webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

TRUMP2

---

5/16 see main for older

TRUMP 15 INDICT 10 23

trump pres newer

tag: trmp

---

---

aha not pm:

brexit and trump WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED BUT FOR GT RECSSION, JUST AS WEIMER COLLAPSE --> HITLER WW2 the men who stole the world prime/11 23 wolfe?

---

---

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/revealed-how-hollywood-moguls-sat-shocking-apprentice-tapes-and-helped-trump-get

---

big speech draws on peter s clintoN cash and another book bogus:

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/trumps-attack-on-clintons-character/

Summary

Donald Trump’s once delayed, and much anticipated, speech on Hillary Clinton’s character, included numerous false and misleading statements:

Analysis

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, originally planned to deliver a speech attacking Hillary Clinton’s character on June 13. He postponed it because of the mass shooting a day earlier in Orlando by an avowed follower of the terrorist Islamic State. Trump gave his speech in New York on June 22.

In his speech, Trump described Clinton, the Democratic presumptive nominee, as “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency,” and laid out his case against her. But his rhetoric was not always supported by the facts.

The 3 a.m. Call

:{:{Trump falsely claimed that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.” Two emails from Clinton show that she was awake after it was learned that Stevens had died in the attack on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi.}:

}:

We have written before about Trump’s repeated claim that “instead of taking charge” during the Benghazi attacks, then-Secretary of State Clinton “decided to go home and sleep.” Clinton says she was continuously engaged in responding to the attack from the moment she learned of it in the afternoon and “did not sleep all night.”

Trump has used the claim to suggest that Clinton failed the “3 a.m.” test, referencing Clinton’s famous 3 a.m.” campaign ad in 2008, in which she claimed she was more “tested” and prepared than Barack Obama to handle a late-night call to the White House about a dire emergency.

Trump, June 22: Among the victims is our late Ambassador, Chris Stevens. I mean, she — what she did with him was absolutely horrible. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed. That’s right. When the phone rang, as per the commercial, at three o’clock in the morning, Hillary Clinton was sleeping.

The embassy in Tripoli alerted the State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., about the attack on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi at about 3:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sept. 11, 2012. We detailed some of Clinton’s activities in the ensuing hours, and concluded that “the evidence shows Clinton was fully engaged in the immediate response, and subsequent congressional investigations concluded the government response to the attack — including Clinton’s — was appropriate.”

It is true that, at some point in the night, Clinton decided to leave the State Department and continue working from her home. But Clinton testified before a House Select Committee hearing on Benghazi that she was continuously engaged in responding to the attack, that she stayed in constant contact with various officials through secured phone lines at home, and “did not sleep all night. I was very much focused on what we were doing.”

Other than Clinton’s word, we can’t independently verify whether Clinton did sleep for a brief period that night. She testified that she was home alone. However, two emails made public contradict Trump’s claim that Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.”

Public records show that at 11:12 p.m., Clinton sent an emailto her daughter, Chelsea (who is identified in the email under her alias “Diane Reynolds”). In that email, the secretary of state wrote: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group: The Ambassador, whom I handpicked and a young communications officer on temporary duty w a wife and two young children. Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow.”

We also know that at 11:38 p.m., Clinton emailed State Department officials Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland, to ask if the State Department should announce Stevens’ death that night or wait until the following morning.

Update, June 24: Trump acknowledged in a June 23 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that he had no evidence to support his claim that Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.” Trump said “who knows if she was sleeping … she might have been sleeping.”

Jewels from Brunei

Trump: Hillary Clinton accepted $58,000 in jewelry from the government of Brunei when she was secretary of state.

This is false. Clinton traveled to Brunei in September of 2012, and she did receive — on behalf of the U.S. — jewelry (“Mouawad Larme D’Amour 18k gold, sapphire, and diamond earrings, necklace, and bracelet”) worth an estimated $58,000, according to the Department of State’s Office of the Chief of Protocol.

However, Clinton did not keep the jewelry. The gifts were transferred to the General Services Administration, the chief of protocol report said.

This is standard practice when federal employees receive gifts from foreign countries. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9, clause 8) prohibits all federal officials from receiving any “presents” from foreign governments, kings, or princes, without the consent of the Congress, as explained in a 2012 Congressional Research Service report.

“The Congress has consented generally, in the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act, to the acceptance of gifts of ‘minimal value’ from foreign governments offered as souvenirs or marks of courtesy, and the acceptance of other gifts when a refusal of the gift may cause ‘offense or embarrassment’ or otherwise harm the foreign relations of the United States,” the CRS report says. “A tangible gift of more than minimal value accepted for reasons of protocol or courtesy may not be kept as a personal gift, however, but is considered accepted on behalf of and property of the United States.”

In Clinton’s case, the department’s chief of protocol noted that the jewelry was accepted because “[n]on-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and U.S. Government,” and the gifts would be transferred to the GSA.

Bogus Refugee Budget Claim

Trump: Hillary also wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to settle Middle Eastern refugees in the United States, on top of the current record level of immigration that we already have.

There’s no evidence that Clinton wants to spend that much.

Clinton has said that she would admit as many as 65,000 refugees from Syria, which is a 550 percent increase from the 10,000 Syrian refugees that President Obama said that he would authorize for admission in fiscal year 2016. However, Clinton has not specified how much she would be willing to spend on those refugees.

The total authorized budget for “Refugee and Entrant Assistance” was $1.67 billion in fiscal 2016. And $948 million of that was not for refugees, but for unaccompanied minors who immigrate to the U.S. illegally. The fiscal 2016 figure was also when the ceiling for global refugee admissions, not just those from Middle East nations, was 85,000. It’s hard to see how Clinton’s proposal to add 55,000 Syrian refugees to the 10,000 authorized by Obama would add “hundreds of billions” to the budget for refugee assistance.

The Administration for Children and Families, which includes the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has asked Congress for $2.18 billion for refugee and entrant assistance in FY 2017. That’s an increase of just over $510 million from the last fiscal cycle. And assistance for unaccompanied minors accounts for $373 million of that increase.

Trade with China

Trump: Our trade deficit with China soared 40 percent during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state — a disgraceful performance for which she should not be congratulated, but rather scorned.

Trump greatly exaggerated the rise in the trade deficit with China while Clinton was secretary of state.

The trade deficit with China went up 17.5 percent in that time, not 40 percent. Clinton was secretary of state from January 2009 to February 2013, and we’d note that trade is under the purview of the Commerce Department. Still, to reflect the change during her tenure, we would start the clock in 2008, when the trade deficit with China was $268 billion. By the end of 2012, two months before Clinton left office, that trade deficit was $315 billion, an increase of $47 million, or 17.5 percent.

It’s possible to look at the trade deficit with China for the particular months Clinton was in office, but the figures are not seasonally adjusted (they show a 15 percent growth, anyway).

This isn’t the first time Trump has been wrong in citing statistics on the U.S. trade deficit with China. We have pointed out several times now that he is off the mark when he repeatedly claims that it’s $505 billion. The trade deficit with China was $367 billion in 2015.

In his speech, Trump went on to say that “Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs,” and in a tweet on June 21, he directly linked a rise in the trade deficit to the loss of “millions” of jobs. As our fact-checking colleagues at the Washington Post wrote, “[a] billion dollars of exports is estimated to create about 6,000 jobs.” That’s according to a Commerce Department analysis of U.S. jobs supported by exports. So, if one wanted to run a back-of-the-envelope calculation using that formula, the $47 billion increase in the deficit over four years would amount to 282,000 jobs. That’s not “millions.”

Worth noting is that the Commerce Department analysis found that U.S. jobs supported by all exports increased by more than 100,000 from 2008 to 2012, and have gone up further since.

Iraq Departure and Clinton

Trump blamed Clinton for the “disastrous strategy of announcing our departure from Iraq, handing large parts of the country over to ISIS and the ISIS killers.” The departure date was set by President George W. Bush. Obama did not change the scheduled departure date, and ultimately it was Obama’s call, not Clinton’s.

Trump: Then there was the disastrous strategy of announcing our departure from Iraq, handing large parts of the country over to ISIS and the ISIS killers. ISIS threatens us today because of the decisions Hillary Clinton has made, along with President Obama.

As we have written before, Bush signed an agreement, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, on Dec. 14, 2008, that said: “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”

Nevertheless, Obama had three years to negotiate a new agreement prior to the Dec. 31, 2011, withdrawal date to keep some U.S. troops in Iraq. Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s defense secretary from July 2011 to February 2013, wrote in his 2014 book, “Worthy Fights,” that as the deadline neared “it was clear to me — and many others — that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability” in Iraq. As a result, the Obama administration sought to keep 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. combat troops in Iraq.

But negotiations with Iraq broke down in October 2011 over the issue of whether U.S. troops would be shielded from criminal prosecution by Iraqi authorities. Panetta said the Obama White House did not press hard enough to reach a deal, and that the U.S. “had leverage” and could have “threatened to withdraw reconstruction aid” if Iraq didn’t agree to “some sort of continued U.S. military presence.”

Clinton was involved in the negotiations as Obama’s secretary of state and, at least publicly, supported the president’s decision. Days after Obama announced he would withdraw all troops by Dec. 31, 2011, Clinton was asked on “Meet the Press” if critics had a point that such a withdrawal would “endanger recent success in Iraq by not having any residual force.” She replied: “They should have raised those issues when President Bush agreed to the agreement to withdraw troops by the end of this year.”

She later defended Obama’s actions at a 2014 town hall meeting televised by CNN. This time, she blamed the Iraqi government.

Clinton, June 17, 2014: Some now say, well, you should have made him or you should have — but that’s not the way it works. You have to — if you’re going to having American troops in harm’s way — and we knew Iraq would be quite dangerous for a long time, unpredictable, at the very least — you have to have the host government, in this case Iraq, say, OK, here’s what we want. We’re signing this agreement which will protect American soldiers. We didn’t get that done. And I think, in retrospect, that was a mistake by the Iraqi government.

Trump is free to argue that Clinton should have done more to persuade Obama to renegotiate a withdrawal agreement with Iraq, but it was ultimately Obama’s call, not Clinton’s. And the initial departure date was set by Bush.

Clinton Doesn’t Support ‘Open Borders’

Trump falsely claimed that Clinton would “end virtually all immigration enforcement and thus create totally open borders for the United States.” Clinton supported the 2013 Senate immigration bill that, in addition to a path to earned citizenship for those currently in the country illegally, would have included significant investments in border security.

Trump: She’s pledged to grant mass amnesty and in a first 100 days, end virtually all immigration enforcement and thus create totally open borders for the United States, totally open borders.

Clinton has said she supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” and she has vowed that within the first 100 days as president, she would send a plan to Congress that would include “a path to full and equal citizenship” for those currently in the country illegally. She has also said that she would defend Obama’s executive orders that “provide relief from deportation for DREAMers and parents of Americans and lawful residents.”

But that’s a far cry from ending “all immigration enforcement” and “open borders.” Clinton’s campaign website says she supports “humane, targeted immigration enforcement.” Specifically, the website says she would “focus enforcement resources on detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety.”

In her book, “Hard Choices,” Clinton said she supported the 2013 Senate immigration bill, S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. (page 459)

Clinton, “Hard Choices”: I only wish that the bipartisan bill passed in the Senate in 2013 reforming our immigration laws could have passed the House.

The bill would have funded an enhanced border security plan, additional border fencing, the implementation of an E-Verify system, and an exit visa system to stop visa overstays.

“Border security has always been a part of that debate,” Clinton said during a Democratic debate in November.

In short, Trump goes too far with his claim that Clinton’s support for an immigration overhaul that includes an earned path to citizenship would mean she would “end virtually all immigration enforcement, and thus create totally open borders in the United States.”

Clinton’s Server ‘Easily Hacked’?

Trump: Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments, perhaps even by her financial backers in communist China. Sure they have it. Putting all of America and our citizens in danger, great danger.

Trump is wrong. There were attempts to hack into Clinton’s server, but there’s no evidence to date that shows any attempts were successful.

We wrote about this topic earlier this month when Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the chairman of the homeland security committee, said “you have to assume that our enemies and our adversaries had access to every email that ever went over her private server.” The senator’s office provided no evidence that hackers were successful in gaining access to Clinton’s emails — only evidence that attempts were made, including by hackers originating in China and Russia.

Update, June 24: Trump said in the June 23 interview with NBC that he read or heard that Clinton’s email was successfully hacked. Asked where he got that information, Trump said, “I will report back to you. I’ll give it to you.” When asked how he could make his claim “with such certainty” without evidence, Trump said, “I don’t know if certainty. Probably she was hacked.”

Russia and U.S. Uranium 

Trump: Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Trump is referring to the sale in 2010 of Uranium One, a Canadian-based company with uranium mining stakes in the West, to Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency. He is right about investors making contributions to the Clinton Foundation, but Trump vastly overstates the State Department’s role in approving that sale.

As we have written, the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States is required by law to investigate all U.S. transactions that involve a company owned or controlled by a foreign government, including the sale of Uranium One. As secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine voting members on the foreign investments committee, which also includes the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy, the attorney general, and representatives from two White House offices — the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. (Separately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needed to approve (and did approve) the transfer of two uranium recovery licenses as part of the sale.)

Peter Schweizer — author of “Clinton Cash,” which Trump referred to in his speech — claimed in a TV interview last year that Clinton, as a committee member, had “veto power” and “could have stopped” the sale. But that’s not accurate. The committee can approve a sale, but it cannot stop a sale. “Only the President has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction,” according to guidelines adopted by the Department of Treasury, which chairs the committee.

Correction, June 23: Our original story incorrectly stated that Schweizer wrote in his book that Clinton had veto power over the sale. Schweizer said that in a TV interview, not in his book. We have revised our story to correct the record.  

:{*:{}:

*}:

Opposition to Iraq War

Trump: Though I was not in government service, I was among the earliest to criticize the rush to war, and yes, even before the war ever started.

As we have said before, there is no evidence that Trump opposed the war before it started. We wrote a timeline of all Trump’s public comments that we could find in 2002 and 2003, and found no instances of Trump voicing his opposition before the war started on March 19, 2003. Trump has stated during primary debates that his opposition was “loud and clear” and well covered by newspapers, claiming erroneously that he could provide “25 different stories” to prove his opposition. He has yet to provide any evidence.

Trump is right, however, that he was an early critic of the war. As our timeline showed, Trump said four months into the war that the U.S. was wasting moneyin Iraq that could be better spent in U.S. cities, and after six months he suggested it was a mistake going to war in Iraq. “I guess maybe if I had to do it, I would have fought terrorism but not necessarily Iraq,” Trump said in a TV interview on Sept. 11, 2003.

Wages Actually Are Up

Trump wrongly said that “real wages for our workers have not been raised for 18 years.” Average weekly earnings for production and non-supervisory employees are up 10 percent, adjusted for inflation and seasonal factors, over that time period.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figures show average weekly earnings were $280.90 in May 1998, as expressed in 1982-84 dollars. The figure was $309.22 in May 2016, 18 years later. Here’s the BLS chart showing the increase:

Trump isn’t the only politician to claim that wages have stagnated. Democratic candidates Clinton and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley made similar claims about real wages last year.

NAFTA and Free Trade 

Trump: Hillary Clinton supported Bill Clinton’s disastrous and totally disastrous NAFTA. Just like she supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization.

It is true that President Bill Clinton signed the enabling NAFTA legislation in 1993. However, the trade agreement was negotiated and signed by the prior president, George H.W. Bush in 1992. Also, the NAFTA bill could not have reached Clinton’s desk without Republican support in Congress.

The Senate passed the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, 61-38, on Nov. 20, 1993, with 34 Republican votes, and the House passed it three days earlier, 234-200, with 132 Republican votes.

So to call it “Bill Clinton’s disastrous NAFTA” ignores the trade agreement’s history.

As for China, the Clinton administration in 1999 negotiated the U.S.-China WTO trade agreement, as explained in a Congressional Research Service report updated in November 2001. It officially joined the WTO in December 2001, when President George W. Bush was in office.

Hillary Clinton supported both trade deals, but did not vote on either one. She did not join the Senate until January 2001.

Trump: We’ve lost nearly one-third of our manufacturing jobs since these two Hillary-backed agreements were signed.

Trump overstates the job losses. NAFTA took effect Jan. 1, 1994. As of December 1993, the U.S. had 16,815,000 manufacturing jobs and as of May it had 12,285,000 jobs — a decline of 4,530,000 jobs since NAFTA took effect, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a decline of 27 percent – closer to a quarter than a third.

But more importantly, Trump ignores the impact of jobs created elsewhere by trade agreements that offset manufacturing job losses, and he ignores other reasons for the loss of manufacturing jobs, such as technological advances that have reduced employment.

As we have written, a 2015 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service called NAFTA’s impact “relatively modest.” CRS said, “In reality, NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters.” That’s because NAFTA, like all trade agreements, created and destroyed jobs. For example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace did a report in 2004 called “NAFTA’s Promise and Reality” that said the NAFTA Trade Adjustment Assistance program provided assistance to 525,000 workers affected by the agreement as of September 2003. However, the report said that those jobs “were likely offset by other jobs gained” and resulted in “either a neutral or very small net positive effect on employment.”

China’s entry into the WTO had a greater impact. In fact, China, in 2010, displaced the U.S. as the largest manufacturing nation in the world, based on the value of each country’s manufacturing in U.S. dollars, according to a CRS report called “U.S. Manufacturing in International Perspective.” China’s manufacturing rise, which can be seen in Figure 2 of the report, has taken place since China entered the WTO.

But the CRS report also notes that “U.S. manufacturers’ large investments in automation … have eliminated many routine assembly jobs; only two in five workers in U.S. manufacturing establishments are now directly engaged in production.” So not all the job losses can be attributed to trade deals and those job losses were offset in part by job gains elsewhere.

— by Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley and D’Angelo Gore

Sources

==

...Lewandowski is also in consideration for the role of deputy chief of staff for planning, as is Katie Walsh, the RNC’s chief of staff. As for White House counsel, the list includes both Alan Garten, the general counsel at the Trump Organization, and Donald McGahn, his campaign attorney, as options.

Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller — an immigration hawk and former communications aide to Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions — is under consideration for a variety roles, including deputy chief of staff for policy, director of speechwriting, director of the domestic policy council and director of communications. Miller often warmed up for Trump during rallies in the Republican primary and embodies Trump’s message of limited immigration, free trade skepticism and distaste for the donor class.

Miller isn’t the only former Sessions aide being considered for a Trump administration. Rick Dearborn, Sen. Sessions’ chief of staff, is listed as the sole option for leading the office of legislative affairs.

:{:{}:

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/10/exclusive-here-is-a-list-of-people-donald-trump-is-considering-for-senior-white-house-jobs/#ixzz4PuBMVkuZ}:

==

i360?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/17/1583590/-Koch-organizations-picking-up-ground-game-slack-from-Trump

Koch brothers have created a ground game where Donald Trump has failed, not to elect Trump but to elect all those Republican senators who won't dump him. See, they're too pure to sully their hands with him, but not so to elect his enablers.

FAIRLESS HILLS, Pa. (AP) — To the Republicans in the red "Can't Afford Katie" T-shirts, it's as if Donald Trump doesn't even exist.

These activists have been sprinting through Pennsylvania neighborhoods, talking to people about how bad Democrat Katie McGinty would be as a U.S. senator. Here to help save Republican Sen. Pat Toomey — and, more broadly, the party's control of the Senate — are employees and volunteers for Americans for Prosperity, the best-known group financed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Similar scenes are playing out in North Carolina, Florida and Ohio. […]

Four years after spending heavily in a futile effort to prevent President Barack Obama's second term, the Kochs have pushed all of their resources down ballot. And their resources are ample: They're on track to spend about $250 million on policy and politics in the two years leading to Election Day.

They've spent about $42 million of that on TV, and are now pulling all ads to focus their money on door-to-door voter contact, something the Trump campaign isn't doing. They've got about 1,200 employees across 36 states doing the grunt work to make sure the Senate majority remains Koch-friendly. They're using their massive voter database, which has long-since eclipsed the GOP's, to target some 5 million solid Republican voters who might be tempted to sit this election out because of Trump.

That would be disaster for the Kochs. They need their bought Senate, as much as ever

---

---

heritage MIC stocks up

Trump campaigned on maintaining a strong military, but also voiced some skepticism about overseas military engagements and overpayments to defense contractors. The defense stocks surging is a sign that investors believe that Trump will be significantly more supportive of their priorities than he may have let on.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/defense-industry-stocks-surge-following-donald-trump-victory/

==

omg see energy team ebell tppf hamm cramer

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/27/climate-science-denialist-myron-ebell-named-trump-adviser

---

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/23/trump-touts-drilling-potential-botches-facts-shale-industry-conference

....

...

Rally, Protest Outside Shale Insight 2016

Outside the convention center, about 150 protesters gathered for a rally and march.

“It's not really about jobs, it's about money,” said Erin Kramer, a protester and organizer with OnePittsburgh. “Trump illustrates that to a T — with the package of that mass capitalism you also get a whole bunch of hate, a whole bunch of racial unrest and human rights violations.”

Conference organizers indicated that Hillary Clinton was invited to attend, but told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that she declined, citing scheduling conflicts.

While Trump repeatedly called on the shale gas industry to help him get out the vote in November, before the event, it seemed he still had work to do to gain their enthusiastic support.

Within the Republican party, Trump has been an extraordinarily divisive figure, with many prominent Republicans refusing to endorse him. And when it comes to contributions from oilfield workers, Trump's reception from them has been notably muted.

“As of last week, Republican nominee Donald Trump raised a paltry $245,000 from individuals working in the oil and gas industry, according to figures provided by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics,” NPR's State Impact recently reported. (By contrast, Mitt Romney raised $5.9 million from the oil and gas industry in 2012.)

In Pittsburgh, Trump arrived for his speech late, then kept the executives, who included top officials at major oil and gas companies, waiting as conference organizers informed the crowd that Trump was pausing to spend another several minutes giving an interview, rather than speaking to the hundreds of businesspeople and journalists there to hear him speak.

But once he arrived on stage, Trump tried hard to make his own support for the fossil fuel industry quite clear.

“Producing more American energy is a central part of my plan to make America wealthy again, especially for the poorest Americans,” he said. “I knew I'd have to make that statement in order to get you guys a little bit enlivened. Oh well, you'll like the rest of what I've got to say even more.”

Trump also used a significant portion of his time at the podium to comment on protests over the police killings of black Americans, and it was those remarks that drew the most attention from the national media. He decried recent protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, which were sparked by the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott, father of seven, who neighbors say was waiting for his son to arrive on a school bus.

Even before the police released video of that death, whose circumstances they've disputed, Trump had made up his mind about who he was behind. “The men and women in blue need your support,” Trump told the crowd. “They need your thanks and they need your gratitude.”

He seemed to suggest that Black Lives Matter protests were fueled not by anger over the police killings of black Americans, but by drugs. “And if you're not aware, drugs are a very, very big factor in what you're watching on television at night,” Trump told the crowd.

Clinton supporters quickly seized on Trump's remarks, especially his comments disparaging the protests over police violence.

“Today, in a room full of oil executives, Trump blamed the Charlotte protests on 'drugs' and insinuated that his administration would have no 'compassion' when it comes to criminal justice,” Brad Woodhouse, president of Correct The Record, which describes itself as “a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC,” said in a statement. “Despite weeks of so-called outreach to communities of color, Trump today showed us who he really stands with: wealthy fossil fuel special interests.”

To be sure, Trump was in Pittsburgh primarily to discuss another conflict — the fight over the fate of the fossil fuel industry.

“It's war,” Trump said. “And you people know it's war.”

The stakes are indeed high. Climate scientists warn that if the world's remaining oil, gas, and coal are burned, the climate consequences would be extraordinarily catastrophic.

In an open letter this week, 375 members of the National Academy of Scientists, including Steven Hawking, issued a grave warning. “It is of great concern that the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord,” the scientists wrote. “The consequences of opting out of the global community would be severe and long-lasting — for our planet's climate and for the international credibility of the United States.”

Trump made it clear that if he was elected, his administration would go further, repealing several measures aimed at curbing climate change. “We will eliminate the highly invasive 'waters of the U.S.' [Clean Water Act] rule and scrap the $5 trillion Obama-Clinton climate action plan and the Clean Power Plan,” he told the crowd.

Then he left the room to a standing ovation.

---

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/23/trump-touts-drilling-potential-botches-facts-shale-industry-conference

==

lags in $

...

Like Trump’s campaign itself, the outside groups supporting him have been more disjointed, with several organizations appearing to compete for the attention of donors and the favor of the candidate.

Make America Number 1 is primarily financed by conservative billionaire and Renaissance Technologies CEO Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who have provided $13.5 million of the $16 million raised by the super PAC thus far. The group supported Ted Cruz in the primary, when it was run by Kellyanne Conway, now Trump’s campaign manager.

Great America PAC is an unusual outside spending group in that it relies substantially on small donations of $200 or less. It has suffered some hits in leadership, with Tea Party activist Amy Kremer leaving the group in May; its senior adviser, Jesse Benton, was convicted (and sentenced this week) on federal charges of public corruption. It has raised $11.2 million and says it has spent $7.2 million on independent expenditures, including online, mail and television advertising. The PAC’s treasurer is attorney Dan Backer; questions have been raised about the legitimacy of other super PACs with which Backer has been involved.

Several other outside groups have identified themselves as supporting the Trump effort, but they are generally small and appear less organized. But the Trump family doesn’t seem to have a cohesive strategy on this front, with the candidate’s two sons headlining fundraisers for two different groups. That has stoked the donor confusion: If they can’t pick a PAC, how will contributors know which one to fund?

==

omg:

Trump: Scalia Will Be 'The Ultimate Example' Of My Supreme Court Picks

9/9/16 @ 5:15

Trump: All My Judges Will Be 'Picked By The Federalist Society'

6/13/16 @ 5:15

rww

---

http://www.ecowatch.com/donald-trump-fracking-2012606194.html

...

"America is sitting on a treasure trove of untapped energy—some $50 trillion in shale energy, oil reserves and natural gas on federal lands, in addition to hundreds of years of coal energy reserves ... [and] it's all upside," Trump said to the crowd made up of executives from Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, and the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association.

Trump said the country needs an "America-First energy plan" and touted his ideas to "open up federal lands for oil and gas production, open offshore areas, and revoke policies that are imposing unnecessary restrictions on innovative new exploration technologies."

His "American Energy Renaissance" also includes:

Environmentalists slammed Trump's self-proclaimed energy revolution which, as he reiterated Thursday, would end the war on coal and scrap the $5 trillion Obama-Clinton Climate Action Plan and the Clean Power Plan.

"Donald Trump ... takes talking points from the biggest polluters in the country to slap together his disastrous energy positions," Sierra Club political director Khalid Pitts said.

"Trump's dirty-fuels-first plan is pretty simple: drill enough off our coasts to threaten beaches from Maine to Florida, frack enough to spoil groundwater across the nation, and burn enough coal to cook the planet and make our kids sick. In stark contrast, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate in this race who is committed to grow the booming clean energy economy to create jobs and help tackle the climate crisis."

...

Greenpeace USA spokesperson Cassady Sharp agrees. "Donald Trump proved again that he is an unfit leader with no grasp on reality," she said.

"Trump pandered to the Marcellus Shale industry today, singing the praises of a dangerous energy extraction process that threatens the health and safety of families and communities all over this country, and promising to slash critical regulations and the EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]. This man has no business dealing with America's energy policy, and he would be a belligerent catalyst of catastrophic climate change if he were elected president."

 ===

==

immigration policy sp vouchers

---

ELECTION 2016

Meet the 'Deplorables': 13 Despicable Characters in Trump's Very Crowded Basket

Looking at who surrounds the GOP standard-bearer, it's hard to argue with Hillary Clinton's controversial comments.

By Adele M. Stan / AlterNet September 15, 2016

no links

As word spread of Hillary Clinton's characterization of half of Donald Trump's supporters in her in a September 9 speech, the right-wing outrage machine went into overdrive. Half of the Repubican standard-bearer's followers, Clinton said, were "a basket of deplorables," while the rest were simply people who felt let down by the government and were desperate for change. With the help of mainstream media, focus turned to the "deplorables" part of her comments. The Trump campaign texted supporters a link to a video ad that mischaracterized Clinton's remarks. In response to the right's fury, Clinton gamely stated that maybe she shouldn’t have said “half."

Truth is, we don't really know what percentage of Trump's current crop of supporters belong in the "deplorables" basket, but what we do know is this: There are a goodly number of public figures and leaders of odious white-supremacist organizations who love them some Trump, and Trump has either embraced them or declined to disavow them. Here we list some of the biggest eggs in the deplorables basket.

  1. Stephen K. Bannon: When Trump hired Bannon, then the chief executive of Breitbart News, as his campaign CEO in August, you couldn’t ask for a clearer sign that the GOP standard-bearer was staking a potential victory on igniting the racist resentments of the right-leaning faction of the electorate. During an event in Cleveland the week of the Republican National Convention, Bannon boasted to journalist Sarah Posner that since he took the reins at Breitbart News, the site had become “the platform for the alt-right.”

The alt-right, or alternative right, is a loose affiliation of groups and publications that advance a white nationalist or white supremacist ideology, often characterizing the more established conservative movement as being weak or “cuckholded.” Bannon has written and directed a number of films designed to frighten viewers into thinking their culture is being extinguished, such as Torchbearer, his latest project with Citizens United. That film features horrific scenes of violence, and stars Phil Robertson, the patriarch of “Duck Dynasty,” a reality television show that was temporarily suspended after GQ published an interview in which Robertson made anti-gay comments, and said blacks were all happy and singing “Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare.”

  1. Richard Spencer: President of the innocuous-sounding National Policy Institute, Spencer, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), advocates for an Aryan homeland for the supposedly dispossessed white race and calls for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of European culture. He's one of the leading figures of the white nationalist “alt-right” that Trump has courted. At a press conference Saturday, Spencer said of Trump, “Certainly we have been, you could say, riding his coattails, there’s been more interest in us because we’re generally pro-Trump, because we’re inspired by him and things like that.”

He went on:

Even in all his vulgarity and I would never deny him, this is what we want in a leader. This is someone who can make the future. So I think that is the way I would define our love of Trump, is that he seems to be willing to go there, he seems to be willing to confront people. And that is very different from the cuckold.

  1. Pamela Geller: A New Yorker with an Ayn Rand fetish, Geller wandered around the right for a while before she found her calling: rallying the forces of hatred in opposition to an Islamic community center that was being developed in lower Manhattan in the early aughts. Together with Spencer, Geller took over the group, Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), using it as a platform for opposing the Cordoba House development and spewing hatred against Muslims, even falsely suggesting they practiced bestiality, according to the SPLC. She and Spencer falsely described the planned community center as a “victory mosque” created to celebrate the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Eating pork and depicting the Prophet Muhammad are both forbidden to practitioners of the Muslim faith. Yet Geller combined the two proscriptions in a cartoon on her website depicting the prophet with the face of a pig, according to SPLC, which lists SIOA as a hate group.

In Cleveland, the week of the 2016 RNC, Geller was a featured speaker at an event sponsored by the group Gays for Trump, which was hosted by Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News.

  1. Milo Yiannapoulos: Described by Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way as the alt-right’s gay enfant terrible,Yiannapoulos, the technology editor of Breitbart News, has become semi-famous simply for being an awful person. He was banned from Twitter for his racist dogging of the actor Leslie Jones, and he is known for his anti-Muslim invective.

Yiannapoulos likes to play his gay identity for laughs, often in the service of mocking Muslims. At an "America First" rally in Cleveland co-hosted by radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that took place the first day of the Republican National Convention, Montgomery reports, Yiannapoulos said: “Die on your feet or live on your knees. Well, I do live on my knees, but that’s all right. That’s all right. As long as I’m not facing Mecca, I guess I’m all right with you guys."

  1. Jared Taylor: Editor of the “racialist” American Renaissance magazine, Taylor is an unabashed Trump supporter. He even has a strategy suggestion for Donald Trump, as he told the Washington Post’s David Weigel:

[Taylor] said that Trump should “concentrate on his natural constituency, which is white people,” suggesting that winning 65 percent of the white vote would overwhelm any Democratic gains with minorities.

Watching Trump’s attacks on non-white immigrants and his courtship of the alt right—of which Taylor is a part—it would be safe to deduce that Trump and/or his advisers have been working that very strategy for a while now.

In an August 29 appearance on "The Diane Rehm Show" on NPR, Taylor discussed his opposition to Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights act, which bars private businesses that serve the public from racially discriminating against their customers. “[I]f I am a private club, a private business, I should have the right to discriminate for good reasons, bad reasons or no reasons at all,” Taylor said. “It's part of the essential freedom of making choices as a human being.”

During the same segment, Taylor explained his rationale for ranking racial groups differently:

"Among the many positions held by the alt-right, we reject the notion that race is some sort of sociological optical illusion. Race is a biological fact, whether we wish to recognize that or not, and we completely reject the idea that all races are exactly equal and equivalent and in effect interchangeable."

  1. Alex Jones: The radio host and conspiracy theorist is an anti-government ranter, seeing every terrorist attack as a “false flag” event that was actually conducted by the government. In 2014, Dave Niewert reported that Jones was pushing the narrative that President Obama and the media were in cahoots trying to foment a race war.

When Republicans converged on Cleveland for their convention, Jones headlined an “America First” rally that featured a number of groups with the words “for Trump” in their name: Bikers for Trump, Gun Owners for Trump, Gays for Trump. He complained that his constitutional rights were abridged when he couldn’t get permits for several of his efforts, including the small planes that were flying over the city trailing “Hillary for Prison” banners. It was, of course, all a conspiracy.

Jones also contended that Jared Loughner, the gunman who, in January 2011, shot and critically wounded Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six in Tucson, was actually part of a government plot. Jones contends that the 9/11 attacks were part of “an inside job” by the government. And before Trump got around to it, Jones accused Raphael Cruz, father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) as being part of the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

Trump appeared on Jones’ InfoWars radio program in December, praising Jones for his “amazing reputation,” and promising not to let him down.

  1. Roger Stone: Even Roger Stone probably thinks he’s deplorable. A famous Republican operative and dirty trickster, Stone is perhaps most famous for having organized what became known as the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000, at the Miami-Dade election board, where votes were being recounted in the Bush v. Gore presidential election whose outcome was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.

It was Stone who, during the 2008 presidential campaign, took to Fox News to advance the false narrative that a tape existed of Michelle Obama referring to white people as “whiteys.”

In 2015, he was an official member of the Trump campaign, but later resigned to run a pro-Trump PAC. However, he remains close to the campaign. At the “America First” rally in Cleveland, he apologized for his tardiness, offering the excuse that he had been delayed because he was meeting with the Trump campaign team.

  1. Roger Ailes: If you’ve been reading Gabriel Sherman’s outstanding reporting for New York magazine on the scandal that forced Ailes out of Fox News, you know just how despicable he is. After former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson accused Ailes of sexual harassment, other women came forward, including one who said Ailes had videotaped her when they had sex with the threat of using the tape against her should she cause him any trouble. (Fox has since settled with Carlson for a reported $20 million.) Sherman revealed that Ailes also illicitly acquired the phone records of journalists who had been critical of Fox News.

Ruport Murdoch, chair of Fox’s parent company, News Corporatin, is said to have been unhappy that Ailes was using Fox to support the Trump campaign. Now that Ailes is out of Fox, guess who the campaign’s latest high-profile deplorable adviser is? Roger Ailes.

  1. Troy Newman: The president of Operation Rescue jumped aboard the Trump train this week. An anti-choice extremist, Newman even co-authored a book with a would-be domestic terrorist, Cheryl Sullenberger, who in 1988 was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to blow up an abortion clinic. In that 2003 book, Newman and Sullenberger argue, according to People for the American Way, “that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.”
  1. Ann Coulter: Where does one begin with the big, steaming pile of deplorable that is Ann Coulter? Her demonization of LGBT people at the 2006 Values Voter Summit? Her 2007 use of the word “faggot” from the stage of a major conservative conference? Her use of the word “raghead” to describe Muslims? Her creation of the false narrative that undocumented Mexican immigrants are purveyors of violent crimes and thieves of American jobs? How about her assertion that abortion clinic workers murdered by zealots “had a procedure performed on them with a rifle.” Gentle reader, I’ll leave it for you to decide.

Coulter has hitched her fading star to the Trump train, having released in August her latest spittoon of venom encased between the covers of In Trump We Trust: More fun, though, is watching her bomb of a performance at the Comedy Central roast of Rob Lowe, as comics and celebrities on the dais take her down.

  1. Mike Pence: The Indiana governor and Trump running-mate is a favorite of the Koch brothers’ ground-organizing group, Americans for Prosperity. In March, Pence signed into law one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, even prohibiting women from aborting a fetus because of a major defect or disability. He’s also something of a right-wing hero for his crusade against gun control. If all that isn’t deplorable enough for you, consider Pence’s response to the endorsement his ticket received from former Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke. Twice asked if he would describe Duke as “deplorable,” Pence demurred, saying he isn’t “in the name-calling business.” Because Trump has disavowed Duke’s support (albeit petulantly) and Pence has oh-so-politely said he doesn’t accept Duke’s support, I have not included the odious, disgusting, despicable, DEPLORABLE David Duke on this list. Pence may have a hard time calling him such, though, because it’s hard to refute Duke when he says Trump has "embrace[d] most of the issues that I’ve championed for years.” Duke added: “My slogan remains ‘America first.’” Funny thing: Donald Trump uses that slogan as well.
  1. Donald Trump, Jr.: The candidate’s oldest son, as Right Wing Watch termed it, “has got a white supremacist problem.” Most recently, as the campaign tried to make hay of Hillary Clinton’s remarks, Junior posted a meme on Instagram featuring the tagline, “The Deplorables,” featuring his father, his brother Eric, and a number of his father’s surrogates and associates, emulating the movie poster for The Expendables, about a band of merceneries. Also included in the lineup was the Trump version of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been appropriated by white nationalists as a sort of mascot. (The Trump version of Pepe sports a cartoon rendering of Trump Senior’s trademark hairdo.)

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

On Thursday, Junior compared the treatment Republicans receive from the media with that European Jews received at the hands of the Nazis. Speaking with host Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, the chip off the old block complained that media had "built [Hillary Clinton] up," even overlooking what he said was the Democratic National Committee's attempt to get Bernie Sanders out of the nomination contest. "If Republicans were doing that," Donald Trump Jr. said, "they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now."

As Ari Rabin-Havt notes, Junior has consorted with racists in the past:

In March, [Donald Trump, Jr.] appeared on a radio show with James Edwards, host of the white supremacist radio show Political Cesspool.

[...]

Less than two weeks ago, he retweeted a prominent white supremacist. And that wasn’t even the first time he’s done so: Trump Jr. once retweeted a white supremacist’s false claim that a Trump supporter pictured giving the Nazi salute was actually a Bernie Sanders fan in disguise.

  1. The Man Himself, Donald J. Trump: You really don’t have time to read in one article all of the things that make Trump deplorable. Suffice it to say, all of the above and more. If you don't believe me, check out this MTV compilation of racist statements, actually made by Donald Trump and interpreted by an actor.

==

Considering how much he brags about his business acumen, shouldn’t Donald Trump do a better job of keeping up with economic trends? The “great” America he pines for preceded the advent of today’s globalized information age and the automation that rendered steelmaking a largely worker-free endeavor. Likewise, the Republican presidential nominee’s fossil-fueled ambitions make no sense in light of what’s up with energy and its tremendous labor consequences: The oil, gas and coal industries are heading toward obsolescence as green energy booms.

Since Trump enjoys talking about energy industries and their workers, his clueless declarations about them get lots of airtime and ink. Here’s one galling example: “The Obama-Clinton administration has blocked and destroyed millions of jobs through their anti-energy regulations,” Trump said in a Detroit speech. “The Obama-Clinton war on coal has cost Michigan over 50,000 jobs.”

It’s hard to know where to start with this motherlode of lies, given that the United States produced more oil than Saudi Arabia and more natural gas than Russia last year, following massive growth for both fuels during the Obama administration. But here’s what’s amiss in that last line. The Trump campaign told Politifact that the Michigan assertion, which surely confused the locals in a state where the last coal mines closed in the 1950s, addressed the loss of potential employment opportunities from decisions not to build coal-fired power plants.

Politifact deemed the assertion false. “Market forces, not just environmental regulations, have driven many of the job losses in the coal sector,” the fact-checking outlet observed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were only 60,000 people employed at power plants in the entire country in 2014, so the notion that 50,000 Michiganders could have found those mythical jobs underscores Trump’s unpresidential habit of making up numbers to suit his whims.

I’ll get to those market forces shortly, after a quick review of pertinent US job statistics drawn from an International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) report released in late May. All told, according to the group, a total of 769,000 Americans were toiling for renewable energy businesses in 2015, including small-scale hydropower, biofuels, and geothermal. Here IRENA’s  snapshot of energy employment by industry:

Interestingly, IRENA’s fossil-fuel employment figures are actually higher than the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coal mining jobs have now dwindled further to 52,300. As for oil and gas extraction workers, there were only 172,700 of them in July. The BLS does not track wind and solar employment with the same regularity as oil, gas and coal jobs, but it did predict that wind turbine technician would be the nation’s fastest-growing profession through 2024. Renewable-energy jobs grew 6 percent last year, in stark contrast with an 18-percent decline in oil and gas employment, IRENA found.

The new energy paradigm that Trump either can’t or won’t accept has created a labor market where the solar power industry employs more US workers than oil and gas extraction. There are also more than three times as many solar workers as coal miners and the solar industry is growing at 12 times the speed of overall job creation. Green-energy job growth may keep going for decades. The share of power generated by renewable energy will triple to 44 percent from 14 percent by 2040, according to the latest Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast. In other words, this is no blip.

Furthermore, the Obama administration couldn’t do away with or prevent the creation of “millions” of jobs if it tried. These professions only employ tens and hundreds of thousands of workers.

About those market forces: Some 350,000 and gas workers around the world did lose their jobs between October 2014 and January 2016, including 100,000 here in the United States. That was due to price collapses, which caused oil and gas companies to suffer massive losses and, in many cases, go bankrupt. Trump calls for a yuuuuge boost in national fossil-fuel output, but it was a massive increase in US production that triggered the oversupply problems and sent prices into the doldrums. So a government policy intended to boost US production even more would not necessarily spur the creation of more oil and gas jobs.

Coal employment has also continued to implode, but that’s mostly because of coal’s eroding market share and the industry’s preference for mountaintop removal and other environmentally devastating techniques that require less labor. “Perhaps as President, Donald Trump will have his energy secretary restore coal jobs by requiring the coal industry to return to pick-and-shovel days,” suggested Tina Casey on the CleanTechnica website. Most big US coal companies, having declared bankruptcy, surely can’t afford to expand their payrolls that way.

Utilities are replacing coal with cheaper natural gas — no big climate win — and wind power. Increasingly, utility-scale solar is gaining traction too as the costs of solar panels have plunged, making renewable energy more competitive. Until now, battery technology has not progressed to the point where fossil-fuel backup systems seem unnecessary, but that too could change — with dire consequences for natural gas. So far, oil prices have been depressed by a global glut. If buoyant predictions about electric vehicle sales soaring in the 2020s prove true, it would bring about something else: a collapse in the demand for oil that would naturally undercut oil prices and employment.

Despite that important climate deal reached in Paris last year, carbon-cutting policies are not solely responsible for our nation’s new energy paradigm. President Barack Obama has taken some steps to expedite the transition to greener energy, but his Clean Power Plan is tied up in the courts and he failed to get a climate bill passed. In the wake of that legislative debacle, individual states retained plenty of leeway and the consequences, to say the least, are inconsistent. Oregon, which still gets 30 percent of its power from coal, has decided to wean itself off the stuff altogether within two decades. But Nevada has gone out of its way to squelch its own rooftop solar boom. While regulatory pressure on coal is real, the closures of coal-fired power plants seen so far have generally had more to do with public health woes, like asthma, environmental concerns unrelated to carbon pollution, and the competitive pressures posed by cheaper alternatives like natural gas, than climate action.

The rise and fall of specific energy jobs reflect the dynamics of their industries. Investment in US-generated renewable energy rose 17 percent to $44 billion last year as investment in fossil fuels fell. Renewable energy constituted just about all of the new electricity-generating capacity that came online in this country during the first quarter of 2016 as no new coal or nuclear generation entered the mix and additional natural gas capacity was negligible.

Meanwhile, more than 40 coal-fired power plants are slated to close in 2016, on top of the 94 that shut down last year.

One of the strangest things about Trump’s poor grasp of the energy business could be how it may distort his perceived chances of victory. Grilled about how he thinks he can win the White House without a traditional ground game as a growing number of Republicans back his opponent and his poll numbers droop, the real estate mogul counted coal miners among the constituencies he believes will deliver.

“We are gonna have tremendous turnout from the evangelicals, from the miners, from the people that make our steel, from people that are getting killed by trade deals, from people that have been just decimated, from the military who are with Trump 100 percent,” he told Eric Bolling in an early August Fox News interview. “I don’t know that we need to get out the vote.”

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords. A former foreign correspondent and financial reporter, she earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Emily lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband and two young children. Follow her on Twitter @ESGreco

AN

==

https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/17/trump-s-kitchen-cabinet-continued-what-media-needs-know-about-nominee-s-top-advisers-and-supporters/212477

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-ally-urges-revoking-voting-rights-poor-and-certain-women

When Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump needs an emcee for a rally in Nevada, he turns tradio personality Wayne Allyn Root, author of the recently published bookAngry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon is Changing America—and What We Can All Do to Save the Middle Class, who has graced the podium of at least three Trump events in the Battle Born State. On Monday, reports Right Wing Watch, Root called for the disenfranchisement of broad swaths of the electorate, notably anyone on Medicaid, or who receives food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or who gets prescription contraception via the no-copay feature of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

As I write this, the Trump campaign had yet to repudiate Root’s proposed unconstitutional rollback of voting rights. Yet the book jacket of Angry White Male features a blurb from the candidate himself, and a foreword by campaign adviser and dirty-trickster Roger Stone, who seems responsible for those elements of Trump campaign messaging drawn from and disseminated in the right’s fever swamps. Stone’s function in the Trump campaign appears to be to facilitate the nominee’s alliances with conspiracy theorists such as 9/11-truther Alex Jones and Root, who complements Trump’s birtherism with a companion false narrative that Obama never attended Columbia University. (Apparently, there is no long-form diploma.) During the 2014 midterm election cycle, Root labeled Obama “a Manchurian candidate” who Root said was seeking to foment a race war.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):

Now, Root has entered a new phase, deciding who should and shouldn’t be allowed to vote. In an error-filled rant flogging his new Trump book with Virginia radio host Rob Schilling on August 29 (flagged by RWW’s Miranda Blue), Root said of the competition faced by those of his ideological persuasion:“[I]f the people who paid the taxes were the only ones allowed to vote, we’d have landslide victories.” He continued:

"People with conflict of interest shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you collect welfare, you have no right to vote. The day you get off welfare, you get your voting rights back. The reality is, why are you allowed to have this conflict of interest that you vote for the politician who wants to keep your welfare checks coming and your food stamps and your aid to dependent children and your free health care and your Medicaid, your Medicare and your Social Security and everything else?"

Then Root appeared to catch himself, perhaps realizing that a sizable number of Trump supporters—perhaps as much as one-third—are on Medicare and Social Security. So he “amended” his statement, according to Blue, saying:

"Social Security should not, Medicare should not [disqualify you from voting], because you paid into the system. But all the other stuff, all the other goodies, free Obama phones, free contraception, you know what, you can get them but you shouldn’t be allowed to vote; it’s a conflict of interest. Take that away, we’d win every single election in this country."

The point Root was apparently attempting to make was that anybody on government assistance should not have the right to vote. But even in that noxious formulation, the inclusion of women who obtain prescription contraception via Obamacare without paying a copay would appear to be a special punishment, since the women themselves pay for that prescription via their insurance premiums.

The federal program he appears to reference called Aid to Families with Dependent Children hasn’t existed for 20 years. (The program that replaced it, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, almost never provides direct financial assistance, depending on how individual states administer the program.) Oh, and that “free Obama phone”? No such thing. Never existed.

But in Trump World, facts don’t matter.All that matters is the resentment piled up by a certain portion of the white electorate whose members feel threatened by societal changes such as civil rights law and the empowerment of women. Perhaps presaging his patron’s potential failure at the polls in November, Root is obviously trying to do his part to set the false narrative that, should Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton win in November, it will be because the system was somehow rigged against Trump in favor of the candidate of non-white people (never mind that most people on government assistance are white) and licentious women.

In his book-jacket praise for Root, Trump writes: "Wayne Allyn Root knows how to be tenacious and relentless." But the real riches for Root, aside from the Trump branding he was so generously provided, are in Stone’s foreword, where, in the first sentence the campaign adviser describes Angry White Male as the "Handbook for the Trump Revolution.” Stone goes on:

Now, in Angry White Male, Root provides a manifesto for Donald Trump’s silent majority, and outlines how immigrants and non-Americans flood here by the millions to sign up for America’s generous taxpayer-financed welfare state.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Trump or his spokespeople to condemn Root or to take any responsibility for the utterances of the author of a book with Trump’s name in the title and Trump’s blurb on the publisher’s praise page. He’s Trump’s Number One fan.

==

==

trump:

wife:

Trump, Rove, Norton, Barbour, Brulte = Inside Bush's Indian Bureau - A labyrinth of lobbyists is manufacturing millions

Wayne Barrett, Jennifer Suh - April 27th, 2004 - http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,barrett,53013,1.h...

... Wayne Smith ... the '90s, he'd been chief deputy to California's Republican attorney general ... at 52, he was assistant deputy secretary at Interior, managing the $3.5 billion budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and overseeing the hotly politicized Indian casino industry ...

... in his new job—which he got on the recommendation of a colleague from his AG days, Sue Wooldridge, top aide to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton. Neal McCaleb, who was Smith's immediate boss and ran BIA, put him in charge of gaming ... BIA remained a bureaucratic land where the only chiefs are buttoned-down lobbyists, raking in millions from tribes whose casinos are virtually franchises to print influence-peddling largesse.

Smith was troubled early ... his office was lobbied on behalf of two tribes by Diane Allbaugh, the wife of Joe Allbaugh, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the 2000 national campaign manager for Bush. Diane Allbaugh, who worked at a firm headed by former Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour, appeared on behalf of a Louisiana casino developer under contract with the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians and the Paucatuck Eastern Pequots, a Connecticut tribe then tied to Donald Trump. McCaleb urged Smith to take her calls, explaining that he and Joe Allbaugh were old Oklahoma friends and that Allbaugh had "helped convince the White House" to install him at BIA.

... lobbyist who concerned Smith more than any other ... he'd been on the transition working group for Interior, staffing the agency. The dark force of Indian gaming, retained as a hidden consultant by tribes and developers across the country, was Roger Stone, a veteran of eight Republican presidential campaigns and star of the Miami/Dade recount shutdown. Scott Reed is often his up-front lobbyist face.

... Reed began leaning on Smith in late January 2002. Smith even got a note supporting the Stone faction from the Republican leader of the California state senate, Jim Brulte. Stone had recommended the retention of a consulting firm owned by Brulte's former chief of staff, Tom Ross, and Ross wrote the memo summarizing the Buena Vista case that Brulte enclosed. Later in 2002,Stone would host a fundraiser for Brulte at his 40 Central Park South apartment and take Brulte to visit Stone's longtime client Donald Trump.The Brulte intervention sent a particularly strong message to Smith because he'd attended a 2001 Palm Springs meeting involving Karl Rove and a dozen tribes, where Brulte was introduced as "the administration's main man in California—especially for Indian matters." .

---

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-anti-indian-campaign-20160630-snap-story.html

Soon after an American Indian tribe announced plans to open a casino at a Catskills horse track, ads started appearing in local newspapers and on radio, sounding an alarm about unbridled crime and corruption.

They came from the New York Institute for Law and Society, a new self-described grass-roots anti-gambling group targeting the St. Regis Mohawks. Its campaign in 2000, supposedly supported by 12,000 “pro-family” donors, warned of the evils an Indian casino would bring: “increased crime, broken families, bankruptcies and, in the case of the Mohawks, violence.”

But there were no 12,000 donors. Virtually all the money for the campaign, more than $1 million, came from Donald Trump.

The institute was the brainchild of Trump’s longtime lobbyist and consultant, Roger Stone, and Trump himself was hands-on — not just paying the bills, but signing off on ad copy or radio scripts depicting the tribe as violent criminals and drug dealers. When Stone hired private investigators to dig up dirt on the Mohawks, Trump secretly paid the bills.

“Roger – This could be good!” Trump scrawled across one ad that included a picture of hypodermic needles and lines of powder meant to depict cocaine, underneath the headline: “Drug Dealing at Monticello?,” the name of the track. The ad ran in Catskills newspapers, credited to the institute.

Trump personally approved ads slamming Indian tribe: 'This could be good!'

Trump personally approved ads slamming Indian tribe: 'This could be good!'

Trump has pointed to his experience in business and real estate as the main argument for why he should be president. As he prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in July, some of the more combative and controversial episodes in his long career, including the anti-Mohawk campaign, are coming under renewed scrutiny. Hundreds of pages of records from a New York agency’s investigation into the ad campaign, obtained by the Los Angeles Times, reveal new details about Trump’s covert fight against the tribe. It was unusual not only for how deeply involved he was, but for the sharp tone of the attacks and the elaborate attempt to conceal his role.

Stone told state investigators that he thought the public might pay attention to a “pro-family” group, but not to Trump, a loud and longtime critic of Native American gambling who was trying to stave off competition for his three casinos in Atlantic City.

“You could hide Trump’s actions? From the public?” the investigators grilled Stone. “And you did that? Over and over again?”

“Yes,” Stone answered each time, finally adding: “Nothing wrong with that, by the way.”

The agency, the state's Temporary Commission on Lobbying, disagreed. Trump paid $250,000 for violating state law on lobbying and was forced to make a rare public apology.

In a recent interview, Stone said the ads were accurate, based on news accounts, and insisted that the casino campaign broke no laws. He said Trump, whose presidential campaign did not respond to detailed questions, was entitled to secrecy, like other donors to nonprofit advocacy groups.

“Sorry, kiss my ..., that’s a 1st Amendment issue,” Stone said, adding that the ads weren’t lobbying because they didn’t advocate for or against specific bills. “Donald wanted to settle because it was easier. We both thought we could win a long, drawn-out case.”

In the rough-and-tumble casino business, Trump was not the only executive to use a public-opinion campaign to try to thwart would-be rivals. Tribes themselves have spent heavily to block competitors, including in California.

Trump was once so involved in trying to block an Indian casino that he ...

www.latimes.com/.../la-na-pol-trump-anti-indian-campaign-20160...

1.

Los Angeles Times

Jun 30, 2016 - Soon after an American Indian tribe announced plans to open a casino at a ... WhenStone hired private investigators to dig up dirt on the Mohawks, ... but not to Trump, a loud and longtime critic of Native American gambling ...

How Trump Smeared Native Americans Back in 1993 - The Daily Beast

www.thedailybeast.com/.../how-trump-smeared-native-americans-bac...

1.

The Daily Beast

Jun 2, 2016 - The story of how Trump told Congress 23 years ago that Indians were ... to stop Native Americans from expanding the number of casinos they were ... In 2000, with the help of his long time friend/lobbyist Roger Stone, Trump ...

Trump's long history of clashes with Native Americans - Alaska ...

www.adn.com/.../trumps-long-history-of-clashes-with-native-a...

1.

Alaska Dispatch News

Jul 25, 2016 - His earlier battles with Indian casinos also reveal Trump's .... In explaining Trump'sremark, Stone noted that many Eastern tribes have ...

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/making-donald-trump-told-journalistic-nemesis

,... dcj bk

Donald is a master of manipulating the conventions of journalism,” explained Johnston, who proceeded to shatter many of them in a book talk that was frequently punctuated with the declaration “because Donald just makes it up,” referring to the man Johnston dubs “a modern-day P.T. Barnum.” The former *New York Times*man’s book already hasprovided fodder for the tabloids.

It chronicles the rise of Trump’s fortunes, beginning with the Republican presidential nominee’s grandfather, a German immigrant who, as Johnston put it in distinctly un-Timesian style, ran a “whorehouse,” and continuing through Trump’s father, whom Johnston described as an industrious businessman with some unfortunate views.

In 1927, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Queens — something his son has tried furiously to deny, but, said Johnston: “I have the clips.” Later, as Johnston details in his book, the elder Trump, in trouble once before with the feds for allegedly bilking a federal housing program for returning GIs, was ordered by the federal authorities to stop discriminating against African-Americans who were trying to rent apartments he owned. The settlement came only after Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to get the allegations of racial bias thrown out by the courts — alawsuit in which he was represented byRoy Cohn, former longtime aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), the disgraced Communist witch-hunt perpetrator.

Johnston sees Trump’s association with Cohn — who, he said, “taught Donald how to hurt people”— as part of a disturbing pattern. “We have never had a major party candidate for president with the kind of relationships Donald Trump has,” Johnston said at the National Press Club. While some past presidents have had unsavory friends and business associations, Johnston continued, “They were not the mob. They were not drug traffickers.”

At the event, Johnston raised repeated questions about Trump’s ties to Felix Sater, a Russian-born stock fraudster and admitted fellow traveller with the mob. Sater is now a defendant in a tax fraud case; papers unsealed earlier this month name Trump and two of his children as “material witnesses.”

He invited his audience to contrast the treatment Trump gave a convicted drug dealer who ran a company that operated Trump’s helicopter fleet with what he did to his infant great-nephew, gravely ill with an ailment that caused seizures.

For his troubled helicopter provider, Joey Weichselbaum, the real estate mogul provided a luxury apartment, continued employment and a testimonial to the court after the latter’s indictment for drug trafficking, Johnston recounts in his book. But Trump was much less accommodating to the grandson of his late older brother after the baby’s parents challenged the will of his father, Fred Trump (which cut them out), in court. Trump removed the ailing child from the family’s medical insurance policy. “I can’t help that,” Johnston quotes Trump telling a New York Daily News reporter who asked why he cut off the infant’s health care coverage (a court later restored it).

Vindictiveness is a point of pride for Trump, Johnston said. “His personal motto is ‘get revenge,’” said the reporter, who devotes an entire chapter to Trump’s speechifying and writings on the subject. Describing how Trump fired a female employee who, citing ethical qualms, wouldn’t call a banker friend on his behalf, Johnston quotes Trump’s own account from his book, Think Big:

“She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad… I can’t stomach disloyalty…and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable.”In another outside-the-box move for a journalist, Johnston said he has reached out to some of the evangelical ministers who back Trump, offering to provide evidence of how much the candidate’s personal views deviate from the philosophy that Jesus Christ outlined in his Sermon on the Mount. “I’ve called them. I’ve offered to go,” Johnston said. So far none has taken him up on the offer.

Having covered Trump since he was the Atlantic City bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Trump was trying to break into the casino business in the New Jersey beach town, “I have probably the largest Trump document collection in the world,” Johnston said. An expert on tax law who lectures on the subject at the Syracuse University, Johnston said he believes, “in all likelihood, Donald has paid no federal income taxes for years.” That’s based on some documents that have leaked out from various court cases, Trump’s lack of charitable giving to his own family foundation (which suggested no need for deductions), and a gaping tax loophole available to real estate developers.

It’s also possible that Trump’s decision to break with long-standing campaign tradition and not release his tax forms could be based on his reluctance to reveal his true net worth. While Johnston says he believes Trump is “very rich,” he, like many others, questions whether he’s quite as rich as he makes himself out to be. Trump’s chief talent lies in “making deals to bring in money that supports a lifestyle” fit for a billionaire, Johnston said. “How many billionaires, who you really know are billionaires, do you see out hawking ties, steaks, bottled water and board games?”

For all his denunciations of Trump, Johnston’s journalistic career has made him uniquely qualified to understand the Republican presidential nominee’s appeal. “I started documenting the growing inequality in America when I started working for The New York Times,” he said. “Government rules take from the many and give to the already rich few.” The people who are being inexorably pushed out of the middle class are on the edge of despair, not least because their plight is so invisible, he argued. “They get almost nothing written about them.”

Johnston’s got a plan to tackle that problem too. He says the Trump book was an interruption from writing his real magnum opus. “I’m writing an entirely new tax code — soup to nuts,” he said.   Kathy Kiely,

==

see twitter:

FEB 18, 2016 06:33 AM PST

The Twitter candidate: Donald Trump’s mastery of social media is his real ground game

Donald Trump has embodied what it means to be a social savvy politician

ANTOANETA ROUSSI

Donald Trump keeps proving political analysts wrong by consistently staying ahead in the polls, and some social media gurus are beginning to think that his online campaign presence may be the real reason for his staying power.

Since entering the race last June, the real estate magnate’s social media presence has grown exponentially and today he boasts 6.2 million followers on Twitter. The political novice who has remained top of the polls in the majority of the Republican race has spent just a fraction of what his opponents have on advertising, yet has gained the most publicity.

Indeed, every time the public would have dispelled Trump from the race, particularly after his outlandish comments about immigrants, Muslims and well, the general population, (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”), he has inadvertently proven time and time again, that the Trump brand is a force to be reckoned with. He has embodied what it means to be a social savvy politician and cashed into Twitter’s dynamic, real-time messaging tool for his complete and utter enjoyment.

The secret behind Trump’s successful online presence: Justin McConney. The 29-year-old digital strategist of the Trump campaign has reportedly encouraged the presidential candidate to give fans and supporters what they want. “In Trump’s case, that means controversy — the more outrageous the content, the better.”

....

==

Republicans not voting for Mr Trump

Republicans voting for Mrs Clinton

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/koch-brothers-are-helping-trump

...Just days ago at a gathering in Colorado Springs, Koch told some 80 Koch network donors that he and the network would not support Trump, despite the urging of some of the network’s backers. Conflicting reports emerged about whether a meeting between the Kochs and Trump had been or would be sought by either: The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the network’s donors, Doug Deason, was urging Charles Koch to meet with Trump, while Trump tweeted that he had turned down a meeting with the brothers, instructing them to meet with “the puppets of politics,” whatever that means.

Yet Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel reported on June 17 that Mark Holden, chief counsel for Koch Industries and chairman of the board of the Koch network’s Freedom Partners pass-through group, met with Trump’s top campaign staff.

While there is no love lost between the billionaire brothers and the GOP standard-bearer,Trump stands to benefit from their efforts in the 2016 election cycle, even if their focus is on elections other than the presidential. It’s as simple as this: If you get voters to the polls in order to vote for the Senate or House candidate of your choice, chances are good they’ll vote for the presidential candidate who appears on the same ticket.

The Koch network’s favored candidates are, of course, all Republicans.

Would things be better for Trump if the Koch network more explicitly backed him? Sure. With the brothers' backing, he would likely receive more individual donations directly to his campaign. And canvassing or advertising in the presidential race by Koch network groups such as Americans for Prosperity or its retiree-focused 60 Plus Association could assuage the fears of Trump doubters who might otherwise find themselves voting for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson or simply not marking a box next to the name of a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, Trump will likely reap benefits from the network's 2016 efforts.

Waste Not, Want Not

Earlier this year, as word emerged from Koch world that the network would focus on Senate and House elections rather than throwing its money at the presidential campaign, most mainstream media outlets ran with the narrative that this decision was based on Charles Koch’s dislike of Trump, allowing the chairman and CEO of Koch Industries to appear to be principled—or at least a bit genteel. There’s little doubt that Trump’s baldly stated racism and sexism is an embarrassment to some in the upper echelon of GOP donors. In addition, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and trade deals runs counter to positions embraced by the neo-libertarian Kochs. But those concerns are secondary to the Kochs’ decision not to go all in on the presidential campaign.

The truth is that, after wasting some $400 million on the 2012 election cycle, the Koch brothers assessed those efforts and arrived at the conclusion that focusing on winning Congress was the way to go. As early as February 2013, Politico’s Vogel reported that the Koch network was poised to reposition itself in the 2016 cycle. Vogel wrote:

Americans for Prosperity spent roughly $140 million last year — its biggest annual budget by far — flooding swing state airwaves with anti-Obama ads and streets with paid canvassers, though AFP has always positioned itself as a nonpartisan organization that doesn’t measure its success or failure on the results of a single election.

Still, Charles Koch was overheard at a holiday party criticizing AFP’s 2012 effort, arguing it needed to be completely overhauled — and questioning whether it could be made effective at all.

In fact, Vogel reported, the brothers essentially “ordered up an audit” of the network’s efforts to elect Mitt Romney, and reconfigured their network’s workflow accordingly.

Strength In the States

In truth, the Koch network has always been a state-based operation. Think Wisconsin in 2011, when the network effectively elected Governor Scott Walker, who then did its bidding by all but ending collective bargaining by public employees.

Across the nation, the network’s efforts help elect the majority of the nation’s 31 Republican governors and turn or maintain Republican dominance of 30 state legislatures. These are the offices that control the shape of congressional districts, which largely accounts for how right-wing Republicans came to dominate the House of Representatives. Add to that the Koch network’s efforts to elect its favored candidates to the U.S. Senate, and you arrive at today’s divided government, with the presidency in Democratic hands, and Congress in Republicans’. (Unless Democrats manage to reclaim a majority of governors’ mansions and change the make-up of state legislatures by the time the next round of redistricting begins in 2020, the Republican right is likely to maintain its hold on the House.)

The Limits of Advertising

When you think of political spending, what likely comes to mind is the endless barrage of negative advertising that floods the television and radio airwaves, especially in presidential election years. But years of research into the effectiveness of these ads shows limited, if any, effect, a bit of information Charles Koch has likely considered.

As Andrew Cockburn reported for the June issue of Harper’s:

According to David Broockman, a political scientist at Stanford, multiple studies have demonstrated that such ads are essentially self-erasing. “There really is not much evidence that TV has a long-lasting effect on people’s views,” he told me. “Someone sees a TV ad on Monday afternoon, they change who they say they’ll vote for on a survey on Tuesday, but by Wednesday, their view has snapped back to what it was on Monday morning before they saw the ad, because they’ve just forgotten it.”

What does work? Intensive face-to-face conversations by political canvassers. This is what Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ ground-game operation, excels at. “[T]he effect,” writes Cockburn, “is infinitely more cost-effective than any traditional media-heavy approach.”

In this election cycle, AFP is deploying its canvassers with the aim of electing members of Congress, as well as U.S. Senate candidates in some key states on the Electoral College map: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, to name a few.

The Washington Post’s Matea Gold tagged along with one AFP canvasser in Pennsylvania, and found that those canvassed because they were likely to vote for Republican Senator Pat Toomey if they made it to the polls were also likely to pull the lever, albeit reluctantly, for presidential candidate Donald Trump.....

---

http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-doubles-down-on-climate-science-denial-live-on-fox-1946817050.html

...

Trump's continued dismissal of science would keep him isolated on the world stage, where every single world leader acknowledges the dangers and science of climate change (you can find and read quotes from every world leader here).

It's clear why Clinton pummels Trump by 38 points on the issue of climate change, the widest spread between them on any single issue, according to Gallup.

"If Donald Trump thinks he can negotiate with the hard facts of climate science, he's going to fail just as badly as he did in Atlantic City," Khalid Pitts, Sierra Club national political director, said. "His unhinged conspiracy theories denying science would embarrass our country around the world and endanger families across the country who are already feeling the pain of extreme droughts and storms fueled by the climate crisis."

Here's the transcript of Trump on FOX News:

O'REILLY: Okay. But did you ever call climate change a hoax?

TRUMP: Well, I might have because when I look at some of the things that are going on, in fact, if you look at Europe where they had their big summit a couple of years ago, where people were sending out emails, scientists practically calling it a hoax and they were laughing at it. So, yes, I probably did. I see what's going on and you see what's going on.

O'REILLY: Do you believe that that man-made fossil fuels and gases have eroded the environment so that the sun is more intense on Earth? Because that's the basic thing? Do you believe that's happening?

TRUMP: Well, they are saying man made and I say it could have a minor impact but nothing, nothing to what they're talking about.

---

==

Donald Trump Adds Well-Known G.O.P. Adviser to Campaign Staff

By ASHLEY PARKER and MAGGIE HABERMANJUNE 5, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/06/us/politics/trump-hires.html?_r=0

Donald J. Trump’s campaign is adding staff members to key areas it has been criticized for neglecting, bringing on Jim Murphy as its new national political director and preparing to beef up its communications team.

:{:{}:

}:

Mr. Murphy, the head of JLM Consulting, was a senior adviser to Bob Dole’s 1988 and 1996 presidential campaigns and managed floor operations at three Republican conventions. Previously, he was president of DCI Group, a public affairs firm.

Mr. Murphy’s hire comes just over a week after the campaign fired Rick Wiley, who held the position previously but was fired after less than two months. And it also comes amid stumbles by Mr. Trump as he and his team try to ramp up to a more robust operation capable of running a multimillion dollar general election campaign.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Murphy spoke by phone over the weekend, and four campaign aides confirmed Mr. Murphy’s hiring.

The campaign has only one person, Hope Hicks, the campaign spokeswoman, overseeing communications, and is hoping to add at least two new hires to help as early as this week.

Mr. Murphy got his start in politics working for Senator Gordon J. Humphrey, Republican of New Hampshire, and also briefly served as deputy political director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the mid-1980s.

:{:{}:

}:

Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman who also hired Mr. Wiley, helped bring Mr. Murphy on board. Mr. Murphy also worked with Michael Glassner, the Trump deputy campaign manager, on the Dole campaign in 1996, and he is familiar with the campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, from their days working together in New Hampshire. He is also close withRick Reed, who makes ads for the Trump campaign

---

==

omg when we said seek professional help, this is not what we had in mind]

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/trump-turns-over-his-campaign-to-lobbyists-222242

Donald Trump’s new chief campaign strategist, Paul Manafort, is bringing on some close associates for key spots on Trump's presidential campaign, including several whose lobbying histories seem to epitomize the special-interest influence against which the candidate rails.

Among the influence industry veterans who have been helping the campaign in recent weeks, according to sources close to the Trump campaign, are Laurance Gay, who worked with Manafort on an effort to obtain a federal grant that one congressman called a “very smelly, sleazy business,” and Doug Davenport, whose firm’s lobbying for an oppressive Southeast Asian regime became a liability for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The pair join another former Manafort lobbying partner named Rick Gates, who was identified as an agent of a Ukrainian oligarch in a 2011 racketeering lawsuit that also named Manafort. And Manafort this week met with Marc Palazzo, a formerlobbyist for a Koch Industries subsidiary who used to work as a communications staffer for GTECH Corp., the controversial lottery operator, to which Gay, Davenport, Gates and Manafort all have ties.

It's not clear whether the people who recently started advising the campaign are working as staff, consultants or volunteers. But what unites almost all of them is a professional connection to Manafort, 67, a veteran GOP operative who was hired by Trump late last month to professionalize his campaign.

For the first 10 months of his candidacy, the billionaire real estate showman relied on a relatively inexperienced skeleton staff that helped elevate him from quirky political sideshow to a candidate on the verge of the GOP presidential nomination. But that core team, led by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, was seen as unable to take Trump all the way, so the candidate handed the keys to Manafort, who has moved quickly to consolidate power on the campaign.

Manafort has made a decades-long career drifting between GOP presidential politics and lucrative lobbying and consulting work. The firm he helped found developed a niche representing a roster of controversial international clients that has been described as “the torturers’ lobby.” Clients included Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan guerrilla Jonas Savimbi, a group accused of being a front for Pakistani intelligence, and — most recently — ousted Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. In fact, the last time Manafort was intricately involved in a presidential campaign was Bob Dole’s unsuccessful 1996 bid, and he has been largely absent from GOP politics and Washington for years.

Manafort’s recent additions to the Trump campaign have prompted incredulous reactions among Lewandowski’s loyalists on the campaign, who have privately questioned whether Manafort understands modern presidential politics, said one operative who works with the Trump campaign.

“They said that they were going to bring in a new campaign team, but Manafort has been out of the game for so long,” said the operative. “He doesn’t have any current connections, so he’s just bringing in all his old lobbyist friends.”

It's an odd fit for a campaign based in large part on Trump's broadsides against Washington special interests and their lobbying corps, which Trump alleges have skewed the political process against the interests of regular people. Those lobbyists, he argues, are backing his opponents out of self-interest.

Two months after launching his campaign last year, Trump boasted on CBS’ "Face the Nation": "I don't want lobbyists. I don't want special interests,” adding that he "turned down $5 million last week from a very important lobbyist, because there are total strings attached to a thing like that. He's going to come to me in a year or two years and he's going to want something for a country that he represents or for a company that he represents.”

Manafort did not respond to questions about whether his own lobbying background or those of his new advisers would undermine Trump’s message, or whether his new team had the experience to run a presidential campaign in 2016.

Palazzo, who worked with Manafort on one of Ed DiPrete’s successful Rhode Island gubernatorial campaigns in the 1980s, rejected the idea that bringing on lobbyists without recent presidential campaign experience would hurt more than help.

“I’ve known Paul Manafort for many, many years. I have great respect for him, and am confident in his ability to help Mr. Trump win the nomination,” said Palazzo, 56. He met with Manafort at the campaign’s Manhattan headquarters this week to talk about the campaign but said he is “not going to assume an official role with the campaign.”

Gay, 63,Davenport, 44,and Gates, 43, did not respond to messages seeking comment about their roles with the campaign or their lobbying work.

It’s not immediately evident whether Gay, who is based in Connecticut, has worked on a presidential campaign in recent decades. But he has been on the ground in California and has met with Trump’s state director Tim Clark, according to the operative who works with the Trump campaign. The operative said that Gay has had discussions about the campaign’s plans to spend heavily in the run-up to California's primary on June 7 — the last day of voting — which in all likelihood will determine whether Trump reaches the 1,237-delegate threshold necessary to secure the GOP nomination before the convention.

Gates, who boasts in an online bio that he “has worked on several US presidential campaigns and has participated in many international political campaigns in Europe and Africa,” took over some of the duties of Lewandowski's deputy Michael Glassner, according to multiple campaign sources.

“He was coordinating nuts and bolts kind of stuff with the staff on the ground, trying to make sure we had the right people in place, and interviewing potential hires,” said a campaign insider. The insider said that some of those operational duties were inherited by Rick Wiley, who Manafort hired to be national political director. Wiley appears to be the only Manafort hire so far with recent high-level presidential campaign experience, though Wiley’s stewardship of Scott Walker’s underperforming presidential campaign was widely panned. The Wisconsin governor entered the race as an establishment favorite and was the beneficiary of $32 million in campaign and super PAC cash, but his campaign was seen as poorly managed, and he dropped out after plummeting in the polls.

Multiple campaign sources said that Davenport, who first worked with Manafort many years ago, is helping lead the campaign’s strategy for courting individual delegates, assembling what’s known as the delegate “book.” That will be a critical job, since those individual delegates could decide the GOP nomination at the party’s July convention if Trump fails to reach 1,237 delegates on or by June 7.

While Davenport has been involved in past conventions, his role was at least partly that of a lobbyist planning corporate events. His last high-level presidential campaign experience appears to have come in 2008, when he was a regional campaign manager for McCain. He stepped aside after it was revealed that the lobbying and public relations firm for which he worked, DCI Group, had previously been on retainer for the repressive military regime in Myanmar, then known as Burma.

Davenport is currently lobbying for DCI on behalf of hedge funds that hold Puerto Rico’s debt and don’t want Congress to approve a restructuring plan, according to lobbying disclosure records.The investors’ aggressive tactics — running attack ads in lawmakers’ home districts — have rankled some Congress members and other bondholders. He also lobbied for forcing Argentina to pay back U.S. investors in its own recent debt dispute. At least one of the hedge funds hounding Argentina is also involved in Puerto Rico.

And Davenport has lobbied since at least 2001 for GTECH, which dominated the state lottery equipment business but also came under legal scrutiny for its business practices. Its founder, Guy Snowden, resigned in 1998 after a London jury convicted him of attempted bribery, and GTECH last year was absorbed by slot machine maker IGT.

Gates and Gay also lobbied and worked for GTECH, which was represented by Manafort’s lobbying firm in the late 1990s — around the time Palazzo served as GTECH’s director of communications. He called Davenport and Gay “good friends and talented professionals.”

Gay led the company’s government relations and sales between 1994 and 1998. After leaving the company with a reported $4.5 million golden parachute, Gay registered to lobby in Connecticut for the casino-owning Mashantucket Pequot Indians and mall developer Westfield.

Gay and Gates also worked together at Gay’s Hartford, Connecticut-based firm Business Strategies and Insight LLC. In the early '00s, they registered to lobby Congress on behalf of Xavier Chemical Co., a Georgia firm that was locked in a dispute with the U.S. Army about a federal contract to operate a former ammunition plant.

More recently, Gates represented the American Stock Exchange and VILF Consultants, a Virgin Islands company lobbying on the territory’s infrastructure. Gates was named in a racketeering lawsuit brought in U.S. federal court by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko against Manafort and his associates for their work for pro-Russian strongman Yanukovych. The complaint, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, describes Gates as an agent of Ukrainian gas oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who Tymoshenko accuses of improperly shielding profits. (A judge dismissed the suit, ruling it fell outside U.S. jurisdiction.)

Gay also found himself in the hot seat over his work with Manafort after joining his firm in the 1980s from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he had been an official.

Manafort had been a partner in a venture to redevelop a housing project in New Jersey, and he paid his own lobbying firm to help win $31 million in HUD subsidies. Gay was the go-between between the firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, and HUD. A congressional investigation found the facilities lacked laundry machines, gutters or downspouts, and theHUD official who Gay had lobbied was later convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government.

While Manafort and Gay were never charged, Manafort was called to testify about the matter in the late 1980s before the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Employment and Housing.

"The technical term for what we do — and law firms, associations and professional groups do — is lobby," Manafort told the committee at the time. "For the purposes of today, I will stipulate that, in a narrow sense, some people may term it influence-peddling."

:{:{}:

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/trump-turns-over-his-campaign-to-lobbyists-222242#ixzz4EQIqB1hv 

Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook}:

===

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/trump-robocalls-white-nationalists-iowa

Some registered voters in Iowa received robocalls Saturday from a white nationalist super PAC that urged them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

“I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America,” Jared Taylor said on the robocall, paid for by the American National Super PAC. “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

Taylor is the founder of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance. The robocall included two more endorsements from a conservative Christian talk show host and the head of the white nationalist American Freedom Party.

Reverend Donald Tan, a Filipino-American minister and host of Christian talk show program "For God and Country," encouraged Iowans to vote for Trump by citing scripture.

“First Corinthians states 'God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise and God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong,’” he says on the call. “For the Iowa caucuses please support Donald Trump."

The robocall was closed out by American Freedom Party chairman William Johnson, who identified himself only as "a farmer and white nationalist." Johnson, who founded the PAC that paid for the robocall, notes that Trump did not authorize it.

The American Freedom Party had issued a press release Friday announcing the launch of the robocall campaign, calling Trump its "Great White Hope."

Jared Taylor also serves as a spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens, which wascited in the manifesto written by Charleston shooter Dylann Roof as the group that opened his eyes to what he saw as the scourge of black-on-white crime in America. Roof went on a shooting rampage at a historically black church in June, killing nine parishioners....

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/exposing-trumps-trade-appeal-working-class-voters-what-it

Trump is selling himself as the champion of working-class voters. He says Democrats and their presumptive presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, are selling them out with trade deals. But Trump is just a fraud.

Unfortunately, President Obama is pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and Clinton is not confronting him for doing so.

That has to change—fast. Clinton must publicly, directly and loudly challenge President Obama and demand that he withdraw TPP from consideration by Congress.

Trump’s Trade Speech

Trump’s speech on trade and “globalization” issues attempted to frame Clinton and Democrats as being on the side of the “Wall Street” forces that have pushed low-wage policies on working-class Americans. He is using the upcoming and hated TPP being pushed by President Obama as an example of this, saying Clinton is only “pretending” to oppose TPP in order to get votes.

From the speech:

The legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways and skyscrapers that make up our great American landscape.

But our workers’ loyalty was repaid with betrayal.

Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization—moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas.

Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.

[...] The people who rigged the system are supporting Hillary Clinton because they know as long as she is in charge nothing will ever change.

In Trump’s usage, the words “trade” and “globalization” mean one and only one thing: moving American jobs and factories to low-wage countries. This movement of jobs in recent decades, pitting American workers against exploited workers who are paid squat and can’t do anything about it, has been used as one lever to intentionally create unemployment, break the unions and force down wages. (Inflation panic leading to Federal Reserve interest rate increases, deficit scares leading to austerity—especially the refusal to spend on infrastructure—and obstruction leading to minimum wage stagnation are others.)

Trump is appealing to disaffected working class workers who used to vote Democratic, but have seen their jobs shipped out of the country and/or their wages cut or stagnate. These workers see Democrats as complicit in adopting free-trade deindustrialization policies. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), pushed and signed by President Clinton, has become a catchall symbol of this disaffection with free-trade policies, but Democrats are generally seen as having done little to fight such policies.

President Obama contributed to the problem by campaigning with a promise to renegotiate NAFTA, then reneging on this promise once elected.

Trump also went after the Chamber of Commerce for their TPP support, implying they back Clinton. The New York Times reports:

Pressing his staunch opposition to trade deals, Donald J. Trump escalated his attacks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, saying it was “totally controlled by the special interest groups.”

“They’re a special interest that wants to have the deals that they want to have,” he told a packed arena at a rally here, to whoops and cheers. “They want to have T.P.P., the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the worst deals, and it’ll be the worst deal since NAFTA.”

[...] saying the Chamber was “controlled totally by various groups of people that don’t care about you whatsoever.”

Obama Pushing TPP As Election Nears

Clinton has said she is opposed to TPP, and opposed to letting TPP come up for a vote in the “lame duck” session of Congress that follows the election. But as Trump makes trade a centerpiece of his campaign, her opposition and trade focus has not been particularly vocal. She has not asked Democrats in Congress to oppose the TPP, and thanks to past Democratic betrayals many in the public just do not believe her.

Unfortunately, as the election nears, President Obama is pushing and pushing hard to get the TPP passed. Doing this directly conflicts with Clinton’s need to show that Democrats are on the side of working people and provides Trump with powerful ammunition.

Making matters worse, efforts to write TPP opposition into the Democratic Party platform were voted down—by Clinton delegates. Unlike Trump, Democrats do not appear to understand how much this matters to voters.

Brexit Warning...

==

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, received an endorsement Wednesday from a heavyweight foreign policy adviser to Republican presidents.

Brent Scowcroft, who served as National Security Adviser to Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, and who worked in the White House of Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, said Clinton "brings truly unique experience and perspective to the White House."

His endorsement was released hours after the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump launched a broad attack on Clinton's experience, honesty and foreign policy experience in a 40-minute speech. Scowcroft directly rebutted Trump's claim that Clinton does not have the temperament to lead, citing her experience working on high-pressure issues such as Iran and Israel.

"She brings deep expertise in international affairs and a sophisticated understanding of the world, which I believe are essential for the commander-in-chief," Scowcroft said.

His backing follows that of another prominent Republican in national security circles. Richard Armitage, who served in the State and Defense Departments under George W. Bush and President Ronald Reagan, announced last week that he will vote for Clinton over Trump.

While scores of Republican experts on national security have publicly declared they cannot support Trump, fewer have taken the step to back Clinton.

"I believe Hillary Clinton has the wisdom and experience to lead our country at this critical time," Scowcroft said.

His views have differed from Clinton's in the past, including a divide over the wisdom of invading Iraq, a step Clinton supported at the time, while Scowcroft did not.

Despite his long history as a Republican adviser, Scowcroft has shaped Democratic views as well. During his first presidential campaign, President Barack Obama said he had "enormous sympathy" for the realist foreign policy approach of both Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush. Scowcroft later helped Obama assemble his national security team.

In a recent Atlantic magazine article outlining Obama's foreign policy views, the President mentioned Scowcroft, saying, "I love that guy."

---

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/06/donald-trump-christine-whitman-climate

---

Dan Scavino Jr., a senior adviser and the social media director for the Trump campaign

:{:{}:

}:

:{:{}:

Director of Social Media

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.

July 2015 – Present (1 year)Greater New York City Area

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. Adviser

The Trump Organization

June 2015 – Present (1 year 1 month)Greater New York City Area

#MakeAmericaGreatAgain • #Trump2016

#MakeAmericaGreatAgain

#MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Director Of Development

Joe Torre Safe At Home Foundation

September 2013 – April 2015 (1 year 8 months)Greater New York City Area

I love the Joe Torre Safe At Home Foundation! Joe & Ali Torre are like family. They are TWO AMAZING people who I love like family & care about very much! Time has come for me to pursue opportunities where my passion is! I am grateful for their full support.

Executive Vice President / General Manager

The Trump Organization

January 2003 – March 2013 (10 years 3 months)Greater New York City Area

Trump Golf offers private clubs and public courses of uncompromising sport, amenities and service.

As the foremost golf course developer in the world, Donald J. Trump is committed to creating the finest portfolio of award-winning courses. With 15 courses throughout the world, Trump golf properties offer a new level of challenge, luxury, service and performance that have become synonymous with the Trump Golf experience.

Trump National and International Golf Clubs are some of the most sought after clubs worldwide and are considered to have the highest standards in golf course design, maintenance, and management. Trump courses combine the most spectacular landscapes with the talents of the world’s best golf course architects such as Tom Fazio, Pete Dye, Martin Hawtree, Arthur Hills, Gil Hanse and Tom Kite, creating a timeless blend of beauty and challenge on every hole.

(Open)5 honors and awards

Trump exec instrumental in purchase of golf club

Trump exec instrumental in purchase of golf club

Scavino Ranks Top 20 In World

Scavino Ranks Top 20 In World

11 Inspiring Tales of Unexpected Success

11 Inspiring Tales of Unexpected Success

Trump course accessible, even without pricey membership

Trump course accessible, even without pricey membership

Playing the Trump Card

Playing the Trump Card

Pharmaceutical Sales Representative

Galderma

January 2003 – January 2004 (1 year 1 month)Greater New York City Area

After 5 successful years with Coca-Cola, I received an opportunity to work at Galderma Lab's, calling on doctors in the New York Market. Spent 3 months in training, reading, & studying. Passed all of my science/chemical exams - and began in March, in my own territory. REALLY enjoyed what I was doing…until the golf club I worked at thru high school, and college called me - and gave me an opportunity I could not refuse…

District Sales Manager

Coca-Cola Enterprises

May 1998 – January 2003 (4 years 9 months)Greater New York City Area

Began with Coca-Cola right out of college. Received 2 promotions in 4 years & became the youngest District Sales Manager in the company at the time.

2001-2003 - District Sales Manager

2000 - Business Development Manager

1998, 1999 - Account Manager

(Open)1 honor or award

Golf Services

The Trump Organization

1992 – 1998 (6 years)Greater New York City Area

Formerly Briar Hall, bought by Donald J. Trump - at 16 years old, I worked my summers & weekends at Briar Hall Country Club, which eventually became Trump National Golf Club, in Westchester County, NY (after a $100 million PLUS renovation). I worked in the restaurant, bag room, cart barn, and caddied for Mr. Trump - when he would come up to play on the weekends.

}:

LI scrape

:{:{}:

Jessica Macchia

Executive Assistant to Donald J. Trump

Corey Lewandowski

Campaign Manager Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.

Ryan Keller

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.

Megan Powers

Campaign Coordinator at Donald J. Trump for President

Michael Cohen

EVP & Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump at The Trump Organization

Lynne Patton

Vice President of The Eric Trump Foundation & Senior Assistant to the Trump Family

Katrina Pierson

Spokesperson at Donald J Trump for President

}:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/us/politics/meg-whitman-likens-donald-trump-to-fascists-at-republican-retreat.html?_r=0

==

bad week mex judge curio  i'm with racist ryan

2 reports on fraud:

trump u

http://go.propublica.org/e/125411/l-utm-campaign-dailynewsletter/2djgvy/35114236

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trumps-wealth-built-stiffing-scores-contractors-businesses-and-employees-years-report

==

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/28/3783022/donald-trump-drought/

peaking to an audience in California on Friday, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump told the crowd “there is no drought” in their state.

Trump claimed there isn’t a real water shortage. Instead, he said, state officials are intentionally denying water to farmers in the middle of the state — choosing to reroute the water to the ocean to protect an endangered California fish called the delta smelt.

“It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump said. “There is no drought. They turn the water out into the ocean.”[vid]

Trump appears to be attempting to draw a distinction between water for agricultural purposes and water for environmental purposes, the two main categories of water use that California balances. The fish that he referenced is nearing extinction and has become a source of controversy in California as some water has been allocated to maintain its habitat.

But there’s no question the drought exists.

California has been grappling with an unprecedented drought that covers nearly 95 percent of the state, and experienced one of its driest years ever in 2015. The past several years have beenmarked by wildfires, water rationing, and mountaintops without snow. And because California is the nation’s top agriculture producer, the situation threatens to upend the United States’ food production system.

Trump, who has a long history of making flat-out untrue assertions about environmental issues, said he would quickly fix California’s water issues if he becomes president.

“If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive,” Trump said. “We’re going to get it done, and we’re going to get it done quick. Don’t even think about it.”

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/egyn-kellys-trump-interview-signaled-fox-news-surrender

==

ca dump water in ocean to save guppy?

==

OMG ~ paris, xl

http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/26/donald-trump-energy-plan/

Trump has spent a lot of time talking about his hands — and less time talking about his actual plans. Today, though, Trump will be unveiling his so-called energy policy for an audience of fossil fuel CEOs.

Here’s what you actually need to know about Trump’s environment and energy agenda in five minutes or less.

1. Not only has Donald Trump failed to propose a plan to address climate change — he won’t even admit that it’s happening.

“A total hoax.”

“Bullshit.”

“A con job.”

You might think these are good words to describe Trump’s campaign. No — they’re his take on the climate crisis.

...

2. Donald Trump wants to undermine U.S. leadership by “renegotiating” the historic Paris climate agreement.

Trump told Reuters: “At a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum. And at a maximum I may do something else.”

President Obama and other global leaders did something remarkable — they brought nearly the entire world together to agree to meet our climate challenge. Trump is proposing we negotiate away American global leadership. What he said is ridiculous and would do irreparable damage to our role in the world.

3. Donald Trump says he wants to bring back coal, the world’s dirtiest fuel.

Coal is the world’s dirtiest energy source, from mining to burning to disposing of coal waste. Currently, 233 U.S. coal plants have been retired or are set for retirement.

...

4. Donald Trump would eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — endangering our health and safety.

Donald Trump: No, I’m not cutting services, but I’m cutting spending. But I may cut Department of Education … Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace. Every week they come out with new regulations.

Chris Wallace: Who is going to protect the environment?

Donald Trump: We’ll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit.

...

5. Donald Trump’s business ventures are already devastating the environment.

Trump cut down about 500 trees so that his Virginia golf course could have more than a “little glimpse” of the river. His New Jersey golf course has been cited for a “string of violations.” One luxury development in Scotland left the local community without water for years.

Trump clearly cares more about the fate of his golf courses than the health of the millions of families affected by the climate crisis.

...In fact, according to Politico, Trump is trying to build a seawall to protect one of his golf courses from “global warming and its effects” — even as he insists that climate change is a “hoax.”

==

elliot  B bribe NY

Matea Gold May 24 at 6:06 PM

Donald Trump spent much of the Republican presidential primary contest inveighing against politicians for leaning on wealthy contributors for support. Now he’s doing the same.

On Tuesday, some of the GOP’s best-connected fundraisers signed on to help raise as much as $1 billion for Trump and the Republican National Committee, part of an effort to rapidly build out a finance operation that the candidate has lacked until now.

Half a dozen of the party’s elite money players — including New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks — have agreed to serve as vice chairs of the Trump Victory fund, a joint fundraising committee between Trump’s campaign, the RNC and 11 state parties, the party announced Tuesday.

Johnson served as finance chairman for former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s presidential bid, while Hendricks donated $5 million to a super PAC supporting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, said that the candidate was not contradicting his stance on rich donors by accepting their help, noting that most of the money raised would go to the RNC for its national voter mobilization this fall.

Trump captures the nation’s attention on the campaign trail

View Photos The Republican candidate continues to dominate the presidential contest.

“That will benefit not only Mr. Trump, but all the races down ballot,” he said, adding: “I don’t think it’s fair to say that an individual worth $10 billion will be indebted to someone who writes a check for $10 or $100.”

In fact, the victory fund is seeking donations in far greater amounts. The first fundraiser, which Trump was set to headline Tuesday in Albuquerque, requires a $10,000 donation per person. Tickets for a high-priced dinner in Los Angeles on Wednesday at the home of investor Thomas Barrack Jr. start at $25,000.

And a rich supporter who wants to give more could shell out as much as $449,400 to the joint committee, whose proceeds are split between the Trump campaign and the party.

[Here’s how a wealthy Trump supporter could give $783,400 to support his campaign and the RNC]

Leading the effort to bring in big dollars are major financial backers of Trump’s past rivals — even some he targeted as special interests who seek to control the agenda of the politicians they support.

Earlier this year, Trump regularly cited Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, as someone who would influence Bush’s health-care and pharmaceutical policies.

Nevertheless, his comments did not rankle the New York Jets owner, who has been friends with Trump for three decades, according to a person familiar with Johnson’s views. Among the ties between the two men: Their daughters went to school together.

That kind of long-standing relationship that Trump has with wealthy business leaders has helped convert apprehension about the real estate developer into active support, donors said. The coalescing among the party’s money class has been accelerated by antipathy to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“It’s the party unifying because they realize that Mrs. Clinton is not a viable choice,” said Ron Weiser, who was a national co-chair for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and is one of the new Trump Victory vice chairs. “I think you’re starting to see that across the board.”

Just a few months ago, Florida developer Mel Sembler expressed dismay at the thought of Trump as the party’s nominee. “I kept telling myself that won’t happen, that can’t happen. .?.?. I now fear it may happen,” he told the Tampa Bay Times in February.

Now Sembler, who helped lead fundraising for a pro-Bush super PAC, has agreed to serve as a vice chairman of the victory fund.

When asked why, Sembler responded in a text message: “Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee.”

[Trump’s deal with the RNC shows how big money is flowing back to the parties]

As a sign of party unity, the past three RNC finance chairmen have come aboard the effort: Weiser, a former ambassador to Slovakia; Dallas investor Ray Washburne, who had been the national finance chairman for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie; and Los Angeles venture capitalist Elliott Broidy, who serves on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

“There is truly a sense that we’re going to win this thing, that Trump can win it,” Washburne said. “Everyone is going to throw their shoulders behind it and put money behind it.”

The operation is being led by Lew Eisenberg, the RNC’s finance chairman, and is getting a big boost from experienced finance staff at the party headquarters. Chairman Reince Priebus is even calling major fundraisers himself, asking them to host events.

Local Politics Alerts

Breaking news about local government in D.C., Md., Va.

Sign up

The firepower reflects anxiety among senior GOP fundraisers about meeting Trump’s declared goal of $1 billion — a sum that would require the committee to pull in an average of $250 million a month during the next five months.

“If everybody does their job, anything is possible,” Weiser said. “But that’s a lot of hard money.”

The team is finalizing a schedule of fundraisers and is recruiting state finance chairs in each state.

An effort to actively solicit small donations online is also expected to kick off soon. That could provide a major infusion of cash for Trump’s campaign, which could tap into the kind of online fundraising juggernaut that has helped power the bid of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton’s Democratic challenger.

“There’s a real opportunity with the enthusiasm that people have for Donald Trump,” said Henry Barbour, a Mississippi-based GOP strategist who serves as a RNC national committeeman. “I think we’re going to find a lot of new low-dollar donors.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gop-fundraisers-once-mocked-by-trump-now-rallying-to-support-his-bid/2016/05/24/e48ace7a-21d4-11e6-9e7f-57890b612299_story.html

==

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/281074-trump-scores-heavyweight-establishment-republicans-on

rnc

big name recruits include Woody Johnson — who owns the New York Jets and was a top fundraiser for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and previous GOP nominees Mitt Romney and Sen.John McCain (Ariz.) — and Diane Hendricks,who is one of the most sought-after mega-donors in Republican politics.

Hendricks, a Wisconsin-based roofing tycoon, has an estimated net worth of $4.8 billion, according to Forbes. She gave $5 million to a super-PAC supporting the failed presidential campaign of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. And since 2014, she has given at least $3 million to the political arm of the conservative donor network helmed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records.

"This is an impressive leadership team comprised of talented individuals working together to unite the party and win what will be the most important election of our lifetime," Trump said in a statement Tuesday.

"The money raised is an investment in the Republican Party and the future of our country, which, as president, I am going to make better and stronger than ever before."

The Trump Victory Committee, as the joint committee between the party and the Trump campaign is branded, has already begun fundraising and is recruiting finance chairs for all 50 states, the RNC statement said.

On Wednesday, the committee will host its first fundraiser at the Los Angeles home of one of Trump's friend, the multimillionaire investor Thomas Barrack.

And while it's a coup for Trump to land a billionaire donor like Hendricks, it's perhaps even more consequential for the RNC and its presumptive nominee to recruit into its fold prominent GOP donor-fundraisers such as Mel Sembler, Ray Washburne, Ronald Weiser and Kelly and Joe Craft.

They are among the best-known and most-respected fundraisers in conservative politics, and many have deep ties to the Bush family — the closest rivals to the Clintons in U.S. political fundraising today.

They will likely help normalize Trump and calm concerns that remain among the donor community, particularly concerning some of Trump's more controversial positions, including his opposition to trade deals and his plans to round up and deport 11 million illegal immigrants.

Sembler is a longtime Bush family ally who served as ambassador to foreign nations in both Bush administrations. He is supremely connected among conservative donors in Florida. Weiser also served as an ambassador under former President George W. Bush and has a history of generous personal giving and prolific political fundraising.

Washburne is a former RNC national finance chair and was the top fundraiser for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's presidential campaign.

Coal billionaire Joe Craft has a history of lavish political spending and fundraising, including giving $1.25 million to Karl Rove's American Crossroads group during the 2012 election cycle, according to FEC records.

The joint fundraising team will be headed by RNC finance chair Lew Eisenberg, and he'll be closely supported by the head of the Trump campaign's fundraising team, New York banker Steve Mnuchin.

"We are proud to have put together an experienced and motivated leadership team which is going to raise the support our nominee will need to win the White House," Priebus said in a statement.

"We still have a lot of hard work ahead of us to defeat Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, and I know this team is committed to raising the additional resources that will make the difference in producing victory this November."

==http://theresurgent.com/donald-trump-is-already-walking-back-his-supreme-court-list/

Trump's list included a handful of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit as well as several justices on state supreme courts.

Among those on the list were Thomas Lee, the brother of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Diane Sykes, the ex-wife of conservative radio host Charlie Sykes, who blasted Trump repeatedly on his program ahead of the Wisconsin primary in April.

---

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/who-are-trumps-potential-supreme-court-picks

list also provides a stark contrast to the judicial philosophy already outlined by Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, though she has named no names. Presidential candidates usually speak in more general terms and don’t issue actual lists, but Trump bears the burden of proving to conservatives that he won’t crush their dreams of a lifetime appointment who shares their values. For example, one potential nominee,William Pryor, referred to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which recognized a right to abortion nationwide, the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law.”

As for Trump’s own judicial philosophy, in the second of three positions he took in a single day on abortion, Trump himself said the issue “should be put back to the states for determination,” a rough approximation of some conservatives’ critique of Roe.Trump, whose sister is a federal judge, also seemed unclear on the role of judges when he said she had “signed that bill.” (Judges rule on questions of law and do not sign bills.) He also said of his potential Supreme Court picks, “I would wanna see scholars, but I think more than my asking, I would go on references of other people that I respect. Because that is not necessarily my world. I’m very much into the world of legal and legality. But, that is not my world, so I would go to people that I have great respect for and say, ‘Who do you recommend?’”

Members of the conservative movement have been skeptical. In March, conservative columnist George Will warned his fellow conservatives that Donald Trump could not be trusted with the Supreme Court. “There is every reason to think that Trump understands none of the issues pertinent to the Supreme Court’s role in the American regime, and there is no reason to doubt that he would bring to the selection of justices what he brings to all matters — arrogance leavened by frivolousness,” Will wrote.

Will may be relieved today.Texas state Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, on Trump’s list, is a judge Will declared should be the next Republican president’snominee in a column last year. The reason for Will’s praise: Willett’s embrace in an opinion of the concept of “economic liberty,” which would potentially threaten many regulations of business passed in the name of health and safety, but which conservatives say simply harm competition.

Whether Willett welcomes Trump’s favor is an open question. Last June, the prolific tweeter offered the following haiku: “Donald Trump haiku— Who would the Donald Name to#SCOTUS? The mind reels. *weeps—can’t finish tweet*.

--

==