MMR, Sept 17-18, 2016

Ha, same time, deleted mine!

Donald Trump has benefitted from plenty of free and favorable media, particularly from CNN. But he may have finally pushed his luck too far.

Trump had promised that his appearance at the new Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., on Friday would include a major statement about President Barack Obama’s birth status.

The real estate mogul teased the appearance that morning, fueling speculation that he might finally admit he had been wrong to question the president’s U.S. citizenship. There was even talk that Trump might apologize.

It didn’t happen. After speaking for a few minutes about his new hotel and letting a series of veterans praise his candidacy, Trump said, “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”

The statement, which lasted about 30 seconds, contained two separate lies.

Clinton didn’t start the birther controversy. Trump, who as recently as this week has refused to say he believed Obama was born in the U.S., didn’t end it.

And CNN’s panelists made sure their viewers knew it.

This was John Berman: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign never pushed it.” And this was his co-anchor, Kate Bolduan: “It’s false. … Donald Trump in 2011, he made this his signature issue. No one has gone as far as Donald Trump on the birther issue.”

Jake Tapper ― who, to his credit, has been among the most aggressive about calling out Trump’s lies ― was blunt: “Those are two factually false statements. ... She and her campaign never, never started the birther issue. Second, Donald Trump did not end the birther issue.”

Tapper also noted that the birther issue had a racial element, because it was an effort to delegitimize the nation’s first African-American president.

John King, who remembered interviewing Trump on the day Obama released his birth certificate, was nearly speechless.

“After four or five years of leading a fraudulent and reckless campaign against the legitimacy of the United States president, you got, what, about six or seven words from Donald Trump?” he said.

“And none of those words,” Berman noted, “were ‘I’m sorry, I apologize.’ Or explaining why he ever questioned the birth status of the United States president.”

On social media, other media figures reacted with a similar mix of incredulity and condemnation.

This response may have partly reflected a realization that Trump had manipulated the media once again, by getting the networks to break away from normal coverage in order to show some pretty routine campaign speeches ― and promote his new hotel along the way. After promising a big reveal, Trump began his appearance by bragging about his new hotel. He then let a parade of veterans sing his political praises, turning the event into a free advertisement.

“We got played,” CNN panelists admitted on air.

Whatever the reason, the reaction to Trump’s birther statement recalled the harsh commentary following Trump’s attacks on federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel (the judge of Mexican heritage presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University) and the Khan family (the Muslim parents of a soldier killed in Iraq).

Trump’s statements in those cases so clearly betrayed racial bias that they fueled lengthy political controversy, and ended up hurting his campaign. Friday’s statement on the birther controversy was so egregiously dishonest that it may have a similar effect.

www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-birther-cnn_us_57dc2301e4b08cb14095847e?section=&

Trump: Never wrong, never sorry, never responsible

What makes Donald Trump such a singular figure — in modern politics and, perhaps, ever — is his refusal to take ownership of the outrageous things he has said and done.

It is the essence of his leadership style, the defiance that exasperates his foes and makes his supporters love him all the more. The one thing that is consistent about him is inconsistency.

Not only does Trump refuse to apologize, he blames others for his own actions. His campaign staff may claim to speak for him, but he will leave even his aides twisting when it suits his purposes.

Never had the GOP nominee done all of this in such a fun-house-mirror fashion as on Friday, when he disavowed a crackpot con that he had once promoted. He even went so far as to claim credit for rectifying the situation.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said, falsely, in an appearance at his newly opened luxury hotel, which is just a few blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”


Trump was referring to the false, racism-tainted theory that the nation’s first African American president was born outside the United States and, therefore, is not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office.

The impulses of the former “Celebrity Apprentice” host are those of a showman, not a traditional politician encumbered by a record and a governing philosophy.

“There is something of the reality-TV culture in this. What’s going on right now is all that really matters,” conservative intellectual Yuval Levin said.

That was the same instinct for expedience that led Trump earlier this year to revive long-discredited theories that Clinton White House official Vince Foster had been murdered, and to speculate that the father of his GOP primaries opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), had somehow been mixed up in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong,” Trump told “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon a year ago. “I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

Instead, Trump just moves on, without a backward glance at the many pronouncements and positions that he has left by the roadside when he no longer finds them useful.

His unsubstantiated theories also delve into serious policy questions.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-never-wrong-never-sorry-never-responsible/2016/09/16/88446d0e-7c1c-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumpdebrief-920pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Why a Donald Trump Victory Could Make Climate Catastrophe Inevitable
Michael Klare on the forces moving us toward an uninhabitable planet.

This story first appeared at TomDispatch.com.

In a year of record-setting heat on a blistered globe, with fast-warming oceans, fast-melting ice caps, and fast-rising sea levels, ratification of the December 2015 Paris climate summit agreement—already endorsed by most nations—should be a complete no-brainer. That it isn't tells you a great deal about our world. Global geopolitics and the possible rightward lurch of many countries (including a potential deal-breaking election in the United States that could put a climate denier in the White House) spell bad news for the fate of the Earth. It's worth exploring how this might come to be.
That geopolitics will play a decisive role in determining the success or failure of the Paris Agreement has become self-evident.

The delegates to that 2015 climate summit were in general accord about the science of climate change and the need to cap global warming at 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (or 2.6 to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit) before a planetary catastrophe ensues. They disagreed, however, about much else. Some key countries were in outright conflict with other states (Russia with Ukraine, for example) or deeply hostile to each other (as with India and Pakistan or the United States and Iran). In recognition of such tensions and schisms, the assembled countries crafted a final document that replaced legally binding commitments with the obligation of each signatory state to adopt its own unique plan, or "nationally determined contribution," for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions.

As a result, the fate of the planet rests on the questionable willingness of each of those countries to abide by that obligation, however sour or bellicose its relations with other signatories may be. As it happens, that part of the agreement has already been buffeted by geopolitical headwinds and is likely to face increasing turbulence in the years to come.

That geopolitics will play a decisive role in determining the success or failure of the Paris Agreement has become self-evident in the short time since its promulgation. While some progress has been made toward its formal adoption—the agreement will enter into force only after no fewer than 55 countries, accounting for at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have ratified it—it has also encountered unexpected political hurdles, signaling trouble to come.

On the bright side, in a stunning diplomatic coup, President Barack Obama persuaded Chinese President Xi Jinping to sign the accord with him during a recent meeting of the G-20 group of leading economies in Hangzhou. Together, the two countries are responsible for a striking 40 percent of global emissions. "Despite our differences on other issues," Obama noted during the signing ceremony, "we hope our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire further ambition and further action around the world."

www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/09/donald-trump-brexit-paris-accord-climate-change

Donald Trump’s Latest Birther Lie

The midday bulletin arrived as another bizarre moment in the absurdist presidential campaign of Donald Trump: News Alert: Trump admits Obama was born in the United States.

What? It read like some variation on “Trump Finds the Earth No Longer Flat.” But no, Mr. Trump, the ultimate mountebank, was at it again, altering but not abandoning the Big Lie campaign that first made him the darling of wing nuts and racists five years ago: his vicious insistence that President Obama was not born a legitimate American citizen.

Did he apologize to Mr. Obama and the American people for the political poison he spread for so long? Of course not. Being Mr. Trump, he instead substituted a lie for a lie. He falsely accused Hillary Clinton of starting the birther myth, then further claimed he had nobly “finished” it off by badgering the White House for proof that Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, not Africa.
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The standard words for campaign mishaps — “flip-flop,” “retreat,” “walk-back” — simply do not apply to this candidate’s spirals through unreality.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Mr. Trump maintained with a straight face, speaking in Washington to a crowd of friendly military veterans. “I finished it.” Then he conceded the truth, an act that must have felt very peculiar to him: “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”

Not quite period, much as Trump strategists now wish it were. Mr. Trump is probably hoping to reassure voters that he is edging into the mainstream, that he is not just the reckless, cynical bully of the Republican primaries. But the birther lies cling to him as tightly as his nativist hallucinators.

The facts — because facts still matter — are that Mr. Trump continued to heap doubt on President Obama’s birth certificate even after it was released, slyly retweeting others’ contentions that it was a fake and a “computer generated forgery.”

After he tried to pin the birther smear on her, Mrs. Clinton called it what it is: an “outrageous lie” intended to “delegitimize our first black president.” Mr. Trump delegitimized his own candidacy instead.

www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/opinion/donald-trumps-latest-birther-lie.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Why did Trump and his supporters believe Hillary's birther lies for so many years???

Have we now moved into the 'Thanks Hillary!' era?

People care more about saying i won, than care about their own self-interests.

No comeback for the Noles this week ; (

Donald Trump may think that he can just get away with spending years and years promoting the damaging, racist, and horrible theory that Barack Obama is a foreign-born (Muslim) terrorist who usurped the ‘throne,’ but DNC interim chair Donna Brazile spent the wee hours of Saturday morning reminding him that he’s dead wrong, one tweet at a time.

On Friday, Trump finally admitted that President Obama was born in the United States, “period.” In fact, he spent an entire 20 seconds admitting that he has been wrong all these years before using the rest of his time to promote his new, overpriced hotel in Washington, D.C. — so you know he means it, right?

But in admitting that he had been lying to America, those lies being the reason that he rose to political prominence in the first place, Trump needed a replacement lie — so he just did what he did best and blamed the whole thing on Hillary Clinton. While it is true that racist, desperate, die-hard Clinton supporters did start the “birther” rumor via an anonymous chain email, Trump picked up that particular ball and ran with it, leading a half-decade witch hunt against the “Kenyan-born” President. Clinton, it has been confirmed time and again, had nothing to do with birtherism past denouncing it.

“President Obama produced a birth certificate, but Donald Trump is the only candidate in modern times to refuse to produce his tax returns,” Brazile tweeted, noting that African-Americans would need to sacrifice their “self-respect” to support Trump at this point. After that, she just unleashed on him:

President Obama produced a birth certificate, but Donald Trump is the only candidate in modern times to refuse to produce his tax returns.

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

This week, Donald Trump attacked an African-American pastor from Flint, and the first Black to be President of the United States. #RaceCard

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

Trump has ask Black voters and others what do you have to lose by supporting him? Consider this: Our self-respect. #StrongerTogether

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

Trump does all this while still constantly attacking Hillary Clinton. That’s his version of multi-tasking—insulting several targets at once.

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

Trump made no apology for spending years pushing a story that he now says was a lie. He acts as though he is being gracious. #NeverForget

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

And of course, Trump replaced his birther lie with the lie that Hillary Clinton started birtherism and that his diligence put it to rest.

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

It will be much easier to spend the next few weeks working feverishly than it would be to spend the next four years suffering hellishly.

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

Donald Trump finally deigned to say—for the time being at least—that our first African-American president was in fact born in the USA.

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 17, 2016

Donald Trump is nothing but a thin-skinned bully who is nothing if he is not insulting someone — like war hero and POW John McCain, the family of a gold star veteran, or the President of the United States. I remember a time in recent history when conservatives would go insane if someone insulted veterans and their families or even the President. But those days are over. The Republican Party has sold out all of its values to back a racist xenophobe who calls our allies to the South rapists, our Muslim friends terrorists, and who threatens to attack other countries over so much as a rude gesture.

This is what we’re up against, people. Be sure to get out and vote on November 8. Can you imagine the sort of people this guy would nominate to the Supreme Court? Oh. Nevermind. He’s already told us.

winningdemocrats.com/donna-brazile-just-unleashed-a-brutal-late-night-tweetstorm-on-racist-birther-donald-trump-screenshots/

Former CBS Nightly News anchor Dan Rather has emerged as a national voice of reason during this year’s carnival of an election. The legendary journalist called out bunk mainstream reporters cowed into submission by Donald Trump’s incessant need to lie and whose every word is meant to deceive Americans into choosing his particular brand of narcissistic fascism:

Enough is enough. It is a reality that every reporter must come to grips with. Trump is not a normal candidate. This is not a normal election. He will set a precedent that other demagogues will study and follow.

Fear, combined with the lure of ratings, views, clicks and profits, have hypnotized too much of the press into inaction and false equivalency for far too long. I am optimistic the trance is being broken. Fear not the Internet trolls. Fear instead the judgement of history.

Earlier this week, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out the other night, American media simply isn’t equipped by its manual for calling candidates liars.

In particular O’Donnell cited the New York Times, who won’t say a candidate lied, writing that Trump “stretched the truth” – which is a euphemistic way of saying that any reasonable person would question his grip on sanity after so many blatant falsehoods. He rightly accused the Gray Old Lady of lying to its readers by softening and legitimizing the barrage of Republican falsehoods. Rather saved his strongest criticism for the New York Times too:

And yet when presented with this challenge, too much of the press has been cowed into inaction. This is a man who can be fact-checked into obscurity by any second grader with an Internet connection.

And yet when he issues a mealy-mouth non-apology about President Obama’s obvious pedigree as an American, here we are with too many in the press not acknowledging his years of lies (check your Twitter feeds about how the New York Times initially covered this event). All of this of course sets the stage for Trump to lie again about somehow birtherism being Clinton’s fault.

It’s not. Dan Rather is absolutely right to crush the Times for a headline that trumpeted the racist candidate Trump as doing well in polls, while incidentally reporting that he wouldn’t personally disavow birtherism yesterday. Even Colin Powell, one of the few remaining Republicans with any level of public respect, called out Trump for racial hate in his non-sensical demands for President Obama’s birth certificate long after one had been produced.

Dan Rather pins the blame squarely onto the members of the media who treat this year’s Presidential election like a horse race, which it absolutely is not. For the first time in over 240 years, an American demagogue has arisen whose calculating manipulation has played the “objectivity” of the corporate news media, the equivocation and most sadly, the overwhelming self-interest triumphing over the quest for truth displayed by outlets like CNN who employs Trump’s former and possibly current campaign staffer Corey Lewandowski.

It’s truly unprecedented for news to be displayed as a talk show, with all of the voices in the room treated equally, including the racists, anti-semites and religious extremists deployed across the television media landscape to “surrogate” the unsubtle Republican brand of xenophobia and victimhood that Donald Trump peddles to his audiences. Rather’s long perspective enabled him to write this passage about the dangerous signs of decay:

For a long while, these thoughts have been coursing through my veins with concern and disbelief, and yet my abiding loyalty to the notion of fair, accurate and unbiased journalism held me in check from saying it out loud – much as I suspect it has muzzled the true feelings of many of my colleagues. But we must remember that Donald Trump knows this and cynically plays the press corps’ deep desire for fairness to his undeserved benefit.

Trump’s relationship with the press is at the heart of so much that is troubling about his candidacy – the secrecy, the lack of transparency on something as normal as tax returns, the flaunting of the very rules by which we elect our leaders, the appeasement of hate groups. And his embrace of Roger Ailes and Breitbart, institutions who have polluted press freedoms, is a further dangerous sign of decay.

The latest, barring the traveling press from covering an event and using them as ridicule in a speech, are but the most recent chapters in a novel full of outrageous acts. And this sentiment apparently extends to members of his own family as witnessed by his daughter Ivanka’s actions in an interview with Cosmo.

Our country needs the wisdom and experience of Dan Rather more than ever today, as our country meets its most dangerous test from within. Hopefully, his message travels so far, that even corporate journalists read this story and understand how crucially important their jobs for the next 50+ days have become to our nation’s future. Because if they don’t, a Trump administration will probably start imprisoning journalists and leave Mr. Rather’s “second graders with an Internet connection” as the only ones left to fact check the rubble of America after Trump destroys our free society with his rotten lies and bigotry.

occupydemocrats.com/2016/09/16/legendary-journalist-dan-rather-just-blasted-trump-for-making-demagogues-training-manual/

I'd say 'wingers. They never take responsibility of their BS and their fringe and it's always someone elses fault.

God hifternun! We're watching the tennis (as you can expect and imagine), but it looks like it's all going to be down to the last match, which I'm not very hopeful Evans/Edmund (whoever plays) will win (vs Del Potro probs.) - Nope, Evans vs Mayer....

Still, Leicester beat Burnley yesterday, with our new Striker scoring twice, so...

License to Kill, Flaweda Version.
SYG has gone amok.

www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/tampa-man-shoots-father-of-three-then-calls-stand-your-ground-hotline/2293853