One From driftglass

driftglass (a coupla days ago):

Today was the day when the Republican party's nominee for president declared open war on the leadership of the Republican party for finally daring to timidly whisper about various, glaringly observable realities (h/t @Billmon).

BTW - nobody does PhotoShop better:

 

Sometimes You Vote With Your Checkbook

Reuters:

Kerry Woolard, the 37-year-old manager of Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, went online in June and made her first political contribution: A $250 donation to the campaign of her boss, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Woolard's donation was unusual.

Only a dozen of an estimated 22,450 people employed at Trump's companies have donated more than $200 to the celebrity businessman's bid for the U.S. presidency, a Reuters review of federal campaign finance records through August shows. Those who gave less to either Trump's campaign or his joint fundraising committees would not have shown up in the review.

The contributors, including an office cleaner, a golf course groundskeeper, a bartender and an attorney, have given $5,298 to Trump's campaign, a fraction of the $112 million Trump's political operation has received from donors and joint fundraisers.

An employee at Trump enterprises gave $275 to the campaign of her employer’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. A 13th Trump employee, a lawyer at the Trump Organization, contributed to a Trump Super PAC, giving $1,000. 

Kids These Days

WaPo:

Students at Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as young conservatives at colleges across the state reconsider support for his campaign.

A statement issued late Wednesday by the group Liberty United Against Trump strongly rebuked the candidate as well as the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for defending Trump after he made extremely lewd comments about women in a 2005 video. The students wrote that Falwell’s support for Trump had cast a stain on the school’s reputation.

“We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history,” the statement said. “Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him. … He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.”

--and also too--

The Liberty University student manifesto against Trump comes as college Republican groups across the country reconsider support for the candidate. On Tuesday the University of Virginia College Republicans announced that the group voted to rescind its endorsement of his candidacy for president. The chairman of the College Republicans at Hampden-Sydney College, Tanner Beck, posted a statement on Facebook noting that Trump “has gone from simply being an embarrassment to our party, to a potentially permanent stain on our brand and our country.”

The statement was posted online as a petition

I'm not holding out a lot of hope that this will flip any given Trumpster, and I don't really give a rat's ass what anybody thinks their imaginary friend has to say about politics (or anything else for that matter).  

That said, maybe I can take it as a good sign that some of these young adults are forming political identities that aren't simply Red vs Blue and My-Team-No-Matter-What, in spite of the submissive authoritarian crap that gets drilled into them at a "Religious University".

Realistically, some of these "kids" will go on to become the next buncha blue-nosed pinch-faced purity warriors that plague every system everywhere, but some will also grow into regular human-type people who can change things where they are with the tools they have at hand.

A guy can hope, can't he?

Today's Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

And yesterday's Keith:

Watch this video on The Scene.

A Guy Can Wish

Conservatives unleashed #Trump and his #BasketOfDespicables on the nation. It is fitting that the #GOP be among the first casualties. pic.twitter.com/jgcTSa6OgK

— rootwoman123 (@rootwoman123) October 12, 2016

Through The Floor

There's a virulent strain of "conservative" that grew out of the 90s when people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh taught the GOP an important "debate" technique that says basically that the point of the exercise is simply to make the libruls mad (thanks, driftglass)

I'd call that picture evidence of the depth of their depravity, thinking again they've reached the basement floor, but they manage to go on crashing thru each lower limit, until it seems there's just no bottom for them.

And it's not like people haven't been trying to warn us this day was coming.

Each New Thing

Almost every day, when the newest horrifyingly right radical thing drops into our laps, I think, "this has to be as bad as it gets".  And every time, all I have to do is wait for a day (sometimes less), and along comes something to top it.

Leggings and gerbils, Dave Daubenmire (via Right Wing Watch):

Tim Wise (FB):

America will never be great until people who think like this are marginalized and removed from any position of authority or influence over anything besides their little pathetic tabernacles to the Lord...sadly, large numbers of men think this way and have quite a bit of power and influence.. And that is one of the reasons we can't have nice things. Time for men whose masculinity isn't threatened by strong and powerful women to stand up and demand that men like this are a relic of the past and should be relegated to it...like museum relics.

It's A Wonderment

Given recent blowups regarding revelations of Mr Trump's ever-increasing Ick Factor, I got curious as to the Endorsement Scorecard, so off to Wikipedia we go.

And, ooh look - here's a snapshot of Newspaper Endorsements for 2016

In a 5-way contest, Trump finishes behind "No Endorsement" and "Not Donald Trump" and Gary (what's "a leppo"?) Johnson. Dead.Fucking.Last.

Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Not one. Not so much as the Bergen County Shoppers Guide. Nothin'.

But wait, Mike - everybody knows the Librul Media can't we trusted. What about all the others; the "real people" ?

So, I went to the Endorsements page for each candidate, and browsed around a bit, and then I employed the time-honored metric of counting the number of times I had to hit Page Down to get thru the lists - and here's my very silly little quickie recap:

Hillary Clinton = 54 pages

Donald Trump = 17 pages

There ya have it - Hillary stomps his ass by better than 3-1.

Oh yeah - maybe this is the kicker and maybe it's not, but anyway, here's the score on how many endorsements have been retracted for each of 'em:

Hillary Clinton = 0

Donald Trump = 42

Knowing how low and crass and mercenary any given politician (or pundit) can be, we know how bad the situation has to get before one of these public ho-bags admits to making a mistake and reverses course.

Forty-fucking-two

And Now An Important Announcement

For just my Republican friends - from Hair Fuhrer* himself - you'll always remember what a special day it was.

Just Donald Trump telling people to vote on November 28th... pic.twitter.com/RdeqCo0JSd

— Alan Kestrel (@AlanKestrel750) October 12, 2016

*thanks @tengrain

Today's Tweet

Needed to get this one in before it disappeared.

This guy, at the rally with his wife and three kids, in his "She's A Cunt, Vote For Trump" shirt. pic.twitter.com/NDQMz1uteG

— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) October 11, 2016

Today's Quote

"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live."

--Sarah Kendzior

hat tip = Facebook friend LM-M

The Word Around The World

hat tip = Facebook bud DR

Polling Here At Home

Blue Virginia:

Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton holds a 9 percentage point lead over Republican Donald Trump among likely voters in Virginia (45%-36%), according to The Roanoke College Poll. Libertarian Gary Johnson trails with 7 percent of likely voters, while Independent Evan McMullin and Green Party candidate Jill Stein each garner 1 percent. Ten percent of likely voters remain undecided. In a two-way matchup, Clinton’s lead extends to 13 points (51%-38%). Clinton led by 7 percentage points in the September Roanoke College Poll (44%-37%).

The Roanoke College Poll interviewed 814 likely voters in Virginia between October 2 and October 6 and has a margin of error of +3.4 percent. The poll was conducted after the first presidential debate and prior to both the second debate and the release of the videotape of Donald Trump making vulgar comments about women.

Virginia's looking like a bellwether - a leading indicator kinda thing.  Increasing buzz going on about how If HRC's lead goes up a lousy two points here in The Old Dominion over the next coupla weeks, we could be in for a regular tsunami.

And Now For Something Different

This whole campaign cycle is a freak show without the tent, and so the only thing that could possibly occur that would seem odd is if somebody actually came up with a policy idea on what we might try in order to make a few improvements - and wow, look at that, it's Hillary Clinton, trying to get us to talk about something other than what Donald Trump is doing with his tiny orange hands.

Vox:

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton unveiled what is arguably among the most important policies she’s announced during her entire presidential campaign. It is an ambitious but politically attainable plan that will lift huge numbers of families with children out of poverty. It is targeted exclusively at the poor, and the extreme poor in particular, with no money spent on the middle class or rich.

Specifically, Clinton is calling for a change in the refundability threshold of the child tax credit. Those sound like technical changes, but it has tremendous ramifications. Currently, the poorest American families can’t claim the credit, which is a mainstay of the tax returns of most middle-class families. That’s because households that make less than $3,000 a year — the truly, desperately poor — are excluded entirely, and households making under $9,666.67 can’t get the full credit.

Clinton would change the law so that families start getting the credit with the first dollar they earn. That would effectively increase the tax refunds of the poorest families with children. In addition, Clinton would double the credit for children 4 and under, something that helps both poor and middle-class families with young kids, and she’d make the credit phase in much faster for families with kids in that age range.

I make no claims to knowledge of such things beyond the single Econ course I barely muddled thru in one of my abortive attempts at going to college, but I managed to learn that the more people who can participate in an economy, the better that economy works; and that the best way to circulate money thru an economy is to pump it up through the roots instead of sprinkling it on the leaves.  It's basic Keanesian stuff and it's what works best - which seems like a fairly simple concept, but it's something that's proved to be a little elusive for the average "conservative".

I'm a Bernie guy - and I think Bernie'd be good with an initiative like this because it means his challenge for the nomination showed HRC that moving her agenda a little to the left is a good and appropriate and politically safe thing to do, plus it signals Hillary's willingness to fix one of the big problems created by the Welfare Reform thing in the mid-90s, which is something Bernie kept hammering her on. 

So - yays all around.

Today's Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

Samantha Bee

As is frequently the case when we have to address something Donald Trump has said or done, this is NSFW.

Today's Tweet

HILLARY: i told you he'd fuck the chair
TRUMP: *while fucking the chair* I never fucked the chair pic.twitter.com/QACRSry4SG

— michael koh (@ughHugs) October 10, 2016

John Oliver

"...we got a lotta cowards in this country." --Larry Wilkerson

Today's Today

"Let us, in the name of The Holy Trinity, go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."  

--Christopher Columbus

hat tip = @JohnFugelsang (the quote is via Howard Zinn - and it may be apocryphal)

From Indian Country Today:

On the second Monday of October each year, Native Americans cringe at the thought of honoring a man who committed atrocities against Indigenous Peoples.

Columbus Day was conceived by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic Fraternal organization, in the 1930s because they wanted a Catholic hero. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the day into law as a federal holiday in 1937, the rest has been history.

In an attempt to further thwart the celebration of this “holiday,” we at ICTMN have outlined eight misnomers and bloody, greedy, sexually perverse and horrendous atrocities committed by Columbus and his men.

As usual, 2 things: 

First, Columbus was a man of his times. Those times could be dispassionately brutal and uncaring, so they produced people who often behaved as compassionless brutes.

Second, we apply a very liberal amount of hagiographic cleanser to the stories, and hey look - a brand new gold-plated sparkling American hero.

I have no problem celebrating all the really great things we want this country to be and to stand for and to characterize for the rest of the world to emulate, but when we learn that the guy who's supposed to embody all that awesomely awesome awesomeness was a complete asshole by every modern standard (standards we claim to hold dear) - we gotta make some changes.

Today's Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.