Slashdot Mirror
Online Journalists Launch An Onslaught Against Donald Trump (nytimes.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Online journalists at Buzzfeed are publicizing two controversial videos featuring Donald Trump. First the site "filed court motions seeking the release" of Trump's under-oath testimony in a June trial, in which the real estate mogul "says he planned his caustic remarks on immigration delivered during the launch of his presidential bid," bragging that they'd "led to my nomination in a major party in the country." And Buzzfeed is also publicizing a video clip from the 2000 softcore porn movie Playboy Video Centerfold: Bernaola Twins, in which Trump makes a cameo appearance. Playboy has even said that years earlier Trump actually pressured his second wife to pose for Playboy. ("Trump himself was on the phone negotiating the fee," remembered a top Playboy editor. "He wanted her to do the nude layout. She didn't.")
But his biggest problem may be the mainstream media. According to the New York Times, Trump "declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years..."
But his biggest problem may be the mainstream media. According to the New York Times, Trump "declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years..."
That, and it's going to fracture the GOP - which could lead to more than a two party system.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
You pretty much have to be a sociopath or psychopath to make it to the level Trump/Clinton make it. There have been numerous studies proving that C-level executives and politicians are exponentially more likely to exhibit those signs.
Whether or not he actually got the tax break, it indeed makes him smart. If you knew how to game the system the way Trump, Gates, Jobs or Clinton did, you would do it too. Jobs purportedly never drove with a license plate on his vehicles, Gates did the overseas tax dodge, they found and used the loophole. Trump did the same, sure he screwed people over but he didn't cause the crisises Madoff, Bank of America, Wells Fargo have gotten involved in. It's not like he sold access to a US government office he held through a charity.
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But you said Trump wasn't a billionaire? This proves Trump was a billionaire in 1995. One cannot record billion dollar loss without having a billion dollars worth of assets at one time. Since the IRS audited it, that means Trump had at least a billion dollars in 1994,but 20 years later he somehow doesn't.
How much do you want to bet that Trump leaked the tax returns himself?
What a clueless git. So think of it this way- when Trump is elected President, the media will be a serious watchdog on everything he does for the next 4 years. Good or bad, you'll know about it. IF Hillary is elected, the media will continue to faun over her, hide her illegal dealings, lie about events far worse than Benghazi and EmailGate and generally ignore every illegal, immoral or unConstitutional thing she does. You think that Obama's emphasis on race relations is bad, just wait. She's all pay for play and there will be a slew of VERY unsavory characters that run through the White House, and not all of them will be sporting a blue dress. Pick your poison brother, because Hillary for the next 4 years will end in a civil war.
I've experienced the same living in South America and witnessing people i used to regard as smart defending the likes of Castro, Chavez, Kirchner and Rousseff. It was a sad eye opener.
Amen. The woman is only experienced if you count several decades of impressive job titles won through nepotism when she did a terrible job at all of them once provided with the responsibility of the office.
The gall of this woman to brag about her stamina for having to endure 12 hours of congressional testimony while sitting in a chair should enrage anyone who has seen the movie "13 Hours".
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4172430/
As Secretary of State, she demonstrated herself to be a total buffoon of a micromanager by forcefully inserting herself into military decision-making process (disrupting the OODA loop) when she was so stricken with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Hypothyroidism, and Parkinson's to render her bedridden and unable to perform when the infamous "3am" phone call (which she used to dog-whistle against BHO during the 2008 DNC primary) came in and finally landed in her outrageously incapable lap.
Her legacy as the literal founder of ISIL(it was her brainchild to topple Muammar Gaddafi, leaving Libya in anarchy) should terrify anyone who thinks that Daesh are bad people.
Buzzfeed is a corporation, just like Citizens United is a corporation. We heard it was wrong for Citizens United to spend money to make a political film. Where's the outrage about Buzzfeed spending corporate money against Trump?
Please post your expressions of outrage here. Unless your outrage was phony. Or selective, partisan outrage. Or you can explain why corporation B can legitimately spend on politics, but corporation C can't.
More like:
Vote for Hillary: cool with the corruption that comes with politics as usual.
Vote for Trump: watch me introduce corrupt business practices into that mix.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Publishing - the man's own media appearances is an "onslaught"? Isn't that more like "routine"? It barely qualifies as journalism, too easy.
Isn't holding people accountable for their public positions the very job of journalists?
And The Times - every journalist has been howling for those tax returns for a nearly a year, they've been expected for 40 years - and now actually showing a couple of pages of a really old one is an "onslaught"? Most would say, "no brainer".
If you accept that charge then what about President George "My Pet Goat" Bush? He and his entire core team were in the Oval office when intelligence sources reported about a possible Al Qaeda attack on US soil. They thought it was unimportant and sloughed it off. It was completely ignored.
Based on the standard you apply to Clinton then Bush, Cheney and pretty much every person in that room should have been convicted of criminally failure to execute their duties of office. The President and Vice President and Secretary of State should have been hung and the rest sentenced to life in a federal penitentiary.
My conclusion is that you are all foul hypocrites who are so hyper-partisan that you put your party ideology above the national interests of the United States.
Why is Snark Required?
When you have the sort of money that Donald Trump or Putin have (I've read Putin may have about $70 billion), then you generally make deals with each other. Billionaires generally come from two backgrounds, founding extremely successful companies that are one-offs. (Zara, Microsoft, Google, Apple), or by making a large number of deals that add to your holdings over time, increasing its value (Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, Sheldon Adelson, Waleed Bin-Talal, Mark Cuban).
These guys have dealings with so many ventures it's realistically impossible to not find a connection between all of them to each other in some way. That's how they got to be so big in the first place.
Donald Trump has struck a nerve with the american people. It's sad that he was the one to figure out how, but he did. That nerve is the sensitivity to the overtly corrupt political structure now at the helm of this country "for the people". He promised he could not be influenced because he has more than enough capital to fund his run, and live happily ever after.
Unfortunately, the Democrats didn't do any better, by swinging their ball completely in the 100% opposite direction. Hillary Clinton seems to be as politically astute as Donald Trump is politically ignorant. She successfully derailed Bernie Sander's campaign with insider dealings so corrupt, they forced the DNC chairman(woman) to resign, along with other DNC senior staff. She has been making insider plays, taken money from just about anyone who would give it to her, no matter what the cost to the American people, or the favor required; and wiggled her way to the Democratic presumptive nominee this election year, seemingly through those backroom deals. Her entire campaign doesn't really promise anything ground-breaking, really its just more of the same overly corrupt Washington insiders. Instead, her campaign is really "I'm not him". His campaign, if he could ever get the media to stop talking about his mouth, is "I'm not them".
Either Slashdot is not as intelligent as I thought, or it is more right-wing than I thought
Trump is not "right-wing". He is a populist, with an eclectic and shifting mix of the worst of both left and right.
"Right-wing" means fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, free trade, and cutting entitlements, ... like the Republican led Congress when Bill Clinton signed their bills into law.
FTFY
What? You thought Bill Clinton wrote every piece of legislation that Congress voted on?
You need to watch Schoolhouse Rock.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Progressive does NOT automatically equal Democrat. I'm am so sick and tired of everyone only seeing two sides, turning everything into a razor thin monolith with D on one side and R on the other. Perhaps you've heard of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said "In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with people's money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative." Once upon a time there was a movement of Progressive Republicans.
"To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." This was back in 1912. plus ça change, plus c'est la.
Who do I stand with? Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and other like them. Both "parties" are morally corrupt, and under the control of the planet-spanning corpocracy. We had a chance with Sanders, but we squandered it. Johnson is a joke. Trump is only in this for Trump, Inc. Hillary is inherently unlikable, and is a corporate puppet who only changed her tune at all because of Sanders. Neither should be President.
However, given the "choice" we've been presented, I still would rather have a corrupt, mean politician as opposed to a megalomaniac who is intent on building an oligarchy like his buddy Putin.
His returns will show he's not a billionaire. To him that's the worst possible thing for the media to be able to prove. He'd rather be known as a crazy jerk than a pure charlatan.
We had a chance with Sanders, but we squandered it.
No, we dodged a bullet. His entire world view is based on either pure fantasy, or on making productive people slaves to non-productive people and calling that a virtue. Even Hillary Clinton (who is currently doing her best in public to pretend she likes what Sanders stands for, because she's wildly pandering to low-information young people who want free stuff) says in private (audio recording just released!) that Sanders' supporters are unrealistic live-in-mom's-basement people who want free stuff and don't know what they're talking about. She may be an evil witch, but she's correct about that. Of course, being an evil witch, she'll still lie her ass off and pretend to embrace those people's wish lists long enough to get elected. Nothing new there.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That's a bit extreem don't you think? Jack booted thugs? Seriously, Hitler? C'mon, no one buys that. Also, Donald Trump is running on the republican ticket, but he is far from an establishment republican like Jeb Bush is. Hilary is literally a 30 year career politician at various levels of government. She is the embodiment of Claire Underwood, with less sex appeal, and more political savvy, if thats even possible.
Also, I didn't say Donald Trump is a good guy, or a good leader. I only said that he found a nerve in American society today, which suffers at the hands on the special interests, locked in a dance with American politics.
But about that business of his. No doubt, he owns some of the most fantastic addresses in the world. The real-estate under his towers in Manhattan are worth quite literally billions. You don't get your company to that size "with an iron fist, and no help or good ideas from anyone else", or by "blaming everyone but himself as he never accepts responsibility".
Donald's organization The Trump Organization has tens of thousands of employees, activities spanning the globe, and is a model for modern business, leveraging its brand and assets. America could use some of that kind of thinking. Stop fixating on the "politically incorrect" in what he says. Before judging someone on their rants, ask yourself "what is the most important part of his job". I don't care if my dentist is a muslim-hating womanizer, as long as he does my dental work well. Likewise, I don't care if Donald trump disparaged women in a Larry King episode, or suggested "stop and frisk". We aren't electing a president of the National Organization of Women, or a chief of the NYPD. We are electing a president. I want him to curb our addition to international intervention, and improve our economy by moving it more towards a "laissez faire" economic model. Something he might be familiar with having an education in economics from one of the worlds best schools for that stuff.
So how is he going to get things done and "Make America Great Again"
Silly voter, he's just going to do it. Trust him, he has a secret plan. Remember, he knows more about ISIS than the generals (he said so himself!). And he has "the best temperament", the "best memory", and "has the best words". Those are all direct quotes so you know they're true!
When he gets elected we'll wake up the next day and the streets will be clean, kids will say "Sir" and "Ma'am", and Leave It To Beaver will be back on the TV machine. Black people will know their place again, atheists will once again be persecuted as is proper, and mothers will go back to the kitchens where they'll spend all day cooking tasty, nutritious food for the whole family again. It'll be glorious!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...