Friday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Why Paul Ryan Needs to Denounce Trump

An op-ed in Newsweek by a former business news reporter with the New York Times is a must read. It calls on Paul Ryan to denounce Donald Trump and also goes into detail on Trump's lack of true business acumen and mental stability.  The writer calls Trump a carnival barker and rightly so.  The man is a menace and the thought of him in the White House ought to terrify every sane American.  Trump's business empire may well be propped up by Russian money and his campaign is still under the titular leadership of a man, Paul Manafort, who could well be on his way to an FBI investigation for his dealings with enemies of America in Ukraine.  Here are op-ed highlights (read the entire piece):

History rarely presents the opportunity to prove our character. Usually, we stumble through an election year, caught up in petty bickering and the occasional raging controversy that soon fades from public consciousness. . . . This is not one of those years, Mr. Speaker. These are dangerous times for America and the world. What America does in this election will affect our allies, our enemies, our children.  

We have a candidate for president from your party going so far as to suggest that “the 2^nd Amendment people” could stop a president from exercising the Constitutional powers to nominate judges. And that, an obvious suggestion for assassinating a political opponent, is just the latest and most unbelievable historical outrage.

As youths, many of us read in history books about people who stood by and allowed horrors to unfold, and assured ourselves we would have challenged demagogues, regardless of the consequences. Now we are adults and face our first real chance to prove that. And so, Mr. Speaker, I ask you—in the first of a series of open letters to you over the next few weeks about the dangers posed by Donald Trump and his many secrets—to do what you know you must: Condemn your party’s presidential candidate. Condemn Trump as someone who does not represent the values of the Republican Party nor America. Condemn him as a danger to the United States. Condemn him to show that anyone should be disqualified for the presidency if they suggest their supporters should consider murdering public officials to achieve policy goals.

Would doing this cost you your seat in Congress? Probably. But others have sacrificed far more—those crippled while fighting tyrants overseas, those who died at the hands of racists at home while pursuing justice.

Imagine how history will view you for staying silent. If Trump is elected president, you—as the most prominent leader in the Republican Party—will be responsible for his actions. You will not be able to control him, no more than his campaign team, nor his bankers, nor his business partners could control him. As someone who first covered Trump’s business dealings decades ago, I assure you that the petty bully who mocked the family of an Army vet killed in battle is not a political novice who needs only to educate himself. That hate-filled man is the real Donald Trump, the one business reporters have known for over 40 years—reckless, narcissistic, lacking all self-awareness, eager to lash out at anyone who tells him what he does not want to hear. No intervention will help . . .

In decades to come, your children and grandchildren will ask, “Why didn’t you do something?”

Some conservatives of character, like Erick Erickson, Jonah Goldberg, Max Boot, Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, have denounced Trump. They would rather their party lose the White House in 2016 than turn America’s future over to an unstable man who could well gain access to the nuclear codes. Speaker Ryan, you and other Republicans who care about conservatism, who care about America, must set aside the petty differences that separate our nation’s great parties and join all those fighting to stop this man. Patriotism must trump tribalism.
 “The thing you don’t understand about Donald Trump is that he’s mentally ill.”   One of Trump’s most senior executives said those words to me in the summer of 1990. I knew this person was not qualified to make a clinical diagnosis, but it was disturbing that one of the developer’s lieutenants would say such a thing to a reporter and clearly mean it.
 When the inevitable occurred and Trump could not even pay the interest on his billions of dollars in debt, his lenders found themselves in an impossible position—if they demanded he make good on all the debt he had personally guaranteed, he would file for personal bankruptcy, and the financial institutions that doled out the cash to him would go under. Trump and his lenders were standing in a basement filled with gasoline, and if either lit a match, they would both burn to death. Trump did not “outsmart” his banks, as he likes to say now. He and they had been so reckless that they had to save him to save themselves.
 [T]he words that best summed up the financial nonsense that led to the bankruptcy of Trump’s businesses were uttered in the early 1990s by the dean of financial journalists, Floyd Norris. He said that someday we all would have to explain to our children and grandchildren the bizarre story of Donald Trump, how so many banks behaved so recklessly to benefit a man who was obviously little more than a carnival barker. The answer, Floyd said, was: “You just had to be there. It can’t be explained rationally.”
 Mr. Speaker, we are again having to explain the success of the carnival barker, only now he is much more dangerous. Rather than being just someone who could put legions of banks out of business, he could become president of the United States and cause incomprehensible harm. Plenty of people—including members of your own party and even psychiatrists—are saying Trump exhibits signs of mental illness, as his lieutenant told me decades ago.
 It is not too late to do the right thing. Condemn Donald Trump. Don’t be on the wrong side of history.

Will Ryan heed the call?  I doubt it.  In my view, Paul Ryan is a man who is utterly morally bankrupt. He feigns religiosity yet pushes policies that are the antithesis of the Christian message he claims to honor.  Like Trump, Ryan embodies the swamp fever and pathological lying that are synonymous with today's Republican Party.  Do NOT expect Ryan to do the right thing. 

Expect the Trump Campaign to Get Even More Extreme

Part of what has lead the Republican Party to be now controlled by an out of control and down right ugly party base has been the rise of extreme right wing talk radio and similar "news" sites and outlets. These microphone jockeys and "journalists" care little about objective reality and focus on what will most excite the prejudices and paranoia of their listeners.  Hence why one study found that those who watch Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, were found to be the least informed - even less informed than those who watched little or no news at all.  Now, Donald Trump's campaign is going to be under the control and guidance of one of the mavens of the most extreme such faux news sites, Breitbart News.  A column in the Washington Post looks at how the GOP's craziness is likely about to get far more insane.  Here are excerpts:

Shaken by the fact that he’s losing, Donald Trump has fled into the parallel universe of the extreme right — and apparently plans to stay there for the remainder of the campaign. Let’s see if the rest of the Republican Party is dumb enough to follow him.

Trump has reportedly been feeling “boxed in” and “controlled” by the few people around him who actually know something about politics. Advice from these professionals to tone it down must be responsible for his slide in the polls, he seems to believe. So he has hired as chief executive of his campaign a man named Stephen Bannon, who will not only let Trump be Trump but also encourage him to be even Trumpier.

Bannon runs Breitbart News, a website that creates its own ultranationalist far-right reality — one that often bears little resemblance to the world as it really is. 

The site’s since-deceased founder, Andrew Breitbart, once “described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement,” according to a Bloomberg News profile. Riefenstahl was the brilliant filmmaker who became one of Hitler’s most effective propagandists. I think the comparison is wrong; Bannon is not nearly as talented.

He is a practiced provocateur, however, with a gift for reinforcing the worldview of far-right true believers. Bannon gives readers the impression that the nation is in grave and imminent peril, that Muslims are conspiring to impose sharia law throughout the land, that Mexican immigrants are running rampant in a wild crime spree, that only Trump can save us — and that polls showing him far behind Clinton are somehow skewed, incompetent or irrelevant.

It’s all a paranoid fantasy, designed to exploit anxieties about demographic and economic change. And Trump has decided that his best chance of winning is to peddle this garbage, some of which he may actually believe.

So if anyone was wondering whether this election cycle could get any worse for the GOP, it just did.

It now appears to be a good bet that Republicans will lose control of the Senate. It is far too early to predict a “wave” election that might threaten the GOP’s big majority in the House, but Democrats are allowing themselves to dream. For Republicans, the two most likely outcomes of the election are bad and worse.

Trump’s decision to throw in with the likes of Bannon can only increase the probability of a GOP debacle. Does it have to be spelled out for you in neon lights, Republicans? Trump could not care less about the party, and he would happily destroy it to feed his own ego.

Bannon, likewise, appears to view the party of Lincoln as merely a vehicle for his own ambition, which is to nurture and grow a nationalist-right movement. His website is as critical of the Republican establishment as it is of the Democrats. He has no interest in making Trump more palatable to the general electorate. 

It was perhaps foolish of me to hope that very many Republican elected officials would reject Trump on principle. But now, perhaps, more will do so for reasons of self-preservation.

Trump has made his decision. In a town hall meeting this week moderated by Sean Hannity of Fox News, Trump ignored opportunities to embrace traditional American values and instead reinforced a message of nationalism, xenophobia and fear. He offered himself as the only solution, promising, like any tinhorn strongman, that “I have as big a heart as anybody.”

But there is no room in that heart for the GOP. Trump won’t save you, Republicans. You had better save yourselves.

 The GOP establishment is now truly reaping what it has sown by years of winking and nodding to insane elements of society, including the Christofascists, white supremacists and the outright crazy. Trump is the embodiment of it all and Bannon  will make the lunacy even worse.  I for one have no sympathy - all of this could have been avoid if the leadership had had a spine and not welcomed these horrible people into the party.  

Friday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Thursday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

David Frum: Trump is Fueling Democrat Turnout

In past presidential elections, most of the conservative pundit class and conservative thinkers - to the extent that term isn't an oxymoron - rallied to the support of the Republican Party nominee, despite disagreement on many issues.  This year has been remarkable because of the number of conservatives either outright attacking Donald Trump or announcing that they will be voting for Hillary Clinton (the former head of General Motors and a life-long Republican has an op-ed in today's Washington Post).  What is driving this and the likely surge in Democrat turn out?  Conservative columnist David Frum sums it up in one word/name: Trump.  Here are highlights from a piece in The Atlantic:

Donald Trump today just solved Hillary Clinton’s biggest strategic problem: how to ensure that minority voters show up for her in 2016 as they showed up for Barack Obama in 2012.

Post-Obama Democrats face a quandary: Their coalition is bigger than the Republican coalition, but also less committed to political participation. When voter turnout drops, as it does in off-year elections like 2010 and 2014, Democrats lose.

In 2012, Democrats mobilized a truly heroic turnout effort to re-elect President Obama. Black voter turnout in particular excelled: For the first time in American history, it surpassed white turnout. The extraordinary organizing effort of the Obama re-election team certainly deserves much of the credit. But organization can only ever do so much. Black voters turned out in huge numbers, exceeding even 2008 turnout, because they believed they had an important personal stake in the vote.

Earlier in the cycle, many wondered whether Hillary Clinton could generate anything like that kind of response from the Democratic base. “Will Black Folks Deliver for Hillary Clinton?” asked The Root in the spring of 2015. Charles D. Ellison, a keen student of African American voting, deployed an impressive mass of statistics and history to answer, in effect: “We’ll see.”

Instead—as with so much else this cycle—the black vote, like the women’s vote, like the Latino vote, like the divisions in the Republican Party, is being decided by Donald Trump.

Reportedly frustrated by Paul Manafort’s attempts to impose message discipline upon him—apparently determined to win or lose speaking his own thoughts in his own words—Donald Trump has done two astonishing things in the past 24 hours. The first was to replace his former campaign CEO with the head of the provocative Breitbart website, Steve Bannon. The second was to travel to West Bend, Wisconsin, a city almost 95 percent white and 40 miles from Milwaukee, to “reach out” to black America by defending the police of Milwaukee against their critics.

Trump is surrounded by people who think it’s 1968 all over again, with white Americans ready to respond to a message of firm suppression of nonwhite disorder. But even after the crime uptick since 2014, the United States remains a very safe society—with crime a distant worry for the voters a normal Republican presidential candidate should now be seeking. The police-violence issue, however, does matter overwhelmingly to the black Americans whose turnout Hillary Clinton so desperately needs. Trump just cranked up the volume of the issue that helps her most—and his new team is made up of people likelier to crank it up louder still.

The defense of violent police force within and against troubled black communities looks likely to be elevated by the Breitbartized Trump campaign to the top of its agenda. Hillary Clinton could not wish for more. Down ballot Republicans could not fear worse.

Is Vladimir Putin playing Trump?

Many in America's foreign policy and national security agencies have expressed alarm over the apparent bromance between Donald Trump.  Many fear that either Putin is playing Trump for a fool - one hears constant concern over his ignorance in foreign affairs and disinclination to educate himself, always claiming to know everything.  Now, a piece in Politico looks at parallels between the Trump-Putin relationship and that of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi who ultimately left office amidst numerous scandals.  As the piece noted, many believed that Berlusconi had personal financial benefit from his ties to Putin.  With rumored Russian money propping up Trump's business empire, one needs to wonder whether Trump would sell out America and its allies to further enrich himself.  Here are article excerpts:

In January 2009, the U.S. ambassador in Rome cabled Washington to raise an alarm. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the diplomat wrote, had cultivated a troubling relationship with the country’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

“Berlusconi admires Putin’s macho, decisive, and authoritarian governing style, which the Italian PM believes matches his own,” wrote the ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli. “From the Russian side, it appears that Putin has devoted much energy to developing Berlusconi’s trust.“

The ambassador noted with concern that the brash Italian billionaire, who was driven from office by scandal in 2011, was openly challenging U.S. policy toward Russia and echoing Putin’s views on issues from NATO expansion to Kosovo to missile defense.

And he shared reports from opposition party contacts of a more “nefarious” factor: talk that “Berlusconi and his cronies are profiting personally and handsomely” from business ties to Russia.

Seven years after that cable, disclosed by WikiLeaks, the Berlusconi-Putin bromance has acquired a new resonance, as foreign policy analysts and even some U.S. officials see unsettling echoes in the recent long-distance kinship between the Russian leader and Donald J. Trump.

It may even suggest that Putin is applying a specific method to the GOP nominee. In recent years Putin has befriended several major Western European politicians, including former leaders of France and Germany, who openly challenge U.S. and European policies toward Russia, including NATO’s buildup in Eastern Europe and economic sanctions punishing Putin’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

But Trump is most frequently compared to the 79-year-old Berlusconi. Both men are wealthy populists known for their expensive tastes, outrageous rhetoric, relationships with women and all-around showmanship. Like Berlusconi, Trump has demonstrated an unusual affinity for Putin — along with notable dissent from confrontational U.S. and Western European policies toward Russia.

To some, however, it hints at something more.

“The parallels with Trump are a little too disturbing,” says a U.S. government analyst who closely tracked Russia’s relationship with Europe when Berlusconi was in office. “Putin is very strategic. He would focus on people’s vulnerabilities — whether their vanity or greed or financial needs.”

That view echoes the analysis of former deputy CIA director Michael Morell, who recently wrote in The New York Times that Putin, drawing from his background as an intelligence officer, had made a “calculated” overture to Trump early in the presidential campaign, “playing upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him,” and turning Trump into an “unwitting agent” of Russia.

Though Trump, in recent interviews, has downplayed his affinity for Putin, the Republican nominee has also taken several policy positions that echo the Kremlin line. He has questioned the relevance of the 67-year-old NATO alliance, called for U.S.-Russian cooperation against the Islamic State, and questioned U.S. and European sanctions imposed on Moscow after Putin’s forcible March 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

Trump’s relationship with Putin — whom Trump says he’s never even met — remains embryonic compared to the extraordinary kinship between the Russian leader and his Italian chum.

As the January 2009 cable noted, the officials also suspected that illicit money might be fueling the friendship. One October 2008 U.S. cable from Rome noted that “many (including his own party officials) suspect [Berlusconi] has a personally and financially enriching relationship” with Putin’s oligarch allies.

In recent weeks, allies of Hillary Clinton have fanned rumors and speculative press reports suggesting that Russian investments in Trump business ventures have influenced his views. Trump and his son Donald Jr. have made numerous trips to Russia exploring business deals there, and in 2008 Donald Jr. told an audience that Russian money makes up a “disproportionate share” of the family company’s assets. Trump has denied having financial ties to Russia, though his refusal to release his tax returns makes that impossible to verify.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Wednesday Male Beauty - Pt 4

Why Blacks Loathe Donald Trump

A Black Lives Matter sign outside a rally for Donald J. Trump in Des Moines, Iowa.

There are many segments of American society that hate Donald Trump.  For starters, there are Hispanic voters who take umbrage at Trump's depiction of them as would be rapist and criminals.  Then, of course, there are women voters who view - correctly, in my opinion - Trump as a foul sexist pig.  The there is the LGBT community which rightly sees Trump's promises to leading Christofascists as an ominous threat.  And then there are blacks who according to some polls support Trump the least of any demographic.  A column in the New York Times looks at why Trump is so despised by black voters.  Here are column highlights:

So now Donald Trump is campaigning for the black vote. (Long, awkward pause.)

Like so much of what Trump has said and done, this new outreach forces writers like me to conduct scatological studies, framing Trump’s actions in their historical and intellectual absurdity.  But, here we go.

Trump, who got a shocking 1 percent of support among black voters in a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, has been urged to reach out to black voters.

A day after The New York Times published an article pointing out that “the Republican nominee has not held a single event aimed at black voters in their communities, shunning the traditional stops at African-American churches, historically black colleges and barber shops and salons that have long been staples of the presidential campaign trail,” Trump ventured to a suburban town outside Milwaukee that is 95 percent white and 1 percent black to tell the black population of America — a population that has been consumed in recent years by a discussion of police misconduct and extrajudicial killings — that “the problem in our poorest communities is not that there are too many police, the problem is that there are not enough police.”

The speech was tone deaf, facile and nonsensical, much like the man who delivered it.

Then within hours of making that speech, Trump shook up his campaign in part by naming Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the campaign’s chief executive.  This is the same Breitbart that the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in an April “Hatewatch” report:

“Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas — all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”

“The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.”

How are you reaching out to the black community when you step on your own message with such an insulting hire?

All of black America is looking askance at Donald Trump. He has no credibility with black people, other than the handful of black staffers and surrogates who routinely embarrass themselves in their blind obsequiousness.

Trump has demonstrated through a lifetime of words and actions that he is no friend of the black community. . . . . He erupted like a rash onto the public consciousness on the front page of The New York Times in 1973 because he and his father were being sued for anti-black bias at their rental property.

This is the same man who took out full-page ads blaring the headline “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” in New York City newspapers calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers made up of four African-American boys and one Hispanic boy, who were accused and convicted of raping a white female jogger in the park. A judge later overturned the convictions in the flimsy cases and in 2014 the Five settled a wrongful conviction suit with the city for $41 million.

Trump is the same man who stepped into presidential politics by becoming the embodiment of the Birther movement, relentlessly demanding to see President Obama’s birth certificate.

This is the same man at whose rallies African-Americans have been verbally and physically assaulted.

This is the same man who has scandalously maligned Muslims, apparently not realizing that it’s estimated that approximately one-fourth of the 3.3 million Muslims in this country are African-American.

Donald Trump is the paragon of racial, ethnic and religious hostility. He is the hobgoblin of retrograde racial hegemony.  And this is the man who now wants to court the black vote? Puh-leese …,