Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Another Twitter Poll...

In honor of Donald Trump's love and respect for unscientific online polls, such as those that gave us yesterday's hilarious "#TrumpWon" hashtag, here's another:

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Last night's debate summarized by a 36-second video from January...

Last night at Hofstra, Donald Trump's constant sniffles (which he retroactively blamed on the microphone) and the issue of consistently cheating workers were two of the highlights of his resounding debate loss.
In the following video we see last night's 90 minutes on Long Island previewed by 36 seconds in Pensacola on January 13th.


Monday, September 26, 2016

And have we all forgotten "John Miller" already?

This is just to refresh everyone's memory as we're less than 12 hours from the first debate.
If there were tapes from 1991 of Hillary Clinton pretending to be "Johanna Miller" in order to brag about herself to a reporter in the third person, wouldn't we still be hearing every day about how it destroys her credibility? And her sanity?

Friday, September 23, 2016

The Trump Family and the First Amendment

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Twitter page of Little Donny Junior, famous shooter of elephants and inheritor of wealth and a notorious name, has recently attracted more traffic because of an infamous tweet comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned Skittles. When you get to his page, you're confronted with his pinned tweet from last March, les mots he finds the most bon:
I'm only able to refer to this dark-haired scion of the Trump dynasty (pronounced with a "din" rather than with a "dine" to make it sound classier) as Fuckface Von Clownstick Junior because I have not given away my First Amendment rights by signing the infamous Trump non-disclosure, non-compete, and non-disparagement agreement that all employees and volunteers of the Trump campaign must sign, even those who only make phone calls and never actually meet a Trump. This entire agreement is worth reading, but the key clause is the lifetime gag order contained in paragraph two.
2. No Disparagement. During the term of your service and at all times thereafter you hereby promise and agree not to demean or disparage publicly the Company, Mr. Trump, any Trump Company, any Family Member, or any Family Member Company or any asset any of the foregoing own, or product or service any of the foregoing offer, in each case by or in any of the Restricted Means and Contexts.

Sign this agreement and you'll never be able to tweet a bad word "even if fictionalized" about the scams of Trump "University" or the Trump Steak that gave you Mad Cow Disease, without risking a lawsuit from the aggressive Trump legal team. And (I hate to even type these next eight words) if Donald Trump is elected to the presidency, you will be legally enjoined from demeaning or defaming him; that's not exactly in the spirit of the First Amendment, is it Donny?

Where does he stand on the other aspects of the First? Would it be establishing religion to "guarantee" that "if  I become President we'll be saying Merry Christmas at every store...Every store"?


Could it be considered favoring the establishment of a state religion to talk about "one people, under one God, saluting one flag" when speaking to the conservative Christian Values Voters Summit?

Is it in the spirit of freedom of the press for a presidential candidate to threaten to sue the nation's most serious newspaper for having the temerity to investigate his many shady business practices?
This is not a man who has any real understanding of, or love for, what freedom of the press means:
It's not only the sacrilegious mentions of the Trump name that might lead to crackdowns on press freedom; he even blamed freedom of the press for contributing to terrorism earlier this week.

That leaves the question of his views toward peaceful assembly. He has supporters who are happy to take care of protesters, and he's happy to give them directions from his bully pulpit:



How might he use that pulpit if he were to attain the most powerful podium in the world?


Happy Birthday to John Coltrane

He would have been turning 90 today.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

This Week's True Blue Liberal Twitter Poll Is Live...

With Newsweek releasing a major story about the Trump Organization's foreign entanglements today, and New York Attorney General announcing a probe of the Trump Foundation's shenanigans last night, it seemed like a good time to ask the following question:

Friday, September 09, 2016

Trump knows all about "reducing generals to rubble"


"I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble." --Donald Trump at NBC's "Commander in Chief Forum," September 7, 2016

Just as Donald Trump has gained a tremendous amount of foreign policy experience by owning the Miss Universe pageant (not just "Miss World," but "Miss UNIVERSE"!), as a young tycoon in the 1980s he also learned a great deal about generals by owning a stable full of Generals (specifically the USFL's New Jersey Generals), and in reducing them and their football league to rubble.



Happy Birthday to Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (September 8, 1945 – March 8, 1973)

Here's Pigpen singing 'Easy Wind' with the Grateful Dead in 1970:


Thursday, September 08, 2016

Satori in the Supermarket

An awful epiphany rolled over me as I was on the checkout line with my lunchtime salad just now. If my local supermarket stocks Donald Trump's favorite newspaper every week, then some customers may be doing more than snickering over its ridiculous cover stories. Some people may actually be buying the National Enquirer and taking it home and opening it up. Even worse, some of those people may actually find its incredible stories credible.

Seen at a supermarket on September 8, 2016.

I have obviously been underestimating the level of stupidity surrounding us on a daily basis. I knew theoretically that many Americans claim to not believe in evolution or climate science or the need for using correct English spelling and grammar in conservative tweets; the Republican convention introduced me to a counterculture of reality-television duck hunters and other "celebrities" existing in a parallel cultural universe; I even half-believed that some people watch pro wrestling and NASCAR and the NFL as if they aren't fixed; but today it hit me on a gut level that there are even people who might look at this Photoshopped picture of Hillary Clinton* on today's checkout line and read (skim) the article about "Hillary's FULL MEDICAL FILE!" and believe its lies about her "3 Strokes, Alzheimer's, Liver damage from booze, and Violent rages," and one of those credulous readers might be Donald Trump. 

Millions of other gullible readers might be enthusiastic Trump voters ready to usher in the idiocracy on November 8.



_________
*Though today's Gaunt Hillary was last month's Fat Hillary.



Thursday, September 01, 2016

Happy Anniversary to Blues for Allah, released on September 1, 1975


If a record company attempts to release any album containing the word "Allah" during the upcoming Trump presidency, they will face some extreme vetting. Extreme. Extremely extreme. Vetting.




Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
if you plant ice you're gonna harvest wind

Weighty Questions Being Weighed by National Enquirer

Seen at the supermarket
on August 11, 2016.
Why is Donald Trump's newspaper of record so obsessed this month with running fictional stories about the weight of the most prominent Democratic women?
Seen at the supermarket today, September 1, 2016.






















There is no way that Michelle Obama has gained 95 pounds this year or that Hillary Clinton has gained 103 pounds, no matter how skilled the Enquirer's Photoshop magicians may be. Could this have anything to do with Donald Trump's own health, or questions about his official sub-200-lb weight?

The nation's favorite checkout-counter reading endorsed Donald Trump in March, and he returned the favor in July.
"I've always said, Why didn't the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for Edwards, and O.J. Simpson, and all of these things?" -- Donald J. Trump, July 22, 2016


UPDATE 7/19/2022: My original video link from 2016 has gone black, so here's another link from Mediaite with Trump's praise of the Enquirer: https://www.mediaite.com/online/donald-trump-wonders-out-loud-why-didnt-the-national-enquirer-get-the-pulitzer-prize/