Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Sunday, October 2, 2016

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
NEVADA—Bendixen & Amadi—CLINTON 45, Trump 44
NEW JERSEY—Stockton—CLINTON 46, Trump 40

Rick Hasen: “One of the things we take for granted is that even in tumultuous times when elections are hard fought, the losers concede the election and embrace the process, even if things did not go well…”

“Donald Trump threatens this peace by raising the prospect not only of sending his supporters, unsupervised, into polling places (likely in minority neighborhoods). This can lead to voter intimidation on election day. He has also backed off his earlier, somewhat ambiguous statement that he would support Hillary Clinton if she won.”

“Trump’s gambit may be planned or, more likely, he’s just making it up as he goes along. It is no joke. Our democracy is a fragile thing which depends upon accepting the rules of the game.”

Donald Trump “declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years,” records obtained by the New York Times show.

“The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.”

“Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.”

Washington Post: What we know about Trump’s tax history

From the New York Daily News in the 1990s:

Notably, she did resist Trump’s insistence that she accept Playboy magazine’s million-dollar centerfold offer. “Trump himself was on the phone negotiating the fee,” remembers a top Playboy editor. “He wanted her to do the nude layout. She didn’t.” (“I’m thankful for my body, but I didn’t want to exploit it,” Marla offers. “How would I ever be taken seriously.”

Democrats take note: Noam N. Levey reports at The L.A. Times that A new Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 78% of respondents want “new restrictions on how much pharmaceutical companies can charge for high-cost drugs for illnesses such as hepatitis or cancer…More than eight in 10 Americans favor allowing the federal government to negotiate with drug makers to get lower prices on medications for people on Medicare, a move that the pharmaceutical industry and its supporters in Congress have blocked for years….And 86% of Americans support new requirements on drug companies to release information on how they set prices.”

Over at The Washington Post, Aaron Blake calls out Trump for claiming Angela Merkel is his favorite world leader (after bashing Hillary for being “America’s Merkel”):

In an interview airing Thursday night, Trump pulled perhaps the biggest about-face of his campaign: Merkel, he said, was a world leader he admired. […] It’s almost like Trump was asked about a world leader he really liked, and Merkel was the first to come to mind — and then he immediately thought better of it. […] That “catastrophic leader” “who is ruining Germany” and whom Trump continued to bash just a month and a half ago is now the person he labels a “really great world leader.” He even used that same construction — “really great leader” — in February, before arguing that Merkel is the opposite.

To state the obvious: Those are statements that are impossible to reconcile with one another. They make no sense, when placed next to one another. Even as Trump qualified his answer in Thursday’s interview by noting that Merkel’s immigration policies were bad, it makes no sense for him to say she’s still a “really great world leader.”

Asked if Bill Clinton’s past indiscretions came up at the second debate, would his own past marital history also be fair game, Donald Trump told NH1, “I guess. They can do it. But it’s a lot different that his. That I can tell you. We have a situation where we have a president who was a disaster and was ultimately impeached over it, in a sense for lying. We’ll see whether or not we discuss it.” Asked if he was worried about his past marital history, Trump added “no, not at all. I have a very good history.”

The meeting of Gov. Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Kaine, two pensive and little-known nominees, “might be the least anticipated vice-presidential debate in 40 years,” the New York Times reports.

“There are several reasons for the lack of excitement, which could rival previous low-interest debates like Al Gore versus Jack Kemp in 1996. That one drew the fewest television viewers, 26.6 million, of any matchup since the first vice-presidential debate in 1976.”

Martin Longman says Trump is Hillary’s perfect opponent.

Clinton is the first to admit she’s not a great politician. She doesn’t have the natural gifts of her husband. She doesn’t possess the inspirational oratory of Obama. But even if she had those gifts, she may not benefit from them. Despite many benchmarks of progress women have achieved in this country, they are still suspect when seeking power. If she were like Bill or Barack, she’d suffer for it.

So what does she do? She does what all pioneers have done. She has prepared more than anyone, mastered strategy more than anyone, learned from her mistakes better than anyone. Indeed, she had to, because for a women to seek the power of the highest office, she must prove she’s twice as worthy as her male counterpart who may or may not feel entitled to that power by dint of being a man.

Trump is one such man. If Monday made anything clear, it was that he bullshitted his way to the GOP nomination. At exam time, he wanted an ‘A’ without having done his homework. He’s pretty much the opposite of what most Americans consider deserving.

The debates revealed another level of entitlement. He doesn’t have respect for any authority higher than himself. Most Americans defer to some kind of higher authority — whether it be the rule of law, facts, or God — but Trump does not. There is nothing, not even the fact that he supported the US invasion of Iraq, that supersedes his ego.

Perhaps this is due to his wealth. Perhaps this is due to his celebrity. I don’t care. What’s clear is that he operates on the margins of fact-based reality, a place where he doesn’t need to win arguments to achieve his goals. He merely bulldozes his way.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised more than $154 million in September, marking its best fundraising month, Politico reports.

Los Angeles Times: “After the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes opened for play in 2005, its world-famous owner didn’t stop by more than a few times a year to visit the course hugging the coast of the Pacific.”

“When Trump did visit, the club’s managers went on alert. They scheduled the young, thin, pretty women on staff to work the clubhouse restaurant — because when Trump saw less-attractive women working at his club, according to court records, he wanted them fired.”

Washington Post: “No matter what his advisers try to do ahead of next Sunday’s town-hall debate at Washington University in St. Louis, his performance is utterly unpredictable. Those advisers can run him through mock debates and put him through murder-board, rapid-fire exercises. They can give him a dozen good ways to try to attack Clinton. They can prepare binders of background information, game out answers and give him as many flashcards to study as they can.”

“In other words, they can give him the best information and game plan in the world. But based on the first debate, they cannot trust him to execute. Trump’s weakness is his capacity to forget in the heat of battle the advice he’s been given. Clinton seemingly can knock him off stride with the flick of a phrase.”

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