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Michael Winship: At Second Debate, a Monster Calls

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2016 //
35

Michael Winship is a senior writer for Moyers & Co.

His reaction to the second debate was to recoil in horror at the low, mean, hateful, crude man that Republicans selected as their candidate. Remember when the GOP once called itself the party of “family values”? Ha.

He writes:

If there was the tiniest doubt left in your mind that Donald Trump holds no regard for the principles and ideals of a representative democracy — or that he views this country as anything more than a podium for his grandstanding ego, base dictatorial instincts and gutter mentality — Sunday night’s debate should have shot that shred of doubt straight to hell.

This is what Trump and his gang have turned this election into: a cheap, tawdry burlesque; a circus sideshow of freaks and conspiracy nuts.

It was not enough for Trump that he continue to slime our airwaves and the internet with his offensive rants and tweets or that he responded to the 2005 videotape of his sexist, brutish behavior with a non-apology apology that segued into yet another attack on the Clintons. Which in turn segued into that bizarre, tabloid-style press conference just before Sunday’s debate with four women accusing not only Bill Clinton, but Hillary Clinton as well, of abusive conduct.

Which in turn segued into the debate itself. (The Washington Post reported that the Trump campaign wanted to seat the four accusers in the candidates’ family box so that Bill and Chelsea Clinton would have to confront them but the Commission on Presidential Debates intervened and refused. The women were seated elsewhere in the auditorium.)

This is what Trump and his gang have turned this election into: a cheap, tawdry burlesque; a circus sideshow of freaks and conspiracy nuts that titillates the lowest of the lowest common denominator and has made us the laughingstock of what’s left of the free, thinking world.

This is not to excuse any of Bill Clinton’s past extramarital peccadilloes, or the Clintons’ preservation of the status quo, their bearhug embrace of money and influence. Nor does it let off the hook the members of the press and their corporate higher-ups who egged on this Trump sleaze machine.

But the Republican Party? You brought this on yourselves, boys and girls. For years now you have placed party, power and privilege above patriotism and country, feeding hatred and bigotry to advance your own agenda. Even before that tape came out last Friday, you knew who Trump was and is. You have always known. You just didn’t care as long as it seemed he would lead you to victory.

Read on. When this election is over, we will have to think long and hard about how our society and our culture facilitated the rise of a man utterly lacking in kindness, self-control, compassion, intellect, empathy, knowledge, and basic decency.

Categories Trump

Trump Still Insists the “Central Park 5” Were Guilty

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2016 //
10

In 1989, a female jogger was brutally attacked and raped in Central Park in New York City. The crime gripped the city for weeks. Five teenagers were arrested, confessed and implicated one another after intense police questioning, convicted, and sent to prison. They were exonerated years later based on DNA evidence and the confession of another criminal. Trump to this day insists that the original teens who spent 13 years in prison were guilty.

“New York” magazine describes Trump’s intense interest in punishing the perpetrators, taking out full-page ads in every NYC newspaper.

“On Thursday, Trump reaffirmed his view that law and order must take a backseat to punishing people (particularly, nonwhite people) whom he has declared guilty. Asked by CNN for a comment on the exoneration of the Central Park Five, the Republican nominee provided this statement:

“They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same…..”

The story says:

“In 1989, five teenagers — four black and one Hispanic — were arrested for the rape of a 28-year-old white woman in Central Park. The woman was left bound, beaten, and brain-damaged. She was identified as a banker, an ambitious career woman, the kind of person the city needed more of. The “Central Park Five” were identified as hoodlums, superpredators, the kind of people the city needed to expel.

“The crime sold papers.

“And Trump took out full-page ads in all of New York City’s major ones, two weeks after the attack, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. The mogul never explicitly mentioned the five, but did reference criminals who “beat and rape a helpless woman.”

“After two days of questioning, police secured confessions from all five of the accused — although each teenager denied raping the woman himself, and placed guilt on someone else within the group. They later retracted those confessions, claiming they’d been coerced. They were convicted nonetheless.”

“But in 2002, a convicted rapist named Matias Reyes confessed to the crime, saying he had acted alone. While police were unable to connect DNA from any of the Central Park Five to the scene of the crime, Reyes’s DNA matched that in semen found on the victim’s body. The five were exonerated and paid a $41 million settlement in 2014.”

But Trump still believes the Central Park 5 were guilty. It was one of his obsessions, like his campaign to prove that President Obama was not born in the US.

Categories Accountability, Trump

Trump Taj Mahal Closes After Years of Losses: Another Trump Failure

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2016 //
29

This story was published in USA Today:

October 10, 2016 3:11 pm
The Trump Taj Mahal, an iconic casino hotel on the Atlantic City boardwalk, ceased operations Monday after hemorrhaging money for years and negotiations with an employees’ union broke down, according to its owner, billionaire investor Carl Icahn.
The shutdown, which leaves 3,000 employees out of work, was widely expected after management announced the planned closure in August. Beset by labor strife and the decline of Atlantic City as a resort and gaming destination, the hotel lost “almost $350 million over just a few short years,” Icahn said in a statement Monday.
About 1,000 employees, including cooks, bartenders, housekeepers and cocktail servers, went on strike July 1, seeking health care and pension benefits. Icahn said his last offer, which included medical benefits, was rejected and keeping the Taj open would have required additional investments and result in losses in “excess of $100 million over the next year.”
The union, Unite Here Local 54, says many workers at the hotel “have seen only 80 cents per hour in total raises over the last 12 years” while the cost of living in Atlantic City has risen more than 25% during the period.
“Workers are trying to reenter the middle-class after Icahn used the bankruptcy court to strip them of pay and benefits worth more than one-third of their total compensation,” the union said in a statement released last month. “Housekeepers, servers and other casino workers at the Taj Mahal earn on average less than $12 and hour.”
Icahn’s clash with the union employees cost the Taj Mahal an estimated $150 million, the union said.
Meanwhile, Tony Rodio, CEO of Tropicana Entertainment Inc., which manages the hotel for Icahn Enterprises, said in August Icahn has lost about $100 million in trying to run the Taj Mahal after he acquired it from bankruptcy proceedings in February. Tropicana Entertainment is controlled by Icahn Enterprises.
The Trump Taj Mahal opened in 1990 after heavy debt financing and years of legal and financial maneuvers by its then-owner Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. When it opened, it was one of the largest casinos in the world, with more than 100,000 square feet of gaming space, and it billed itself as “the eighth wonder of the world.”
But the fancy billing belied numerous financial woes it faced over the years, including multiple bankruptcy filings by its owners. In 2009, Trump Entertainment Resorts underwent a round of bankruptcy restructuring, in which Donald Trump lost control and the hotel operator company was sold to investment firm Avenue Capital.
In 2014, Trump Entertainment Resorts, whose assets by now mostly consisted of the Taj Mahal, again filed for bankruptcy protection. When it emerged from the legal proceedings in February, Icahn had grabbed control and the hotel become a subsidiary of Icahn Enterprises. ​
According to its website, Trump Taj Mahal customers had until 8 a.m. Monday to redeem gaming chips and vouchers at the hotel. After 8 a.m., they can be redeemed at Tropicana Atlantic City’s Casino Cage.
Room bookings on and after Oct. 9 have been cancelled. Room deposits will be refunded, it said.

Categories Failure, Trump

The New York Times’ Editorial on the Second Debate

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2016 //
67

I can’t contain my loathing for Donald Trump. I wish I could ignore him. But I can’t. We can’t. Why was he sniffing through both debates? He looked and sounded like a coke head. Why did he lurk and loom over Clinton as she spoke? He excused his disgusting behavior by repeated reference to Bill Clinton’s abhorrent behavior. That’s the “everybody does it” excuse. He described his revolting remarks about sexual assault as “locker room banter,” which means “boys will be boys” and it’s okay as long as it’s not on tape. He claimed that Michelle Obama made videos about Hillary that were worse than anything he said; Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Axelrod tweeted that Michelle Obama NEVER made a video about Hillary. He is repugnant and loathsome. 
The New York Times’s editorial board summarizes its reaction: 

“Donald Trump boiled his decadent campaign down to one theme during the presidential debate on Sunday night: hatred of Hillary and Bill Clinton.
“With knock-kneed Republican officeholders showing signs of summoning the nerve to desert him, Mr. Trump labored to demonize Hillary Clinton — blaming her even for his own failure to pay taxes — and to remind his core supporters that he is all that stands between her and the presidency.
“If he were in charge, Mr. Trump told Secretary Clinton at one point, “You’d be in jail.”
“When Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Trump out for his failure to apologize to the minorities, immigrants and women he’s offended, he responded by promising vengeance. Should he win, he said, he would unleash a special prosecutor to investigate her.
“Sniffing and glowering, Mr. Trump prowled behind Mrs. Clinton as she presented herself again as the only adult on stage, the only one seeking to persuade the great majority of Americans that she shares their values and aspirations. Mr. Trump, by contrast, fell back on the tricks he has learned from his years in pro wrestling and reality television, making clear how deep his cynicism goes.
“Just before the debate, desperate to shift attention from his pattern of harassment, Mr. Trump sat hunched over a blank notepad in a hotel meeting room, encouraging four women to face the cameras and tell their stories of sexual victimization. “You went through a lot,” Mr. Trump coaxed one of the women flanking him, as he bent their allegations against Bill and Hillary Clinton to serve himself. The women’s claims deserved to be investigated and aired, and they have been, repeatedly.
“During the debate, Mr. Trump struggled once again to coherently explain his policies, instead wandering down twisting, shadowy alleyways in muttering pursuit of his various claims about Mrs. Clinton, including that she, not he, was responsible for his birther lie about President Obama. He complained that the moderators were ganging up on him and failing to question Mrs. Clinton about her private email server — immediately after they had done just that.
“Mr. Trump probably performed well enough to silence the 11-hour whispering campaign among Republicans about somehow ejecting him from the ticket. That means the G.O.P. will continue asking Americans to vote for a candidate who is debasing and trivializing our politics. During the debate, it seemed somewhere between poignant and futile to hear the moderators invite undecided voters to ask about his plans for the nation.
“When Mr. Trump so grandly accepted the Republican nomination in July, he said, “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves.” By then, though, he had already campaigned for months by beating up on vulnerable Americans, including minorities and the disabled. Only in recent days has the Republican establishment started to acknowledge the magnitude of his hypocrisy.
“The videotape disclosed Friday provided gruesome evidence that the Republican standard-bearer has for years used his powerful status to prey on women. Other revelations followed, including that in 2005 he told Howard Stern on his radio show that, when he owned the Miss Universe pageant, he made a practice of “inspecting” naked contestants backstage. “You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. … And you see these incredible-looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”
“Now, as he struggles to close the biggest deal of his lifetime, a woman is getting the better of him. That’s not surprising, but it is apt.”

Categories Clinton, Politics, Trump

Daily Kos: Paul Ryan’s Critique of Trump’s Misogyny is Equally Misogynistic

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2016 //
18

Reader Ellen Lubic drew my attention to this excellent analysis of Congressman Paul Ryan’s rejection of Donald Trump’s lewd, crude remarks about women.

I must that that when I read his comments online in an instant bulletin from CNN, I found them offensive. I was driving with friends to the airport in Las Vegas on my way home from a National Parks vacation, and I read his remarks out loud. He said, “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.”

My reaction? What? I don’t want to be put on a pedestal, championed and revered like a fragile piece of pottery. I just want to be treated the same as everyone else.

But this writer said it much better, because she knows the lengths Paul Ryan and Gus party have gone to take away women’s rights.

Excuse me? Who are you, Paul Ryan? One of King Arthur’s men? A knight of the Round Table declaring fealty to the Code of Chivalry?

Let’s get one thing straight. You are not my knight in shining armor.

I don’t need to be “championed” by you. And I certainly don’t want to be “revered” by you. As to your assertion that women should not be “objectified”? GTFO. The entire modern Republican party does nothing but objectify women. You deny our humanity daily. You have made it your number one mission to reduce us down to our uteri and said you, and you alone, control what happens to our bodies.

You hold entire hearings about women’s issues without inviting a single woman. When you do deign to allow women to speak, you condescend to, brow beat and aggressively attempt to shame them. You have launched a single-minded assault on the ability of poor women in this country to obtain healthcare. Championed our employer’s rights over our own when it comes to our private healthcare decisions. You have legislated that our doctors lie to us and rape us with ultrasound wands. In Texas, you played God by keeping a dead woman artificially “alive” so that she could serve as an incubator. In Indiana, your new hero, Mike Pence, legislated that women had to deliver aborted or miscarried fetal blood and tissue to funeral homes for burial or cremation and crusaded to severely punish women for having miscarriages in the first place.

And what about you, Paul Ryan? How have you personally “championed” women? Was it in 1998 when you said that women should be criminally prosecuted for terminating pregnancies? When you tried to prevent women serving overseas in our military from having abortions in U.S. military hospitals even when they paid for it out of their own pockets? How about when you worked with Todd Akin to narrow the legal definition of rape to “forcible rape”? Or maybe it was in 2009 when you co-sponsored the “Sanctity of Life” Act which declared a fertilized egg a “person” and outlawed abortions, most forms of contraception and in-vitro fertilization? The numerous times you have voted to defund Planned Parenthood? In 2011 when you supported the “Let Women Die Bill” that allowed hospitals to refuse to terminate pregnancies even when the woman’s life was in danger?

Was it when you opposed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act? Opposed paid family leave?

When. When have you ever “championed” women, Paul Ryan?

Donald Trump may be a crass misogynist who thinks women exist for his own pleasure but you, Paul Ryan, are just as bad if not worse. You don’t respect us. You seek to be master over us and I, for one, could do without your paternalistic brand of “championing”.

Read this great post and open the links. Hypocrisy through and through.

Categories Fraud, Politics, Trump

My Reflection on the Second Presidential Debate

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2016 //
236

I watched it all, with a growing sense of dismay. Once again, Trump was rude, abrasive, and couldn’t stop sniffing. When Clinton was speaking, he got up from his chair, lurked behind her, loomed over her, and it was incredibly distracting. He changed the subject and deflected as usual. His attacks on Bill Clinton were disgusting. Bill Clinton is not on the ballot. For a man who is a serial sexual abuser, a man who boasts of his sexual assaults, to complain about another man’s infidelity is a high level of hypocrisy. What I found so depressing was the small amount of time devoted to discussing actual issues that confront the nation. Trump talks in slogans; he will kill Obamacare and that will fix all the problems with spiraling costs. He will crush ISIS. He will do this and do that, but forget the details. He knows nothing about foreign issues and it is embarrassing to listen to him blabber on about Russia or Syria or anywhere outside of his social media orbit.

But, for me personally, the worst moment of the debate occurred when he said that if he were President, Hillary Clinton would be in jail. That sounded like the kind of threat or behavior that one expects to hear from a dictator. In democracies, winners are gracious in victory and form a government. They don’t pursue their opponents and threaten to jail them. This man is a psychopath. He is unfit to be anywhere near the Presidency.

He played to his hard-core white nationalist base. He gave them the Red Meat they love. He was the bully we have come to know and loathe.

As for the infamous sex tapes, where he bragged about grabbing women by their genitalia, he again said it was “locker room banter,” the kind of thing that men say to one another whenever they are together. If he attempted to apologize for his remarks, it was clear that he was not sincere. He still does not understand why women and men too would find his vulgar remarks offensive. But his debate coaches told him to be contrite, so he pretended. But it wasn’t a good pretense.

The idea that this man is the candidate of the Republican party is a stain on the party. It once claimed to be the party of “family values.” No more. If ever. If they accept this man afflicted with satyriasis as their leader, they lose all pretense of caring about family values, morality, decency, or respect for women.

Yuck! The level of discourse in this campaign has been driven down to potty talk and worse by the most unqualified candidate for the Presidency in modern times, maybe ever.

Categories Clinton, Trump

Just When You Thought You Had Heard the Worst from Trump….

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2016 //
29

CNN reviewed Trump’s frequent on-air conversations with shock-jock Howard Stern. Trump’s comments were sexist, deplorable, despicable, and showed his contempt for women. He is the personification of deplorable.

Worst of all, Trump tells Stern that he has his permission to call his daughter Ivanka “a piece of ass.”


Donald Trump engaged in crude and demeaning conversations about women over a 17-year-period with radio shock-jock Howard Stern, according to a review by CNN’s KFile of hours of newly uncovered audio.

Among the topics Trump discussed: his daughter Ivanka’s physique, having sex with women on their menstrual cycles, threesomes, and checking out of a relationship with women after they turn 35.

Trump’s long track record of making misogynistic comments and engaging in lewd conversations about sex took on a new and much darker tone on Friday night, when the Washington Post published audio of Trump, caught on a hot mic in 2005, bragging about how women let him do whatever he wants to them because he’s a celebrity.

While Trump’s comments — in which he describes forcing himself upon women — stand apart from anything he has said in the past, Trump has long engaged in sexually explicit banter over the years, particularly on Stern. Trump appeared on Stern’s radio program for decades, and while many of his appearances have been reported on, KFile’s review has turned up previously unreported examples of Trump engaging in crude conversations.

On Ivanka Trump’s physique

In more than one interview with Stern, Trump took part in conversations about Ivanka Trump’s appearance, including one about the size of her breasts.

In an October 2006 interview, Stern remarks that Ivanka “looks more voluptuous than ever,” and asked if she had gotten breast implants. Trump is willing to engage in the discussion about his own daughter, telling Stern that she did not get implants.

“She’s actually always been very voluptuous,” Trump responds. “She’s tall, she’s almost 6 feet tall and she’s been, she’s an amazing beauty.”

In another interview, from September 2004, Stern asks Trump if he can call Ivanka “a piece of ass,” to which Trump responds in the affirmative.

“My daughter is beautiful, Ivanka,” says Trump.

“By the way, your daughter,” says Stern.

“She’s beautiful,” responds Trump.

“Can I say this? A piece of ass,” Stern responds.

“Yeah,” says Trump.

Categories Trump

Ladies and Gentlemen: Is This the Next President of the United States?

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2016 //
87

Normally, we expect a certain medicum of dignity from those who seek to be President of the United States.

After all, the President is a role model for citizens, including children.

Right?

Watch this.

Categories Trump

Trump’s Comments on Women: Lewd, Lascivious, Disgusting

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2016 //
70

The biggest political story of the day confirms what people suspected about Donald Trump: he has a loathsome view of women as sex objects, eager to be touched by him. CNN posted his full statements. It contains language that I never permit on this blog.

I read it and was stunned that he would make these comments in the presence of other people. It is the worst kind of juvenile, locker-room insulting of women.

This is a man who looks on women with contempt and measures their worth by the size of their breasts. But that’s the least of what he said.

He is vulgar, crude, and an embarrassment to the Republican Party and to our nation.

Categories Trump

Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair on Donald Trump

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2016 //
14

Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, has known Donald Trump for more than 30 years. He has many stories to tell. You will find his article interesting. You will see the human side of The Donald. And yes, his hands are small.

Categories Trump
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