Peter Lemkin Wrote:

Cliff Varnell Wrote:Trump said:

"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks."

He paused. Someone in the crowd shouts "2nd Amendment!"

Trump continues:

"Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

Forget the dog whistles -- kill Clinton is the clear message.

The MSM has reported that several contacts were made by the Secret Service to either Trump personally or his staff over the comments. So, apparently the SS took it seriously or as potentially serious. He may well have meant only the political power of NRA People, but I'm quite sure there are some who took it quite literally as 'using their guns' to 'deal with' Clinton; so how he really meant it hardly matters - it was to some of his admirers an incitement to violence. Between now and the election I'm quite sure he will come up with even greater 'bloopers'. The man is just brain dead as far as political savvy goes - and that is what most of his admirers love about him...he is just like them.

Quote: Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump Aug 10 Reuters just announced that Secret Service never spoke to me or my campaign. Made up story by @CNN is a hoax. Totally dishonest.

Magda Hassan Wrote:

Peter Lemkin Wrote:

Cliff Varnell Wrote:Trump said:

"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks."

He paused. Someone in the crowd shouts "2nd Amendment!"

Trump continues:

"Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

Forget the dog whistles -- kill Clinton is the clear message.

The MSM has reported that several contacts were made by the Secret Service to either Trump personally or his staff over the comments. So, apparently the SS took it seriously or as potentially serious. He may well have meant only the political power of NRA People, but I'm quite sure there are some who took it quite literally as 'using their guns' to 'deal with' Clinton; so how he really meant it hardly matters - it was to some of his admirers an incitement to violence. Between now and the election I'm quite sure he will come up with even greater 'bloopers'. The man is just brain dead as far as political savvy goes - and that is what most of his admirers love about him...he is just like them.

But Trump says No. Didn't happen.

Quote: Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump Aug 10 Reuters just announced that Secret Service never spoke to me or my campaign. Made up story by @CNN is a hoax. Totally dishonest.

Quote:By Alana Wise | WASHINGTON
A federal official on Wednesday said the U.S. Secret Service had not formally spoken with Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign regarding his suggestion a day earlier that gun rights activists could stop Democratic rival Hillary Clinton from curtailing their access to firearms.
Following Trump's comment at a rally on Tuesday in which he suggested that gun rights activists could stop Clinton from appointing liberal anti-gun justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, a federal official familiar with the matter told Reuters that there had been no formal conversations between the Secret Service and the Trump campaign.
Earlier CNN had reported that there had been multiple conversations between the campaign and the agency.
"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks," Trump told a North Carolina campaign rally on Tuesday. "Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know," he added, leading some critics to believe Trump was referring to gun violence against his rival.
The controversy came as the campaign tried to stay on message after a contentious previous week. Trump weathered criticism within his own party for delaying endorsements of fellow Republicans and for a prolonged clash with the family of a fallen Muslim American U.S. Army captain.

The Summer of the Shill

"Trump is considered so dangerous that many journalists are beginning to be concerned that admitting the truth of negative reports of any kind about the Democrats might make them complicit in the election of the American Hitler." Don Emmert/Getty

By Matt Taibbi
22 hours ago

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Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news.
"For news about Russia, Radio Liberty," he said. "For news about America, Soviet newspapers." He smiled. "Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others."

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[URL="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/every-high-profile-republican-who-refuses-to-back-trump-w434068"]
[/URL]GOP Defectors: Every High-Profile Republican Who Refuses to Back TrumpSo far 113 Republicans who've worked in government have said publicly they won't vote for the GOP nominee

American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.

Like the old adage about quarterbacks if you think you have two good ones, you probably have none this basically means we have no credible news media left. Apart from a few brave islands of resistance, virtually all the major news organizations are now fully in the tank for one side or the other.
The last month or so of Trump-Hillary coverage may have been the worst stretch of pure journo-shilling we've seen since the run-up to the Iraq war. In terms of political media, there's basically nothing left on the air except Trump-bashing or Hillary-bashing.
Take last week's news cycle:
Red-state media obsessed over a series of emails about the Clinton Foundation obtained by Judicial Watch (a charter member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy") as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit. The emails hinted that Foundation donors might have had special access to Hillary Clinton's State Department.
Meanwhile, the cable-news channels consumed by Democrat-leaning audiences, MSNBC and CNN, spent most of last week hammering Donald Trump's latest outrages, especially the "the Second Amendment people" comments seeming to incite violence against Hillary Clinton or her judicial appointments.
Practically every story on non-conservative cable last week was a Democratic Party news flash: Reagan's daughter blasts Trump's comments! MoreRepublicans defect to support Hillary! GOP, expecting Trump loss, shifts funds to down-ballot races! Khizr Khan challenges McCain to Dump Trump! Trump's worst offense was mocking disabled reporter, poll finds!
It's not that stations were wrong to denounce Trump's comments. He deserves it all. But he's not the only stupid, lying, corrupt politician in the world, which is the impression one could easily get watching certain stations these days.
These all-Trump, all-the-time story lineups are like Fox in reverse. The commercial media has devolved, finally, into two remarkably humorless messaging platforms.
What's crucial to understand is that a great many commercial media outlets now are not so much liberal-leaning as Democratic-Party leaning.
There's a huge difference between advocacy journalism and electoral advocacy. Not just occasionally but all the time now, private news organizations are doing the work that political parties used to have to pay for in the form of ads.
In the same way that Fox used to (and probably still does) save on reporting and research costs by simply regurgitating talking points from the RNC, blue-leaning cable channels are running segments and online reports that are increasinglyindistinguishable from Democratic Party messaging.
Hillary Clinton speaks with reporters as she departs after meeting with Senate Democrats during their luncheon gathering at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on July 14th, 2016.[/FONT] Jonathan Ernst/Reuters[/FONT]Trump really sent this problem into overdrive. He is considered so dangerous that many journalists are beginning to be concerned that admitting the truth of negative reports of any kind about the Democrats might make them complicit in the election of the American Hitler.

There's some logic in that, but it's flawed logic. When journalists start acting like politicians, we pretty much always end up botching things even more politically and crippling our businesses to boot.
Our job is to grope around promiscuously for stories on all sides, like dogs sniffing fire hydrants. Trying to fill any other role leads to trouble. It's the media version of the Bull Durham rule: "Don't think, it can only hurt the ball club."
Just look at the history of Fox and its satellite organizations.
Yes, the Murdoch empire has succeeded in accruing enormous power across the globe. In the United States, its impact on political affairs has been incalculable. It's led us into war, paralyzed Democratic presidencies, helped launch movements like the Tea Party and effectively spread so much disinformation that huge majorities of Republicans still doubt things like the birthplace of Barack Obama.
But Fox's coverage has been so overwhelmingly one-sided that it has lost forever the ability to convince non-conservatives of anything. Rupert Murdoch has turned into the Slime Who Cried Wolf. Even when Murdoch gets hold of a real story, he usually can't reach more than an inch outside his own dumbed-down audience.
Worse still, when you shill as constantly as his outlets have, even your most enthusiastic audience members very quickly learn to see through you.
This is a problem because if there ever comes a time when you want to convince your own audience of hard truths, you'll suddenly find them not nearly as trusting and loyal as you'd thought. Deep down, they'll have known all along you were full of it.

"Our job is to grope around promiscuously for stories on all sides, like dogs sniffing fire hydrants. Trying to fill any other role leads to trouble."

This happened to many Republican/conservative media figures in the past year.
The world may never have heard a yawn louder than the one evinced by flyover audiences in January, when the National Review gathered 20 prominent conservatives, headlined by Glenn Beck, to demand that Republican voters draw a line in the sand against Trump. It was an unprecedented show of media unity and determination.
Trump casually walked over the red-pundit-Maginot-line and raced straight to the nomination from there.
This was a powerful lesson. Media power comes from trust and respect, and both are eroded quickly if you only ever give people what they want to hear.
The formula for profits in the news business has grown stale. Commercial news shows now are subsisting on audiences of mostly older viewers who tend to enjoy programming that simply bashes whatever party it is they've grown to hate over the years, be they Republicans or Democrats. The median age of both Fox and MSNBC viewers is over 60.
But young audiences in particular tend to be incredibly turned off by the media-as-cheerleaders model of reporting. News audiences among the young have in recent years declined rapidly, mirroring a corresponding loss of trust in major-party politics.
"Garbage, lies, propaganda, repetitive and boring," is how a University of Texas researcher described the perceptions of young people vis a vis the news. Corporate news directors, much like the leaders of the Republican and Democratic Parties, seem blissfully unconcerned with the changing attitudes of their future customer base.
They'll be in for a huge shock five or 10 years from now when more people are getting their news from independent web content streamed to them through video games or online shopping platforms than they do from people like Wolf Blitzer.
Certainly that won't change if the "MSM" devolves completely into a McDonald's/Burger King situation where the major media splits into Trump Sucks or Hillary Sucks outlets. Forget about the fact that it's boring. From now on, how will we know if a real scandal hits?
The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption. This setup just doesn't work.
Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is seen on a camera monitor as he speaks during a campaign event on July 28th, 2016 in Davenport, Iowa.[/FONT] Joshua Lott/Getty[/FONT]For one thing, if most of your staff is busy all day working up negative stories about Republicans, that dramatically lowers the likelihood that they'll develop sources with info about Democratic corruption.

Moreover, even if you do make an effort to look at both sides, stories usually must be picked up by outlets across the spectrum to have an impact. That happens less and less in the partisan age.
Last year, the New York Times dipped a toe into the "Clinton Cash" material and did its potentially damaging "Uranium One" story about a series of suspicious donations to the Clinton Foundation. The story was soundly reported and forced the Clinton campaign to admit to "mistakes" in its disclosures.
But the response of other non-conservative outlets was mostly silence and/or damage control. That left it to mostly circulate in the Washington Times and Breitbart and the Daily Caller, rendering it automatically illegitimate with most blue-state audiences.
Some people will say that is because the Uranium One/Clinton Foundation matter simply isn't newsworthy. Maybe not. But if it isn't, are we sure we would know?
Right-wing audiences, almost irrespective of source, already discount most scoops about Republicans. That means even potentially devastating stories, like the troubling sexual misconduct lawsuit against Trump and the infamous Jeffrey Epstein involving a 13-year-old victim and an adult witness, will be dismissed out of hand as just more politicized coverage.
The public hates us reporters in the best of times, when we're doing our jobs correctly, merely being conniving, prying little busybodies forever getting up into peoples' business.
But the summer of Trump could easily turn into an Alamo moment for the press. There are reporters who are quietly promising themselves they'll go back to being independent and above the fray in November, after we're past the threat of a Trump presidency.
But just ask the National Review: Once you jump in the politicians' side of the pool, it's not so easy to get out again. And what will they think of us then? Is there a word for "lower than scum?"


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Peter Lemkin Wrote:This is put out by conservatives as reasons why not to vote for Trump, but it works as well for progressives. Facts are facts...and here are on a small number of ones on which Trump has completely reversed his positions.

Magda Hassan Wrote:

Peter Lemkin Wrote:This is put out by conservatives as reasons why not to vote for Trump, but it works as well for progressives. Facts are facts...and here are on a small number of ones on which Trump has completely reversed his positions.

Almost makes me want to vote for him.

It looks from that record he has always been a Democrat and certainly closer to Bernie than Obama. And his current bid to use the Republican apparatus to get into the White House is making him say stupid things to do so by appealing to the weird fauna and flora that now inhabit it.

Drew Phipps Wrote:On tonight's broadcast, Sean Hannity (while interviewing Newt Gingrinch) calls deserting GOP candidates "crybabies." He said the ex-candidates (like Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, (and, I presume, Mitt Romney) who refuse to support Trump) are "crybabies who packed up their toys and went home."

Looks like Trump's name calling tactics have infected another sector of our society. Where is Roger Ailes, to ride herd on these obnoxious talking heads, when you need him?

Oh, right.

Quote: Trump also reportedly is consulting Roger Ailes, the former CEO of Fox News who was recently forced out amid sexual harassment charges, to help coach him for the impending presidential debates.