded enough to listen to them.)  There's no better example recently than this column in the New York Post by "gun advocate" John Lott.

Hillary Clinton claims that some of Donald Trump’s appeal is “xenophobic, racist, misogynistic.” On Thursday she asked, “If he doesn’t respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?”

But who actually cares more about blacks, in particular poor blacks?

On everything from education to jobs to crime, Trump’s policies offer a lifeline to people who have been losing ground for decades. Hillary’s policies will just exacerbate them. And no amount of speeches will change that.

On education, Trump strongly supports school choice. This would give inner-city blacks a way out of horribly performing public schools. Clinton attacks charters and clearly opposes other forms of school choice, opting to protect teachers unions at the expense of students.

And who’s harmed the most by illegal immigration? Who’s most likely to suffer unemployment or wage reductions due to the added competition? Young, unskilled blacks and Hispanics. The biggest beneficiaries? Wealthy people who get to pay less for lawn care and housecleaning.

But crime is the immediate, life-and-death issue for so many blacks and Hispanics trapped in high-crime urban areas. Too many come to physical harm, have their property stolen, or lose their jobs as businesses are driven from their neighborhoods.

Clinton seems more focused on helping criminals rather than their victims. She has promised to cut the US prison population by over 50 percent. By contrast, Trump says the problem is a lack of police in high-crime, heavily black areas. He believes in making things riskier for the criminals, not for the victims.

Clinton has responded to the Black Lives Matter movement by calling for more restrictions on police use of deadly force. She has refused to support stiff prison penalties for those who “knowingly caus[e] bodily injury” to police officers. But if you don’t believe that the police are the problem, making their jobs more dangerous or difficult means police will be less effective in stopping crime in these high-crime areas.

Clinton doesn’t understand that the most likely victims of violent crime — poor blacks living in high-crime, urban neighborhoods — are the ones who stand to benefit the most from being able to defend themselves, and in fact her gun-control plan basically amounts to letting whites get guns but not minorities.

There's so much to unpack here that I'll need an army of logistics experts and perhaps some sort of advanced gravity manipulation device and two or three TARDIS consultants from Gallifrey, but the "GOP black outreach" scam usually involves massive gaslighting of the black experience so that the failure of Republicans to convince black voters to vote for them is the fault of black voters rejecting a "clearly better" series of initiatives rather than Republicans being at any fault whatsoever, and it's exactly what white voters want to hear. 

In other words, GOP outreach for black voters is actually aimed at fence-sitting white voters, making them feel better about voting Republican.  "It's not your fault those people can't see the truth as to why Republican policy initiatives are so great. You're smarter than that, but they haven't had the luxury of being as politically informed as you are."

So Republicans create this alternate reality where the problems of black America have nothing to do with generations of systematic social, economic, and cultural oppression, and everything to do with lack of taking personal responsibility in the greatest country on Earth.  Poor black people living in Detroit or Chicago and shooting each other must be 100% actively making the choice to continue living in a place like that and not taking steps to improve their lives, because the second you start putting cracks in that picture you start asking questions about why systemic racism issues still exist in 2016, and Republican can't have that.

In other words, there has to be a reason other than racism where 95% of black America refuses to give the GOP the time of day, and it has to be something they can blame us for rather than the people trying to convince us to vote for them. Sometimes that "reason" is we're unwitting, uneducated dupes of a Democratic party conspiracy meant to keep us compliant victims, and that we need to be pitied.  Sometimes that "reason" is we're angry and violent, or that we're just simply not as intelligent. But in every instance that reason cannot be because racism against black people in the United States still exists.

And so we get gaslighting admonishments from clever men like Lott here, who tells us that black America would be great if we just did things suburban white Republicans do, like push for charter schools, immigration reform, and more guns.  That would solve our problems, because then we'd be suburban Republicans too and not ghetto Democrats.

Trump's entire campaign has been built on this, guys.  And once we get a Republican who embraces this like Trump has and isn't a self-destructive narcissist disaster like Trump is, America is in real trouble.

Enemy Of The State (Of Maine)

Trump has made being a racist fun, exciting, and acceptable again.  Just ask Maine GOP governor (and Trump surrogate) Paul LePage.


A bad guy's a bad guy. I don't care what color he is. When you go to a war, and the enemy, the enemy dresses in red, you dress in blue? You shoot at red, don't you? Ken? You've been...you've been in uniform. You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color, or people of Hispanic origin.

To recap:

1) LePage is at war with The Enemy.
2) You shoot The Enemy.
3) The Enemy are people of color or of Hispanic origin.

This is Paul LePage's Maine. I am The Enemy to him.

LePage represents Donald Trump and the Republican party. This is Donald Trump's America.  I am The Enemy to them.

They shoot The Enemy.

And if LePage didn't have enough problems, keep in mind he already had people calling for his resignation for his racist tirades.

Gov. Paul LePage left a state lawmaker from Westbrook an expletive-laden phone message Thursday in which he accused the legislator of calling him a racist, encouraged him to make the message public and said, “I’m after you.”

LePage sent the message Thursday morning after a television reporter appeared to suggest that Democratic Rep. Drew Gattine was among several people who had called the governor a racist, which Gattine later denied. The exchange followed remarks the governor made in North Berwick on Wednesday night about the racial makeup of suspects arrested on drug trafficking charges in Maine.

“Mr. Gattine, this is Gov. Paul Richard LePage,” a recording of the governor’s phone message says. “I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you (expletive). I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist (expletive). You … I need you to, just friggin. I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.” 

Looks like someone took you up on your challenge, Gov. LePage.

So keep his statement in mind when conservatives are blaming the Obama administration for Trump's racism.

Trump Cards, Con't

At this point the Trump campaign is actively playing to lose, I really can't think of anything else as to why Steve Bannon is involved as head of the Trump camp.

Stephen Bannon's appointment as chief executive of Donald Trump's campaign has drawn scrutiny to his personal history, including a 1996 arrest in a domestic-violence case that was ultimately dismissed.

Court records show that Bannon was charged with three misdemeanors in Santa Monica, California, on Feb. 22, 1996, after his then-wife claimed he attacked her.

In a police report obtained by Politico and confirmed by NBC News, she claimed that during a New Year's argument about finances, she spat at Bannon and he "reached up to her from the driver's seat of his car and grabbed her left wrist."

"He pulled her down, as if he was trying to pull [her] into the car, over the door," the report said, adding that Bannon also "grabbed at [her] neck" and that she struck at his face to get free.

As his wife, the mother of infant twins, dialed 911, Bannon "jumped over her and the twins to grab the phone from her," the report states. "Once he got the phone, he threw it across the room."

Police said they saw red marks on her wrist and neck and that she told them three or four previous arguments had also become physical.

Bannon was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges — and about six months later, the case was dismissed after prosecutors said they could not find his wife, court documents show.

Police now say the report was mistakenly made available to Politico.

Oh but it gets worse:


Hell of a campaign operation you got there, Don. 

More than likely the damage from the Trump campaign will cost the GOP dearly from here on out, starting in western states, and the GOP knows it.