The Unexpected Public Contribution of Stormy Daniels

Survey: Daniels more credible than Trump by 41 points

Not to beat a topic to death, but the Stormy Daniels interview on 60 Minutes continues to resonate.  Tellingly, a poll shows that 62% of people surveyed believe Stormy Daniels while only 21% believe Donald Trump. That's a 41% spread in favor of the porn star over the occupant of the White House.  I cannot remember anything comparable.  A piece in the Washington Post by Michael Gerson - a former member of the George W. Bush White House and sickened Republican - looks at this stunning situation and the contribution that Stormy Daniels has done to the American public: she has shown that Trump is foul, morally bankrupt, pathological liar. This reality is clear to seemingly everyone but evangelical Christians.  Even Sarah Huckabee Sanders ducked the White House press briefing yesterday in an apparent display that even she would not submit herself to the degradation defending Trump.  Here are column excerpts:

Some who watched the Stormy Daniels interview on “60 Minutes” claimed it contained nothing new. On national television, an adult performer alleged that Donald Trump engaged in an extramarital fling, that his minions legally and physically threatened her to discourage public disclosure of the affair, and that Trump’s fixer paid her $130,000 in hush money to secure her silence immediately before the 2016 election. People should just go back to their knitting. Nothing to see here.

Americans who find this unremarkable have missed an extraordinary cultural moment. Daniels’s allegations are denied by the White House and an attorney for President Trump’s lawyer. Yet who in their right mind would trust Trump’s word over hers? In this case, the porn star has more credibility than the president of the United States. It is not even close.
 If these allegations are true, they reveal a man of poor character. (The technical term in moral philosophy, I think, is “sleazeball.”) Trump seems to regard beautiful women as an employment benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Porn stars and Playboy models are in the same category as a private jet or the key to the executive washroom. This is hardly surprising in our culture of celebrity. To a large number of American males, this represents exactly the kind of treatment they would want as a sports star or rock star.

This type of scandal demonstrates why character does matter in politics. . . . . . Trump feels exempt from the normal rules of honesty and decency. He plays close to ethical and legal lines. And he uses his wealth and influence to shield his embarrassing behavior from view — with hush money, nondisclosure agreements, legal threats and lies from the White House briefing room podium. He forces everyone around him to become complicit in his corruption. Members of Congress, White House staffers, party officials, conservative media figures and religious leaders are all expected to be accomplices. And we are left with a vacuum of integrity at the heart of our government.

Trump has made a career out of paying and manipulating people to be dishonest about him. . . .  This weakness of character is now what moves Republicans in Washington to speak of him as though he were a great leader — bowing and scraping in the hope of getting what they want. Sometimes they do. But in the process they give Trump what he wants: people pretending he is something he is not.

In this scandal, such tactics aren’t working. Trump can’t get the porn star to say he is wonderful and move on. This is the strange, unexpected public contribution of Stormy Daniels.

It is a very sad day when a porn star has more moral integrity and credibility than the occupant of the White House.  Sadly, anyone familiar with Trump's business history over the decades would not be surprised with this result. Everyone, of course, except sanctimonious and morally bankrupt evangelical Christians. 

Why Republicans Are Choosing to Go Down With Trump

The seeming willingness of Congressional Republicans (with very few exceptions) to sake the future on Donald Trump, a narcissistic pathological liar whose approval level has fallen to 36% in some ways appears baffling.  Yes, the party base has become a toxic brew of Christian religious extremists and white supremacists with a sprinkling of greedy billionaires, but at some point one would hope that the future of the country would trump - no pun intended - partisanship and clinging to a file individual.  Sadly, as a piece in Vox argues, two factors convince Republicans to stay with Trump to the bitter end: (i) the fear of primary challenges by Trump's unhinged base, and (ii) an insatiable lust for power that means that Republicans simply cannot allow Democrats to win no matter the consequences to the nation.  It's a disturbing picture, but one that appears to accurately describe the current situation confronting the country.  The prognosis is likely not a good one.  Here are article excerpts:

 Last week, I wrote a piece that asked, “Will Republicans impeach Trump?” The short answer: unlikely.

In this piece, I want to explore how much this “unlikely” conclusion flows from the zero-sum logic of our two-party system. The short answer: a lot.

Because of the two-party system, Republicans are stuck with Donald Trump. If he goes down, they go down with him. There’s now no way for Republicans to advance conservative policy goals without also advancing Trump. And In this era of bipolar two-party tribal politics, no matter what Trump does, there’s always one thing worse for Republicans. Something even more unthinkable, something even more existentially frightening than Trump with his hand on the nuclear codes: Democrats having power.

Most congressional Republicans never wanted Trump as their standard-bearer. They still don’t. But their fates are now tied to him. If Trump goes down in a dramatic impeachment (is there any other kind?), Republicans almost certainly lose their House majority in the 2018 midterms, and probably continue to suffer the repercussions in 2020. And there’s a real risk that if Trump goes down, he tries to take all the furniture with him, fracturing the Republican Party.

So Republican congressional leaders are stuck. The only thing worse than having Trump as their unpopular standard-bearer is losing power and popularity because they tried to remove him as their standard-bearer.

We saw this in the presidential election. One by one, Republican leaders who had criticized Trump decided to forget all the things they said about Trump being a con artist, utterly amoral, a pathological liar. The most important thing was preventing Hillary Clinton from becoming president. Donald Trump was a vote against Hillary Clinton. There was no alternative, only a binary choice.

Many voters felt the same way. They had reservations aplenty about Trump. But right-wing propaganda told them to remember “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.” Some were convinced that “Clinton will demolish America as we know it, and every human life will be under government control.” As talk show host Dennis Prager put it recently in a National Review article (italics mine): “Many conservatives, including me, believe that it would have been close to over for America as America if the Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald Trump, had not won.”

Whether motivated by power or by the existential righteousness of their moral cause (or more likely, by a complicated, self-justifying mix of both), Republican leaders continue to make the same craven calculus . . . .

What would happen if they joined with Democrats to call for Trump’s impeachment?  Many of these Republicans would likely find themselves threatened in primaries, treated as traitors to the Republican Party. And some of them would probably lose.

Let’s say that these Republicans were even willing to go a step further. Let’s say they believed Trump was destroying the Republican Party as they knew it, and it was time to let the party die and start a new party in its place.

The Republican Party would then split. How would this play out?

For sake of simplicity, let’s say half of today’s Republican voters would stick with the Trump Republican Party, while the other half move over to the new Conservative Party (which would stand for more traditional conservative values of restraint and limited government).

So assuming a 50-50 electorate right now, we’d instead now have a 50-25-25 electorate (Democrat-Republican-Conservative).  . . . . The result? Democrats would win a landslide in the House, easily taking 300 seats. They’d also probably win a bunch of Senate seats too.

That’s how our single-member, plurality electoral system works. And it’s why Republicans would never do this — because they could anticipate exactly what would happen. If the Republican Party splits over Trump, Democrats win.

You can quibble with my guesstimates of percentages and breakdowns here. . . . But even if it only happens in a handful of districts, even if only a limited number of Republicans break off to stand against Trump, they could tip control to Democrats.

Because we have single-member plurality-winner districts, Republican leaders who formed a third party to support conservative policies but oppose Trump would be handing congressional elections to Democrats.

In the two-party system, Republicans in Congress need Trump as much as he needs them. As a result, Republicans, whether or not they think Trump is a narcissistic, amoral pathological liar, are stuck with him. So are voters who want conservatism without Trump.

Going forward, this trap will only make politics more ugly.

For Republicans, the challenge will be to keep their troops feeling certain that however imperfect Trump might be, Democrats would by definition be worse — that it really might be the end of the republic if Republicans lose the house. This likely means doubling down on all the aggressive us-against-them white Christian identity politics and apocalyptic narratives they can find to make sure their base shows up.

And so deeper into the widening gyre we go. This is the logic of our two-party system right now. And Donald Trump is still our president, leading us into deeper tribalism as he takes advantage of our two-party system’s fatal flaw.

Donald Trump’s Disturbingly Deep Ties To Russia

Again and again Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, has denied that he has ties to Russia and/or that his campaign - perhaps even himself- colluded with Vladimir Putin/Russian intelligence agencies to flip the 2016 presidential election to Trump.  These lies denials have been made in tweets, in an interview with Lester Holt, and through his surrogates and henchmen.  Yet, as past posts have laid out, much of Trump's real estate empire has depended on Russian money to survive.  This influx of Russian money played two roles: (i) it kept Trump's projects afloat, and (ii) it provided a convenient means to launder Russian money derived from dirty/questionable sources.  Now, a piece in Fortune underscores the dishonesty of Trump's disavowals of connections with Russia.  Time magazine has made it's own statement via the cover shown above.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump said in a recent interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, "I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago. I had the Miss Universe pageant — which I owned for quite a while — I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia."

The reality, however, is that Trump couldn’t be more wrong. The President has deep Russian connections that far exceed what he admitted to Holt.

In a 2007 deposition that Trump gave as part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien, he describes efforts to launch real estate ventures in Russia through Bayrock Associates, a shady Russian-connected outfit. Bayrock had partnered with Trump on at least four major but failed American projects: the Fort Lauderdale Trump Tower, the Trump Ocean Club in Fort Lauderdale, the SoHo condominium-hotel in New York, and a resort in Phoenix.

Bayrock had its office on the 24^th floor of Trump Tower, and its 2007 glossy brochure featured a photo of Trump and Tevfik Arif, a principal Bayrock partner, who served for 17 years in the Soviet government before emigrating to the United States. It called the Trump Organization a “strategic partner,” and listed Trump as their primary reference.

Felix Sater, the Russian-born managing director and majority shareholder in Bayrock, was convicted of assault in 1991. Then, in 1998, federal prosecutors convicted Sater of fraud, for running a $40 million penny stock fraud in collaboration with the New York and Russian Mafia. In return for a guilty plea, Sater reportedly agreed to work as a government informant.

The plaintiffs in a 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, among others, alleged in the civil lawsuit that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes.

In September 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Trump’s many deals with Bayrock unravels Donald Jr’s comments.

Trump’s 2013 sojourn in Russia for the Miss Universe pageant was far less innocent that he would have us believe. According to the Washington Post, the deal to bring the pageant to Russia was “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.”

While in Moscow, Trump met with Russian oligarchs who were closely aligned with President Vladimir Putin, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of the state-controlled Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.

The Bayrock Group’s Felix Sater emerges again during the Trump campaign and presidency. Sater contributed the maximum $5,400 to Donald Trump’s campaign. Then on February 19, 2017, the New York Times reported that “A week before Trump fired Michael Flynn resigned as national security advisor, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.”

The Times said that three men were responsible for developing and delivering the plan: Andrew Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, and Andrii V. Artemenko, a pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament.

The third man was none other than Trump’s former business partner and convicted fraudster, Felix Sater. How and why Sater became involved with a key member of the Trump administration in the most sensitive of diplomatic transactions between the United States and Russia remains one of the many mysteries to be resolved by congressional and FBI investigators.

If Trump's lips are moving, the safest assumption is that he is lying.  The Time article can be found here.

Trump Undergoing Major, Public Ego Injury Tantrum

With a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing him to be the least popular president in modern history and no legislative accomplishments as he nears the first hundred day benchmark, Der Trumpenführer is doing what he does most: lying and engaging in fact free claims as his fragile ego grapples with the fact that a majority of Americans hate him.  This reality should come to little surprise given that less than 30% of registered voters supported him and that Hillary Clinton garnered nearly 3 million more votes in the past presidential election.  But Trump lives in a fact free world dominated by his own narcissism and egomania.  Here are some highlights from the poll findings from the Washington Post:

President Trump nears the 100-day mark of his administration as the least popular chief executive in modern times, a president whose voters remain largely satisfied with his performance, but one whose base of support has not expanded since he took the oath of office, . . .

But the president’s balance sheet overall tilts toward the negative. Majorities of Americans say Trump has not accomplished much during his first months as president. Meanwhile, he shows little improvement on his temperament and honesty, and while he’s gained ground on empathy, over 6 in 10 still say he does not understand the problems of people like them.

Trump and others in his administration have attacked the courts, accusing them of overreach, but nearly 6 in 10 people see their actions as a legitimate role for the judicial branch.

The president’s approval rating stands at 42 percent, the lowest recorded at this stage of a presidency dating to Dwight Eisenhower. Trump’s 53 percent disapproval rating is 14 percentage points higher than Bill Clinton’s 39 percent disapproval in April 1993, the worst before Trump. Eight years ago, then-president Barack Obama’s approval was 69 percent, his disapproval 26 percent.

The Post-ABC poll finds 43 percent of Americans said they strongly disapprove of Trump’s performance.   That’s also the worst by far of any president since George H.W. Bush by more than double.

Of those who say Trump has not accomplished much, 47 percent pin the blame on him while about a quarter blame congressional Republicans. Only 7 percent say Democrats are to blame.

One of Trump’s biggest deficiencies compared with other presidents is whether he is honest and trustworthy. Fewer than 4 in 10 (38 percent) say he is. At this point in their presidencies, 74 percent said Obama was honest, 62 percent said George W. Bush was honest and a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed 61 percent said Clinton was honest.

Another gap is on the question of whether Trump can be trusted in a crisis. The poll finds that 43 percent — about the same as Trump’s approval rating — say he can be trusted; 73 percent said so for Obama and 65 percent for George W. Bush at this point in their presidencies.

Not exactly supportive findings for a man who likes to claim his own magnificence. A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the public tantrum on display.  Here are excerpts:

We know that President is undergoing a major, public ego injury tantrum because he has failed to manage any major legislative accomplishments in his first 100 days in office. The scale of the failure is so total one would almost need a Kelvin Scale of fail to capture its full extent. But in addition to all the other panicked flailing, there’s this gambit that seems to have gotten fairly little notice.

President Trump has now at least opened the door to denying he’s not even at 100 days, that people are miscounting and that is in fact at only just over 60 days. 

When asked about the situation with Obamacare Repeal and tax reform Trump told the Associated Press this (emphasis added) …

I’ve been here 92 days, but I’ve only been working on the health care, you know, I had to get like a little bit of grounding, right? Health care started after 30 day(s), so I’ve been working on health care for 60 days. … we’re very close. And it’s a great plan … we have to get it approved.

In this exchange Trump doesn’t go the whole way to demanding a comprehensive new day score. For the moment he’s only creating a new carve out 60 count for repealing Obamacare since “health care started after 30 day”. But clearly he’s preparing a broader sort of 100 day truth movement to claim the measure should be taken from February 21st, 2017 rather than January 21st, 2017.

The same day as the interview, Trump initially claimed that the entire 100 day metric is artificial and stupid.

But Trump more than anyone has made it more central by insisting it was the metric against which he wanted to be judged. The new effort to demand a different count or the “30 day reset/handicap” proposed to the AP is likely a sign that he knows he’s shackled himself to the 100 day mast.

Not tears or sympathy for this horrible, amoral bastard from me.

New PPP Poll: Two Weeks Since Inauguration, Voters Yearn For Obama

A new PPP Poll ought to be sending alarm bells off among Congressional Republicans, not to mention among Der Trumpenführer's inner circle. Taken just two (2) weeks after Trump's inauguration, the poll results are damning with in many instances a majority of Americans being firmly against Trump's polices and his conduct.  By a very wide margin, Americans want Der Trumpenführer to obey the rulings of the federal courts even as childish brat like tweets continue to spew from The Orange One.  Perhaps most interesting is the fact that except within the ranks of Trump supporters, the opposition to Trump - and by extension Congressional Republicans - is growing.  Here are highlights from the poll findings:

Less than 2 weeks into Donald Trump's tenure as President, 40%  of voters already want to impeach him. That's up from 35% of voters who wanted to impeach him a week ago. 

Beyond a significant percentage of voters already thinking that Trump should be removed from office, it hasn't taken long for voters to miss the good old days of Barack Obama...52% say they'd rather Obama was President, to only 43% who are glad Trump is.
 Why so much unhappiness with Trump? Voters think basically everything he's doing is wrong:
 -Overall voters are pretty evenly split on Trump's executive order on immigration from last week, with 47% supporting it to 49% who are opposed. But when you get beyond the overall package, the pieces of the executive order become more clearly unpopular. 52% of voters think that the order was intended to be a Muslim ban, to only 41% who don't think that was the intent. And the idea of a Muslim ban is extremely unpopular with the American people- only 26% are in favor of it, to 65% who are against it. . . . Finally voters see a basic competence issue with Trump's handling of the executive order- only 39% of voters think it was well executed, to 55% who believe it was poorly executed.

-It hasn't taken long for voters to develop a pretty dim view of Trump advisor Steve Bannon, and become wary of the extent to which he's being given power within the administration. Only 19% of voters see Bannon favorably, to 40% who have a negative opinion of him. Only 34% of voters approve of his being given a seat on the principals committee of the National Security Council, to 44% who are opposed to that. What's particularly telling is that only 19% of voters think Bannon belongs in that seat on the National Security Council more than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff  the Director of National Intelligence, to 59% who believe those folks are more deserving of that place at the table. Even Trump voters think he's gone too far on that front- by a 40/35 margin they think the more traditional members should have that position rather than Bannon.
 -Very few voters go along with Trump when it comes to his voter fraud paranoia.  Only 26% of voters think millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 Presidential election, to 55% who believe that's not a real thing. This is another issue where even a significant number of Trump voters become wary of his claim- 47% believe it but 27% don't and another 26% aren't sure. It's been unusual to find things where a majority of Trump's voters don't go along with him.
 -Obamacare continues to become more popular the more talk there is about repealing it. 46% of voters now say they support it to just 41% who are opposed. And only 33% of voters think the best course of action is for Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act and start over, to 62% who think it would be better to keep it and fix the parts that need fixing.  

Another aspect of Trump's unpopularity is that he's losing all of his fights. In the last week he's gone on the attack on Twitter against John McCain, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN and in each case we find voters siding with Trump's adversary:
 -By a 51/37 spread voters say John McCain has more credibility than Trump.
 -By a 52/41 spread voters say the Washington Post has more credibility than
Trump.
 -By a 51/42 spread voters say the New York Times has more credibility than
Trump.
 -By a 50/42 spread voters say CNN has more credibility than Trump.
 -Only 13% of voters approve of the job Congress is doing, to 68% who disapprove.  Paul Ryan has a 35/43 approval rating, and Mitch McConnell's is 17/55.  Democrats lead the generic Congressional ballot 45/42. 

Going back to Obamacare, one of my favorite poll result is this:

Q16 Which of the following would you most like to see the Congress do about the Affordable Care Act, given the choices of keeping what works and fixing what doesn’t, or repealing it and starting over with a new healthcare law?
 62% Would most like the Congress to keep what works in the Affordable Care Act and fix what doesn’t 33% Would most like the Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act and start over with a new
healthcare law 5% Not sure

 #NotMyPresident

Obama Rejects Trump Immigration Orders, Backs Protests

With the Trump/Pence regime embarked on a campaign that makes a mockery of what most decent moral people view as American values and likely appeals only to white supremacists and Christian fanatics, former President  has finally released at statement that (i) condemns Trump/Pence's anti immigrant actions, and (ii) applauds ad encourages the large scale protests taking place across the country.  No doubt Der Fuhrer will launch a twitter rant against Obama, but thankfully Obama is saying what needs to be said.  It is crucial that decent moral Americans begin to shout in one huge voice that Trump/Pence is NOT acceptable and that the majority of us condemn them and their policies. Despite his delusions of grandeur, Trump lost the popular vote and the vast majority of Americans did not vote for him.  He has no mandate and he is not above the law or the U.S. Constitution.  NBC News has details on Obama's statement.  Here are excerpts:

Breaking his silence only 10 days after he left office, former President Barack Obama backed nationwide protests against President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration Monday.

In a strongly worded statement issued through a spokesman, Obama said he was "heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country."
"Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake," he said.

Shortly afterward, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates — a holdover from the Obama administration — sent a memo to Justice Department lawyers ordering them not to defend the executive order against several legal challenges that were filed over the weekend.

The former president rejected Trump's contention Sunday that his executive orders restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries were "similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months."

The 2011 order did not ban visas for refugees, who by definition don't travel on visas. It tightened the review process for citizens of Iraq and for refugees from the six other countries, while Trump's is a near-blanket order applying to nearly all residents and citizens of all seven countries.

It should be obvious by now to any sentient individual that if Trumps lips are moving, he's lying.   

Donald Trump’s Lies About Russia

If nothing else, Donald Trump has proven himself time and time again to be a pathological liar. Worse yet, he denies fats that are substantiated both by video recordings and contemporaneously published news articles. Now, faced with (i) what the CIA and other intelligence agencies say is overwhelming evidence of Russian intelligence hacking the DNC and other Democrat offices, (ii) previous reports on Trump's reliance on Russian money, and (iii) statements by Russian officials that Trump campaign officials communicated with  Moscow during the campaign, Trump resorts to lying about everything and trying to spin the whole frightening affair as "ridiculous" and unfounded because the White House failed to act strongly back in October.   The New York Times sums up Trumps lies and duplicity in a main page editorial.  Here are highlights:

No matter how divided our politics and our times, Americans can agree that our status as a strong, democratic nation rests on the bedrock of free and fair elections. That confidence is what was targeted when Russia, one of our oldest, most determined foreign adversaries, invaded American computer networks and released thousands of pages of documents to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election.

This news emerged last summer. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency shared a further conclusion, based on months of analysis, that the Russian hacking was intended to favor Donald Trump.

“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, said recently. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Extrapolating motive from evidence is always tricky. But after the C.I.A. provided classified briefings for Congress and the White House, members of both political parties were convinced.

But not President-elect Trump.

Mr. Trump’s instant rejection of the C.I.A. findings as “ridiculous,” based on no review of its work, echoed Moscow’s.

On Nov. 10, two days after the election, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said “there were contacts” between Moscow and Mr. Trump’s campaign. “I cannot say that all of them, but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives,” Mr. Ryabkov said.

Paul Manafort, one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers, resigned after reports described his political ties to Russia. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, sat with Mr. Putin at a gala for Russian state television, where he has appeared as a commentator.

Donald Trump Jr. told a real estate gathering in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” adding “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Mr. Trump hasn’t released tax returns or other records that could ease fears that he has financial deals in Russia to protect. And he’s refusing to divest his business interests, so whatever ties there may be are likely to remain.

President Obama has asked the nation’s intelligence community to deliver a fuller report on its findings before he leaves office on Jan. 20, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for a congressional investigation. The results of that inquiry should be made public, and the intelligence community should tell Americans as much as it can about the cyberattack and its goals.

Mr. Trump’s reaction to the C.I.A.’s findings leaves him isolated, and underscores his dangerous unfamiliarity with the role of intelligence in maintaining national security. There could be no more “useful idiot,” to use Lenin’s term of art, than an American president who doesn’t know he’s being played by a wily foreign power. Or maybe it’s as Mr. Trump says: He’s “a smart person,” and avoids presidential intelligence briefings because they repeat what he already knows. If so, what else does he know about Russia that the intelligence agencies don’t?

Sadly, I have a gut feeling that Trump wasn't being played by Putin but rather was in league and cooperation with him.  Recall how Trump on occasion seemed to know what was in hacked e-mails and communications before they were published.  I suspect a Russian "bird" told him all about what was being done and due for release.  The word treason keeps forming on my lips.

Fact-Checking the Second Clinton-Trump Debate

Overall, the debate can be summed up as follows: Trump lied a lot, Clinton not very much. So yet again, we see the man that the Christian Right has flocked to revealing himself as a pathological liar. So much for Biblical values or simple honesty.  And when Trump wasn't lying, he was pouting and making also sorts of weird faces - and sniffling constantly too - while Clinton remained poised and smiling. A piece in the Washington Post fact checked the debate.  Here are highlights:

In the second presidential debate, Donald Trump once again relied on many dubious and false claims that have been repeatedly been debunked. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, on occasion made a factual misstep, but it didn’t even compare to Trump’s long list of exaggerations.

Your [Obamacare] health insurance is going up … 68 percent, 59 percent, 71 percent.”— Trump

Premiums are expected to increase overall in 2017, but Trump is cherry-picking from the highest proposed increases in the insurance marketplace.

State-by-state weighted average increases range from just 1.3 percent in Rhode Island to as high as 71 percent in Oklahoma. But the most common plans in the marketplace will see an average increase of 9 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s July analysis. These plans have been used as the benchmark to calculate government subsidies.

The vast majority of marketplace enrollees (about eight in 10) receive government premium subsidies. They are protected from a premium increase (and may even see a decrease) if they stay with a low-cost plan.

You owe the president an apology, because as you know very well, your campaign, Sidney Blumenthal — he’s another real winner that you have — and he’s the one that got this started, along with your campaign manager, and they were on television just two weeks ago, she was, saying exactly that. So you really owe him an apology.”

— Trump

To support the debunked notion that Clinton’s campaign originated “birther” rumors during the 2008 presidential campaign, Trump once again referenced longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal and Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle. But he’s grasping at straws — and once again refused to apologize for his own role in promoting the birther fable.

“Hillary Clinton attacked those same women, attacked them viciously.”— Donald Trump

Trump has used this line of attack throughout the campaign, sometimes saying Hillary Clinton was an “enabler” of her husband’s affairs, saying she would “go after these women and destroy their lives.”

One of the interviews that Clinton’s critics have pointed to is a Jan. 27, 1998 interview on the Today Show, saying it showed Clinton was discrediting allegations by then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This interview took place a week after her husband was accused of having an affair with Lewinsky, and Clinton blamed Republican foes for making false attacks against her husband.

This interview, by many accounts, was certainly pivotal to saving Bill Clinton’s presidency, as his wife forcefully backed him. But by Hillary Clinton’s account at the time her husband had not yet admitted the Lewinsky affair to her. That did not happen until Aug. 15, 1998, according to her memoir.

“Bill Clinton was abusive to those women.”— Trump

While Trump has ramped up the attacks on the Clintons and the sex allegations against Bill Clinton, the record shows that Trump dismissed or minimized these very allegations for many years. Trump dismissed the women involved as losers and not attractive. Trump even suggested that Americans would have been more forgiving if Clinton had slept with more beautiful women.

“In San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment.” — Trump

There is no evidence this was the case in the 2015  terrorist attack that killed 14 people. There have been unconfirmed second- or third-hand reports — a friend of a friend of a neighbor — that a neighbor claimed to have noticed suspicious activity but did not report anything for fear of doing racial profiling. The religion of this supposed neighbor is unknown, but presumably a fear of racial profiling would suggest the neighbor was not Muslim.

“You [Clinton] get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 e-mails, and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say, very expensive process.”

— Trump

Trump is technically correct on the timeline, but Clinton’s staff had requested the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena, according to the FBI’s August 2016 report. Moreover, there’s no evidence Clinton deleted the emails in anticipation of the subpoena, and FBI director James Comey has said his agency’s investigation found no evidence any work-related emails were “intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

“I was against the war in Iraq. Has not been debunked.”— Trump

This is just totally false.  We have found no evidence of his early opposition.

There's more, but the take away is that Trump is like an elementary school bully who lies at will and will say anything that he believes is useful at the time.  His word means nothing. 

Trump’s Hitler Like Disregard for the Truth

Fact checking has shown that close to 75% of what Donald Trump says is either completely or largely false.  The man lies with abandon.  More frighteningly, he seems to believe whatever the lie is that is rolling off his lips at any given moment in time.  Trump's apologists argue that all politicians lie.  While this my be true to some extent, especially in today's Republican Party, in fact, no one lies as much and dangerously as Donald Trump.  Only among the conservative professional Christian set does one find even a close level of dishonesty (which may help to explain evangelical Christian support for Trump).  As a column by Richard Cohen suggests, there are historical comparisons to Trump, and none good.  In the column, Cohen compares Trump and Adolph Hitler's similar levels of lying and apparent belief in the truth of whatever the lies may be that they are promoting.  Here are highlights:

I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is.

Soon after becoming chancellor, Hitler announced that the Jews had declared war on Germany. It was a preposterous statement because Jews were less than 1 percent of Germany’s population and had neither the numbers nor the power to make war on anything. In fact, in sheer preposterousness, it compares to Trump’s insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States — a position he tenaciously held even after Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate.

At the time, people tried to make sense of Hitler’s statements by saying he was seeking a scapegoat and had settled on the Jews. Not so. From my readings, I know of no instance in which Hitler confided to an intimate that, of course, his statements about Jews were, as we might now say, over the top. In fact, he remained consistently deranged on the topic. He was not lying. For him, it was the truth.

Trump’s fixation on Obama’s birthplace is similar. It was not, as far as he’s concerned, a lie. It was a strongly felt truth that he abandoned only last week and then only under intense pressure — not out of conviction. . . . Like a child, he had his fingers crossed.
 Just as Hitler’s remarks about Jews were deeply rooted in German anti-Semitism, so was Trump’s birtherism rooted in American racism — with some anti-Muslim sentiment thrown in. Trump’s adamant insistence on it raised issues not, as some have so delicately put it, about his demeanor, but instead about his rationality. It made a joke out of the entire furor over revealing his medical records. I’m sure that Trump is fine physically. Mentally, it’s a different story.

It’s a mistake to make the unreasonable compatible with the reasonable — to think, say, that Trump cannot be serious about this birther stuff or building a wall or likening the difficulties of becoming a billionaire to the loss of a son in Iraq. That was the authentic Trump, a man totally unburdened by concern for anyone else.

There is no lie that cannot be believed. Even after Germany had murdered most of Europe’s Jews, allied investigators at the end of World War II found that many Germans believed, as historian Nicholas Stargardt put it, that their country’s defeat only “confirmed the ‘power of world Jewry.’ ”

Germany was not some weird place. At the advent of the Hitler era, it was a democracy, an advanced nation, culturally rich and scientifically advanced. It had a unique history — its defeat in World War I, the hyperinflation of the 1920s — so it cannot easily be likened to the contemporary United States. But it was not all that different, either. In 1933, it chose a sociopathic liar as its leader. If the polls are to be believed, we may do the same.

Erick Erickson: Republicans Owe Bill Clinton an Apology

There are few websites more right wing and anti-Obama than Red State -  generally never agree with its position on anything.  Yet it is amazing to see that wild reaction at Red State to Donald Trump's position as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Select headlines for today include the following:

RUBIO COMPARES TRUMPTO 3RD WORLD STRONGMAN - Rubio’s comments may seem like the words of an angry former foe, but the accuracy of them should worry you.

LYIN’ DON: TRUMP JUST TOTALLY MADE UP THE STORY THAT HE TALKED TO MARCO RUBIO RECENTLY - Late Friday night, Marco Rubio advisers not only denied that he was supportive, but flat out stated that no such conversation took place at all.

And no one is more vocal about his horror of a potential Trump presidency than the site's editor, Erick Erickson, who despite his extremism on many issues, seems to recognize that the Trump candidacy reveals the utter hypocrisy of those in the GOP supporting him.  In a piece on another blog, Erickson lets loose and make the statement that, if the GOP will support Trump, then the party owes Bill Clinton a major apology for what it did during the Monica Lewinsky witch hunt and impeachment spectacle.  This indictment applies in particular to "family values" crowd who are now embracing a thrice married, serial adulterer as the GOP standard bearer.  Here are column highlights:

The predicate act to Bill Clinton’s impeachment was his affair with an intern and his lying to cover it up. Republicans said the President of the United States is not above the law and lying under oath to obstruct justice is an impeachable offense.

Seventeen years after Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for covering up an affair, they are handing their party over to a man who has openly bragged about his affairs. On the day the Republicans first meet in Cleveland, Donald Trump will be taken to court for allegedly defrauding hard working Americans through Trump University.

What voters have already learned about Donald Trump during the primaries should give them pause. Many of his business dealings have left others worse off while he has played the bankruptcy courts to keep going. While investors in various Trump enterprises lost money, Trump made fortunes.

On the campaign trail, Trump was more a pathological liar than Bill Clinton ever was. He smeared his opponents, their wives, and their families. He embraced 9/11 trutherisms that George Bush was to blame for the attacks, he peddled malignant, false stories about Ted Cruz’s father, and few Republicans ever called on him to account. Many gave him passes on the lies they would never give to Bill Clinton.

Republicans owe Bill Clinton an apology for impeaching him over lies and affairs while now embracing a pathological liar and womanizer. That apology will not be forthcoming. In fact, for years Republicans have accused the Democrats of gutter politics and shamelessness. Now the Republicans themselves have lost their sense of shame.

As Marco Rubio withdrew from the Republican primary in Florida, Trump supporters showed up to heckle him as he was giving his withdrawal speech. In South Carolina, a Trump supporter refused to help a disabled woman who had been in a car wreck because the woman had a Bernie Sanders sticker on her car. The man actually said he thought the Lord came to him. But these people have learned this behavior from their party’s new political leader.

If so much were not on the line, it would be somewhat humorous to watch. But the Supreme Court hangs in the balance; the relationship between the states and federal government hangs in the balance; and our relationship with our allies hangs in the balance. All of these things are at stake and the party that fancies itself as the grown up party has handed itself over to a huckster with a cult of ill behaved children.

Angry voters made a terrible miscalculation in the Republican primary. They presumed that the rest of the nation shared their anger. They were wrong and now, with so much on the line, the Republicans will field as their Presidential nominee the least popular Presidential candidate in American history. God save the republic.

Those deserving the harshest condemnation, of course, are the supposed "godly Christians" who, like the modern day Pharisee cited by Erickson, who have taken hypocrisy to new heights and revealed the utter moral bankruptcy of the Christofascist base of the Republican Party.  Their support of Trump makes it clear that they are nothing more than animus filled racists and zealots.  I sincerely hope that Trump's candidacy once and for all makes it clear that fundamentalist Christians deserve no deference or respect!