"10 Things Trump Supporters Are Too Stupid To Realize"

[deicer]

In his own words, Trump basically says that this should be the last election.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/10/27/trump-we-should-just-cancel-the-election-and-just-give-it-to-me.html?via=desktop&source=copyurl

[DEFCON]

Is Wikileaks going to have enough time to get all the information on the Clinton gang into the public realm before the election?

If so, why bother electing Hilary when we know impeachment proceedings will almost certainly follow?

 

[deicer]

Does this problem run in 'rich and powerful' families?

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/10/28/conrad-blacks-son-charged-with-assaulting-girlfriend.html

Jonathan Black, 38, son of fallen media baron Conrad Black, has been charged with assault causing bodily harm after reportedly breaking his girlfriend’s wrist.

Black appeared in court for a bail hearing Friday morning.

Black was arrested Thursday, and charged with assault causing bodily harm and mischief, said Toronto Police Service spokesperson Jenifferjit Sidhu.

Black’s lawyer Robb MacDonald said he’d been instructed by his client’s family not to make any statement to the media, but added “We will be fighting his charges.”

A CBC report, quoting court documents, stated Black wilfully damaged his girlfriend’s cellphone.

He will be spending the weekend in a detention centre and appear in court on Monday, the report said.

This isn’t the younger Black’s first brush with the law.

In 2011, Black pleaded guilty to criminally harassing his former girlfriend. In that case, he and his girlfriend had a tumultuous relationship and lived together for six months before they split up in October 2010, according to an agreed statement of facts.

But he continued messaging her. In December 2010, she told him to stop.

Nonetheless, he kept phoning, as well as sending emails and text messages. On Jan 11, he sent more than 60 texts.

Some of the messages bemoaned their breakup and expressed his desire to continue seeing his ex-girlfriend. Others were profane, derogatory and threatening toward her and her new boyfriend, court heard.

In 2008, he was charged with leaving the scene of an accident in the downtown area, and fined $2,000 for it.

[DEFCON]

No more so than it does at the other end of the economic spectrum; psychopathic disorders occur fairly consistently throughout & across the population as far as I know. 

[deicer]

Is this why Trump won't release his tax returns?  So sketchy that even his own people shake their heads?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-election/trump-used-legally-dubious-method-to-avoid-paying-taxes/article32609915/

Donald Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the U.S. Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.

Thanks to this one maneuver — which was later outlawed by Congress — Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.

Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits to Trump for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City.

As that empire floundered in the early 1990s, Trump pressured his financial backers to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt he could not repay. While the cancellation of so much debt gave new life to Trump’s casinos, it created a potentially crippling problem with the IRS. In the eyes of the IRS, a dollar of canceled debt is the same as a dollar of taxable income. This meant Trump faced the painful prospect of having to report the hundreds of millions of dollars of canceled debt as if it were hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income.

But Trump’s audacious tax-avoidance maneuver gave him a way to simply avoid reporting any of that canceled debt to the IRS. “He’s getting something for absolutely nothing,” John L. Buckley, who served as the chief of staff for Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, said in an interview

The new documents, which include correspondence from Trump’s tax lawyers and bond offering disclosure statements, might also help explain how Trump reported a staggering loss of $916 million in his 1995 tax returns — portions of which were first published by The Times in October.

U.S. tax laws allowed Trump to use that $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income. But tax experts have been debating how Trump could have legally declared a deduction of that magnitude at all. Among other things, they have noted that Trump’s huge casino losses should have been offset by the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income he surely must have reported to the IRS in the form of canceled casino debt.

By avoiding reporting his canceled casino debt in the first place, however, Trump’s $916 million deduction would not have been reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars. He could have preserved the deduction and used it instead to avoid paying income taxes he might otherwise have owed on books, TV shows or branding deals. Under the rules in effect in 1995, the $916 million loss could have been used to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income for 18 years.

Trump declined to comment for this article.

“Your email suggests either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law,” Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Your thesis is a criticism, not just of Mr. Trump, but of all taxpayers who take the time and spend the money to try to comply with the dizzyingly complex and ambiguous tax laws without paying more tax than they owe. Mr. Trump does not think that taxpayers should file returns that resolve all doubt in favor of the IRS. And any tax experts that you have consulted are engaged in pure speculation. There is no news here.”

Trump financed his three Atlantic City gambling resorts with $1.3 billion in debt, most of it in the form of high-interest junk bonds. By late 1990, after months of escalating operating losses, New Jersey casino regulators were warning that “a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question.” By 1992, all three casinos had filed for bankruptcy and bondholders were ultimately forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to salvage at least part of their investment.

The story of how Trump sidestepped a potentially ruinous tax bill from that forgiven debt emerged from documents recently discovered by The Times during a search of the casino bankruptcy filings. The documents offer only a partial description of events, and none of Trump’s tax lawyers agreed to be interviewed for this article.

At the time, Trump would have been hard-pressed to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes. According to assessments of his financial stability by New Jersey casino regulators, there were times in the early 1990s when Trump had no more than a few million dollars in his various bank accounts. He was so strapped for cash that his creditors were apoplectic when they learned that Trump had bought Marla Maples an engagement ring estimated to be worth $250,000.

It is unclear who first glimpsed a way for Trump to dodge a huge tax bill. But the basic maneuver he used was essentially a new twist on a contentious strategy corporations had been using for years to avoid taxes created by canceled debt.

The strategy — known among tax practitioners as a “stock-for-debt swap” — relies on mathematical sleight of hand. Say a company can repay only $60 million of a $100 million bank loan. If the bank forgives the remaining $40 million, the company faces a large tax bill because it will have to report that canceled $40 million debt as taxable income.

Clever tax lawyers found a way around this inconvenience. The company would simply swap stock for the $40 million in debt it could not repay. This way, it would look as if the entire $100 million loan had been repaid, and presto: There would be no tax bill due for $40 million in canceled debt.

Best of all, it did not matter if the actual market value of the stock was considerably less than the $40 million in canceled debt. (Stock in an effectively insolvent company could easily be next to worthless.) Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations, this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.

Alarmed by the obvious potential for abuse, Congress and the IRS made repeated efforts during the 1980s to curb this brand of tax wizardry before banning its use by corporations altogether in 1993. But while policymakers were busy trying to stop corporations from using this particular ploy, the endlessly creative club of elite tax advisers was inventing a new way to circumvent the ban, this time through the use of partnerships.

This was the twist that was especially beneficial to Trump. Wealthy families like the Trumps often own real estate and other assets through partnerships rather than corporations. Trump, for example, owned all three of his Atlantic City casinos through partnerships, an arrangement that allowed casino profits to flow directly to his personal tax returns when times were good.

But what if times were bad? What if Trump’s casino partnerships could not repay hundreds of millions of dollars they owed to bondholders? And what if the bondholders were persuaded to forgive this debt? Wouldn’t that force the partnerships — i.e., Trump — to report hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income in the form of canceled debt?

Enter the tax advisers with their audacious plan: Why not eliminate all that taxable income from canceled debt by swapping “partnership equity” for debt in exactly the same way corporations had been swapping company stock for debt.

True enough, the IRS and Congress had clearly signaled their disapproval of the basic concept. Fred T. Goldberg, who was the IRS commissioner under President George Bush, recalled in an interview that the IRS frowned on partnership equity-for-debt swaps for the same reason it objected to corporate stock-for-debt swaps. “The fiction is that the partnership interest has the same value as the debt,” he said. Lee A. Sheppard, a contributing editor to Tax Notes, wrote in 1991 that trying to find a legal justification for this tactic was akin to proving “the existence of the Loch Ness monster.”

On the campaign trail, Trump boasts of his mastery of tax loopholes and claims no other candidate for the White House has ever known more about the tax code. This background, he argues with evident disgust, gives him special insight into the way wealthy elites buy off politicians and hire high-priced lawyers and accountants to rig the tax system — just as, he claims, they rig elections.

That insight was on display in 1991 and 1992 when he was laying the groundwork to make a multimillion-dollar tax bill disappear.

Before proceeding with his plan, Trump did what most prudent taxpayers do — he sought a formal tax opinion letter. Such letters, typically written by highly-paid lawyers who spend entire careers mastering the roughly 10,000 pages of ever-changing statutes that make up the U.S. tax code, can provide important protection to taxpayers. As long as a tax adviser blesses a particular tax strategy in a formal opinion letter, the taxpayer most likely will not face penalties even if the IRS ultimately rules the strategy was improper.

The language used in tax opinion letters has a specialized meaning understood by all tax professionals. So, for example, when a tax lawyer writes that a shelter is “more likely than not” going to be approved by the IRS, this means there is at least a 51 percent chance the shelter will withstand scrutiny. (This is known as an “MLTN” letter in the vernacular of tax lawyers.) A “should” letter means there is about a 75 percent chance the IRS will not object. The gold standard, a “will” letter, means the IRS is all but certain to bless the tax avoidance strategy.

But the opinion letters Trump received from his tax lawyers at Willkie Farr & Gallagher were far from the gold standard. The letters bluntly warned that there was no statute, regulation or judicial opinion that explicitly permitted Trump’s tax gambit. “Due to the lack of definitive judicial or administrative authority,” his lawyers wrote, “substantial uncertainties exist with respect to many of the tax consequences of the plan.”

One letter, 25 pages long, analyzed seven distinct components of Trump’s proposed tax maneuver. It found only “substantial authority” for six of the components. In the stilted language of tax opinion letters, the phrase “substantial authority” is a red flag that the lawyers believe the IRS can be expected to rule against the taxpayer roughly two-thirds of the time. In other words, Trump’s tax lawyers were telling him there were at least six reasons the IRS would likely cry foul if he were audited. In anticipation of that possibility, the lawyers even laid out a fallback plan that would have allowed Trump to spread the pain of a large tax hit over many years if the IRS ultimately balked.

It is unclear whether the IRS ever challenged Trump’s use of this specific tax maneuver. According to a financial disclosure statement prepared by Trump’s accountants, he was under audit by tax authorities as of 1993, only a year after he avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income because of this legally suspect tactic. But the results of that audit are unknown and the agency declined to comment Monday.

Regardless of whether the IRS objected, Trump’s tax avoidance in this case violated a central principle of U.S. tax law, said Buckley, the former chief of staff for Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation who later served as chief tax counsel for Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

“He deducted somebody else’s losses,” Buckley said. By that Buckley means that only the bondholders who forgave Trump’s unpaid casino debts should have been allowed to use those losses to offset future income and reduce their taxes. That Trump used the same losses to reduce his taxes ultimately increases the tax burden on everyone else, Buckley explained. “He is double dipping big-time.”

In any event, Trump can no longer benefit from the same maneuver. Just as Congress acted in 1993 to ban stock-for-debt swaps by corporations, it acted in 2004 to ban equity-for-debt swaps by partnerships.

Among the members of Congress who voted to finally close the loophole: Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

[deicer]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html?utm_content=inf_10_2641_2&wpsrc=socialedge&tse_id=INF_3a2cc8909fd611e6bd3ee3ca348530db

[deicer]

http://secondnexus.com/politics-and-economics/three-new-explosive-trump-ties-to-russia/

[DEFCON]

Deicer

I'm not appreciating the articles the way you seem to. Would you be able to provide some sort of rationale to explain why Russia needs to be an enemy?

As far as the alleged hacking of Hilary's illegitimate server goes, who could fault a foreign power for gathering sensitive information that was effectively free for the taking from a hopelessly careless politician and her staff?

Would you approve if you were to learn that your own Country was engaged in the same activities the Clinton gang would have us believe Russia is solely guilty of?

Finally, does it matter that the US is continuously engaged in monitoring the private communications of its own citizenry, not to mention the rest of the world's too? 

 

[chockalicious]

Trump refuses to acknowledge what 17 security agencies have reporated, Russian hacking of the US govt.

I can't believe that someone would actually dismiss this for partisan reasons.

[deicer]

Gday Defcon

I do not worry if a Trump supporter appreciates the information I am posting. 

What I am attempting to do is to put up information from generally credible news sources of what dangers Trump is bringing into the election process.  As well, highlighting the facts that he is doing everything he accuses Clinton of, but in a far more serious, dangerous, and threatening manner to the security of the United States. Also, with the FBI investigation that has been reopened against Clinton, it is also improper that they haven't made statements about the investigations into Trump and his connections to the Russians.  If it was a fair process, it would be open to scrutiny on both sides, not just one. Is the FBI Director attempting to influence the election process?

Who you wish to support is your prerogative. We may think we have no skin in the game, but whoever is elected next week will affect the globe.

If it upsets you to see information that is denigrating your preferred candidate, then feel free to post credible counter arguments as to why you think the accusations against Trump are false.

I have said before, both candidates are greasy, but only one is truly dangerous.

 

[deicer]

[Guest]

19 minutes ago, deicer said:

Gday Defcon

Also, with the FBI investigation that has been reopened against Clinton, it is also improper that they haven't made statements about the investigations into Trump and his connections to the Russians.  If it was a fair process, it would be open to scrutiny on both sides, not just one. Is the FBI Director attempting to influence the election process?

 

To bring you up to date re the investigations:  From Yesterdays New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.

Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.

[deicer]

Yes, but further down in the same article...

The F.B.I.’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue, as does the investigation into the emails involving Mrs. Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, on a computer she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony D. Weiner. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters argue that voters have as much right to know what the F.B.I. has found in Mr. Trump’s case, even if the findings are not yet conclusive.

 

“You do not hear the director talking about any other investigation he is involved in,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Democrat of New York, said after Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress was made public. “Is he investigating the Trump Foundation? Is he looking into the Russians hacking into all of our emails? Is he looking into and deciding what is going on with regards to other allegations of the Trump Organization?”

As well, the Slate and Secondnexus articles also indicate that the investigation into Trump is ongoing...

 

[UpperDeck]

Look....said before and will say again.....please critically analyze the information you receive and do not assume that it is accurate because, for example, it derives from a "non-partisan" source.

Deicer has overwhelmed this thread with various articles presumably with the intent to "inform".

For example, he quotes a Globe article on the Trump taxation "issue". In Canada, if you owe the bank money and default and the bank accepts an amount less than the actual debt, the "forgiven shortfall" is a loss to the bank.

In the US, the debtor is required to report the amount forgiven as income. Trump apparently had a number of investment vehicles including limited partnerships. Hundreds of investors lost their investments but the losses accrued to the limited partnership.

That which is a legitimate deduction from income in Canada may not be in the US and vice versa and I assure you, there as many opinions on the tax consequences of certain "schemes" as there are experts willing to publicly express an opinion.

Bottom line....to date, the IRS has not initiated any proceedings against Trump. If it does and when it does, I'm certain the issue will be litigated in an appropriate forum and not on twitter or the aef.

Reference was made to Russian involvement in hacking. First let me ask.....does anyone here doubt that the US has agressively engaged in global cyberattacks? Does it not behoove all foreign interests to develop tools to oppose this cyber warfare and to invest in their own weapons of intelligence?

Further....though I have no doubt there are Russian hackers daily engaging in opposing manoevers with US counterparts, I do not know that these hackers can be said to be acting on behalf of and under the direction of the Russian government.

But what the hey......my opinions are also based on what I read and are probably of similar value. The tax stuff? I know a very little.

[DEFCON]

Hi Deicer

"it is also improper that they haven't made statements about the investigations into Trump and his connections to the Russians"

I thought I saw a statement from the FBI the other day in this regard that made it pretty clear, Trump has no meaningful link to the Russians.

 

"If it upsets you to see information that is denigrating your preferred candidate,"

You've misunderstood my position; I'm enjoying the show very much. Even though Trump can scare the crap out of me, I believe his candidacy is an expected and obviously welcome consequence of socialism gone too far.  

 

Would you be willing to have a go at the three questions below that I had asked you earlier?

 "As far as the alleged hacking of Hilary's illegitimate server goes, who could fault a foreign power for gathering sensitive information that was effectively free for the taking from a hopelessly careless politician and her staff?

Would you approve if you were to learn that your own Country was engaged in the same activities the Clinton gang would have us believe Russia is solely guilty of?

Finally, does it matter that the US is continuously engaged in monitoring the private communications of its own citizenry, not to mention the rest of the world's too?"

 

Cheers

 

[deicer]

Hi Defcon

To answer your three questions first:

1: Even the Pentagon has been hacked.  It probably wasn't as easy as you think to get into Clinton's email server, and with the resources Russia has to bring to bear, I don't think the phrase 'hopelessly careless' is applicable here.

2: I believe every developed country is engaged in the same activities.

3: No it doesn't matter.  If it leads to catching  a bad guy/country, then obviously it's worth it.

I make these points from the view that I don't do anything unlawful, therefore I don't have anything to worry about.  And so far in the multiple score of years that I've inhabited this planet, I've been doing OK.

As for overall security, as one can see where they have video surveillance in public places, a video is worth a million words. Same with other forms of surveillance.  Makes catching bad guys much easier when you can identify faces, cars, license plates etc.  I think the rise in crime this summer in the GTA is a direct result of the cessation of carding.

The election is in it's end game, and it just has gone to show how 'dumb' our society has gotten.  Decades of corporate interference has led us to this point, and to look at it from that point of view, it is just their victory lap to put Trump, one of their own, on the throne.

It will be what it will be,,,,,

 

[Moon The Loon]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/mississauga-couple-that-lectured-for-trump-university-fined-for-fraud/article32673906/

" Trump assured customers registering for his program that he had personally hand-picked only the best people to teach courses that would share lessons for attaining financial success."

" The AP has already reported that Trump University staff and speakers included at least four convicted felons, including a Florida cocaine-trafficker and a former army sergeant court-martialled for sexually assaulting a fellow soldier’s eight-year-old daughter. Half the 68 former staffers whose backgrounds the AP reviewed had personal bankruptcies, home foreclosures, credit card defaults, tax liens or other indicators of significant money troubles."

Can'ya imagine what backgrounds his choices for Secretaries of [name any portfolio] will have?

[Jaydee]

Great Article....and written by a Leftist at that. There's hope yet.

"We still don’t know the outcome of the 2016 election, in which our “democratic process” has produced two candidates widely despised by the American people, but we do know the race’s biggest loser: reporters and the profession of journalism, which has been reduced to surrogacy, largely on behalf of Hillary Clinton."

 

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations"

 

 

http://observer.com/2016/11/this-election-has-disgraced-the-entire-profession-of-journalism/

[Gumbi]

His conclusion is priceless...

 

 

[deicer]

This Op Ed pretty much lays out what is happening...

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/opinion-republicans-are-now-vowing-total-war-and-the-consequences-could-be-immense/ar-AAjUbMo?li=AAadgLE&ocid=spartandhp

The election is just four days away, and something truly frightening is happening, something with far-reaching implications for the immediate future of American politics. Republicans, led by Donald Trump but by no means limited to him, are engaging in kind of termite-level assault on American democracy, one that looks on the surface as though it’s just aimed at Hillary Clinton, but in fact is undermining our entire system.

I know, my conservative friends will say that this kind of talk is just fear-mongering and exaggeration. But there is something deeply troubling happening right now, and it goes beyond the ordinary trading of blows in a campaign season. Consider these recent developments:

— There appears to be a war going on inside the FBI, and from what we can tell, a group of rogue agents, mostly in New York, may be in such a fervor to destroy Hillary Clinton that they may be aggressively leaking damaging innuendo to the press against her in the waning days of the campaign. They succeeded in their apparent goal of making FBI director James Comey a tool of their campaign — and the basis for their investigation is an anti-Clinton book written under the auspices of an organization of which the CEO of the Trump campaign is co-founder and chairman. Pro-Trump FBI agents now seem to be coordinating with Trump surrogates to do maximal possible damage to Clinton.  

— Republicans continue to cheer the fact that the electronic systems of American political groups were illegally hacked, and then private communications were selectively released in order to do damage to one side in this election. The Republican nominee has explicitly asked a hostile foreign power to hack into his opponent’s electronic systems.

— High-ranking Republican officeholders are now suggesting that they may impeach Clinton as soon as she takes office. These are not just backbench nutbars of the Louie Gohmert variety, but people with genuine power, including Ron Johnson , the senator from Wisconsin, Michael McCaul , the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and veteran legislators like James Sensenbrenner and Peter King . The message is being echoed by top Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani .

— There is a growing movement among Republicans in the Senate to simply refuse to approve any nominee appointed by a Democratic president to the Supreme Court, leaving open any and all vacancies until a Republican can be elected to fill them.

— State and local Republican officials are engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to suppress the votes of African-Americans and other groups likely to vote disproportionately Democratic; in many cases officials have been ordered by courts to stop their suppression efforts and they have simply ignored the court orders .

— Republican elected officials increasingly feel emboldened to openly suggest violence against Clinton should she be elected.

It is important to understand that is not normal. This is not just bare-knuckle politics. Something extraordinary is happening.

Let’s take the FBI case as just one example. You have a situation where a group of FBI agents is in direct conflict with prosecutors who believe the agents have a weak case in their attempt to find evidence of corruption that can be used against Clinton. The agents, in an atrocious violation of FBI policy against injecting the Bureau into an election, begin leaking dark innuendo to reporters. That convinces the FBI director that he has no choice but to go public with the fact that the Bureau is looking at some emails that might or might not have something to do with Clinton, though no one has actually read them. That news lands like a bombshell, despite its complete lack of substance.

And then it turns out that these agents are basing their investigation on a book called “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer. Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute , an organization co-founded and chaired by Steve Bannon. Who is the CEO of the Trump campaign.

While the “imagine if the other side was doing this” argument can sometimes sound trite, in this case it’s more than apt. Imagine if a group of FBI agents were leaking damaging information on Donald Trump in violation of longstanding departmental policy, and it turned out that they were basing their innuendo on a book published by the Center for American Progress, which Clinton campaign chair John Podesta founded and used to run. Republicans would be crying bloody murder, and I’m pretty sure the entire news media would be backing them up every step of the way.

It’s not that this kind of thing is completely unprecedented. When Bill Clinton was impeached, people talked about “the criminalization of politics” — the idea that Republicans were trying to use the levers of the justice system as a means to prevail in what should be just ordinary political competition. George W. Bush’s administration fired a group of U.S. Attorneys because they were unwilling to pursue bogus voter fraud cases against Democrats or were too willing to investigate genuine corruption among Republican officials. There are cases like the absurd prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, who has been in jail for years because he reappointed to a state health care board a man who had donated money to a lottery initiative Siegelman favored. And there was this guy named J. Edgar Hoover.

But as he has in so many ways, Donald Trump takes every ugly impulse Republicans have and turns it up to 11, and just about the entire party follows him down. So now they are making it very clear that from literally the day Hillary Clinton is inaugurated, they will wage total war on her. There will be no rule or norm or standard of decency they won’t flout if it gets them a step closer to destroying her, no matter what the collateral damage.

It’s important to understand that strong institutions are what separate strong democracies from weak ones. In a strong democracy, one party can’t come into power and just lock up its opponents. It can’t turn the country’s law enforcement agencies into a partisan tool to destroy the other party. It can’t say that the courts will function only at its pleasure. We have the world’s most stable system not just because there aren’t tanks in the streets on election day, but because we have institutions that are strong enough to restrain the venality of individual men and women. And now, Republicans are not even pretending that those institutions should be impartial and transcend partisanship. They’re saying, if we can use them to destroy our opponents, we will. Something is seriously breaking down.

And please, spare me any explanations for this phenomenon that rely on how “divided” Americans are. Are we divided? Sure. But there’s only one party that is so vigorously undermining core democratic institutions in this way. You may not like what Democrats stand for, but they aren’t engaging in widespread official vote suppression, chanting that should their candidate win her opponent should be tossed in jail, promising to prevent any Republican president from filling vacancies on the Supreme Court, suggesting that they’ll try to impeach their opponent as soon as he takes office, cheering when a hostile foreign power hacks into American electronic systems, and trying to use the FBI to win the election.

Only one party is doing all of that. And we should all be very worried about what Republicans will do after November 8, whether they win or lose. 

[Moon The Loon]

Say nothing; promise nothing; know...less.

Hanged vs firing squad. That's the choice...

 

 

[Moon The Loon]

 

[deicer]

Mr. Trump finally released a plan.  For those who live in Ontario, we all know how the 407 worked out....

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/11/04/donald_trump_s_plan_to_privatize_america_s_roads_and_bridges.html

[deicer]

Why Russia is a Trump supporter...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/follow-the-money-to-see-why-putin-is-rooting-for-a-trump-victory/article32690746/

[Gumbi]

He's unstoppable!!!

 

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/05/politics/donald-trump-barack-obama-protester/index.html