The Daily Beast reports: In the days since a video emerged showing Donald Trump bragging about his ability to get away with sexually assault, several women have stepped forward to allege the Republican presidential nominee touched them inappropriately. Together, their allegations amount to a substantial list of alleged sexual harassment and assault dating back to the early 1980s. Trump has denied every allegation against him. [Continue reading…]
The Hill reports: Steve Bannon, the chairman of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart who became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, gave explicit orders to his staff to destroy Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
On editorial conference calls, the Breitbart chairman would often say “Paul Ryan is the enemy,” according to a source who worked with Bannon at the news organization.
A former Breitbart staffer said Bannon used to rage against Ryan all the time.
Bannon views Ryan as a leader of an elite globalist cabal determined to sell out America by opening its borders on immigration and trade.
“Bannon has Alex Jones-level paranoia about Paul Ryan,” the source said, referring to the right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist who runs the pro-Trump website Infowars.
“He goes on these amazing rants,” the source added of Bannon. “He thinks Paul Ryan is part of a conspiracy with George Soros and Paul Singer, in which elitists want to bring one world government.” [Continue reading…]
Kurt Eichenwald writes: I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin — and, somehow, Donald Trump — seem to believe. And that should raise concerns about not only Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.
An email from Blumenthal — a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros, at the center of conservative conspiracy theories — turned up in the recent document dump by WikiLeaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to WikiLeaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblower group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess — and transformed into Blumenthal — there is even more proof that the Russians are not only orchestrating this act of cyberwar but also really, really dumb.
The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government-controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya.
The documents that WikiLeaks has unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the WikiLeaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.
The email was amazing — it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fever dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: Donald Trump celebrated his freedom from the Republican establishment Tuesday, boasting that it’s “so nice” to be unchained.
Trump’s tweet was a tacit attack on House Speaker Paul Ryan, whom the Republican nominee has continued to lash out at since the top elected Republican on Monday told his conference he would no longer defend Trump.
“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump tweeted.
The real estate mogul also highlighted the chasm in the Republican Party, conceding that Democrats are “far more loyal” than the GOP. More than two dozen Republicans have either said they will no longer support their nominee or called on him to step aside from the top of the ticket since a tape emerged Friday showing Trump speaking in incredibly lewd terms about sexually assaulting women. [Continue reading…]
While Trump is angered by the lack of support he is receiving from much of the Republican establishment, his campaign seems to be signalling that it has no problem with his supporters not bothering to vote for other Republican candidates.
Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman, tweeted yesterday:
I can't keep my phone charged due to the mass volume of texts from people all over the country who will #VoteTrump but⬇️ballot not so much.
— Katrina Pierson (@KatrinaPierson) October 10, 2016
Ned O’Gorman writes: Early into last night’s debate, Donald Trump found himself in an awkward position. No, I am not talking about the question first asked about the Access Hollywood tape on which he boasts of sexual assault. I am talking about a more subtle moment: early on Donald Trump found himself calling himself a “politician,” incredulously admitting, “I can’t believe I am saying that about myself.”
Almost one hundred years ago, the German social theorist Max Weber gave a lecture in Munich called “Politics as Vocation” in which he argued that there was a big difference between the “occasional” politician and the “professional” politician. We are all, he claimed, occasional politicians, in as much as we all may vote, circulate a pamphlet or petition, or give a stump speech. But professional politicians are a different breed: For them politics is a vocation, a calling, and with the vocation comes certain burdens and responsibilities.
The biggest problem with Donald Trump in this election cycle is that he is, in fact, no politician, at least not in a vocational sense. And contrary to popular belief, that is a very bad thing for a person running for president. [Continue reading…]
Michael Weiss writes: Well, now I prefer the guy who didn’t know what Aleppo is.
In the second presidential debate, during which Hillary Clinton looked as if she could profit from her own no-fly zone against her menacingly hovering opponent, Donald Trump made a series of assertions about the five-year-old humanitarian catastrophe in Syria that no one with access to Google, much less classified intelligence, ever ought to make. That he managed to do this while both deferring to a theocratic—excuse me, Islamic terrorist—regime he claims to reprehend and also humiliating his own running-mate in the process was a masterstroke of Trumpist illogic and megalomania.
By way of reaffirming his faith in a better working relationship with the Kremlin (whose hacking of the Democratic National Committee he again doubted), Trump stated that “Assad is killing ISIS. Russia is killing ISIS. And Iran is killing ISIS.” He sees this as proof of absent American leadership, and is quite comfortable being on their side in a civilizational struggle, even though he hates the fact that Iran is richer and only able to war against the Sunni extremists thanks to Obama’s nuclear deal.
In point of fact, none of the parties Trump rattled off has demonstrated much of a keenness or willingness to fight ISIS in Syria, as a bevy of U.S. officials and independent monitors have repeatedly pointed out. [Continue reading…]
David Leonhardt writes: He lied about a sex tape.
He lied about his lies about ‘birtherism.’
He lied about the growth rate of the American economy.
He lied about the state of the job market.
He lied about the trade deficit.
He lied about tax rates.
He lied about his own position on the Iraq War, again.
He lied about ISIS.
He lied about the Benghazi attack.
He lied about the war in Syria.
He lied about Syrian refugees.
He lied about Russia’s hacking.
He lied about the San Bernardino terrorist attack.
He lied about Hillary Clinton’s tax plan.He lied about her health care plan.
He lied about her immigration plan.
He lied about her email deletion.
He lied about Obamacare, more than once.
He lied about the rape of a 12-year-old girl.
He lied about his history of groping women without their consent.
Finally, he broke with basic democratic norms and called on his political opponent to be jailed — because, in large part, of what he described as her dishonesty. [Continue reading…]
NBC News reports: Donald Trump was accused by his rival’s campaign of “menacingly stalking” Hillary Clinton on stage at Sunday night’s debate, with even a prominent supporter likening the billionaire to a gorilla.
The Republican nominee took full advantage of the town hall debate format by moving around in front of the cameras rather than sitting on his chair.
However, his tactic drew widespread criticism in post-debate commentary and on social media.
“Take a seat, loser!” was the front page headline in the New York Daily News, next to a picture of Trump clutching the back of his seat.
Camera angles gave Trump a looming presence as he moved around in the background behind Clinton.
“If a man did that to me on the street … I’d call 911,” political commentator and former Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace said. [Continue reading…]
I'm a Muslim, and I would like to report a crazy man threatening a woman on a stage in Missouri. #debate
— Moustafa Bayoumi (@BayoumiMoustafa) October 10, 2016
Perhaps if you're in the midst of a scandal about being a groper, don't creepily lurk behind a woman #debate
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) October 10, 2016
In case you missed it, here's @realDonaldTrump stalking #Hillary on the #debate stage. pic.twitter.com/8mRMOXfiWe
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) October 10, 2016
Shawn Otto writes: Four years ago in Scientific American, I warned readers of a growing problem in American democracy. The article, entitled “Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy,” charted how it had not only become acceptable, but often required, for politicians to embrace antiscience positions, and how those positions flew in the face of the core principles that the U.S. was founded on: That if anyone could discover the truth of something for him or herself using the tools of science, then no king, no pope and no wealthy lord was more entitled to govern the people than they were themselves. It was self-evident.
In the years since, the situation has gotten worse. We’ve seen the emergence of a “post-fact” politics, which has normalized the denial of scientific evidence that conflicts with the political, religious or economic agendas of authority. Much of this denial centers, now somewhat predictably, around climate change — but not all. If there is a single factor to consider as a barometer that evokes all others in this election, it is the candidates’ attitudes toward science.
Consider, for example, what has been occurring in Congress. Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, is a climate change denier. Smith has used his post to initiate a series of McCarthy-style witch-hunts, issuing subpoenas and demanding private correspondence and testimony from scientists, civil servants, government science agencies, attorneys general and nonprofit organizations whose work shows that global warming is happening, humans are causing it and that — surprise — energy companies sought to sow doubt about this fact.
Smith, who is a Christian Scientist and seems to revel in his role as the science community’s bête noire, is by no means alone. Climate denial has become a virtual Republican Party plank (and rejecting the Paris climate accord a literal one) with a wide majority of Congressional Republicans espousing it. Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), chairman of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, took time off from his presidential campaign last December to hold hearings during the Paris climate summit showcasing well-known climate deniers repeating scientifically discredited talking points.
The situation around science has grown so partisan that Hillary Clinton turned the phrase “I believe in science” into the largest applause line of her convention speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination. Donald Trump, by contrast, is the first major party presidential nominee who is an outright climate denier, having called climate science a “hoax” numerous times. In his responses to the organization I helped found, ScienceDebate.org, which gets presidential candidates on the record on science, he told us that “there is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of ‘climate change,’” putting the term in scare quotes to cast doubt on its reality. When challenged on his hoax comments, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway affirmed that Trump doesn’t believe climate change is man-made. [Continue reading…]
Sanjiv Bhattacharya reports: It’s not every day that a brown journalist gets to sit in on a white-nationalist strategy meeting. But these are strange times. Racism is trending. Like Brexit, Trump has normalised views that were once beyond the pale, and groups like the AFP have grown bold. Their man’s stubby orange fingers are within reach of actual power, so maybe it’s time to emerge from the shadows at last.
I first met [William] Johnson [the chairman of the white nationalist American Freedom Party (AFP)] in May after he signed up as a Trump delegate before being swiftly struck off by the campaign when the press found out. He’s a surprising figure. An avid environmentalist, fluent in Japanese and, in person, not the bitter old racist I’d expected but rather a jolly Mormon grandfather, bright eyed and chuckling, a Wind in the Willows character. Eric is even more unexpected. Tall and impassioned, he came to racism via hypnotherapy, of all things. He sells solar panels for a living and practises yoga. Together with his friends Matt and Nathan, who are also here at lunch, he runs an alt-right fraternity in Manhattan Beach – “a beer and barbecues thing”. They’re called the Beach Goys. “We’re starting a parody band,” he beams. “We’ve found a drummer!”
Between them they represent two poles of a racist spectrum, young and old. And judging from this lunch, it’s the millennials who are the more extreme. Johnson wants white nationalists to appear less mean and he finds the “JQ”, the Jewish Question, archaic. But Eric loves the meanness of the alt right. “We’re the troll army!” he says. “We’re here to win. We’re savage!” And antisemitism is non-negotiable. In fact, he’d like to clear up a misnomer about the alt right, propagated by the Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos, who is often described, mistakenly, as the movement’s leader. Milo casts the alt right as principally a trolling enterprise, dedicated to attacking liberal shibboleths for the “lulz”– there’s precious little actual bigotry. But Eric insists otherwise. Yes, they like to joke, they have memes, they’re just as funny as liberals – have I heard of their satirical news podcasts, the Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation? But make no mistake, the racism is real. Eric especially enjoys The Daily Stormer, a leading alt-right news site, which is unashamedly pro-Hitler. [Continue reading…]
Susie Neilson writes: In The President’s Speech, a 1985 essay by the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, he observes a group of people with aphasia, a language disorder, as they laugh uproariously at the television. The cause of their amusement is an unnamed actor-turned United States president, presumably Ronald Reagan, addressing his audience: “There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal…The President was, as always, moving—but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?”
Aphasic patients have a heightened ability to interpret body language, tonal quality, and other non-verbal aspects of communication due to a disruption of their speech, writing, reading, or listening abilities. Each aphasic person may have disruptions in any or all of these areas. Usually, the damage comes from a stroke or other head trauma — many people become aphasic in the wake of combat, for example, or after car accidents. “The key,” says Darlene Williamson, a speech pathologist specializing in aphasia and president of the National Aphasia Association, “is intelligence remains intact.”
In this sense, Williamson says, having aphasia is akin to visiting a foreign country, where everyone is communicating in a language you are conversational in at best. “The more impaired your language is,” she says, “the harder you’re working to be sure that you’re comprehending what’s going on.” How do we do this? By paying more careful attention to the cues we can understand, Williamson says. [Continue reading…]
Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: The political drama of the week [before the weekend] — the revelation that, in 1995, Donald Trump claimed nine hundred and sixteen million dollars in losses and as a result might not have had to pay any federal income taxes for two decades — was a New York story in every particular. Its theme was the comeuppance of the capital class by the hand of brainier, laboring professionals. It had a midtown office-tower setting and an earnest protagonist, the Times metro reporter Susanne Craig, who found Trump’s tax returns because she is a compulsive checker of her newsroom mailbox. It had a vengeful ghost: whichever shrewd, jilted ex-wife or shrewd, jilted ex-C.P.A. photocopied the returns and sent them to the press in the first place. And, at the center of it all, there was an eighty-year-old real-estate accountant named Jack Mitnick.
Mitnick functioned both as the story’s narrative pivot and its moral anchor. His signature was on one of the tax forms sent to the Times, and the paper’s reporters tracked him down in Florida, where Mitnick now lives in semiretirement, to try to confirm that the documents were authentic. Mitnick was wary, but eventually he agreed to meet a reporter in a bagel shop. The Times describes the scene: “ ‘This is legit,’ he said, stabbing his finger into the documents.” That “stabbing” is a nice flourish. It describes, after all, the story’s essential plot. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: Reporter David Fahrenthold got a phone call around 11 a.m. Friday from a source with a tip about Donald Trump. The source asked: Would Fahrenthold be interested in seeing some previously unaired video of Trump?
Fahrenthold didn’t hesitate. Within a few moments of watching an outtake of footage from a 2005 segment on “Access Hollywood,” the Washington Post reporter was on the phone, calling Trump’s campaign, “Access Hollywood” and NBC for reaction.
By 4 p.m., his story was causing shock waves. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: A Republican lobbyist was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote one of Vladimir Putin’s top geopolitical priorities at the same time he was helping to shape Donald Trump’s first major foreign policy speech.
In the first two quarters of 2016, the firm of former Reagan administration official Richard Burt received $365,000 for work he and a colleague did to lobby for a proposed natural-gas pipeline owned by a firm controlled by the Russian government, according to congressional lobbying disclosures reviewed by POLITICO. The pipeline, opposed by the Polish government and the Obama administration, would allow Russian gas to reach central and western European markets while bypassing Ukraine and Belarus, extending Putin’s leverage over Europe.
Burt’s lobbying work for New European Pipeline AG, the company behind the pipeline known as Nord Stream II, began in February. At the time, the Russian state-owned oil giant Gazprom owned a 50 percent stake in New European Pipeline AG. In August, five European partners pulled out and Gazprom now owns 100 percent. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: The Israeli government pushed back Thursday against the latest U.S. condemnation of its settlement enterprise as commentators called it another sign of fraying relations between the Jewish state and its most steadfast ally.
The Foreign Ministry issued a statement reacting to the unusually sharp language in the State Department’s “strong condemnation” of Israeli plans to build new settler housing “deep in the West Bank,” closer to Jordan than Israel. The Foreign Ministry said the 98 housing units approved for the Shilo area do not constitute “a new settlement.”
Ayelet Shaked, Israeli’s justice minister and a member of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, said Washington should train its condemnation on Syria “rather than criticizing where Israel builds houses.”
Education Minister Naftali Bennett said Thursday that “we must give our lives” for the cause of annexing the West Bank to Israel.
The Israeli government’s ire was piqued by statements Wednesday from the White House and State Department that further ratcheted up the Obama administration’s criticism of Israel’s settlement policy.
The tone began changing late last year, when Secretary of State John F. Kerry told a gathering at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum that Israel’s settlement expansion was closing off possibilities for a two-state solution. He said Israel would not be able to maintain itself as a Jewish and democratic state if the trend continued.
Since then, in what seems a deliberate calibration, the State Department has spoken out strongly almost every time Israel has announced new housing, not only in the West Bank but also in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians hope to have the capital of an independent state. In July, the State Department called Israeli construction over the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 border, “provocative and counterproductive.” In August, the White House said “significant settlement expansion” poses “a serious and growing threat to the viability of a two state solution.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition fear that between the presidential election in November and Inauguration Day, President Obama could seek a way to try to enshrine U.S. parameters for a future peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Far worse in Netanyahu’s mind would be U.S. support for a resolution along those lines in the United Nations.
“There is no doubt in Israel that Obama wants to leave a legacy,” said former Israel diplomat Jacob Dayan, who was chief of staff to two foreign ministers. “A legacy is created in two ways — a comprehensive speech on the issue, which I am sure Israel will accept because speeches are nice and memorable, but not more than that, or an American U.N. Security Council Resolution on the issue. . . . That is Israel’s biggest fear.” [Continue reading…]
Roger Cohen writes: It is possible because spectacle and politics have merged and people no longer know fact from fiction or care about the distinction. It is possible because fear has entered people’s lives and that fear is easily manipulated. It is possible because technology has created anxiety-multipliers such as have never been known before. It is possible because America is a country living with the dim dissatisfaction of two wars without victory and the untold trillions spent on them. It is possible because a very large number of people want to give the finger to the elites who brought the crash of 2008 and rigged the global system and granted themselves impunity. It is possible because of growing inequality and existential dread, especially among the white losers from globalization who know minorities will be the majority in the United States by midcentury. It is possible because both major parties have abandoned the working class. It is possible because a lot of Americans feel the incumbent in the White House has undersold the United States, diminished its distinctive and exceptional nature, talked down its power, and so diluted its greatness and abdicated its responsibility for the well-being of the free world. It is possible because the identity politics embraced by urban, cosmopolitan liberals have provoked an inevitable backlash among those who think white lives matter, too. It is possible because Trump speaks to the basest but also some of the most ineradicable traits of human beings — their capacity for mob anger, their racist resentments, their cruelty, their lust, their search for scapegoats, their insecurities — and promises a miraculous makeover. It is possible because the Clinton family has been in the White House and cozy with the rich and close to the summit of a discredited political establishment for a quarter-century now and, to people who want change or bridle at dynastic privilege, that makes Hillary Clinton an unattractive candidate. It is possible because history demonstrates there is no limit to human folly or the dimensions of the disasters humanity can bring on itself. [Continue reading…]
Newsweek reports: Plenty of blue-collar workers believe that, as president, Donald Trump would be ready to fight off U.S. trade adversaries and reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing industries through his commitment to the Rust Belt. What they likely don’t know is that Trump has been stiffing American steel workers on his own construction projects for years, choosing to deprive untold millions of dollars from four key electoral swing states and instead directing it to China — the country whose trade practices have helped decimate the once-powerful industrial center of the United States.
A Newsweek investigation has found that in at least two of Trump’s last three construction projects, Trump opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families. Trump has never been accused of engaging in any wrongdoing for his business dealings with those companies, but it’s true that the Mafia has long controlled much of the concrete industry in New York. [Continue reading…]
Poor Alex Jones. He stayed up all night waiting for Julian Assange — who Jones was hailing as a “true liberal” — to deliver Wikileaks’ long-anticipated “October surprise.” The Hill reports: A Tuesday morning WikiLeaks event in Berlin did not produce an “#OctoberSurprise” to derail the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that many had expected, but Julian Assange said he would release more documents before Election Day.
“I’ve seen the internet and I understand there is enormous expectation in the United States,” said Assange, the site’s editor, via video conference at the event, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of WikiLeaks held at 10 a.m. Berlin time.
“Some of that expectation will be addressed [when I announce upcoming projects]. But you should understand that if we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States at a particular hour, we don’t do it at 3 a.m.”
Many observers believed that Assange had planned to announce a document post with damning evidence of corruption, wrongdoing or other scandal.
On Monday, Trump advisor Roger Stone tweeted “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”
Stone has claimed to be in contact with Assange. [Continue reading…]
… @infowars' @realalexjones reacts to #wikileaks nothing burger: "julian assange is a hillary butt plug." pic.twitter.com/1qKwZSwIaL
— nick ramsey (@nick_ramsey) October 4, 2016