Rigged! Satan! 2016 Like No Other Election Before

Donald Trump has claimed that there is a possibility of the US presidential election being “rigged” as he tried to divert attention away from a disastrous week for his campaign by also labelling his rival Hillary Clinton as “the devil” and praising the primary opponent of Republican speaker Paul Ryan.

  Guardian

All US presidential elections are rigged. Rigged every way from Supreme Court interference to Superdelegates to winner take all voting to two-party only debates to voter ID laws to Citizens United to electronic voting to gerrymandered districts. But Trump's fans will be left madder and more crazed when he loses the election because of his claiming a rigged system.

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” he told the crowd [at a campaign town hall in Columbus, Ohio].

He did not elaborate but later repeated the charge on Monday night with Sean Hannity on Fox News, saying: “November 8th, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us.”

Roger Stone, a long time confidante of Trump, amplified these concerns in an interview with a far right wing radio show.

Stone said: “I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly.”

So that's his plan. I guess it's as good as anything he's got.

Laying out a strategy for Trump to adopt, Stone added: “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’”

He also promised a “bloodbath” if the Democrats attempted to “steal” the election.

There you go. A call out to his rabid racist gun-toting fans to hit the streets.  Perhaps the militarized police will be necessary after all.  On the other hand, do they not realize that if they go that far, the president currently in office would be the one to call for a state of emergency and suspend the constitution?  No, you're right.  Their reasoning powers are not strong.

Surely, Stone didn't "promise" a bloodbath.  Would that not be considered an incitement to riot?  But I suppose if arrested, they could really rile up the crazies to fight back.  They'd probably need to spring that Bundy bunch in Oregon and Nevada.  I'm sure they'd like to help.

[On Monday night in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania,] Trump reiterated a frequent allegation of his on the campaign trail in recent days, that in endorsing the former secretary of state, Bernie Sanders made a deal with the devil. He went further this time, explicitly saying: “She’s the devil.”

This is going to be fun, isn't it?

He also reiterated his praise for waterboarding to cheers. Trump complained of Isis: “They can chop off heads, they can drown people, they can bury you in sand and we can’t waterboard.” In the opinion of the Republican presidential nominee, “we’re not playing on a level playing field”.

And who's the anti-christ?

Trump announced Monday that he had raised $35m in July, which he claimed was “unheard of for Republicans”.

Campaigns are not due to file reports to the Federal Election Commission until 20 August. However, if accurate, that figure would represent a decrease of $66m on the total raised by Mitt Romney in July 2012.

Well, unheard of by him. Or did he mean that the figure was amazingly low for Republicans?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Everywhere, I Tell You, Everywhere

He's probably getting a swelled head - or swelleder - from all the publicity the US media and politicians are giving him.  Blaming him for everything, including Trump.  But, not just Trump...

In the early 60s, school children were taught to get under their desks in case of an attack from Russian missiles.  We were told that we had to be ever vigilant, and if we were not, we might wake up one day and find we were communists.  Apparently, at some point, it happened, and we just haven't awoken yet.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Yes, We Bombed Libya Today

I just don't want to talk about it.

Sadly, He's Not Alone in His World

Over 20,000 "likes".

At this point, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for us.

And I don't think we've heard the worst, or the most outrageous, from him yet.

Mr. Khan Was Probably Right: Trump Hasn't Read the Constitution

Donald Trump’s private meeting [on July 7] with Senate Republicans — designed to foster greater party unity ahead of the national convention in Cleveland — grew combative...

[...]

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) left the meeting worried about Trump’s grasp on the basics of the Constitution. At a lunch with reporters afterward, he recalled that the candidate did not seem to know what he was promising to defend.

“I wasn’t particularly impressed,” Sanford said. “It was the normal stream of consciousness that’s long on hyperbole and short on facts. At one point, somebody asked about Article I powers: What will you do to protect them? I think his response was, ‘I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII,’ going down the list. There is no Article XII.”

  

If he's going to be president, why is he singling out certain articles anyway? I'm pretty sure he's going to have to take an oath to preserve and protect the entire constitution.

Probably not too many of us, unless we're constitutional lawyers/scholars, political science students, politicians or historians are really actually very familiar with our consitution. I'm reminded of my trip to Venezuela.  If you came upon a citizen who was also a supporter of then-president Hugo Chavez, and that citizen had a pocket, in that pocket was a copy of the Venezuelan constitution.  They knew what it said, and they could bring it out for an argument or confirmation if need be.

We don't even seem to care much any more if we lose the rights given to us in our own.  I guess we don't need them.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

So, Donald Trump Went Too Far?

I doubt if his nasty remark about Mrs. Khan will lose him any votes he was already going to get. It might not get him any more, but I doubt it will lose what he already has. But why are people acting like Donald Trump is a disgusting aberration? He's the very embodiment of the right wing.

[S]o much of the commentary on the GOP presidential candidate [...] focuses on the person—and the novelty—of Donald Trump rather than on the party and the movement that produced him.

Countering that amnesia doesn’t require any elaborate education in American history; simply recall three moments of recent memory.

In 2002, Georgia’s Democratic senator Max Cleland—a Vietnam vet who had his two legs and part of his arm torn to shreds by a grenade, leaving him in a wheelchair for life, his two legs and part of his arm amputated—lost his Senate seat to Saxby Chambliss. Why? Despite Cleland’s lead in the polls, Chambliss (who went onto serve in the Senate for two terms as an esteemed Republican, for Saxby is an honorable man) ran television ads questioning Cleland’s patriotism (complete with likenesses of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden). The man had given his two legs and part of his arm to this country, but the Republican Party saw fit to back a candidate, and subsequently a two-term senator, who questioned Cleland’s patriotic commitments.

In 2004, the Republican shadow apparatus ran an entire campaign against John Kerry’s war record, claiming that despite his winning of a Bronze Star and Silver Star for what he did in Vietnam, despite the fact that he had put himself into considerable danger to help save his unit, Kerry actually betrayed his country. Not just when he returned from Vietnam and helped lead the opposition to the war, but also while he was fighting the war, putting his life at risk. That these ads were made on behalf of a candidate who used his family connections to get out of fighting that war only added to the indecency.

That same year, Cindy Sheehan‘s son Casey was killed while serving in Iraq. She soon began protesting the war and George W. Bush, camping outside his ranch in Crawford for weeks on end to highlight what had happened to her son and the injustice and folly of the war. Bill O’Reilly said:

I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility…for the other American families who lost sons and daughters in Iraq who feel this kind of behavior borders on treasonous.

[...]

Here we have an instance of a Democratic presidential candidate, a sitting Democratic senator, and a prominent antiwar activist — all with stories of patriotic, almost unthinkable sacrifice — subjected to a pattern and practice of humiliating, disgusting slurs and smears. By figures high and low in — and near and only slightly less near to — the Republican Party.

That we can sit here and act as if Donald Trump’s indecency is a singular pathology rather than a systemic mode of politics, that we can treat his arrival on the scene as a novelty and innovation rather than the logical outgrowth of years of right-wing revanchism, [...] that is itself a kind of collusion, an erasure of the past, a collusion with indecency.

  Corey Robin

Amen.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jill Stein Interviews

Also: Intercept Interview with Jill Stein

I have heard from you and from many of your supporters that we shouldn’t vote for the lesser evil, that we should vote for the greater good. Is the prospect of a Trump presidency equal in your view to that of a Clinton one?

I think they both lead to the same place. The lesser evil, the Democrats, certainly have a better public relations campaign, they have better spin. The dangers are less evident, but they’re catastrophic as well. Just look at the policies under Obama on climate change.

[...]

In fact, the lesser evil inevitably leads to the greater evil in the same way that Barack Obama lost both houses of Congress. He had two years with two Democratic houses of Congress — they could have passed any law that they wanted. They could have provided health care as a human right, they could have pulled back on these wars for oil and the war against terror, and the assault on immigrants, and assault on the press and our freedom of speech and privacy. They could have done any of that. And what did they do? They bailed out Wall Street and installed Larry Summers, the architect of Wall Street deregulation. They’re not on our side.

[...]

You said before that President Obama came into office with an incredible public mandate, and yet he had an incredibly hard time getting anything through Congress. If you were to win the election, would you be able to get any legislation past them?

Because he didn’t want to. He didn’t try. He put his ground troops on the shelf. The myth is out there that the Republicans stopped him. He had two Democratic houses of Congress, he could have done something. He didn’t. What he did was make George Bush’s tax cuts for the rich permanent and he gave Wall Street the biggest bailout on record, that’s what he did.

You think Congress wouldn’t stop you?

No, because we won’t put our ground troops on the shelf. That’s what Barack Obama did. When he got into office, he took his ground troops out of commission. That’s what enabled him to win the primary, because he had such an active grassroots movement. He dismantled that grassroots movement at the same time he was appointing Larry Summers, and it became perfectly clear what his agenda was.

[...]

Come November, is there a worst-case scenario?

No, the two-party system is the worst-case scenario.

  Intercept

Ain't that the truth?

Read the whole interview here.

When Logic Wins the Day

He's EVERYwhere

And I think that guy holding the flag is a Russian soldier. Sure looks like one.



I have to admit, I did not know what the Russian flag looks like. Shame.  This is how we get taken over - citizen ignorance.

What do you want to bet those outfits get a reboot?

But, Yes, Yes He Does

Also, McCain, Trump would be bad for a president, but Sarah Palin would be good?  Go back in your hole, little man.