Trump’s Sour Virginia "Cocktail"

The low population areas are the GOP strongholds

While Donald Trump is a case unto himself in many ways, he embodies a growing problem for the Republican Party in Virginia.  As the demographics of Virginia have rapidly changed, as with Trump, the Virginia GOP focuses its policies on the aging white population with an attitude of "to Hell with everyone else."  The approach works in the carefully gerrymandered districts for the House of Delegates, but is a bust when it comes to state wide elections.  Now, Trump is exacerbating the problem through his racism, vulgarity and extremism - all things that could have been avoided but for Trump being Trump - as noted in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here are excerpts:

Political arguments are rarely gentle or polite anymore, so it was a gift to see two Republicans who passionately disagree about what Donald Trump means for our nation hash out their differences with grace. Their exchange helps explain the mess Trump has made of his campaign.

One clear indicator: Trump, who campaigned in Fredericksburg on Saturday, has handed Hillary Clinton a substantial lead in this former bulwark of conservatism. He is thus speeding along a process by which Virginia, a state that voted for Republicans in every election from 1968 to 2004, finds itself on the verge of becoming reliably Democratic in presidential contests.

My window into the intra-Republican split came courtesy of a lunch here with Russ Potts, a genial moderate Republican legend who spent 16 years in Virginia’s state Senate, and his friend and business protege Zach Franz. Potts, 77, is president of his own sports marketing company; Franz, 33, serves as senior vice president. They have been through the business wars together, but they have very different views of 2016.

Potts speaks with pride of his time in the Virginia legislature — “the oldest continuous legislature in the free world,” he says, reflecting a devotion to the past that is very Virginia — and this has endowed him with a certain attitude toward politics. “I love the decorum and the history and the civility.” None is a word associated with Trump.

“He doesn’t make the cut for a lot of reasons,” Potts says, and he ticks off a comprehensive critique of Trump in bullet-point style, including references to the nominee’s disrespect toward the parents of a fallen Iraq veteran and a disabled journalist: “Character; six times he resorted to bankruptcy; and numerous times he cheated these poor souls who did his drywall or fixed his restaurant, plumbers and electricians. . . . Also, it really bothers me about the way he has treated the Muslim family, the way that he embarrassed the New York Times reporter.”

Potts plans to vote for Clinton, only the second time in his life he has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. The last time was in 1964, when he voted for Lyndon B. Johnson in the landslide that buried Barry Goldwater.

[T]hat is where Trump finds himself. And Virginia is a state in which he cannot afford to offend so many upscale voters. His coarse rudeness will never go down well here. In a telephone interview, Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Northern Virginia, cited an adage: “Virginians will vote for someone they feel comfortable having in their home for a cocktail party.” Trump, he says, doesn’t make the cut, adding: “All the defects of Trump hit home most securely with people who are smart, educated and sophisticated.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, another Virginia Democrat from Washington’s suburbs, says such voters have revolutionized Old Dominion politics. North of the Rappahannock River, Connolly says, “Virginia looks more like a Mid-Atlantic state than a Southern state.” The vast suburban vote near the nation’s capital was key to President Obama’s ability to carry it twice and to what Connolly sees as a nearly insurmountable lead for Clinton this year.

That an alliance between suburban voters and African Americans is turning Virginia presidentially blue is especially alarming to Republicans because the same pattern is repeating itself in North Carolina and is making Georgia close. 

Trump could help Clinton solidify a great transformation in the geography of American politics.

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Sunday Evening Male Beauty

The Idiocy of Biblical Literalism

One of the things that I find most amazing (or disturbing, depending on how one wants to describe the phenomenon) is the lengths that Christofascists will go to avoid admitting that the Bible is neither historically correct as a narrative of accurate history and that much of its premise, The Fall and the coming of a savior as embodied by Christ, has a major problem, namely that Adam and Eve never existed as historical persons.  Without Adam and Eve, there was no Fall, and the rest of the story line collapses. No Fall, and then no need for a savior, etc.  Related to this is the manner in which Christofascists ignore the impossibility of some of the Old Testament.  Which brings me to an article in The Atlantic on the "Ark Encounter."  How 8 people built the huge ark - especially when they had no shipbuilding experience - defies belief.  The same goes for the lunatic claim that dinosaurs were on board.  Here are article highlights (note the references to fabricating "facts"):

Of all the biblical episodes, Voltaire thought none required more faith than the story of Noah’s Ark: “The history of the deluge being that of the most miraculous event of which the world ever heard, it must be the height of folly and madness to attempt an explanation of it.” If only he had visited Ark Encounter—a Christian theme park that opened this summer in Kentucky and boasts a “life-sized” reconstruction of Noah’s Ark. Seemingly impossible details have been fanatically researched and naturalistically explained by Answers in Genesis (AiG), a literalist Christian organization that’s also responsible for the nearby Creation Museum. 

In over 100 exhibits on the ship, visitors learn how each difficulty might have been surmounted: How could eight people feed so many animals? Through an elaborate system of drains and chutes, as illustrated by an interactive video. And what about the stench? Solved easily enough—Noah just needed a ventilation system powered by the tides. And the daily tons of animal waste? Noah could dispose of that with a treadmill-cum-conveyor belt powered by elephants. But how did he fit elephants on the ship? And all those dinosaurs? They were babies at the time. And if visitors doubted that a wooden ship carrying all this cargo could withstand an apocalyptic flood, a placard explains that the ship’s dimensions, as specified in Genesis . . . .

But many I spoke with also confessed that they had never really worried about these details before; instead, they had just ascribed it to God’s power. 

For self-proclaimed literalists, the ark includes a striking amount of fabrications and fictionalizations. Consider, for example, one of the most popular exhibits, where visitors can walk through the family’s living quarters. At the entrance are two placards, one entitled “Artistic License,” and the other “Why Are the Living Quarters So Nice?” In each of the following rooms, visitors can see mannequin renderings of the family and read short bios. . . . But none of these details appear in the Bible. Genesis never takes a charming detour through the family’s hobbies. It never even reveals the names of the women on the ship. And yet these details are integral to the experience of Ark Encounter.

On AiG’s blog, Simon Turpin equates literalism with “plain reading” and “natural interpretation,” suggesting that anyone with common sense will read the Bible as they do. But as Ark Encounter reveals, this apparent simplicity demands endless fabrication. 

Obviously, the First Amendment guarantees citizens the right to cling to whatever religious belief they choose.  That does not, however, mean that the rest of us have to  agree with them or, more importantly, respect them or their insane beliefs that defy reality.

Trump Reportedly Gives $100K to Tony Perkins' Anti-Gay Church

Trump and Pence with hate merchant, Tony Perkins

For those delusional gay Republicans who are still delusional and supporting Donald Trump, reports are that Trump gave $100,000 to the church pastored by Tony Perkins, the virulently ant-gay, white supremacist loving president of Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center certified hate group.  Based on the mandatory statement of faith of Perkins' church, it registers very high on the anti-LGBT scale.  Here are highlights from The New Civil Rights Movement:

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has reportedly donated $100,000 to the Baptist church led by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBT hate group. The church is Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, which Trump visited Friday and where Tony Perkins is interim pastor.

Trump visited the church during his trip Friday to flood-ravaged Louisiana. Perkins, who's previously blamed gay people for natural disasters, said last week that his home was heavily damaged in the flooding, and that 80 percent of the church's members were affected.

At the church, Perkins told Trump that "the big issue" with the flooding is "religious freedom," because the government is attempting to diminish the role of churches that provide disaster relief, according to the video below. 

According to Greenwell Springs' website, the church requires all employees and volunteers to agree to a Statement of Marriage and Family, which reads in part: "We believe that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God." 

Greenwell Springs Baptist is pretty much against every aspect of the LGBT community.  Meanwhile, I'd love to know how many church members are using Internet porn sites.  Louisiana is a state with very high use of web based pornography.  

Sunday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Racialists’ Are Cheered by Trump’s Latest Strategy

The Republican Party first embraced racism when Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater unleashed the so-called Southern Strategy.  However, outside of the Deep South and perhaps Southwest Virginia, the ploys to appeal to racists and white supremacists remained largely under the radar and did not begin to go mainstream, if you will, until the Christofascists - many of whom were Southern Baptists, a denomination founded on racism - began to infiltrate and then hijack many city and county committees.  With the rise of Donald Trump, racism and pandering to white supremacists has become a pillar of the GOP agenda.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the cheering going on among unapologetic racists over Trump's selection of his new campaign  managers.  Here are excerpts:

OAKTON, Va. — Jared Taylor hits play, and the first Donald Trump ad of the general election unfolds across his breakfast table. Syrian refugees streaming across a border. Hordes of immigrants, crowded onto trains.

“Donald Trump’s America is secure,” rumbles a narrator. “Terrorists and dangerous criminals kept out. The border, secure; our families, safe.”

Taylor, one of America’s foremost “racialists,” is impressed and relieved. “That’s a powerful appeal,” he said. “If he can just stick to that, he is in very good shape.”

From his Fairfax County home, Taylor has edited the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance and organized racialist conferences under the “AmRen” banner. He said that Trump should “concentrate on his natural constituency, which is white people,” suggesting that winning 65 percent of the white vote would overwhelm any Democratic gains with minorities.

When Trump made Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon his campaign’s chief executive last week, Taylor found reasons to celebrate. It was the latest sign for white nationalists, once dismissed as fringe, that their worldview was gaining popularity and that the old Republican Party was coming to an end.

The rise of the alt-right — named for the Alternative Right website that the “identitarian” nationalist Richard Spencer set up in 2010 and adopted by those opposed to multiculturalism and mass immigration — has come to define how many of its adherents see Trump. There’s less talk now about a “pivot,” or a moment when Trump will adopt the ideas of people that he conquered. His strategy now resembles the alt-right dream of maximizing the white vote — even as polling shows his standing with white voters falls short of Mitt Romney’s in 2012.

Trump’s newest speeches, read from a teleprompter, hit all of their favorite notes. “I don’t think Trump had mentioned ‘sanctuary cities’ previously,” Spencer said in an interview. “There’s reason to believe that Bannon is returning him to his powerful, populist message — indeed, honing it.

Breitbart, not founded as part of their movement, became a welcoming place for it. The site found millions of new readers clicking on stories about “black crime” and the threat of Syrian refugees. At Breitbart, undocumented immigrants are “illegals,” Black Lives Matter activists venerate “cop-killer heroes,” and Gold Star father Khizr Khan is a busy promoter of sharia law. 

Already supportive of the Trump campaign, people like Taylor see Bannon’s move and the change in Trump’s tone as validation.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has treated all of this as a gift. Hours after Bannon’s hire was official, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook held a conference call denouncing Breitbart — a taster for a series of email pitches and finger-wagging statements to come.

Last month, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh referred to the criminal justice overhauls favored by some Republicans as “prison break legislation” that’s “un-compassionate to crime victims.”

Breitbart’s coverage, and the alt-right in general, advance a theory that a left-behind wing of conservatives have screamed about for decades. In the 1980s, figures such as Pat Buchanan and the late Sam Francis warned that the left was transforming the country without much resistance from the Republican establishment. . . . . Trump’s latest “pivot” has streamlined his arguments, not moderated them; it has promoted the people who agree with the alt-right, not a bid for the center.

Donald Trump's Maze of Debts and Opaque Ties

Is Trump financially beholden to Putin and/or his henchmen?

Donald Trump boasts about his wealth and claims that he is beholden to no one.  Given the maze of limited liabilities ("LLC") used for so many of his ventures, it is difficult to know who his financial bed partners are or how much debt encumbers projects bearing the Trump name.  For business non-lawyers, depending on where organized, there can be zero information on the identities of members of an LLC, which in turn can be other equally anonymously owned LLC's.  Indeed, in Virginia other than a business address where records will be kept, all that is known is who the name and address of registered agent - i.e., who is designated to receive filings and/or lawsuits (I am registered agent for well over 100 LLC's).  Absent a court order, the registered agent has no obligation to disclose who the principals of the LLC are in fact.  The bottom line is that Trump can have ties to foreign entities and individuals and be beholden to lenders and investors whom remain totally unknown to American voters. Indeed, Trump could be in bed financially with Russian oligarchs or even entities tied to Vladimir Putin and we would never know.  The New York Times looks at Trump's maze of LLC's and the huge amount of debt owed by some of them.  Here are highlights:

On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has sold himself as a businessman who has made billions of dollars and is beholden to no one.

But an investigation by The New York Times into the financial maze of Mr. Trump’s real estate holdings in the United States reveals that companies he owns have at least $650 million in debt — twice the amount than can be gleaned from public filings he has made as part of his bid for the White House. The Times’s inquiry also found that Mr. Trump’s fortunes depend deeply on a wide array of financial backers, including one he has cited in attacks during his campaign.

For example, an office building on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, of which Mr. Trump is part owner, carries a $950 million loan. Among the lenders: the Bank of China, one of the largest banks in a country that Mr. Trump has railed against as an economic foe of the United States, and Goldman Sachs, a financial institution he has said controls Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee . . .

The Times’s examination underscored how much of Mr. Trump’s business remains shrouded in mystery. He has declined to disclose his tax returns or allow an independent valuation of his assets.

Earlier in the campaign, Mr. Trump submitted a 104-page federal financial disclosure form. It said his businesses owed at least $315 million to a relatively small group of lenders and listed ties to more than 500 limited liability companies. Though he answered the questions, the form appears to have been designed for candidates with simpler finances than his, and did not require disclosure of portions of his business activities.

Beyond finding that companies owned by Mr. Trump had debts of at least $650 million, The Times discovered that a substantial portion of his wealth is tied up in three passive partnerships that owe an additional $2 billion to a string of lenders, including those that hold the loan on the Avenue of the Americas building. If those loans were to go into default, Mr. Trump would not be held liable, the Trump Organization said. The value of his investments, however, would certainly sink.

Mr. Trump has said that if he were elected president, his children would be likely to run his company. Many presidents, to avoid any appearance of a conflict, have placed their holdings in blind trusts, which typically involves selling the original asset, and replacing it with different assets unknown to the seller.  Mr. Trump’s children seem unlikely to pursue that option.

The full terms of Mr. Trump’s limited partnerships are not known. The current value of the loans connected to them is roughly $1.95 billion, according to various public documents.

Mr. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, said that neither Mr. Trump nor the company were responsible for the debt associated with the limited partnerships.

Still, as with all of the properties in which Mr. Trump holds an interest, the value of the buildings as well as the terms and magnitude of their debt could have a major impact on his personal fortune.

Tracing the ownership of many of Mr. Trump’s buildings can be a complicated task. Sometimes he owns a building and the land underneath it; sometimes, he holds a partial interest or just the commercial portion of a property.

And in some cases, the identities of his business partners are obscured behind limited liability companies — raising the prospect of a president with unknown business ties.

Mr. Trump’s opaque portfolio of business ties makes him potentially vulnerable to the demands of banks, and to business people in the United States and abroad, said Professor Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer.

“The success of his empire depends on an ability to get credit, to get loans extended to his business entities,” he said. “And we simply don’t know a lot about his financial dealings, here or around the world.”

I for one would like to know who potentially holds power over Trump be that domestic lenders - many of whom have blacklisted Trump due to his numerous bankruptcies - or unsavory foreign thugs and/or dictators.  The fact that, if elected,  Trump's assets would not be placed into a blind trust is especially trobling.

Sunday Morning Bonus Male Beauty

RNC Moves Toward “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” Mode

While I don't like to count my chickens before they hatch, as Donald Trump appears to be headed towards a perhaps resounding defeat in November, I do take some delight in the fact that the RNC is in freak out mode and, as one operative reportedly stated, the are moving towards a "break glass in case of emergency" mode to try to protect the GOP's position in the House of Representatives and the Senate.   Seriously, you nominate a loud mouth, narcissistic realty TV "star" and then seem shocked when things start heading down the crapper?  The party gave the foul and ignorance embracing GOP base what it wanted and I hope the cost to the GOP of giving in to one last extreme act of self-prostitution to the Christofascists and white supremacists is horrific.  A piece in Politico looks at the desperation gripping the RNC.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans, worried about preserving their House and Senate majorities in the face of fierce headwinds, are accelerating their plans to distance themselves from Donald Trump – and may soon concede, if only implicitly, his defeat.

Party strategists are mapping out blueprints for down-ballot candidates, in TV ads and on the campaign trail, to present themselves as checks on a Hillary Clinton presidency. It’s an approach that would essentially admit a Trump loss. In interviews, nearly one dozen Republican operatives said they had begun poll-testing the idea – which one labeled a “break glass in case of emergency” strategy - to gauge how the public would react to it.

It would represent a remarkable step – one not seen since 1996, when down-ballot Republicans, resigned to Bob Dole’s loss, campaigned as backstops to Bill Clinton’s second term. It comes at a time of mounting unease among Republicans about Trump’s prospects and how it will impact the fortunes of others. In recent days, a debate has begun to simmer among the party’s operatives about whether it will soon be time for the Republican National Committee to cut Trump off and redirect resources to congressional lawmakers.

“It would be political malpractice if you weren’t exploring the effectiveness of that messaging strategy,” said Rob Autry, a Republican pollster who’s looking into the idea. “If the current polling trends hold true, then down-ballot Republicans will need to start thinking outside the box.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which serves as the official House Republican campaign arm, has requested that imperiled candidates begin polling to see how voters in their districts would respond to a check-based campaign, according to two people who work with the group. (An NRCC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

GOP Rep. Bob Dold, who faces the hurdle of running for reelection in a liberal suburban Chicago district, is also considering the approach, according to two advisers. One recent Dold internal survey found that while voters were deeply unhappy with Trump, they overwhelmingly wanted their member of Congress to be a check on Clinton. Already, Dold has taken great pains to distinguish himself from the Republican nominee, even stressing that he won’t vote for him.

Republicans haven’t begun the offensive yet – but they’re flirting with it. Earlier this month, House Speaker Paul Ryan sent out a fundraising appeal, declaring, “If we fail to protect our majority in Congress, we could be handing President Hillary Clinton blank check.” This week, Mitt Romney told a group of donors on a conference call that a Clinton win was likely and that the party needed to focus resources on down-ballot races so the party could oppose her.

Republicans say the strategy could go into full effect next month, as races intensify and early voting nears in some key battlegrounds. With Trump’s poll numbers deteriorating, they add, time is of the essence.

It wouldn’t be without risk, however. In writing off Trump before Election Day arrives, Republican candidates could risk alienating his supporters – a voting bloc they desperately need.

To many, the 2016 campaign is evoking echoes of 1996. That fall, as the party’s campaign apparatus shifted focus from electing Dole to protecting the GOP congressional majorities, the NRCC aired a commercial warning that if Democrats won majorities in Congress and retained the White House it would result in higher taxes and more federal spending.

Some say it’s too early for Republicans to begin that campaign. For it to be effective, they argue, voters need to have decided that Trump can’t win – a conclusion the public hasn’t reached yet.

Chris Wilson, a prominent GOP pollster, said he was closely examining who voters believed would win the presidential race. More than half of the electorate, he said, was convinced Clinton would be the next president.

“That’s getting close to the point where we would start recommending our candidates pursue more of a midterm strategy and treat Clinton like a de facto incumbent,” he said, adding that he was holding off because Trump could still close the gap.

“Just the fact that we’re considering this counsel,” he said, “is another sign of how sadly strange this cycle is.”