June 22, 2016

I Told the Truth About a Donald Trump Rally. Then the Trolls Threatened My Life.

As a college professor, I teach creative writing to some 50 students a semester at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, a town of 30,000 about an hour north of Savannah. Outside of class, most of my time is spent either chasing tenure or working on my novels. By trade I write fiction, but this past year I’ve begun wading into political writing as a side gig, a practice that finds me, on debate and primary nights, hunkered down at my laptop with a beer and knocking out a few pages of musings and prognostications for Atticus Review, an online literary magazine.

This is how, last Tuesday, I found myself driving five hours to Greensboro, North Carolina, to report on a Donald Trump rally and live-tweet the proceedings to all 1,400 of my followers.


Afterward, having finally escaped the madness, I pulled into a bar-and-grill for some barbecue pork and a much-needed drink. I checked my phone. There were texts from more than a dozen friends letting me know I was trending on Twitter and that my tweets had been liked and retweeted by the hundreds. I’d gained thousands of followers in a matter of hours, and I sat there watching my totals increase.


I’d never expected my coverage to go viral, and the success left me conflicted. The casual racism and not-so-casual misogyny and homophobia I’d witnessed in the Greensboro Coliseum had left me sick in the stomach. After days of mourning with my friends in the LGBTQ community over the massacre in Orlando, it felt sordid to benefit from overhearing a Trump supporter shout, “The gays had it coming!”


All the ghastly rest of the story:

https://newrepublic.com/article/134534/told-truth-donald-trump-rally-trolls-threatened-life

June 22, 2016

The NYT review and fact check of the trumpster's speech

Donald Trump’s Speech: What You Missed

By MICHAEL BARBARO, AMY CHOZICK, PATRICK HEALY, ALAN RAPPEPORT and DAVID E. SANGERJUNE 22, 2016

nytimes.com | June 22, 2016

Donald J. Trump has had a rough week, overseeing a shake-up of his campaign staff and reporting a dismal fund-raising total. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is looking to get things back on track on Wednesday with a speech attacking his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Here are the highlights:

<snip>


• Mr. Trump defended his business record, recalling that he began his career in Brooklyn with a small loan and built a business worth more than $10 billion. “I have always had a talent for building businesses and, importantly, creating jobs,” he said. “That is a talent our country desperately needs.”

Fact Check: This substantially understates the financial assistance that Mr. Trump received from his father, Fred, a major real estate developer in New York City. The decades-old “loan” was for $1 million, a handsome sum that is by no means “small.” But the elder Mr. Trump did not stop there: He handed his son control of a large company with significant property holdings across the city, whose substantial value is difficult to quantify or overstate. Without this leg up, it’s unclear whether Mr. Trump could have built the business empire that he has.

• Mr. Trump said that Mrs. Clinton “has spent her entire life making money for special interests — and I will tell you, she has made plenty of money for them, and she has been taking plenty of money out for herself.”

Fact Check: This assertion is mostly false. Early in her career, Mrs. Clinton worked for the Children’s Defense Fund and as a lawyer for the House impeachment inquiry against President Richard Nixon, and later worked at the private Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, focusing on intellectual property and other cases. Much of her career has been devoted to government service, as first lady, United States senator and secretary of state. But Mrs. Clinton did receive millions of dollars in paid speeches to banks and others and has served on the boards of corporations like Walmart. Mr. Trump argues that she also made money for big donors through her activities at the State Department and her family foundation, but he has not offered clear, convincing proof.

<snip>

read:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/us/politics/donald-trump-speech-highlights.html

June 22, 2016

I think Trump could turn me into "a broken glass voter" for HRC

And it's hardly a secret that I don't have either a high opinion of her or high expectations of a Clinton presidency.

But Trump?

He is unspeakable. Loathsome. Hitleresque in his appeal. The worst product of America imaginable.

It's true I think it's slightly more likely than not that he won't make it to November, but the republican party is directly responsible for him.

The worst part of his ghastly speech this morning- and it was all bad- was his unmitigated gall to reach out to the LGBT community.

This is the Evangelical Advisory Board he named yesterday after meeting with the most homophobic hateful people in this country:

Executive board members include:

•Michele Bachmann - Former Congresswoman
•A.R. Bernard - Senior Pastor and CEO, Christian Cultural Center
•Mark Burns - Pastor, Harvest Praise and Worship Center
•Tim Clinton - President, American Association of Christian Counselors
•Kenneth and Gloria Copeland - Founders, Kenneth Copeland Ministries
•James Dobson - Author, Psychologist and Host, My Family Talk
•Jerry Falwell, Jr. - President, Liberty University
•Ronnie Floyd - Senior Pastor, Cross Church
•Jentezen Franklin - Senior Pastor, Free Chapel
•Jack Graham - Senior Pastor, Prestonwood Baptist Church
•Harry Jackson - Senior Pastor, Hope Christian Church
•Robert Jeffress - Senior Pastor, First Baptist Church of Dallas
•David Jeremiah - Senior Pastor, Shadow Mountain Community Church
•Richard Land – President, Southern Evangelical Seminary
•James MacDonald – Founder and Senior Pastor, Harvest Bible Chapel
•Johnnie Moore - Author, President of The KAIROS Company
•Robert Morris - Senior Pastor, Gateway Church
•Tom Mullins – Senior Pastor, Christ Fellowship­
•Ralph Reed - Founder, Faith and Freedom Coalition
•James Robison - Founder, Life OUTREACH International
•Tony Suarez - Executive Vice President, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference
•Jay Strack - President, Student Leadership University
•Paula White - Senior Pastor, New Destiny Christian Center
•Tom Winters - Attorney, Winters and King, Inc.
•Sealy Yates – Attorney, Yates and Yates

Trump is poison.

June 22, 2016

I'm listening to tRump's speech this morning. AMA.

He looks very subdued. He's using a teleprompter. He's spouting about how great his business but in a much more low key way than at his rallies. Says only he can save us. Not Hillary. It's clear he's going for the whole bashing establishment pols and I'm the outsider. Everything is rigged by Hillary and her cohorts.

Begging for Bernie voters. fuck you asswipe.

"Yesterday, she even tried to attack me"

Here's the truth, I started out not so long ago with a small loan and built a business worth 10 billion. That's what I'll do for America.

As Mark Shields said a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump on a teleprompter is about as thrilling as listening to someone read the yellow pages.

June 22, 2016

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. From a Republican Analyst.

Donald Trump’s political suicide mission



By Mike Murphy

Washington Post


Mike Murphy is a Republican consultant who hosts the new podcast “Radio Free GOP.”


Here’s a pitch for a new reality TV show. Political neophytes run for office; then, when the harsh reality of running a serious national campaign thoroughly punctures their cocky naiveté, they are fired. Donald Trump is already starring in the pilot.

Forget, for a moment, all of Trump’s epic character flaws. A new question has seized the campaign: Can the self-proclaimed world-class business wizard actually manage anything? His campaign’s spiral into collapse proves he cannot. Let us count the ways:

Basic targeting. Presidential campaigns come down to a handful of swing states and a relatively small group of persuadable swing voters who ultimately decide the election. That’s why campaigns invest so much money in paid advertising and on-the-ground organizing in those key states. Trump has done neither. Instead he is careening around the country in his beloved jet, chasing elusive high-dollar donor support in Republican base states. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is gleefully beating his brains out in swing states with harsh but effective negative advertising — none of which is being answered and rebutted by the Trump campaign as his polling numbers tank.

Fundraising. Even if Trump wanted to rebut those Clinton attack ads, he lacks the money to fire back. Recent Federal Election Commission numbers show the Trump campaign with a ludicrously low $1.3 million cash on hand. The money maven is totally broke, which means his voter contact effort has gone silent. If Trump did put up millions in advertising to push back on Clinton, his campaign would have to join several earlier Trump enterprises in declaring bankruptcy. Meanwhile, what relatively little money the braggadocious billionaire has invested in his campaign has mostly been structured as a loan from, you guessed it, Trump. So despite his endless promises during the primary, Trump is showing no actual interest in self-funding his effort. Instead he’s hoping donors pay him back for the cost of bouncing around in his garish airplane. It’s no surprise that so few donors are falling for this suckers’ ploy.

Message. Trump’s pitchfork rhetoric played well in the GOP primary; winning him about 44 percent of the voters. But the voters he needs most now — college-educated white women and Hispanics — are giving Trump record unfavorable ratings in recent polls. It’s almost as though he is trying to offend them. Well, it’s working.

Ground war. Person-to-person campaigning is effective, but it doesn’t happen without a well-run ground organization heavily linked to the metrics provided by modern digital marketing technology. Trump is doing none of this. He seems to think holding rallies with voters who already support him is the campaign activity that counts. That’s not strategy; it’s egomania.


<snip>

read:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-political-suicide-mission/2016/06/22/40b55a28-3876-11e6-9ccd-d6005beac8b3_story.html

June 22, 2016

"He could do Shakespeare, he could do Roddenberry. Nothing looked like a stretch"

Great, established actors always make moviegoing more pleasurable and rewarding. But an even finer pleasure is that of spotting new, exciting, young actors and watching them grow. Anton Yelchin, who died Sunday at age 27, was one of those. You might have seen him, as a teenager, in small roles on television in the early to mid 2000s, in shows like The Practice and NYPD Blue. Even before that, as a child actor, he gave a lovely, uncontrived performance in Scott Hicks’ supernatural drama Hearts in Atlantis (2001), as an 11-year-old boy who’s befriended by an enigmatic loner, played by Anthony Hopkins.


It’s heartbreaking to look at that movie just now, to see how Yelchin, even as a kid, knew how much an actor can give by holding back: So many child actors chomp down hard, but even in that early role, Yelchin already held the secret to being breezy and serious at once. Processing the news of his death is just too sad: Instead, let’s approach his IMDb profile with the joy and wonder it deserves. Because even within the context of a tragically abbreviated career, the range of roles, and challenges, Yelchin accepted is astonishing.

Yelchin had come to America as an infant from Russia. His parents were figure-skating champions, and he had said that he might have become a skater, too, except he showed no aptitude for the sport. He was as graceful as a skater, though, both physically and in terms of what he could do with a role—as an actor he could pull off the equivalent of a triple axel and never show any strain. He could make a mediocre picture, like Nick Cassavetes’ 2006 Alpha Dog, worth watching—just by entering a scene, he’d bring light with him. And in terrific movies with strong ensembles, like Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive, he had a way of standing out, subtly, even as he opened up space for the performers around him. It can take actors years to learn how to be that open and fluid (and some never do).

Yelchin may be best known to audiences as Chekhov in the rebooted Star Trek franchise: He’s been wonderful in that role, coming off as both gentle-hearted and tenacious, and it’s a salve to know that we’ll see him soon enough in Justin Lin’s But Yelchin also took many smaller and possibly more demanding roles, often working with directors known for making smart, bold pictures on a small scale: He was unnervingly seductive as the purring, arrogant Cloten in Michael Almereyda’s 2014 adaptation of Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s most underloved plays. He was also willing to take a chance on relative newcomers, like Gabe Klinger, whose first fiction feature, Porto, featuring Yelchin, will be released this year. Even in a horror film like Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 Green Room, in which he played a punk singer terrorized by backwoods skinheads, he was uncompromisingly graceful.

<snip>

read:http://time.com/4374934/anton-yelchin-tribute/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter

June 22, 2016

this story is ginning up fury and outrage on the right. Never mind that it's false

Never mind that it demonizes Syrians. Never mind that someone or someones entirely innocent will be attacked and likely killed. And yeah, I hold tRump partially responsible for this sick hysteria.

Authorities are denying reports that Syrians gang-raped a child at knife-point in a Twin Falls apartment complex earlier this month, saying the false claims are being spread to incite anti-refugee sentiments.

“There were no Syrians involved, there was no knife involved, there was no gang-rape,” Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs said Monday morning.

His comments largely refute several differing accounts about the incident circulating on anti-refugee resettlement and conspiracy websites and anti-Muslim blogs. Most of those accounts claim a group of Syrian refugees sexually assaulted a mentally disabled girl at knife-point June 2 in the laundry facilities of Fawnbrook Apartments, a low-income housing complex in Twin Falls, and that the attack was celebrated by the perpetrators’ families as city officials orchestrated a cover-up.

Investigators and the prosecutor were quick to dismiss nearly all those claims Monday. Loebs said he didn’t want to “fan the flames of anti-Syrian refugee people” but suspects the false reports are the work of a local group opposed to refugee resettlement who hoped to stir up trouble by claiming the incident involved Syrian refugees who committed a violent sexual assault.


<snip>

read:http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/state/idaho/article84829787.html

June 22, 2016

Actor crushed to death by his jeep, shines a spotlight on a known problem with the vehicle

The death of the actor Anton Yelchin, killed when his Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled backward down a driveway and crushed him against a mailbox pillar last weekend, has cast a public spotlight on a problem with some models of Jeeps and other Fiat Chrysler vehicles.

But for the company, there is nothing new about the issue — which federal regulators first flagged last August.

The question is why, nearly a year later, Fiat Chrysler has still not come up with a fix for the problem, which has now been linked to hundreds of accidents, dozens of injuries and now — potentially — a well-publicized death.

The company, which issued a recall notice on more than one million affected vehicles in April, will say only it is still working on a solution, there was no decision about a recall until this year and there has been no delay. It has written to federal regulators that the remedy will include a software change and “an additional mechanism to mitigate the effect of operator error.”

<snip>


read:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/anton-yelchins-death-highlights-a-known-issue-with-jeeps.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/business/jeep-that-crushed-anton-yelchin-had-been-recalled.html

June 22, 2016

20 Congress members send Obama letter requesting protection of Palestinian children

from Israeli abuses

Salon | Wednesday, Jun 22, 2016 07:59 AM EDT

Twenty Congress members have called on President Obama to take action to protect the rights of Palestinian children.

The lawmakers sent the president a letter on June 20, urging him to appoint a “special envoy for Palestinian youth” in order to monitor the Israeli government’s violation of Palestinian children’s human rights.

The letter (embedded below), notes that Palestinian children are “growing up under military occupation with very few opportunities to improve their lives.”

The letter describes the occupation as “an unimaginably difficult and at times hopeless environment,” where children “live under the constant fear of arrest detention and violence at the hands of the Israeli military.”

Israel’s illegal military occupation marked its 49th anniversary earlier this month. Nearly half, 46 percent, of the roughly 4.7 million Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied territories are minors under 18 years of age.

<snip>

read:http://www.salon.com/2016/06/22/20_congress_members_send_obama_letter_requesting_protection_of_palestinian_children_from_israeli_abuses/

June 22, 2016

Have you ever been to tRump's website? Wowzer.

This is the issues page. Unhinged. Batshit crazy.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/issues/