The face on ghouliani when she zinged him was priceless.
Ooooffftttt
Not really. Hilary was always going to beat trump. The vampire squidette beats the loon. She will do whatever her backers tell her, which will be nothing much of note. She dances to the bankers rather than the Halliburton tune, so I canât see her waging war. The drone strikes will continue, the banks will continue to dictate policy, the rich will remain relatively untouched in the stratosphere and life will go on or not.
She loves a good war
Maybe so, but if it ainât good for goldman, she wonât be let.
Donât we all in fairness, esp those of us that are in the RA.
You truly havenât a clue about US politics, not sure why you post as itâs so embarrassing.
You are confusing a combination of a Tea Party platform and Trumpâs own made up populist platform with a Republican platform, a rookie mistake.
-
You conveniently omitted the central platform of Trumpâs campaign, anti-free market and anti-trade. Traditional Republicans are pro free market and pro trade, in other words pro capitalist. On this one issue alone, he should have been disqualified from running by the RNC. Let him run as an independent if he wanted.
-
On the issue of taxes, taxes are already high in the US, in particular for corporations. High earning individuals if you include all taxes, pay roughly 60%, corporations pay 39%. Republicans stand for lower taxes to encourage investment and small business, the lifeblood of the economy. Tax reform and regulatory reform are urgently needed in the US as they are stifling small business and forcing large businesses offshore, I wouldnât expect a communist to understand that.
-
On immigration, the Republican and Democratic platforms are virtually identical. Obama has rounded up and deported more illegals than any previous president. The only distinction that matters is illegal immigration is only a huge issue in border states, which are primarily red states. Democrats running for local office in those states are just as tough on immigration as Republicans.
Most of the rest of your post is just noise. Neither party will oppose the 2nd amendment, neither party will reverse Roe v Wade, etc. Obamacare however is an huge issue for the great majority of voters, and is probably the single issue that would have seen Clinton defeated in a normal election, but I wouldnât expect someone sitting behind his keyboard in Ireland to understand that.
The âsmoking gunâ is Democracy Partners, an organization paid by the Clinton campaign through the DNC. Unlike the socialist Utopian states you no doubt pine for, like the Soviet Union and Maoâs China, in the US peaceful protest is allowed. Anyone can attend a public event, like a rally, and voice their opposition. However, what isnât legal is a political party organizing protesters with the specific intent of inciting violence. Thatâs called criminal behavior, and the only valid question is why are the FBI not investigating such high level criminal behavior.
The answer to that question is the same reason the director of the FBI did not charge Clinton, although multiple federal laws were broken. What you are seeing in the US, as Julian Assange tweeted this morning, is a consolidation of power ,a rigged primary, rigged media and a âpied piperâ candidate. The latest WikiLeaks releases remove all doubt that Trump was hand selected by the DNC, as the candidate that Clinton could beat.
1 Like
Youâre frothing up around the mouth area again, I see.
Every word of your post is nonsense. You 've been shown up as a simpleton on this thread.
Trump has no policy on trade and no interest in US workers or jobs. His public bluster and rhetoric amounts to threatening to start De Valera 1930s-style trade wars, batshit crazy stuff. In reality heâs as pro-free market and pro-trade as it gets. Heâs a super-predator on workers, refuses to recognise unions, exploits suppliers, uses low-wage labour in poor countries, and is the last person anybody in the rust belt should look to to improve their lot.
You call me a communist, and yet you support a candidate who you erroneously think is anti-free trade and anti-free market, despite being a âlibertarianâ. Youâre all over the place.
US tax a percentage of GDP is 26.9%. Only in a parallel universe where liberal doses of libertarian kool-aid has been drunk is this a high figure. Of course you reside on planet crazy, so of course youâll think itâs a high figure.
Clinton is offering a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Trump plans to round up 11 million of them and deport them. Thatâs quite a difference.
You truly havenât a scooby doo. Iâm not sure why Iâm bothering to respond to you, as itâs like talking to a child.
Nutters on the left like yourself fail to see the distinction between Trumpâs behavior as a businessman and his platform running for president. Any person involved in running a business will do everything legally possible to maximize their profits, and ethics be damned. Whether thatâs using every legal loophole to avoid taxes, taking advantage of trade deals to buy cheap steel from China, whatever. What Trump has done is his business career is no more unethical than Apple and every other MNC routing all their profits through Ireland and Singapore to pay no tax where it is owed, setting up slave labor factories in China where people were jumping off roofs to escape, holding their cash offshore to avoid tax, and on and on. Politicians of both parties have had decades to address tax and trade loopholes (loopholes they themselves inserted into the law), and do nothing. Why? Because the people who gain most from these unethical business practices are their big donors. Trump has actually explained this, but ideological clowns like yourself donât understand it or donât want to understand it.
The reason tax receipts as a % of GDP are low is a symptom of the above problem. Multinationals and the richest 0.1% avoid paying tax in the US. Many of the largest MNCs pay no tax in the US. Raising tax rates will only encourage more avoidance. The answer is massive tax reform, but neither party will tackle that as their donors disapprove and will veto it.
Itâs actually startling how incredibly naive and dense you are on these issues.
2 Likes
Incitement to violence is one of the central planks of Trumpâs rhetoric, as Iâm sure youâre aware.
Trump not only incites violence, issues thinly veiled threats about a gun attack on his opponent, he has been caught boasting about inflicting sexual assault on women. He faces a rape charge on a 13 year old girl.
He used his charity to commit fraud. He paid off a politician to stop a fraud investigation.
In any normal country, heâd face going to jail.
The DNC rigged the Republican primary? 
This just gets better.
But this is the candidate you were claiming had brought more people out to vote in the Republican primaries than ever before, was in touch with the âreal Americaâ and have been on here for the last six months predicting was going to win. Some pied piper candidate. Although heâs certainly led gullible fools like you down the garden path like a pied piper.
âRigged mediaâ. The same ârigged mediaâ that gave Trump âŹ4bn worth of free advertising. The same media which you previously said was anti-Trump. And now youâre saying was actually pro-Trump, but only because they wanted him to lose?
Everything is apparently âriggedâ when you donât get the outcome you want. Thatâs because you live in a fantasy alt-right conspiracy theory world.
Your âsmoking gunâ is a cigarette butt in a wet ashtray.
Youâre bothering to respond because you know Iâve made an utter fool of you over the course of this thread, and like Trump, canât help digging your hole deeper even though you now know youâve been played like the complete sucker you are.
Child-like behaviour, indeed, and how appropriate that you reference a childrenâs cartoon in your response.
Another example of your superficial understanding of US politics and specifically the dynamics of this election. This will be my last response to you today, as I have work to do, something you are no doubt unfamiliar with.
The media were all about Trump during the primary season, as he was box office and ratings and clicks are all they care about. However unwittingly, they also did the work of the DNC by elevating him to the top of the Republican ticket. Since winning the nomination the media have been relentless is going after him, and ignoring Clintonâs scandals. The only data point that matters is that of the total campaign contributions by the media as a whole (including Fox news), 96% has been to Clinton and 4% to Trump. Does that sound like a balanced media?
The Clinton foundation is a large non profit âcharityâ. Between 2009 and 2012 they raised $500M. $110M went to salaries, $25M to travel expenses, and $290M to âother expensesâ. Sounds totally legit all right. Add in the fact that most of the contributions came from foreign governments seeking favors from the State department, and it is quickly apparent how the Clintons went from being broke leaving the White House to now being worth $250M.
I havenât said consistently that Trump would win. Early on I said any one of Rubio, Bush or Kasich would beat Clinton, which is still true. Essentially she is so toxic that any centrist Republican would beat her. After Trump won the nomination, I said he could beat her. Repugnant and all as Trump is, before the tactically planned sex scandal attack (the oldest trick in politics), he was neck and neck with her in the polls.
Iâll leave you to spend the rest of your taxpayer funded day to extract quotes from my posts of the past year in an effort to find contradiction, what a sorry ass individual you are.
2 Likes
Stage 5
1 Like
Gas cunts
During the course of this election you have made many pronouncements and predictions, pretty much all of them wrong. Your economic views are, frankly, mental. You still maintain that the Trump campaign has no racial element to it. You are, to all intents and purposes, a fantasist. Iâm entirely serious on that.
For some weird reason, you think living in Colorado or wherever it is you live bestows you with unimpeachable knowledge of US politics when the reality is youâre nothing more than a bluffer, a moderately educated fool. Iâve met enough Irish people who live in the US and vote Republican over the years to know theyâre generally loudmouth zealots impervious to any reason, who have preconceived, evidence-free notions about most things. You certainly fall neatly into that stereotype.
It never seems to have occurred to you that the negative coverage of Trump is because he is the worst candidate to lead a western democracy since the 1930s. Strange, that.
Youâre pretty much advocating that the media neglect their duty to report things, and in the process showing a profound lack of knowledge about how both media and politics works. The media have reported on every single allegation surrounding Clinton. I know itâs hard for you to accept that none of them amounted to a hill of beans, but do try and move on from your screaming Mary act about her.
The allegations surrounding Trump are real and they are serious, and the objections to his consistently moronic behaviour are entirely justified. The media made Trump, he played the media to his advantage. Thankfully, even in the US, there appears to be at least some tenuous notion of standards. The reason heâs getting the sort of scrutiny that is long overdue is because heâs a gutter-dwelling slimeball. At least some shit will always come out in the wash, and he stinks of it.
Itâs also delicious the way Republicans moan about biased media when they deregulated it themselves. But of course âmainstream mediaâ is âirrelevantâ, youâve already told us so. And Trump is ânot a Republicanâ. Yeah, sure.
Not once over the course of the thread have you provided any evidence of your alt-right fantasies regarding âscandalâ related to the Clinton foundation, because you canât see past the red fog pervading your brain.
The Clinton Foundation provides 11 million HIV sufferers with life saving drugs and 80-90% of its money goes to charitable programmes.
Trump on the other hand used the money from his foundation to commission six foot high portraits of himself and bribe politicians not to launch an investigation into his fraud of a âuniversityâ. The Trump Foundation does not have proper charity certification. Trump claims to have donated money to charitable programmes, who say heâs lying. He uses the Trump Foundation as a conduit to get out of paying tax.
There is a âFoundationâ one of the candidates has which is a scam, and it isnât the Clinton one. Not once have you admitted the Trump Foundation is crooked. Reality and yourself were never easy bedfellows.
Youâve said a lot of things. Like Trump, youâve changed your position so often that you donât even know yourself where you stand.
You were about the last to realise that Trump had the Republican nomination in the bag, thereâs that âknowledgeâ and deep understanding of "dynamics again. One thing has remained constant since April at least - youâve predicted Trump to win, mainly because of heâs âanti-establishmentâ , yet you now contradict yourself by lamenting how an establishment Republican is not running.
Keep believing Trump isnât a pervert by all means, keep sticking your fingers in your ears and whistling while reality continues around you.
1 Like
Very nasty comments from the Democrats.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/10/21/biden-trump-comments/92541160/
Itâs up to Smokin Joe to save us from both candidates.
Looks like stories that Trumpâs campaign was hammering his business are true. Reports back in August were that bookings were down 60% for the first half of the year.
And now this.
http://www.redstate.com/patterico/2016/10/21/trump-hotels-ditch-trump-name/
very good article this from Pilger, most notably for this thread is the bit on Trump & Clinton.
http://johnpilger.com/articles/provoking-nuclear-war-by-media
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually âcondemned ethnic cleansingâ, opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590 page judgement on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified Natoâs illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.
Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented âinternational tribunalâ. Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by US officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.
Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the western media as the âbutcher of the Balkansâ who was responsible for âgenocideâ, especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against âthis new Hitlerâ. David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], declared that as many as â225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59â may have been murdered by Milosevicâs forces.
This was the justification for Natoâs bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbiaâs economic infrastructure. It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious âpeace conferenceâ in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were âworth itâ.
Albright delivered an âofferâ to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces âoutside the legal processâ, and to the imposition of a neo-liberal âfree marketâ, Serbia would be bombed. This was contained in an âAppendix Bâ, which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europeâs last independent âsocialistâ state.
Once Nato began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees âfleeing a holocaustâ. When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims of the âholocaustâ. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing âa semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machinesâ. The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-Nato Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The Nato attack was both a fraud and a war crime.
All but a fraction of Americaâs vaunted âprecision guidedâ missiles hit not military but civilian targets, including the news studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade. Sixteen people were killed, including cameramen, producers and a make-up artist. Blair described the dead, profanely, as part of Serbiaâs âcommand and controlâ. In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate Natoâs crimes.
This was the model for Washingtonâs subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as âparamount crimesâ under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda. While tabloid journalism played its traditional part, it was serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective - the evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by the Guardian, the incessant lies about Saddam Husseinâs non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Observer and the New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the BBC in the silence of its omissions.
At the height of the bombing, the BBCâs Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander. The Serbian city of Nis had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths. Others were more brazen. In February 2003, the day after Blair and Bush had set fire to Iraq, the BBCâs political editor, Andrew Marr, stood in Downing Street and made what amounted to a victory speech. He excitedly told his viewers that Blair had âsaid they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.â Today, with a million dead and a society in ruins, Marrâs BBC interviews are recommended by the US embassy in London.
Marrâs colleagues lined up to pronounce Blair âvindicatedâ. The BBCâs Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said, âThereâs no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially to the Middle East ⌠is now increasingly tied up with military power.â
This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force âbringing goodâ runs deep in western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed exclusively on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel have long conspired to overthrow, not for any humanitarian concerns, but to consolidate Israelâs aggressive power in the region. The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the US, Britain, France, Turkey and their âcoalitionâ proxies serve this end. It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that becomes news in the US and Europe, and provide access to journalists and guarantee a one-sided âcoverageâ of Syria.
The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily artillery bombardment from western-sponsored al-Qaida is not news. On 21 July, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian; there were no photographs.
Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone - a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union - the US is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan Mujahideen, the Syrian ârebelsâ are Americaâs and Britainâs foot soldiers. Many fight for al-Qaida and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11. The CIA runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.
The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus, which, according to the most credible poll (YouGov Siraj), the majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of the barbarism in its shadows. The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a Nato war of attrition against the Russian Federation that eventually destroys it.
The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media across âthe free worldâ. The editorial writers of the Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demand that Obama attack Syria. Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executionerâs role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will âgo furtherâ than Obama.
Gareth Porter, a samidzat journalist reporting from Washington, recently revealed the names of those likely to make up a Clinton cabinet, who plan an attack on Syria. All have belligerent cold war histories; the former CIA director, Leon Panetta, says that âthe next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the groundâ.
What is most remarkable about the war propaganda now in floodtide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. I have been looking through archive film from Washington in the 1950s when diplomats, civil servants and journalists were witch-hunted and ruined by Senator Joe McCarthy for challenging the lies and paranoia about the Soviet Union and China. Like a resurgent tumour, the anti-Russia cult has returned.
In Britain, the Guardianâs Luke Harding leads his newspaperâs Russia-haters in a stream of journalistic parodies that assign to Vladimir Putin every earthly iniquity. When the Panama Papers leak was published, the front page said Putin, and there was a picture of Putin; never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.
Like Milosevic, Putin is Demon Number One. It was Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Headline: âAs far as Iâm concerned, Putin killed my son.â No evidence required. It was Putin who was responsible for Washingtonâs documented (and paid for) overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was the result of Putinâs âaggressionâ. Preventing Crimea from becoming a Nato missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia - from which Crimea had been annexed - were more examples of Putinâs âaggressionâ. Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.
In the US, the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist with a Nobel Prize, has called Donald Trump the âSiberian Candidateâ because Trump is Putinâs man, he says. Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform. âWouldnât it be great if we got along with Russia,â he said.
This is why Americaâs warmongering liberal establishment hates him. Trumpâs racism and ranting demagoguery have nothing to do with it. Bill and Hillary Clintonâs record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trumpâs any day. (This week is the 20th anniversary of the Clinton welfare âreformâ that launched a war on African-Americans). As for Obama: while American police gun down his fellow African-Americans the great hope in the White House has done nothing to protect them, nothing to relieve their impoverishment, while running four rapacious wars and an assassination campaign without precedent.
The CIA has demanded Trump is not elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he is not elected. The pro-war New York Times - taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears - demands that he is not elected. Something is up. These tribunes of âperpetual warâ are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Putin, then with Chinaâs Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the worldâs great power talking peace - however unlikely - would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.
âTrump would have loved Stalin!â bellowed Vice-President Joe Biden at a rally for Hillary Clinton. With Clinton nodding, he shouted, âWe never bow. We never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. Thatâs who we are. We are America!â
In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing him. Lord West, a former admiral and Labour minister, put it well. Corbyn was taking an âoutrageousâ anti-war position âbecause it gets the unthinking masses to vote for himâ.
In a debate with leadership challenger Owen Smith, Corbyn was asked by the moderator: âHow would you act on a violation by Vladimir Putin of a fellow Nato state?â Corbyn replied: âYou would want to avoid that happening in the first place. You would build up a good dialogue with Russia⌠We would try to introduce a de-militarisation of the borders between Russia, the Ukraine and the other countries on the border between Russia and Eastern Europe. What we cannot allow is a series of calamitous build-ups of troops on both sides which can only lead to great danger.â
Pressed to say if he would authorise war against Russia âif you had toâ, Corbyn replied: âI donât wish to go to war - what I want to do is achieve a world that we donât need to go to war.â
The line of questioning owes much to the rise of Britainâs liberal war-makers. The Labour Party and the media have long offered them career opportunities. For a while the moral tsunami of the great crime of Iraq left them floundering, their inversions of the truth a temporary embarrassment. Regardless of Chilcot and the mountain of incriminating facts, Blair remains their inspiration, because he was a âwinnerâ.
Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated, and democratic ideas emptied and refilled with âidentity politicsâ that confuse gender with feminism and public angst with liberation and wilfully ignore the state violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the world.
The stirring of people of all ages around the spectacular rise of Jeremy Corbyn counters this to some extent. His life has been spent illuminating the horror of war. The problem for Corbyn and his supporters is the Labour Party. In America, the problem for the thousands of followers of Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party, not to mention their ultimate betrayal by their great white hope. In the US, home of the great civil rights and anti-war movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of Codepink that lay the roots of a modern version.
For only a movement that swells into every street and across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers. Next year, it will be a century since Wilfred Owen wrote the following. Every journalist should read it and remember itâŚ
4 Likes