TRUMP - Just because.....................Naw, I just can't say it!
POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Monday, March 9, 2026 20:06
VIEWED: 244478
PAGE 53 of 170
The Washington Post fact-checked Donald Trump's big foreign policy speech.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/16/fact-checking-d
onald-trumps-major-speech-on-the-islamic-state/
Trump's Middle East position this week in 2016 flatly turns things 180 degrees from what he said back in the good old days of the early 21st Century. He supported the Iraq War in 2002-03. He favored a quick withdrawal in 2007. He supported the Libya war. He opposed getting involved in Syria. But, but!, BUT! these are all the things he said on Monday have contributed to the rise of ISIS and the destabilization of the Middle East.
In other words, by his own admission, everything he would have done as president would have been a disaster. Except that he doesn't admit it. He just lies about what his positions were. It's an amazing performance.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Here's a good lie......................
TRUMP - THE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY STIFFER (okay, that's a terrible headline)
His company owed more than $30 million in taxes "long-overdue taxes owed by the casinos founded by his friend Donald J. Trump" and paid only $5 million after Christie became governor. A Christie spokesman said that Christie was
NOT aware of the tax dispute:
"Brian Murray, a spokesman for Mr. Christie, said the governor had not been aware of the tax dispute and, therefore, could not comment on the terms of the settlement."
Really!? The all-knowing governor was NOT aware of the dispute. I'm a little surprised, but he also doesn't know his friend and dance partner Donald Trump.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-casinos%E2%80%99-tax-debt
-was-dollar30-million-then-chris-christie-took-office/ar-BBvHIH3?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
Trump Casinos’ Tax Debt Was $30 Million. Then Chris Christie Took Office.
An article by Trump's favorite newspaper, the NY Times, by RUSS BUETTNER
By the time Chris Christie became governor of New Jersey, the state’s auditors and lawyers had been battling for several years to collect long-overdue taxes owed by the casinos founded by his friend Donald J. Trump.
The total, with interest, had grown to almost $30 million. The state had doggedly pursued the matter through two of the casinos’ bankruptcy cases and even accused the company led by Mr. Trump of filing false reports with state casino regulators about the amount of taxes it had paid.
But the year after Governor Christie, a Republican, took office, the tone of the litigation shifted. The state entertained settlement offers. And in December 2011, after six years in court, the state agreed to accept just $5 million, roughly 17 cents on the dollar of what auditors said the casinos owed.
Sign Up For NYT Now's Morning Briefing Newsletter
Tax authorities sometimes settle for lesser amounts to avoid the costs and risks of further litigation, legal experts said, but the steep discount granted to the Trump casinos and the relationship between the two men raise inevitable questions about special treatment.
“You can’t tell whether there’s something problematic, but it’s pretty striking that this one was written down so much,” said David Skeel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who specializes in bankruptcy law and reviewed the case at the request of The New York Times.
The refusal by Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, to release his personal income tax returns has become a growing issue in the campaign. He has also boasted of his success in lowering his tax burden as a businessman, declaring last year in an interview on Fox News that only “a stupid person, a really stupid person, is paying a lot of taxes.”
By that measure, the deal with New Jersey looks remarkably shrewd. The casinos did far better, for example, than those that benefited from a program Mr. Christie introduced in 2014 in which the state agreed to consider reducing penalties for delinquent taxpayers but only if they caught up on all overdue taxes and interest.
Public records do not create a clear picture of how the agreement was reached. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump said she would be in touch regarding questions sent to her. But she did not reply further or respond to subsequent messages.
Brian Murray, a spokesman for Mr. Christie, said the governor had not been aware of the tax dispute and, therefore, could not comment on the terms of the settlement.
The Times discovered the agreement during a review of the thousands of documents filed in the bankruptcies of Mr. Trump’s casinos. The taxes went unpaid from 2002 through 2006, during which time Mr. Trump was leading the company as chairman and, until 2005, as its chief executive. He reaped millions of dollars in fees and bonuses from the company, even as it underperformed competitors, lost money every year and saw its stock collapse.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Christie met in 2002, when Mr.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump, celebrity
www.vox.com/2016/8/19/12527926/donald-trump-celebrity
Try to name the second most famous developer of commercial real estate in New York City and you’ll pretty quickly realize that you can’t. Trump doesn’t stand out from the crowd as the most famous person in this line of work — he’s the only famous person in this line of work. It turns out that at the end of the day, nobody is very interested in real estate development, and real estate developers are mostly obscure.
Trump, by contrast, is a true celebrity: a person who’s famous primarily for being famous.
He earns a lot of money, but his income derives from the fact that he hosts a television show, not from skill at building and running companies. He has business ventures, of course: Trump ties. Trump suits. Trump shirts. But these are celebrity endorsement deals. Stephen Curry has signature sneakers, and Usain Bolt has earned tens of millions of dollars endorsing everything from Gatorade to Visa. But Curry doesn’t run a clothing company any more than drinking Gatorade will let you run as fast as Bolt.
It happens to be the case that fame is a highly monetizable commodity, especially for famous people who are reasonably good on camera.
But there’s a difference between making money as a television star and celebrity endorser and making money as a person who builds and manages businesses. What makes Trump confusing is that the conceit of his television show was that he’s a talented businessman. But just because you see something on a TV show doesn’t make it true. Kit Harington can’t really return from death or lead a medieval army into battle, and David Duchovny doesn’t really solve crimes and arrest people.
Trump really was a businessman for a while, a real estate developer and then a casino mogul, but he was bad at it. He inherited a real estate empire from his father and drove it into bankruptcy. He walked away from the experience with fame. Fame that he was able to leverage, over time, into more fame that he leveraged into more money. It was clever, but it was ultimately savvy media work more than savvy business dealings.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump may get into media after losing
www.vox.com/2016/8/19/12527926/donald-trump-celebrity
Presidential politics remains decidedly stuck in the analog age.
Trump-style ideology has fared pretty well in a number of small European countries that use highly proportional electoral systems. In places like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands, impassioned minorities of populist nationalists have formed large parliamentary blocs that allow them to wield meaningful influence over national politics.
But in the United States, you need a majority — or something close to it — to win. It’s a framework that even in an age of high polarization has always rewarded candidates who are willing to sand down the hard edges of their ideologies in search of a broad audience.
Trump not only hasn’t succeeded at doing that, he’s also never made even a token effort to try.
But his campaign’s latest pivot may help set him up for the next iteration of his media career. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that “in recent months, Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have quietly explored becoming involved with a media holding, either by investing in one or by taking one over.” Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, two of the few major Super PAC donors in Trump’s corner, are also investors in Breitbart.
Roger Ailes, now working for Trump starting this week, is in need of a next act now that he’s been fired from Fox. And while Trump’s never had the skills necessary to be a good politician, he certainly has the right disposition for media success. Vanity Fair reported all the way back in June that he was interested in starting a new TV news channel. And Breitbart, for all its considerable success, doesn’t yet have the kind of major on-camera talent that Trump would provide.
www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/donald-trump-tv-network
http://bizarro.com/comics/august-19-2016 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
SAD!
‘Idiocracy’ Director Mike Judge: Fox Killed Our Anti-Trump Camacho Ads
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/19/idiocracy-director-mike-judg
e-rupert-murdoch-killed-our-anti-trump-camacho-ads.html
The filmmaker behind the futuristic satire and creator of HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ dishes on why the election season ads he’s been cooking up are ‘not going to happen.’
08.19.16 12:15 AM ET
Back in February, screenwriter Etan Cohen (not to be confused with Ethan Cohen), who’s written the celebrated comedy offerings King of the Hill, Idiocracy, and Tropic Thunder, fired off a tweet in reference to the political rise of former reality star Donald J. Trump:
Quote:It generated such a spirited response that Cohen reached out to longtime collaborator Mike Judge, the director of Idiocracy, and by June the word had spread that the two were cooking up a series of anti-Trump ads featuring the film’s President Camacho (full name: President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Drew Herbert Camacho), an ex-porn star and five-time wrestling champion played by the hilarious Terry Crews. They were simply waiting on 20th Century Fox, which owned the rights to the film, to sign off on the ads.
Etan Cohen @etanjc
I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.
11:27 AM - 24 Feb 2016
Well, according to Judge, it looks like Fox refused—and the ads are now dead.
“It kind of fell apart,” Judge tells The Daily Beast. “It was announced that they were anti-Trump, and I would’ve preferred to make them and then have the people decide. Terry Crews had wanted to just make some funny Camacho ads, and Etan [Cohen] and I had written a few that I thought were pretty funny, and it just fell apart. I wanted to put them out a little more quietly and let them go viral, rather than people announcing we’re making anti-Trump ads. Just let them be funny first. Doing something satirical like that is better if you just don’t say, ‘Here we come with the anti-Trump ads!’ Also, when Terry heard that announcement he wasn’t happy about it.
“I think also Fox… yeah, they… even though they’ve probably forgotten they still own it…” he continues, trailing off.
I don’t see Rupert Murdoch signing off on those, I tell him, since the Fox mogul is an avowed Trump supporter.
“Yeah. That’s the other thing. I think there was a roadblock there, too,” says Judge. “I just heard that they were put on the shelf, so it looks like they’re not going to happen.”
Judge, whose excellent HBO series Silicon Valley is up for six Emmy Awards—including Outstanding Comedy Series—is also amazed by how prescient 2006’s Idiocracy, about an “Average Joe” who finds himself transported 500 years in the future where everyone in America is a total fucking idiot, turned out to be.
“Three or four years ago, I started getting comments about it, people discovering it, and it just keeps building. Now every other Twitter comment I get is about Idiocracy, and how it’s a documentary now,” says Judge. “At first, I was just thinking, yeah, that’s nice to hear, but then very specific things, like Carl’s Jr. announcing that they were going to have a completely robotic, non-employee store—and it’s Carl’s Jr. in the movie. Then there’s this thing called the Fellatio Café in Switzerland where you get blowjobs with coffee, and we had the Starbucks thing in there. And then Donald Trump being in the WWF before, and talking about his penis size. It’s just one specific thing after another!”
“It’s surreal,” he adds, chuckling. “I didn’t want Idiocracy to get popular by the world getting stupider faster. I guess I was 450 years off! But yeah, it’s a tad bit scary!”
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
As far as I can tell, where Manafort got his money before Drumpf hired him is a non-issue.
Okay, I'll play. Using your logic, you can never complain about the fact that Clarence Thomas was once a lawyer on the payroll of Monsanto. Similarly, you should have zero concern for where or how Hillary got her money. Right?
You don't have *ANY* problem with a guy who was on the payroll of - and acting as a key consultant to - a right-wing, pro-Putin Russian-backed oligarchical strongman the becoming the architect of the presidential campaign of the Republican party's official nominee?
You've changed more than a little bit, Signym. Politics made strange bedfellows, but you seem to be in bed with a whole bunch of really evil motherfuckers. Or should I say childfuckers, since there's still the question of Trump's rape of at least one 13 year old girl.
But hey, whatever you have to sell yourself so you can sleep at night, right?
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
"Paul Krugman says top Republicans are willing to curry favor with bigots in the service of tax cuts for the rich."
And Signym is the living proof that at least some of the bigots are all ears.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
That cartoon is HI-larious!
Plus, it's true. Trump is prepping for the gigantic landslide pummeling he's gonna get come November.
Why else would he hire that dude from Breitbart and enlist that horny
dude from Faux.
That could be a Captain Obvious commercial.
SGG
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump may get into media after losing
www.vox.com/2016/8/19/12527926/donald-trump-celebrity
Presidential politics remains decidedly stuck in the analog age.
Trump-style ideology has fared pretty well in a number of small European countries that use highly proportional electoral systems. In places like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands, impassioned minorities of populist nationalists have formed large parliamentary blocs that allow them to wield meaningful influence over national politics.
But in the United States, you need a majority — or something close to it — to win. It’s a framework that even in an age of high polarization has always rewarded candidates who are willing to sand down the hard edges of their ideologies in search of a broad audience.
Trump not only hasn’t succeeded at doing that, he’s also never made even a token effort to try.
But his campaign’s latest pivot may help set him up for the next iteration of his media career. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that “in recent months, Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have quietly explored becoming involved with a media holding, either by investing in one or by taking one over.” Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, two of the few major Super PAC donors in Trump’s corner, are also investors in Breitbart.
Roger Ailes, now working for Trump starting this week, is in need of a next act now that he’s been fired from Fox. And while Trump’s never had the skills necessary to be a good politician, he certainly has the right disposition for media success. Vanity Fair reported all the way back in June that he was interested in starting a new TV news channel. And Breitbart, for all its considerable success, doesn’t yet have the kind of major on-camera talent that Trump would provide.
www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/donald-trump-tv-network
http://bizarro.com/comics/august-19-2016
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump's Companies Are At Least $651 Million In Debt
The $651 million includes only companies Trump owns outright. He also is a limited owner of companies with debts of nearly $2 billion.
http://patch.com/us/across-america/donald-trump-owned-businesses-are-l
east-650m-debt-new-york-times-investigation
. . . Trump's holdings will present serious conflicts should he win the White House, regardless of whether he decides to fully disclose all of his investments.
Trump has said he would likely turn over control of his companies to his children while in office, which would do nothing to alter decisions that could determine whether he'd leave office even wealthier than when he got in or if he will leave the White House damaged financially by yet more defaulted loans, more settlement negotiations and more attempts to save his companies using bankruptcy protections.
From the Times:
Quote:www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/donald-trump-debt.html
As president, Mr. Trump would have substantial sway over monetary and tax policy, as well as the power to make appointments that would directly affect his own financial empire. He would also wield influence over legislative issues that could have a significant impact on his net worth, and would have official dealings with countries in which he has business interests.
The investigation by the Times could not know all Trump's debts because of Trump's continued refusal to release his tax returns.
The Times slogged on without them, identified more than 30 Trump assets in the United States and then searched for everything it could find on those companies. The investigation, the Times reported, covered thousands of pages of public information, including loan documents, land leases and property deeds but did not include Trump businesses operating overseas.
By the end of the search, the Times had discovered Trump holds significant interests in three companies that went deep in debt as he served as a limited owner. Together, the Times reported, the companies are nearly $2 billion in debt.
None of that debt was acknowledged on the financial disclosure forms Trump filed in May, fulfilling a requirement for all candidates running for federal office.
Congress passed the disclosure law in 1978 intending to increase government transparency and reduce conflicts of interest. It would seem, then, that the law would require candidates to include some level of detail on debts and assets.
It does not.
Candidates are permitted to describe their financial information in ranges so broad they're almost useless. Trump managed to fulfill the financial disclosure requirement despite his failure to offer any valid information about his wealth or liabilities. . . .
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Editorial: Taxing transparency
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump needs to reveal his tax returns.
Updated: August 21, 2016 3:40pm
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Taxing-t
ransparency-9176120.php
A curious double-standard has become evident in this presidential election year.
If you want to apply for any one of dozens of top positions in the Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security or a number of other federal agencies, you’re required to submit to Senate investigators your income tax returns. If the IRS is auditing you, you’ll probably have to answer detailed questions about why.
But if you’re running for president, there’s no law requiring you to release your tax returns.
Donald Trump is the first major presidential candidate in modern history to keep his tax records under wraps. Such secrecy would be troublesome from any presidential candidate, but it’s particularly unacceptable from this year’s GOP nominee.
Trump’s entire campaign is predicated on boasts about his success in business, but there’s growing evidence he’s all hat and not as much cattle as he claims. One of his top aides has stated he’s worth $10 billion, but an analysis undertaken by Forbes magazine suggests he’s worth less than half of that. Here in the city that gave birth to Enron, we’ve learned the hard way we shouldn’t trust corporate executives who say, “Trust me, the money’s in the bank.”
We also can’t trust Trump’s bragging about creating jobs when he won’t release returns that would outline the extent of his business holdings. A cornerstone of his populist rhetoric is criticism of major U.S. corporations shipping jobs overseas, but without his tax records we don’t know how much his own fortune has been bolstered by overseas investments.
Trump also appears to have made a habit of vastly exaggerating to voters how much money he’s donated to charities. The Washington Post spent weeks doggedly trying to dig up proof the candidate followed through on promises to give away millions of dollars, but apparently the truth isn’t out there in the public record.
By contrast, anybody interested in Hillary Clinton’s finances can pore through her tax returns dating back to 1977. Those documents have been a touchstone for journalists and opposition researchers investigating the byzantine ways in which the Clintons have cashed in during their decades on the public stage.
What’s happened in this campaign shouldn’t be allowed to happen again. Congress needs to make this important political tradition a matter of law by passing legislation that will require presidential candidates to publicly release their tax returns.
In the meantime, voters deciding how to cast their ballots for the presidency in November need to consider a fair and simple question: What’s Donald Trump hiding in his tax returns?
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME