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..."
Meh.
Hillary is a corrupt, lying monster who is the ultimate expression of the repressive system of the political Establishment. She shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the White House. I'm voting for Trump just because the establishment is trying so insanely hard to derail him. When the UN hates his guts, that just adds another sparkle to his appeal. He's the napalm solution for a time when everyone is tired of what Hillary represents.
Burn the system down. Burn it all down.
AMEN.
Vote for Hillary = Affirmation that you're cool with corrupt politics.
Vote for Trump = Drop napalm on the whole F-ing thing.
Never realized how much scrutiny his life would get if he got the nomination.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Nope, voting for Hillary just means you're going for someone with experience to be president for 4-8 years, rather than the insane guy dreaming of nuclear war with fallout for thousands.
Yes, yes...I'm sure Mr. Trump wants nuclear war...
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!
Why didn't that happen when the top Federal rate was 90%?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The point is, that if he's filing tax returns saying he's making massive massive losses, he's clearly not a successful businessman.
Remember, Trump's >$900million loss came from running a fucking casino. And this was in the go-go 90's when people were actually making and spending money.
You've got to be a special kind of businessman to lose almost a billion dollars running a casino.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you read the Wikipedia page you cited, it doesn't say anything about rich people leaving the country in the years the top tax rate was 90%.
If you want to argue that well, "nobody actually paid the top rate", then the same could be said for today. Because, even with all the pissing and moaning from right conservatives about taxes, taxation in the US is really not that high (as shown by your own citation).
You are welcome on my lawn.
Clinton would be a fucking weak candidate on any other occasion, no arguments there. But for Pete's sake, she's running against Trump. Trump. I can't even believe there's a choice to be made here for half the population of the US.
The GOP will have no one but themselves to blame after loosing this election.
It scares the crap out of me that here on Slashdot, a site with presumably smart people like engineers and programmers, so many people are defending and rooting for Donald Trump.
Either Slashdot is not as intelligent as I thought, or it is more right-wing than I thought, which of course is not exclusive.
Vote for the lizard, not the wizard.
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.
Not only not mutually exclusive but also highly correlated.
It's what you get with miserable public education, corporate news media that's only in it for the ratings, and a population where most people don't have a passport and never left their country.
Don't get it, eh? Trump is not the GOP, which is why he was the winning candidate. This election is about immigration, national identity and an economy that's fscking over the middle class and making them pay for everything. The GOP as a party is dead, they just haven't stopped twitching. All you have to do is look at HRC and Trump's campaign slogans- "I'm With Her" is all about Hillary, who will continue to screw over the white middle class to bring in Democrat-voting, public assistance-using blacks, latinos and migrants and make the middle class pay to become a singled-out minority. Trump's "Make America Great Again" is about America for Americans, "To Ourselves and Our Posterity" and looking out for the American who wants an equal footing and opportunity (used or not) to be his or her own person. America is equal opportunity, not equal outcome and anyone who's tells you differently is a Democrat.
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.
"Drop napalm on the whole F-ing thing."
That thing, the place where you live?
Play Command HQ online
I don't know if I've seen so many points expended to suppress both sides of an argument.
What's interesting is looking at the moderation levels over time.
For the first hour after the article was posted, there were a lot of pro-Trump comments.
Now it's 2.5 hours later and all those articles have been modded down. What's left is pro-Hillary, in a roundabout way.
You can tell when something's gone up and down because of the tags., If something has "Score: 2 insightful" it means someone modded it up (to gain the "insightful") and someone else modded it down.
When Whiplash took over I mentioned that this site goes to pot around 6 weeks before a presidential election, and becomes unbearable starting around 2 weeks before an election. This year I think it'll be worse than previous election years.
I can't *wait* until the election is over, so we can go back to having insightful posts.
Reporting the facts. All of them. Leave the editorializing to the readers.
I was wondering how he was going to try to recover from his recent string of bad news. Looks like his method is to pretend it's a conspiracy by the left-wing media to ruin him with an "onslaught" of bad press. Which implies that the stories are false or exaggerated, without actually making that claim. Clever, in case he ever needs to admit that the reports are true.
Truth has no sides. Reality has no bias. If these things are true, and I have seen no indications that they are not, then the news is making Donald Trump look bad because Donald Trump is actually bad. If he steals money from charity to bribe investigators to turn a blind eye to his fraudulent businesses, the blame for the bad press afterward lies purely at the hands of Trump, not on the media and press.
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 Bill Clinton.
an economy that's fscking over the middle class and making them pay for everything
I think I fit the definition of the middle class (between my job and the rent I collect I make just north of $80k/year) and I don't feel like I am being made to "pay for everything", nor do I feel like I'm being fucked over in any way. The top 1% income earners pay 50% of all of the federal income taxes, and the bottom 80% (which I'm part of) barely pay 15%, so please do explain why you think I'm getting fucked over and/or how I am being made to "pay for everything."
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.
Here is real research by real academics who have actual PhD degrees and study the media. They are at one of the best universities on the planet: Harvard. This is the definitive definition of a qualified professional. They don't make shit up like Fox not-really-News.
This research covers 2015, but things didn't change much up to the national political party conventions. The most explosive material wasn't reported until after the first debate, and much of it is coming from online upstarts like Buzzfeed.
The mainstream news organizations have been completely missing until very recently. The information about Trump's income tax claim could have been uncovered by the NY Times at any time in the last two years, but it wasn't. He was getting a free ride from the entire mainstream press until a few weeks ago.
I know that Republicans have an extreme aversion to facts and departed reality many years ago, but the real world doesn't care what you think. It has a nasty habit of showing up when least expected and wreaking havoc on fools who ignore it. With any luck real world facts will finally catch up with Trump and pound him into dust. If that doesn't happen then the whole world is going on an extremely terrible ride.
Why is Snark Required?
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".
People don't vote candidates, in general. They vote if they are happy about how things are, or if they are not. Usually, is the incumbent (I'm happy about how things are in MY life), or the challenger (I'm not happy, let's change something).
In this particular case the incumbent cannot run, so the proxy is the candidate of the same party. Also, people suspect that the usual challengers are not really a change at all. But in this case it is, or at least it appears to be. So the excitement about it.
Voting or defending Trump has nothing to do with Trump, really, and all to do with a desire for profound change. The people express that desire in the only way that the election game allows them, and that's not a good way, that's for sure, but it's the only one.
You are surprised of intelligent people defending Trump, and I am surprised of how this blatant fact, the desire, of so many people, for many current politics to change or reverse course, is completely bypassed by the media, that chooses to center in the, admittedly rather pathetic, personification of that desire. That's an ad-hominem fallacy if I ever saw one, and you fall into that trap and try to keep the discussion there (the person), instead of on the politics.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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?
Alternatively, you're not as smart as you think you are.
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.
People well and truly vote for candidates in the USA, and in general they seem to be confused at situations like Australia or the UK where we vote for parties.
Sorry to disagree, but that doesn't check with the fact that, in the USA, only candidates from the two big parties have a chance to run successfully for the presidency. If people really voted for candidates, then an independent candidate would have an even chance of winning, and that's absolutely not the case. Even in this election, with two deeply flawed candidates, independents cannot even make it to the TV live debate.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Because Trump is a "friend" of Big Media. He knows all the stakeholders by first name. They've all been to his "resorts" for free, they are all bought and paid for by Trump, Inc. Trump is no Republican. He's a White National fascist who used popularity to force the Republican party into a nomination. He's using the same playbook the Communists did after the death of Lenin...fear, confusion, obfuscation of reality to the point the only thing people know to be "real" is Trump himself.
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.
You need to look at the media coverage of all Republican candidates together to understand what happened. The candidates thought to be the strongest opponents against Hillary received the harshest treatment (Christy, Romney, Rubio, and Cruz).
Trump was considered a non-threat, him getting the nomination was supposed to ensure an easy victory for Clinton. The long knives didn't really come out until poll numbers showed Trump actually having a chance to win. Now that he's ahead you see the hysteria.
.
only candidates from the two big parties have a chance to run successfully for the presidency
That's because the other parties tend to run:
1) Avowed communists or other loons
2) Supposed doctors who believe in homeopathy
3) Would-be presidents who can't name a single leader of another country.
Why would such people every gain any traction with a majority of the people in the US? The certainly can't get together enough people to support their campaign operations at a level that makes them strongly visible in a country of hundreds of millions of people - because would-be supporters look at them, weigh their absurd positions against reality, and walk away.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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...
Where were you the last decade? The US has been quite good at destabilizing itself without outside help. Increasing inequality between the 0.01% and everyone else, jobs that become more precarious with time, hyper-partisan media, deteriorating value of an education, etc. Trump vs Hillary is just a symptom.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
For God's sake, have you ever been to Cuba? I have. Twice. Last time i visited i had several offers to trade for my combs, shampoo and ibuprofen.
There's a good reason people still try to flee the island to Miami in makeshift rafts and not the other way around.
Obama had a Democrat controlled congress and he used it to ram a shitty health care bill down everyone's throat.
You didn't elaborate on what made it so shitty, so I'll suggest why (don't blame Obama): The only way this (health care for the masses) was ever going to come to reality was if those who stood the most to lose (insurers and providers of healthcare and medicine) had a say in its conceptual design. IOW, those who had the most to lose from changing the status quo limited the degree to which the status quo changed- naturally by lobbying the democrats as not a single republican voted for passage- they continue to this day to undermine the basic right of healthcare. As it turns out, this lead to insurance policies that are still too expensive for the intended recipients and insurers who resent having to cover those who most need it because it makes it hard for them to profit. The right thing to do was create a single payer system and congress (not Obama) totally half-assed the entire thing. Half a solution in this case was not a solution IMHO. OTOH, a few good things did come of it: coverage of preventive medicine, age increase of dependents, medicare improvements, pre-existing coverage, and more.
He got what he wanted but pissed off enough people to destroy the Democrats majority in both houses.
By that I take it you mean he drove state district gerrymandering to a new level of absurd. The resulting ideological makeup of congress is in no way reflective of the populations they purport to represent, nor the country as a whole.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
A really good nonprofit that is genuinely supporting a cause puts somewhere between 75% and 90% of its income into whatever cause it supports. The Clinton Foundation has a rather different record. For example, in 2015 the New York Post published numbers from 2013 showing that they foundation spend $9 million (out of a budget of $140 million) on charity,
You know that that is misleading to the point of lying, right? The Clinton Foundation doesn't give much money to other charities, true. Instead it runs it's own charitable programs, and percentage-wise spends less on payroll and administrative employee expenses than most charities. I don't know if the CF is a wonderful charity or not, but it is spending money better than other charities. It's been under constant scrutiny by anti-Clinton folks for years; if they were shielding assets for the Clintons it would have come out. Instead, people just repeat the same lies as you did
In a sense, it does lower the Clinton's taxes, in the way that donating to any charity reduces your taxes. It also means that that money is no longer theirs, which is why most people don't give 10% of their income to charity. But nobody has demonstrated that the Clintons are particularly using the CF money on themselves. Maybe they are and nobody has found the evidence (unlike with Trump's foundation). Or maybe you have evidence that the rest of the world doesn't?
I have a very hard time finding the evidence for your conclusion based on any sort of independent, non-partisan, non-cherry-picked evaluations:
Four Star, 93%+ rating from Charity Navigator https://www.charitynavigator.o...
Charity Watch: A Rating, 88% of funds go to programs not administrative costs: https://www.charitywatch.org/r...
The actual evidence seems to indicate that the vast majority of the money that goes to the Clinton foundation actually goes to what it's ostensibly for - charitable causes themselves. That's almost the exact opposite of a "slush fund" or a way to hide money, because they're not getting anything back out of it in any appreciable form. 12%? They'd keep more of the money if they paid standard taxes with no deductions!
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.
There is not a single policy that Bernie has advocated that isn't being put to good use in Northern Europe - he's really a Democratic socialist after the Scandinavian style. So are you saying that Finland is an imaginary place?
On your second point: Too true, I hate it when productive people (like contractors, who actually build useful things) are unpaid slaves to non-productive people (like freeloading Trump and his ilk).