Lazy Saturday Reads: Float Like A Butterfly; Sting Like A Bee
Posted: June 4, 2016 Filed under: just because | Tags: Morning reads, Muhammed Ali 46 Comments
Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee
Good Morning!!
Famed boxer and anti-war and civil rights activist Muhammed Ali died last night at 74. I’ll never forget how he burst on the scene in the early 1960s with poetry and good humor that made boxing interesting to the public at large for a time. I was so impressed with his poetry and his chants of “I am the greatest!” that I bet my best friend’s brother that he would beat Sonny Liston. And I won that bet.
Later, Ali became a “controversial” figure when he refused to go to Vietnam, got involved with Malcolm X, and became a Muslim. He was much more than an athlete. He was and is an important historical figure who changed America and the world.
Ali during the championship fight with Sonny Liston
The Boston Globe: Muhammad Ali, ‘The Greatest,’ dies at 74.
Muhammad Ali, who declared “I am the greatest” and proved it many times over, infuriating some and captivating countless more as he floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee on his way to winning the world heavyweight championship a record three times, becoming perhaps the most widely recognized person on the planet, died Friday in Phoenix. He was 74.
Mr. Ali had long suffered from Parkinson’s syndrome. The condition was understood to be a consequence of his boxing career.
Mr. Ali was hospitalized in Phoenix with respiratory problems earlier this week, and his relatives gathered around him. The family announced his death Friday.
“There’s not a man alive who can whup me,” Mr. Ali declared before his first bout with Joe Frazier, “the Fight of the Century” in 1971. “I should be a postage stamp. That’s the only way I’ll ever get licked.”
In fact, Mr. Ali wasn’t invincible. He lost that fight, as well as four later prizefights. But he finished with a career record of 56-5, 37 of those victories by knockout.
Later, Ali was admired and respected by world leaders.
When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa, he corrected a guest who said that he and Mr. Ali were the world’s two most beloved and unifying figures. “If I was in a crowded room with Ali,” Mandela said, “I would stop what I was doing and go up to him. He is the Greatest.”
Mr. Ali’s star power extended to the world of diplomacy. Jimmy Carter appointed him special envoy to lobby African leaders to support the Olympic boycott in 1980. Mr. Ali helped obtain the release of 14 US hostages in Iraq in 1990. Ten years later, he was named a United Nations Ambassador of Peace.
Ali joking around with Malcolm X in 1964
But in the 1960s, he became a pariah when he refused to be drafted.
“When they draft me, I won’t go,” Mr. Ali had declared of the Vietnam War. “I ain’t got no trouble with them Viet Cong. It ain’t right. They never called me nigger.”
Having refused induction in 1967 as a conscientious objector, Mr. Ali was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He appealed the ruling, and his conviction was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court, in 1971. But Mr. Ali, who had had his championship and boxing license taken away, lost three and a half years of his athletic prime.
What it gained Mr. Ali was a status and personal authority that extended far beyond the realm of sports. His political stance offended many, but to others it made him a hero and martyr. A 1968 Esquire magazine cover famously showed Mr. Ali with arrows sticking out of him, like St. Sebastian.
A ’60s catch phrase held that the personal was the political. In Mr. Ali’s fists the pugilistic was political. He once described his style as “Be loud, be pretty, and keep their black-hatin’ asses in their chairs.” His very name excited controversy.
Many white Americans were aghast when Ali changed his name, but he wasn’t afraid to stand up for what he believed in.
For years, the decision whether to use “Muhammad Ali” or “Cassius Clay,” the name he rejected in 1964 when he joined the Nation of Islam, was a clear-cut political statement. The New York Times Index didn’t stop referring to him as Cassius Clay until 1972. “Cassius Clay is a slave name,” Mr. Ali declared. “I didn’t choose it, and I didn’t want it.”
Muhammed Ali with Dr. Martin Luther King
I hope you’ll go read the entire Globe obit. Here’s just a bit more on Ali as a boxer.
Standing 6 foot 3 inches, Mr. Ali weighed around 190 pounds when he first won the title. His fighting weight eventually rose to 220 pounds. Perhaps Mr. Ali’s key physical attribute was an 80-inch reach, which allowed him to evade punches with relative ease as he relentlessly jabbed at an opponent.
Where other fighters would duck or catch punches, Mr. Ali would lean back from them. He held his hands by his side, rather than up high to protect his head. Mr. Ali’s phenomenal speed and agility allowed him to fight like a middleweight (Sugar Ray Robinson was Mr. Ali’s idol), yet with a heavyweight’s power.
In his trademark white trunks and red-tasseled shoes, he prowled the ring with a dancer’s grace — the New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine marveled at the speed and dexterity of his legwork — showing off with his Ali Shuffle. “I was the Elvis of boxing,” he once said. Even so, Mr. Ali was as much fighter as boxer.
I’ve quoted way too much; please go read the rest at the above link. Muhammed Ali was a unique individual, always his own person, who refused to be pigeonholed by the media and the powerful in sports and politics. In December 2015, although he was battling Parkinson’s disease, Ali spoke out against Donald Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the U.S.
Muhammed Ali with Elvis Presley
From NBC News: Global Tributes to Muhammad Ali, ‘Champion’ and 20th Century ‘Titan.’
From rival sportsmen to world leaders, the world paused Saturday to remember Muhammad Ali – hailing him not only as a “giant” of the boxing ring but also “a true champion for all.”
The 74-year-old boxer and civil rights champion died Friday from respiratory complications after a three-decade battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Ali’s ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ opponent, George Foreman, described the civil rights champion was “one of the greatest human beings I have ever met.”
He said: “No doubt he was one of the best people to have lived in this day and age. To put him as a boxer is an injustice.”
The New York Times described Ali as a “Titan of Boxing at the 20th Century.”
Nevada Senator Harry Reid said the boxer “taught us all about the value of hard work, tenacity and never giving up.”
“He was an inspiration whose tireless work ethic, unmatched skills and supreme self-confidence made him the Greatest of All Time,” the senator said in a statement. “And he showed us that even when you get knocked down, you can always get back up.”
Ali with Bill Russell
Did Reid get that one from Hillary? More tributes at the link.
Reverend Al Sharpton told MSNBC Saturday he was “deeply saddened” at Ali’s passing, adding: “He showed the world how you can risk everything. He gave up the title of heavyweight champion of the world, paying the ultimate price because he believed in something more than just wealth and success. He redefined what success is.
“Then he came back three times and won that title. We should think not only of his boxing skills but what he stood for. He floated in the ring but he stood outside the ring and was a champion.
“People ought to never underestimate that, when he stood up against the wrongs he was one of the most despised people in the country. He took from being one of the most despised to one of the most honored and loved individuals in the world. We will never see anything like that again.”
Read more tributes at the link.
A few more stories on Muhammed Ali:
David Remnick at The New Yorker: The Outsized Life of Muhammed Ali.
Dave Zirin at The Nation: ‘I Just Wanted to Be Free’: The Radical Reverberations of Muhammad Ali.
The New York Times: Muhammed Ali’s Words Stung Like a Bee too.
I’m going to leave it up to you to post other news in the comment thread, because I have a busy day ahead. I’m staying with my nephews for a few days while my brother and sister-in-law are at a family wedding in Indiana.
Just a note on the busy days ahead in politics. Today is the Virgin Islands Democratic primary, with 12 delegates at stake. Hillary should win. Tomorrow Puerto Rico votes, and Hillary should win there too. However there has been a change in the number of voting places there, and that could possibly hurt her according to Armando at Daily Kos. On Tuesday there will be primaries or caucuses in California, New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and New Mexico. The final primary will be in Washington D.C. on June 14.
So . . . what stories are you following today?
Friday Reads: Here comes those crazy, hazy, lazy days of Summer Violence
Posted: June 3, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, morning reads | Tags: Donald Trump, foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, violence 20 Comments
Good Morning!
The Presidential primary season ends on Tuesday but I seriously doubt the bizarre behavior of the men left in the race will stop at that point. What’s worse is that I doubt the violent and nasty behaviors of their supporters will change much either.
We had another night of violence at a Trump Rally in San Jose California. I really feel like we’re careening towards Banana Republic status more rapidly than usual given the dynamics of both the Trump and the Sanders campaign. Both hide their privilege–and their taxes–behind the bravado of populism and anger. Both have policy suggestions and actions that are contradictory and unactionable. Both have sets of True Believers that seem willing to do anything and do so with complicit and explicit consent of the candidate. Both parties are at a loss to control the surrounding chaos too. The Republicans have folded in the face of that chaos. The Democrats are trying to carry on behind the standard bearer. It’s a difficult time.
Josh Marshall of TPM analyzes this current wave of violence.
The rule of law is the only way to fight the bacillus Trump and Trumpism represents in this campaign. Trump introduced the violence and eliminationism into the campaign. His enemies are now following suit, indeed in significant ways expanding it. That’s not protest; it’s mob violence. The one saving grace of last night’s free-for-all and earlier ones is the sheer prevalence of social media. We’re seeing smartphone videos mainly from journalists who were on the scene. But if you look in the background of these videos, almost everyone who isn’t hitting, getting hit or actively taunting is holding up a hand cam of some sort. Everyone involved is readily identifiable, from multiple angles. They should all be identified, tracked down and prosecuted, not primarily as punishment but as deterrence.
Trumpism is a wave of disinhibition. Everybody gets caught up in it. What I wrote back in March during the height of the protester beatings seems even more apropos today …
What we have seen over the last two weeks isn’t just an escalation of chaos and low level violence but a progressive normalization of unacceptable behavior – more racist verbal attacks, more violence. This is in turn clearly attracting more people who want trouble – on both sides. If you’re an angry racist who wants to act out on his anger, can you imagine any better place to go than a Trump rally? If you hate Trump, his supporters and all he stands for and want to get physical about it, where best to go?
All groups have people looking for trouble. Trump events are the best place to find it. Are the folks who got violent more angry, more anti-racist or more righteous in their grievance than the folks who didn’t? Highly doubtful. They’re just more violent.
Indeed, any one looking to vent their anger only needs to go to a Trump Rally. Last night’s protesters turned ugly quick on a campaign that’s marketing racism, nativism, and anger.
Protesters jumped on cars, pelted Trump supporters with eggs and water balloons, snatched signs and stole “Make America Great” hats off supporters’ heads before burning the hats and snapping selfies with the charred remains.
Several people were caught on camera punching Trump supporters. At least one attacker was arrested,according to CNN, although police did not release much information.
“The San Jose Police Department made a few arrests tonight after the Donald Trump Rally,” police said in a statement. “As of this time, we do not have specific information on the arrests made. There has been no significant property damage reported. One officer was assaulted.”
In one video circulating widely on social media, two protesters tried to protect a Trump supporter as other protesters attacked him and called him names.
Another video captured a female Trump supporter taunting protesters before being surrounded and struck in the face with an egg and water balloons.
Again, the ugliness outside is as bad as the ugliness inside where Donald Trump attacks just about every constitutional principal 
that’s ever been established by our democratically enacted governing bodies. He’s declared war on the press and the judiciary whenever they don’t do his bidding or act slavish towards him.
A Donald Trump campaign staffer and a private security guard removed a POLITICO reporter from a campaign rally here on Thursday evening for reporting at the event without the campaign’s permission.
A campaign staffer spotted the reporter typing on a laptop outside of the press pen at the San Jose Convention Center and asked the reporter, who was attending on a general admission ticket, if he had press credentials. The Trump campaign has refused to credential the reporter for multiple events.
The staffer said he would consult with his superiors and returned minutes later with a private security officer who instructed the reporter to leave the premises, escorting him out a nearby exit.
“The campaign is not aware of the incident or any details pertaining to it and therefore cannot comment,” wrote campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks in an email. She added that the campaign is “looking into it.”
Thursday’s ejection occurred as Trump mounts an increasingly caustic campaign against the free press.
After weeks of media scrutiny about donations he promised to veterans groups, the presumptive GOP nominee held a news conference Tuesday to announce the groups that received the money. But Trump, who often refers to journalists as “scum” and “slime” — used the event instead to lambaste reporters for asking questions about the donations in the first place, referring to one ABC reporter as “sleaze.”
According to the Washington Post and the Associated Press, Trump sent many of the checks after reporters began asking the campaign about the fate of the donations. The total also fell short of the $6 million he originally boasted.
In response to Trump’s haranguing of reporters at the press conference, veteran newsman Dan Rather wrote, “a shudder went down my spine.”
Trump continues to attack the Judge in charge of the serious fraud case against Trump University and demonstrates a distinct lack of knowledge about the judicial system as well. This is Adam Liptak’s analysis from the NYT. A video there shows the speeches with Trump saying things that clearly show his contempt for law.
Donald J. Trump’s blustery attacks on the press, complaints about the judicial system and bold claims of presidential power collectively sketch out a constitutional worldview that shows contempt for the First Amendment, the separation of powers and the rule of law, legal experts across the political spectrum say.
Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.
“Who knows what Donald Trump with a pen and phone would do?” asked Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute.
With five months to go before Election Day, Mr. Trump has already said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations. He has threatened to sic federal regulators on his critics. He has encouraged rough treatment of demonstrators.
His proposal to bar Muslims from entry into the country tests the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom, due process and equal protection.
And, in what was a tipping point for some, he attacked Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of the Federal District Court in San Diego, who is overseeing two class actions against Trump University.
Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat.
“They ought to look into Judge Curiel, because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace,” Mr. Trump said. “O.K.? But we will come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case?”
David Post, a retired law professor who now writes for the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative-leaning law blog, said those comments had crossed a line.
“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton continues to ignore Sanders–and rightly so–focusing attacks on the character and temperament of Donald 
Trump. Yesterday’s speech on foreign policy was a clear laundry list of the ways that Donald Trump is unfit for the office of President. The speech was well-received by the media. The only critic of the speech outside of Republican circles that are consolidating around Trump was nasty Senator Bernie Sanders whose march to irrelevance can’t come soon enough.
“Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different; they are dangerously incoherent,” she said. “They aren’t even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.”
Sanders has taken issue with Clinton’s own foreign policy, routinely blasting her for her early Iraq War support and her praise of Henry Kissinger, another former secretary of State.
In his statement on Thursday, Sanders added, “We need a foreign policy based on building coalitions and making certain that the brave American men and women in our military do not get bogged down in perpetual warfare in the Middle East. That’s what I will fight for as president.”
Both Trump and Sanders–and a cackling chorus of jackdaws in the media–continue to demonize Clinton. Both Sanders and Trump get away with annoying and aggressive personalities that have crossed the line to rudeness a long time ago. Yet, it’s Clinton that is deemed not human enough.
How can we explain the virulent hatred toward Hillary Clinton from men and women of both political parties? The attacks against her: Benghazi, personal emails, lying, etc., are relatively minor, the usual political scuttlebutt, in contrast to the extreme intensity of her vilification. So many people say they just don’t like her, and this negative impression is not new. Since her role as First Lady in Bill Clinton’s White House, she has been portrayed as a witch, a Lady Macbeth, a ruthlessly ambitious, egocentric woman who considers herself above the law to achieve her exploitative goals. Some see her as a shrieking harpy. As a psychoanalyst, I believe that the intensity of this character assassination is motivated by a largely unconscious misogyny that is deeply rooted in the human (male and female) psyche. It is often triggered in response to a strong, independent woman. But this enmity is especially intense for Hillary, who is emotionally reserved and aggressive in her pursuit of the presidency. (See SNL’s recent hilarious caricatures of these qualities.)
None of her caring activities have dispelled the impression that she is cold and inhuman. Not her steadfast work on behalf of children. Not her unwavering support of women: their reproductive rights and equal pay, and her advocacy for disadvantaged minorities: blacks and Hispanics. Not her exemplary role as a wife, who remained faithful to her philandering husband, nor her role as a loving mother to her daughter, Chelsea.
Male presidential contenders like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump can act strongly, ambitiously, strategically and aggressively, and the public admires them for these traits rather than demanding “emotional warmth.” As a cool tempered woman, Hillary is judged by a different standard. In 2008, it was only when she broke down crying at a coffee house campaign stop that she was perceived as capable of feeling.
What upsets so many Americans about a strong, competitive woman?
It’s refreshing to see the media coverage of her speech yesterday. Matthew Yglesias writes “Hillary Clinton rolled out the anti-Trump argument that could deliver a landslide” at VOX. This is no ringing endorsement of Hillary with the usual back handed jabs as well as a critique of Hillary trying to appeal to center right Republicans.
Over the course of the past year, Clinton has been talking primarily to Democratic Party primary voters. This argument — and this speech in general — is not one that will be especially appealing to them.
What she’s offering instead is an argument aimed at a much broader audience. It’s an argument that acknowledges, implicitly, that there are tens of millions of right-of-center Americans who’ve never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate but didn’t support Trump in the primary. Clinton is pitching an argument aimed at those people — one designed to offer little ideological or policy content in hopes of appealing to 70 percent of the population rather than 51 percent.
It’s essentially the argument that Business Insider’s Josh Barro made early this week — Trump carries too much tail risk:
It’s clear he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. So we can’t be certain which of these things he would do. But we can be certain that he’s capable of doing any or all of them. Letting ISIS run wild. Launching a nuclear attack. Starting a ground war. These are all distinct possibilities with Donald Trump in charge.
In other words, ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen? Conservative-minded people aren’t going to be thrilled with a Clinton presidency, but they’ve already lived through eight years of Bill Clinton and eight years of Barack Obama. The country is still standing. With Trump, by contrast, we really have no idea what we’re going to get.
Donald Trump’s ideas, Clinton said, are “dangerously incoherent”; indeed, “they’re not ideas at all.” She calls him “temperamentally unfit” and raised the specter of nuclear war.
Here’s Fred Kaplan from Slate on Hillary’s speech: ” Hillary Clinton Just Kicked Trump in the Shins And showed that she’s certainly tough enough for the long haul.”
For those who thought Hillary Clinton needed proxies or a running mate to attack Donald Trump with the savagery required of a long-slog campaign, her Thursday speech in San Diego should be a mind-changer.
The all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee showed that she’s fit to be her own attack dog, mauling her ill-matched Republican foe to shreds without getting muddy in the process.
Not two minutes into the speech, she calmly and coolly delivered this broadside:
Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different; they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies. He is not just unprepared, he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability, and immense responsibility. This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes, because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because someone got under his very thin skin.
The audience gasped at hearing “bizarre,” tittered at “personal feuds,” and burst into laughter and applause at “very thin skin.” They hadn’t heard any presidential candidate talk like this—they certainly hadn’t heard Clinton talk like this. It was a full takedown of Trump, but in an anti-Trump manner, spoken not in vague adolescent epithets (“stupid,” “idiotic,” “crooked,” “goofy”), but in an itemized checklist of his utter, almost laughable unsuitability for the job.
“I will leave it to the psychiatrists,” she said later, to explain Trump’s “bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen who have no love for America,” not least Vladimir Putin, for whom Trump shows not the slightest understanding and who, because of that, she reminded Trump—“will eat your lunch.”
It’s pretty clear that Hillary is not going to fold like the cheap lawnchair campaign of Jeb Bush. She’s in it to win and that’s a good thing because it’s pretty evident that there’s some very dangerous ideas and people associated with Trump and Sanders. The latter we should be rid of on Tuesday. The former will be inciting violence in a city near you until November. I don’t know how any Republican can look in the mirror knowing that.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: The General Election Campaign Begins
Posted: June 2, 2016 Filed under: just because 52 Comments
John and Yoko
Good Afternoon!!
The insane campaign continues, and we are moving into the general election phase despite Bernie Sanders’ whining.
I just can’t wait until next Tuesday when Hillary will clinch the number of delegates for the nomination. She should get quite a few from Puerto Rico on June 5, and get the rest in New Jersey on June 7, before the California votes are even counted. At that point, perhaps President Obama will endorse Hillary. It appears he is already anxious to get started.
The Boston Globe: Obama wades into election debate with Indiana speech.
ELKHART, Ind. — President Obama on Wednesday forcefully inserted himself into the 2016 presidential campaign, assailing Donald Trump and the Republican Party for peddling economic policies that he said would benefit the rich and connected at the expense of a still-struggling middle class.
Obama framed this year’s presidential contest as a choice between a Democratic Party committed to working families and a Republican Party he said was beholden to China, “big oil,” “big banks,” and the wealthiest Americans. White House aides cast the speech as the president’s first major attempt to influence the race to succeed him.
Patti Smith
“If what you care about in this election is your pocketbook; if what you’re concerned about is who will look out for the interests of working people and grow the middle class,” Obama said in a fiery, campaign-like speech, “if what you’re concerned about is the economy, then the debate is not even close.”
Aides said the president, who is expected to ultimately endorse Hillary Clinton, is eager to jump into the carnival-like political debate between Trump and the Democratic nominee.
Railing against one of Trump’s comments — that he would roll back rules imposed on Wall Street — Obama’s voice grew louder as he declared, “That is crazy!” Sleeves rolled up and his finger wagging, the president asked the supportive crowd, “Have we really forgotten what just happened eight years ago?”
The president said that when he hears that working families are voting for the Republican economic agenda, “I want to have an intervention!”
Naturally, Donald Trump was not happy about being criticized by the president: McClatchy: Donald Trump warns Barack Obama he’ll ‘hit him’ like Bill Clinton. Donald is going to learn that Bill and Barack are a lot tougher than he is.
John Cage
Donald Trump, lashing back at Barack Obama after the president waded forcefully into the presidential campaign, on Wednesday said Obama “doesn’t have a clue” and threatened to turn his attacks on him in retaliation.
“This is a president who doesn’t have a clue,” Trump told supporters in Sacramento. “If he campaigns, that means I’m allowed to hit him, just like I hit Bill Clinton.”
Trump’s remarks followed an appearance by Obama in Elkhart, Ind., on Wednesday, where the president warned against the Republican Party’s economic policies and said the GOP was misleading Americans on the condition of the economy.
Rallying supporters at a hangar at Sacramento International Jet Center, Trump said foreign leaders view Obama as a “total lightweight,” and he said Obama should not involve himself in the campaign.
“He shouldn’t campaign,” Trump said. “He should go out and do the job that he’s supposed to be doing.”
Gee, what’s Don the Con going to do, go birther on Obama again? That didn’t go so well the last time.
Frank Zappa
Trump got more embarrassing news yesterday as the media delved into the court documents on his fraudulent “university.” The Miaimi Herald reports: Golf tournament leaving Trump’s Doral course for Mexico.
Whether desiring more cash or less of Donald Trump, the PGA Tour announced Wednesday it’s yanking its annual star-filled event away from the city of Doral after 55 tournaments.
The new location: Mexico City, in a country Trump once stated sent “rapists” to the United States over a border on which Trump wants to build a wall.
What began in 1962 as the Doral Country Club Invitational and has been the World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship since 2011 will be the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship starting in 2017. The PGA doesn’t know which course it’ll use. Only Augusta National, home of the Masters; Pebble Beach; and The Colonial in Fort Worth, Texas, have hosted tournaments for more consecutive years than the Blue Monster, the nickname for Trump National Doral’s Blue course.
In a statement released through The Trump Organization, Trump said, “It is a sad day for Miami, the United States and the game of golf, to have the PGA Tour consider moving the World Golf Championships, which has been hosted in Miami for the last 55 years, to Mexico. No different than Nabisco, Carrier and so many other American companies, the PGA Tour has put profit ahead of thousands of American jobs, millions of dollars in revenue for local communities and charities and the enjoyment of hundreds of thousands of fans who make the tournament an annual tradition. This decision only further embodies the very reason I am running for President of the United States.”
Right. Don the Con is upset because some low-paid service jobs will move to Mexico. How embarrassing would it be to have the Masters Tournament overshadowed by Trump’s ugly racist image? How many companies would want their products associated with his hate speech?
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been all over TV for the past couple of days talking about Trump’s fraud lawsuits. From CNN: N.Y. attorney general on Trump University: ‘This is straight up fraud.’ Here he is on Good Morning America.
And here he is on Morning Joe today.
This is serious stuff. A little more from CNN:
Trump is currently facing three separate lawsuits — two class action suits filed in California and one in New York by Schneiderman — which argue the program that took in an estimated $40 million, but was mired in fraud and deception.
Schneiderman’s case argues that Trump and Michael Sexton, the former president of the program, engaged in fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct, and that although the program promised to offer courses taught by experts personally selected by Trump, the teachers were neither handpicked nor experts.Schneiderman has repeatedly lambasted Trump and his “university,” telling CNN’s Carol Costello Tuesday on “Newsroom” that Trump “defrauded people out of money. They’re entitled to their day in court.”Frida Kahlo
“This is a hugely important case. If you look at the facts of this case, this shows someone who was absolutely shameless in his willingness to lie to people, to say whatever it took to induce them into his phony seminars,” Schneiderman told CNN. “Telling people who are in hard economic times — we’re talking about 2008, 2009 — people desperate to hold onto their homes, to make some money, convincing them that he will teach them his entrepreneurial secrets.” ….“We sued him in 2013. He says it’s a political case. Nobody in August 2013 thought that this guy was going to be the Republican nominee for president,” the attorney general said Thursday. “Thousands of people were bilked out of millions of dollars. Our first priority is to get their money back and to reestablish the legitimacy of educational institutions in New York State.”
Hillary’s campaign was on this yesterday. From the AP via The Boston Globe: Clinton calls Trump University ‘a fraudulent scheme.’
‘‘Trump University was a fraudulent scheme used to prey upon those who could least afford it,’’ Clinton’s campaign wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning.
Clinton aides suggested the likely Democratic nominee would use Trump University as part of a broader effort to cast Trump as a callous businessman who promises Americans ways to get ahead, but is only concerned with enriching himself. As part of that effort, Clinton has previously hammered Trump for appearing to cheer for the collapse of the U.S. housing market and for failing to make good on pledges to donate to veterans until he was pressured to follow through by the media.
‘‘He is pitching voters that he can help improve their lives, but it is all a scam whose only goal is to promote Trump,’’ Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said.
Charles Bukowski
And from Politico: Clinton unloads on ‘fraud’ Donald Trump.
At a Newark, New Jersey, event, Clinton wasted no time diving into an attack on Trump, opening her remarks by bringing up the most recent development in the Trump University lawsuit — unsealed testimony in which former staff described the program as a “fraudulent scheme” and a “total lie.”
“Trump and his employees took advantage of vulnerable Americans,” Clinton said, recounting testimony from Trump University employees suggesting that students were encouraged to make risky financial decisions like maxing out credit cards and emptying retirement accounts. “This is just more evidence that Donald Trump himself is a fraud. He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U. It’s important that we recognize what he has done because that’s usually a pretty good indicator of what he will do, and on issue after issue, we see someone who is unqualified and unfit to be president of the United States.”
Clinton also attacked Trump for the months-long delay in the delivery of money to veterans charities from a fundraiser he held in January with Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. Trump attacked the media during a news conference earlier this week for questioning whether the donations had indeed been made, calling one reporter a “sleaze” and deriding another as “a real beauty.”
“Just yesterday we learned the truth about Donald Trump’s big talk about helping veterans,” Clinton said. “It turns out it wasn’t until the press shamed him that he actually made the donations he had promised. For months, it was all just a publicity stunt.”
Pablo Picasso
It’s great to see Hillary ignoring Bernie and seriously focusing on the general election. Here’s how Trump responded:
Donald Trump on Wednesday unleashed a sustained barrage of attacks on Hillary Clinton after the likely Democratic nominee spent the day unloading on the Republican billionaire over his controversy-ridden Trump University.
Trump began by pre-empting Clinton’s next salvo, a foreign policy speech Thursday aimed squarely at Trump, by suggesting the speech is full of “such lies” and capped off his denunciation of the Democrat by insisting Clinton “should not be allowed to run” because of her controversial use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, which Trump said amounted to a breach of “federal law.”Between those attacks, Trump also called Clinton “a person with no actual talent,” slammed her foreign policy decision-making as secretary of state and recycled an attack previously reserved for his GOP primary opponent, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush: “low energy.”
Pretty weak. Don the Con is going to have to come up with better material that that. Hillary is “low energy?” Give me a break.
I’ll have a few more links in the comment thread. What stories are you following today?
Wednesday Reads: Just what exactly are the Republicans Nominating?
Posted: June 1, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, Afternoon Reads | Tags: Donald Trump, KKK, Nazis, the Mafia, the MOB, Trump University 59 Comments
Steve Bell, UK, The Guardian
Good Afternoon!
I’ve watched the Republican Party go straight down the drain from about the time they nominated and beatified a senile old B movie Actor for President. I really thought that was about the worst they could do after Richard Nixon. Then came Dubya Bush. That had to be the worst, right? Well, I was wrong. They’re in the process of nominating a reality show celebrity with longstanding ties to the Mafia and the White Supremacy movement whose lies more than 90% of the time and has absolutely no understanding of the world beyond his penis and phony persona. He’s a huckster with so many failed businesses–seeded by his inheritance and tax incentives–that it’s even difficult to take him seriously when he touts his special deal-making talent.
Yes, don’t we all wish we had a rich father who co-signed every deal and whose death ended the dealing because there was no longer a co-signer? Any one could do business on those terms. The laundry list above is basically what the media buries below the free advertising it bestows on a man that should be a pariah.
The other thing, too, that I think the media has to hold his feet to the fire on is he’s gotten away with this notion that he’s a superior deal-maker, and a very successful businessman. I thought about it after he went after the Iran deal. He said, “Obama negotiated this horrible deal with Iran. It’s a bad deal, and when I get to Washington, there won’t be bad deals anymore. I’m a great deal-maker.” And then the reality, the objective reality, is that he’s been a horrible deal-maker. His career is littered with bad deals. And yet, he’s essentially now a human shingle. He’s not someone who’s a particularly adept deal-maker, if you look at his whole career.
Donald Trump Biographer Timothy O’Brien
Why are the Republicans doing this to our nation? How much do they despise our country?
“This is too unreal. Can we watch something more realistic like Star Wars?” Philip Ytournel, Denmark’s Politiken
The consolidation that is now occurring within the Republican Party around this horrible human being who is widely recognized as being essentially morally and intellectually bankrupt is beyond horrifying. It is the stuff that makes the most cynical of us start applying the Godwin Frame. What kind of candidate is praised by the pariah state of North Korea?
Writing in DPRK Today, a self-described Chinese North Korean scholar named Han Yong Mook called the presumptive Republican nominee “wise” and a “far-sighted presidential candidate.”“The president that U.S. citizens must vote for is not that dull Hillary — who claimed to adapt the Iranian model to resolve nuclear issues on the Korean Peninsula — but Trump, who spoke of holding direct conversation with North Korea,” he wrote.
I cannot understand how many people do not see the appalling lack of character in this man. He is not fit for any level of public service and should’ve been cut off from any use of public funds years ago. It’s amazing to me that he’s not run afoul of the law before however, I am very aware that getting a rich white man into jail for stealing public treasure and racketeering is not an easily accomplished task given they can run amok in the justice system for some time. The Trump “University” scam should have landed the man in jail.
Fernando Liera, Mexico
I’ve taught university for some time both in for-profit Universities and state run Universities and community colleges. The stories coming out of the failed Trump “University” are horrifying. An article in The Atlantic written by Matt Ford refers to it as “The Art of the Swindle.” That’s very aptly put.
Predators, by and large, do not attack the strongest prey in the wild. They instead target the vulnerable, the very young, and the very old—the prey that is least able to defend itself.
Trump University, the defunct real-estate education program created by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, pursued a similar approach, according to its former employees in legal documents unsealed Tuesday.
“Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” said Ronald Schnackenberg, a sales manager at Trump University in 2006 and 2007.
Those declarations and other internal Trump University documents depict an aggressive, ethically dubious business model that targeted potential customers’ financial fears and socioeconomic anxieties and offered Trump’s personal brand as the solution—a strategy later echoed in his presidential campaign.
The model of registering students in for-profit Universities is frequently to line up Sales People that have innocuous names like Student Adviser or Recruiter to apply the screws. Many of these For-Profits have either failed or reformed under lawsuit, threat of losing any accreditation they may have achieved or under threat of losing the ability to provide Student Loans. Trump “University” was never accredited and therefore never regulated under Federal laws. So, it operated outside even the worst of these models. Completely false information was provided to students as part of a heavy-handed sales pitch. This article from HuffPo has some extremely interesting documents that were released by Judge Curiel via a decision related to Art Cohen v. Donald J. Trump.
Since he launched his presidential bid last year, Trump has offered conflicting accounts of his involvement with Trump University. In March, Trump defended the company during a debate, saying that its salespeople “did a good job” and that the program had an “A” rating from the Better Business Bureau. (The truth is a little more complicated.) Trump has also claimed in promotional videos that he hand-picked the instructors at Trump U.
The playbooks instruct salespeople to mention Trump by name in order to intimidate potential customers who are hesitant to spend thousands of dollars on a Trump University product. “Mr. Trump will not listen to excuses,” the playbook tells salespeople to say, “and neither will we.”
In another scenario, salespeople are instructed to berate potential customers, telling them, “You’ve had your entire adult life to accomplish your financial goals… and you’re not even close to where you need to be.”
TRUMP UNIVERSITY
But according to more than 5,000 former Trump University customers, it wasn’t their plans that were flawed — it was the Trump U. business model itself. Many of the former students now suing Trump say they were pressured into spending money they didn’t have on Trump University products.
The playbook instructed Trump University employees on how to target potential customers with bad credit. “What most people do,” reads one prompt, “is handle the tuition by putting it on their credit cards because it gives them the ability to make very small monthly payments and maintain a low overhead to run their real estate project.” Later on, it says, they can “use their success in real estate to pay off the banks in a couple of months or so.”
“However, you don’t seem to have the advantage of having that kind of leveraging power,” the pitch continues. “Do you have any other seed capital or savings set aside to further invest into your real estate projects?”
TRUMP UNIVERSITY
The playbook also emphasizes the need to collect key financial information from potential customers. Salespeople were instructed to find out if clients were single parents who “had three children that may need money for food,” for example, or if they were a “middle-aged commuter.”
Steve Bell, UK. The Guardian
This is an equally horrifying lede from NY Magazine : “Trump University Told Recruiters to Target Single Parents With Hungry Kids.” The analysis is provided by Eric Levitz.
It’s worth remembering that even before Donald Trump launched his pseudo-fascist campaign for the presidency, he was already among the most loathsome humans our great nation has ever produced. On Tuesday, U.S. district court judge Gonzalo Curiel ordered the public release of Trump University’s “playbooks” — guides the (bait-and-switch scheme masquerading as a) real-estate school used to recruit (or con) its enrollees. The playbooks show that prospective students were encouraged to pay for the program, which could cost up to $35,000, by going into credit-card debt.
“We teach the technique of using OPM … other people’s money,” reads one sales script that was obtained by The Hill. “Most students who are invited to this program use established lines of credit, like a credit card, utilizing the bank’s money, OPM, to handle their tuition. I’m not talking about tens of thousands of dollars, but on the other hand, not a couple of hundred dollars either.”
In practice, Trump University staff delivered this message a bit more crudely, according to newly released written testimony obtained by the New York Times. “It’s O.K., just max out your credit card,” Corrine Sommer, an event manager at the school, recalled her colleagues telling prospective students.
If a cash-strapped applicant said, “I don’t like using my credit cards and going into debt,” the playbook instructed recruiters to respond, “[D]o you like living paycheck to paycheck? … Do you enjoy seeing everyone else but yourself in their dream houses and driving their dreams cars with huge checking accounts? Those people saw an opportunity, and didn’t make excuses, like what you’re doing now.”
Most charmingly, the playbooks suggest recruiters exploit the desperation of a single parent with hungry children in order to convince said parent to take on massive credit-card debt.
The Republican Party is well known for its massive and nasty Opposition Research and character smear blitzes. Roger Stone is with Trump so he obviously was not on the job working against his friend. However, where were the people behind Jeb Bush? This massive amount of information has been out there. The Politico link which leads to the first quote is an interview with five Trump Biographers who all basically find him to be an appalling person with pages of examples and citations.
Both the press and the Republican party have not done due diligence with Trump. Are they that obsessed about Hillary Clinton that they’ll let a fascist in the White House with less morality than any sentient being slithering, crawling, or slinking in the deepest, darkest nether regions of our planet?
So, the Mafia connections are pretty brazen also. You can read my friend Peter’s take on them here at First Draft. Peter excerpts a particularly horrifying article from David Cay Johnston.
David Rowe, Australia, The Australian Financial Review
I’m not the only one who has picked up signals over the years. Wayne Barrett, author of a 1992 investigative biography of Trump’s real-estate dealings, has tied Trump to mob and mob-connected men.
No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.
This is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business.
From the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.
Now that he’s running for president, I pulled together what’s known – piecing together the long history of federal filings, court records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett’s files. What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.
Tom Robbins writing for Vice also has some very telling information.
Actually, there’s an old FBI memo that puts a different spin on Trump’s attitude about the mob. It is a classic example of a young but already shrewd Trump hard at work. It was written in 1981 by a veteran FBI agent, reflecting meetings that he and a fellow FBI official were having with the 35-year-old developer from Queens, then a rising star in New York’s business firmament. The topic of the meetings was Trump’s pending plunge into the Atlantic City casino industry. And while the memo was written in the stilted language of FBI-bureaucratese, Trump’s wide-eyed comments were recorded with what seems like barely suppressed amusement. “Trump advised agents that he had read in the press and media and had heard from various acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were known to operate in Atlantic City,” the memo states.
Then, there are the ties to white supremacist groups. This recent Forbes article is on his propensity to retweet NAZIs. Okay, I finally Godwinned.
Trump is “giving us the old wink-wink,” wrote Andrew Anglin, editor of a white supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, after Trump retweeted two other “white genocide” theorists within a single minute. “Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate…Today in America the air is cold and it tastes like victory.”
It is possible that Trump ― who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweeting ― is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings.
There’s this article from The Atlantic which diagram’s Trump’s language to the KKK of the 1920s which would indicate his father’s influence. Where was the sunlight on this last fall? The analysis is by Kelly J. Baker.
Making America great required exclusion, intolerance, and vitriol. Unfortunately for the Klan, their message of 100 percent Americanism started losing ground by the end of the 1920s. Public scandals involving Klan leaders and convictions of Klansmen for murder made white Americans reconsider their allegiance to the order and its increasingly tarnished ideals. The Klan started to appear too extreme and dangerous for even the slightest association. Their steep rise was tempered by an equally steep fall. Moreover, the Klan developed an image problem: their persistent association with racism—which continues to plague the modern Klans despite efforts to rebrand their image to reflect the love of the white race, not racism per se.
The Klan’s message of 100 percent Americanism and restrictive immigration resonated in the 1920s, and their message gains traction again and again every time white Americans encounter social change and shifting demographics. With a black president, LGBT equality, an enormous Hispanic community, and predictions that America will soon be a majority minority country, their message resonates now, too. That’s why a former Klan leader is encouraging other white supremacists to vote for Trump and why The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos found that extremist white-rights groups also plan to vote for him. Maybe Trump doesn’t know better. Or maybe the echoes are less like echoes and more like the purposeful conjuring of a racialized message—one that too many white voters still want to hear.
You can follow any of these links to Trump’s sordid past, present, and undoubtedly our conjoined future. Perhaps both the Republican Party and the media are so caught up in their own frames that they’ve failed to take Trump seriously. We’re beginning to see more standard vetting now. However, it’s nearly too late. Phillip Bump of WAPO analyzes the consolidation of the party around Trump.
What’s changed, though, is that Republicans have warmed up to the guy. As the Times writes, “[U]nfavorable views toward Mr. Trump among Republican voters have plummeted 15 percentage points since last month; 21 percent now express an unfavorable view of him, down from 36 percent in April.” We pointed out last week that consolidating the Republican base would make Trump’s favorability numbers look more like Clinton’s, and voila.
The subtext to that is this: With their nominee settled, Republicans are rallying around him. There’s more evidence to this effect than is worth delineating, but this is not uncommon for presidential races.
There will be undoubtedly be much white washing. He’s still getting more free press than any one ever has before. Just this week as Clinton was introducing major policy initiatives on the military and veterans, the cable TV cameras were focused on an empty podium waiting the wildly-coiffed one. Corporate news chases profits and this man needs to be stopped at all costs. The two countries in the world that welcome Trump are Putin’s Russia and North Korea. The rest are horrified. We all should be horrified.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments