Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Bitter Almonds]

Do you need to be reminded, once again, that name-calling isn't a shortcut to victory in a debate?

Maybe you missed the part where I said I'm not here to "debate" anything. I'm here to tell what I think, regardless of others' wrong views and opinions. Calling her and her supporters a few names is nothing compared to the real damage this low-life has done and plans to do to people.

[BryanM]

Apologists continue to apologise.

Anyone who thinks that reforming the system from within is possible (and preferable to the alternative) should consider that this relentless apologism which bends over and surrenders to evil every damn time actually makes reform impossible.

BTW, did you manage to keep a straight face while you were praising the dems for their supposedly new-and-improved platform, courtesy of the guy that they just stabbed in the back? Treachery is a ticket for the ninth circle, you know.

And that's why voting for Johnson is such a good tactical choice for some. If they get federal funding, they'll have some capacity to grow. If they grow, then they can get their poll numbers up. If they get their poll numbers up, they can get in the debates. If they're in the debates, then the Republican party is done at the white house level.

Then you can stop being so goddamn afraid, all the goddamn time.

Voting for Hillary empowers republicans as it depresses the fuck out of voters. Does a good job of riling up republicans though, having someone whose entire platform comes across as "republicans suck!". A supreme court of nine Hitlers is just what we get thanks to egomaniac, power hungry justices who refuse to retire while their team holds the football.

At least with Pence as president, democrats will probably retake the House in 2018.

If we're still alive and have some desire to continue to live. Probably not. Neoliberals have done an excellent job of beating the survival instinct out of us. Walking corpses, at this point.

Then you can stop being so goddamn afraid, all the goddamn time.

I really don't get why some people think not being afraid of the end of all life is somehow "cynical". The human species was going to go extinct some time. Right now is a time. So why not now?

Fear doesn't motivate everybody.

[Mischief Maker]

So BryanM, why did you vote for Bernie in the primary?

I mean clearly you don't seem to care about his ability to pass progressive legislation.

Clearly you don't trust his judgment in endorsing Hillary.

And now you're supporting the Libertarians, who are his polar opposite in terms of policy? I thought you were going to vote for Jill Stein to legitimize the Greens. Do you know Gary Johnson supports the TPP?

I mean what, if not his policies, decided you to back Sanders? It can't be for his acting ability.

[EmperorIng]

That's a pretty... imperceptive reading of Bryan's posts, MM.

I didn't think that Bernie was a cult of personality candidate

Though between this and reposting images from Daily Kos, I'm starting to feel that's par for the course. Yikes!

[BryanM]

I basically have an enormous directory of stupid dank Bernie memes.

If we're in a truly bizarre worldline where he raises from the grave like a majestic phoenix, this thread will be turned into a bukkake mudslide of them.

you're supporting the Libertarians

If by "support" you mean "sit on my ass and occasionally mention you could in theory split the conservative base over at SHMUPs Forum", then yes.

If by "support" you mean "actually vote for them and put effort into talking other people into voting for them", then no.

The only real conversation I'm interested in having on libertarianism is why do many of them think their platform could be popular on its own. All other conversations on the topic have long been resolved.

So BryanM, why did you vote for Bernie in the primary?

I voted for him because I've wanted to vote for him over six years. He seems a good enough fellow to be allowed to have political power.

I mean clearly you don't seem to care about his ability to pass progressive legislation.

I do and to do that we need to change the democratic party.

We won't change the democratic party with a leader that can't beat Donald Trump. We'll just end up killing the democratic party if we do that.

Clearly you don't trust his judgment in endorsing Hillary.

I do. Being a whinny bitch over losing would kill his future presidential hopes and undermine his message with those on the fence for no material gain. It is the correct tactical choice in his position.

However, I am not Bernie Sanders.

I get it, you're afraid. (It's really bad now that even the hack frauds over on Nate Silver's site are scared.) I understand that, and sympathize. I barely slept on March 15th when Donald Trump was elected president. I was full _____ mode. It took a couple days to accept the world we're living in.

You build up this thing in your mind that something is so awful. Like getting peed on. "GROSS" you might think. Then when it actually happens, you discover it's not the worst thing in the world. Urine is just water that smells a little bad and aggressively hugs you.

Of course the fact that Donald Trump is now president is much, much worse than getting pissed on.

[Mischief Maker]

Sorry. Coming off Bitter Almonds I totally misinterpreted you. My mistake.

And yes, I am scared. Not just of the Trump presidency, but even more of his supreme court nominees.

[BryanM]

It's oki. My pro-guillotine policy position can easily get mixed up with the kind of bastard who got an erection from seeing an elderly woman collapse from her Parkinson's last week.

I actually think the supreme court is going to be way worse than you think. They're gonna get some guys in their mid 20's to mid 30's, and get 50 to 60 years of control of the court. I've been operating on the assumption that we're going to have to change the fucking constitution during a period of time while the world burns.

[Mischief Maker]

Well the other reason I'm freaking out so much is truth be told I hate Hillary more than Bitter Almonds, and the part of me that did vote Nader can't stand that the DNC has us by the balls this round. Bernie Sanders had an actual plan to fix our crumbling country but all she wants is her damned brass ring! Our Revolution is pretty much the one thing keeping me from losing my mind.

I would hope Republicans are similarly conflicted over Cheeto Jesus.

The mind says yes to Hillary but the heart screams "CUNT!"

[Bitter Almonds]

The TPP? You mean the same one the $hillary cheerleaders also support? Hahah.

[BulletMagnet]

Bernie Sanders had an actual plan to fix our crumbling country

Much as I support the general gist of what he wants to do, the fact that he was banking on even more unrealistic growth figures than anyone except Trump (IIRC, maybe I forgot someone) undermined his case a good deal. What tattered remains of the left still exist have a hard enough job speaking to a country that's been humping Reagan's corpse for decades, the last thing we need to do is shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to the hard numbers, as the people who might listen won't be as forgiving of it as the Trump crowd.

[quash]

Our Revolution is pretty much the one thing keeping me from losing my mind.

So what happens from here? All of the Bernouts I know are demoralized as all hell and have gone back to posting Occupy Democrats memes on Facebook.

Is there a more militant branch of the Bernie supporters that are serious about founding their own party? Or is it all a bust at this point?

I would hope Republicans are similarly conflicted over Cheeto Jesus.

I explained earlier how the Republican establishment and the base are two separate entities. The base is largely behind Trump, though the establishment isn't. I already explained why that is, too.

I do see a division in the establishment moving forward (keep an eye on the Libertarian party in coming years), but the base is solidly behind Trump.

[Mischief Maker]

Bernie Sanders had an actual plan to fix our crumbling country

Much as I support the general gist of what he wants to do, the fact that he was banking on even more unrealistic growth figures than anyone except Trump (IIRC, maybe I forgot someone) undermined his case a good deal. What tattered remains of the left still exist have a hard enough job speaking to a country that's been humping Reagan's corpse for decades, the last thing we need to do is shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to the hard numbers, as the people who might listen won't be as forgiving of it as the Trump crowd.

Oh shit. Hillary Clinton is going to get fucked in the ass during the debate. And I take no pleasure in the poetic justice of that scenario.

I take it you're referring to the Paul Krugman article on the eve of an important primary where he linked to an open letter online by four economists connected to the Bill Clinton administration calling an analysis of Sanders' plan "unrealistic?" I'm pretty certain I debunked that on this thread with links and citations already but here's a quick recap:

1. The economists weren't criticizing the Sanders plan. An economist outside the Sanders campaign ran the numbers on his plan and found strong growth figures. The Sanders campaign linked to his published findings. The open letter said the outside economist's figures were unrealistic and chastised the Sanders campaign for linking to it and supporting bad science.

2. The open letter itself didn't include any mention of math errors or link to any detailed reports on why the findings were "unrealistic" and it was written in layman-accessible language.

3. The outside economist and others pushed back asking "What was the math error? Where are the numbers?" but never got any response. I think one of the economists on the letter walked back his statements when approached by the media. So I think it's a fair assumption that the Clintons called in a favor from these four economists to get them to write this letter and now that their hatchet job was complete they had no need to draw further attention to this letter which frankly was an academic disgrace on their part.

Again, I'm pretty sure I told you all this already. But here you are months later still holding on to that first impression planted by Paul Krugman. In fact, time has only intensified the lie to the point that you think it's less realistic than Trump's economy-crashing plan. Bernie Sanders is the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee while Donald Trump has bankrupted six companies and is openly mocked by actual billionaires. Way to go, Paul Krugman, you've successfully pulled off a hatchet job and now it's a coin-flip whether or not the next 30 years of Supreme Court decisions will usher in Jim Crow 2.0, good dog!

So why do I say Hillary is going to be fucked in the debate? Because Chris Wallace has publicly announced he won't be on the "truth squad" and won't fact-check lies told by the candidates. So just like these economists, Donald Trump can tell a bald-faced lie, and the next day get yet another pants-on-fire from politifact and other organizations, but the first impression will have already been made with the vast majority of viewers and may be the tipping point for them when making that excruciating decision in the voting booth. God help us all!

[quash]

I realize you think I've just been trolling you, but I really do want to see Bernie supporters use his platform to give rise to a new party. Any deviation from the neocon/neolib status quo is good for the country.

Granted, you are still showing an underserved level of trust in media institutions such as Politifact and still support Hillary Clinton, which tells me you're content with keeping the two party system and installed oligarchy as long as it means we can inch towards a progressive agenda, but I'd like to think that maybe your ilk does have some fight left in them.

This truly is the turning point for your ideology. Trump is most likely going to win, and when that happens, you will most likely see the Jacobin/Salon element attempt to take over the Democrats. It's up to the left wing base to decide whether or not they want to continue to be played by the powers that be by sticking with the current political structure, or if they want to finally start that revolution they've been dreaming about.

[BulletMagnet]

So I think it's a fair assumption that the Clintons called in a favor from these four economists to get them to write this letter and now that their hatchet job was complete they had no need to draw further attention to this letter which frankly was an academic disgrace on their part.

You're starting to sound like quash.

I do recall the stuff you said earlier, but to the best of my knowledge there was never any retort to the letter's main complaint, namely that the growth rate predicted by the outside economist in question would be, by pretty much every tenet of "accepted" economics, all but impossible to achieve, let alone sustain, no matter what actions to that end anyone takes. I don't doubt that Sanders' approach to the economy would likely serve the vast majority of people better than Clinton's, let alone Trump's, but I'm hesitant to believe that he's somehow figured out a way to turn the whole thing upside-down lickety-split; frankly, that's precisely the sort of pie-in-the-sky promise that makes Trump so manifestly unqualified for office, and that's before you even get into the "could he get it past Congress" angle. If what he was proposing was really that revolutionary, and achievable besides, he should have pushed the hard-numbers angle a LOT harder than he did, and not via outside sources; the fact that he maintained as much "plausible distance" from it as he did while still attempting to benefit from the praise only makes me more skeptical.

If I missed some growing those-in-the-know consensus along the lines of "hey, y'know what, those numbers ARE totally achievable" by all means clue me in, but to the best of my knowledge either such consensus doesn't exist or the entire economics profession is merely another wing of the Clinton Mafia.

So why do I say Hillary is going to be fucked in the debate? Because Chris Wallace has publicly announced he won't be on the "truth squad" and won't fact-check lies told by the candidates.

I do agree that this should merit disqualification from serving as moderator; if a candidate says something provably false in front of millions of viewers and you promise in advance not to call them on it, what the hell are you even there for?

[BryanM]

You're starting to sound like quash.

True or false: Paul Krugman is a sycophant of the Clintons.

If you select false, you're an idiot, crazy, or a liar.

[quash]

You're starting to sound like quash.

A year from now, everyone will be sounding like me. I just happened to have early access to the beta for this game; when the final release comes out, you'll all be raving about it as much as I've been. Again, you can thank me later.

[BulletMagnet]

True or false: Paul Krugman is a sycophant of the Clintons.

He's unquestionably a Clinton supporter, but he's repeatedly said that the reason for this is that Clinton's numbers check out while Bernie's don't, and to the best of my knowledge he's not an outlier in his field when it comes to that summation - again, if I'm unaware of some development which says otherwise then link posthaste, but otherwise if Sanders was indeed exaggerating the likely effects of his policies, labeling Krugman a "sycophant" for calling it out is just sour grapes.

[Mischief Maker]

I do recall the stuff you said earlier, but to the best of my knowledge there was never any retort to the letter's main complaint, namely that the growth rate predicted by the outside economist in question would be, by pretty much every tenet of "accepted" economics, all but impossible to achieve, let alone sustain, no matter what actions to that end anyone takes.

[...]

If I missed some growing those-in-the-know consensus along the lines of "hey, y'know what, those numbers ARE totally achievable" by all means clue me in, but to the best of my knowledge either such consensus doesn't exist or the entire economics profession is merely another wing of the Clinton Mafia.

Okey-doke! Let's bring on the sources:

The Open letter itself
Gerald Friedman's measured response
James K. Galbraith's condemnation of the open letter

We are former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Is it really tinfoil hat conspiracy talk for me to draw a connection between these four and Bill Clinton when that's the opening sentence of their letter?

Differences between my evaluation of the impact of the Sanders economic program from that of the Romers reflect different views of the economy, the difference between a static model where national income and employment are largely fixed and a dynamic one where these are shaped by effective demand and are, therefore, susceptible to change in response to economic policy. There are no errors in arithmetic.* It is a fundamental difference in vision that divides our approaches; the same distinction that divided John Maynard Keynes from those he labelled the Classicals in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

[...]

While economists from different perspectives will differ on these fundamental issues, we have experience in the United States that demonstrates the lasting effect of government stimulus spending. Emerging from the depths of the Great Depression, New Deal stimulus spending (including monetary easing) nearly doubled the GDP growth rate from pre-1929 levels to 7% per year, 1933-40, and nearly 10% a year from 1933-44; between the 1929 peak and 1944, output grew to a level 25% higher than it would have been at the pre-1929 growth rate. Active Keynesian policy maintained faster growth rates for the next quarter century as well. From 1947-73, the unemployment rate averaged 4.7% and annual GDP growth averaged 4.0%; output in 1973 was 13% higher than it would have been at earlier growth rates. Only when we abandoned Keynesian policies after 1973 did growth rates fall. From 1973-2014, annual growth has averaged only 2.6%, almost a full percentage point below the pre-1929 rate, while unemployment has risen to 6.5%. Because of the slowing of growth rates after jettisoning Keynesian policies, output in 2007 was almost 30% less than it would have been at the growth rates of the 1947-73 period.

The rest of the paper is very measured and technical, so lets have more fun with Galbraith's angrier response:

You write that you have applied rigor to your analyses of economic proposals by Democrats and
Republicans. On reading this sentence I looked to the bottom of the page, to find a reference or link to
your rigorous review of Professor Friedman's study. I found nothing there.

[...]

You write that “no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes.” But
how did Professor Friedman make his estimates? The answer is in his paper. What Professor Friedman
did, was to use the standard impact assumptions and forecasting methods of the mainstream economists
and institutions. For example, Professor Friedman starts with a fiscal multiplier of 1.25, and shades it
down to the range of 0.8 by the mid 2020s. Is this “not credible”? If that's your claim, it's an
indictment of the methods of (for instance) the CBO, the OMB, and the CEA.

[...]

It is not fair or honest to claim that Professor Friedman's methods are extreme. On the contrary, with
respect to forecasting method, they are largely mainstream. Nor is it fair or honest to imply that you
have given Professor Friedman's paper a rigorous review. You have not.
What you have done, is to light a fire under Paul Krugman, who is now using his high perch to airily
dismiss the Friedman paper as “nonsense.” Paul is an immensely powerful figure, and many people
rely on him for careful assessments.

Sanders' proposal can simply be summed up as "New Deal 2.0." We've done it before and it's worked before. This makes former Bernie Supporters going to Gary Johnson doubly crazy considering the mission of the Libertarian party from the moment it was created (by a business lobbyist) has been to eradicate the New Deal.

[BulletMagnet]

Is it really tinfoil hat conspiracy talk for me to draw a connection between these four and Bill Clinton when that's the opening sentence of their letter?

Noting that they're connected and are looking at things from a markedly Clinton-esque (i.e. less radical) standpoint is one thing, but characterizing the letter as a hit job called in directly from the boss goes a ways beyond that, not to mention plays right into the Trumpian "if it's not what I wanted, it must be fixed" dismissal of anything remotely contrary, which is precisely the last thing anyone who wants a functional nation needs more of.

As for the responses themselves, the basic idea (please correct me if I'm wrong here) seems to be that the model Friedman used to get his numbers attempts to take into account certain "multiplier effects" of Sanders-style policy which, he posits, can not only hasten economic growth but heighten the ceiling for how high it can go when put into effect on a large enough scale, while the baseline cited (admittedly, far too fleetingly) by the letter's authors doesn't.

According to the former and his defenders, such a model is "well within the mainstream", while the latter disagree; frankly, I'm not qualified to determine whose position is most reflective of the reality, but I do recall more than a few conservative economists using similar arguments to make their own cases (i.e. "businesses will save so much money from lower taxes they'll be hiring and investing like crazy, so the tax cuts will end up making money!"). Mind you, even if you're not an economist there's a mountain of evidence that the Heritage Foundation et al are willfully blind on this subject, though as you say the Sanders arrangement is, not surprisingly, more comparable to the New Deal, whose effects were positive for all but a highly bloated slice of the population; whether the "multiplier effect" truly does apply to his proposals - explicitly assuming they're enacted widely enough, which, incidentally, is an argument Krugman has been making for years re: the Obama stimulus - and not those of his conservative counterparts ("trickle-down totally works, but the liberals keep on sabotaging it!"), again, I couldn't tell you, but in any event, as much as I'd like to, I'm very hesitant to call it an open-and-shut case, especially, again, when the hardest numbers we got on the matter came from outside the Sanders campaign.

This makes former Bernie Supporters going to Gary Johnson doubly crazy considering the mission of the Libertarian party from the moment it was created (by a business lobbyist) has been to eradicate the New Deal.

No argument here, heaven knows.

[Mischief Maker]

Well it's a moot point by now, isn't it?

So let's make like the blonde chick in the lower left.

Wave your little flag and try to stifle your cringe as you settle for the lesser evil.

[BryanM]

labeling Krugman a "sycophant" for calling it out is just sour grapes.

He's not a Clinton sycophant for writing one article where he explains everything he's said about economics for the past 20 years is wrong and would never work even a little bit. He's a sycophant for transparently serving power over many decades and receiving great rewards in return for his service.

"Engaging in innuendo suggesting, without evidence, that Clinton is corrupt is, at this point, basically campaigning on behalf of the RNC"

Yeah Paul there's no evidence Hillary is corrupt.

Taking money and then doing favors in return for that money? Hundreds of examples? "No evidence."

Just conspiracy theories. Those mansions grew out of the ground on their own. And then the Clintons claimed squatter's rights. Right.

hit job called in directly from the boss

Correct, it was not called in by the boss.

Krugman is a good little pet because he doesn't HAVE to be told directly what to do. He just does it. And gets his scoobie snacks later.

The worst kind of pet is the sort you have to micro manage. If you have to micro manage, you might as well be doing everything yourself. Such a pain.

Liberal only when convenient
Despite being a well respected economist, Krugman had the biggest brain fart of his career: in an article published meant to be "critical" of Bernie Sanders, Krugman outright says that "too big to fail" was not what caused the Great Recession, despite actually writing that too big to fail was the cause of the Great Recession not too long ago.

Yeah I remember this happening. Classic Krugman. It's easy to forget since the mountain of bullshit put out there in media is basically EVERYTHING they say. It's hard to keep the hypocrisies of one mere subhuman on the tip of the mind. Even for a wizard for me.

Fucking Krugman.

his writing over the past 16 years.

Man, remember how he tore Obama to pieces? Every single week.

Krugman should be in the first batch of people put to the guillotine.

You guys hate Hillary Clinton? Let me tell you about who I hate.

Science and technology, logic and reason are the things I hold in the highest regard. They are the only things to have improved the lot of our miserable species of smelly apes. Without them, we're no different than we were 50,000 years ago. They're sacred. They're my religion.

For someone to pretend to wrap themselves in clean objective math, that most beautiful of all truths... to pretend to be adding value to the world instead of undermining it, that is heresy. Nate Silver and the like are worse than terrorists.

I don't have enough hate left in me for interchangeable and disposable tv actors like the Clintons.

[BryanM]

It is deeply ironic he popularized the term Very Serious People though.

One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they're the commissars. They have jobs as agents of propaganda, and they believe it. By and large, they're part of the privileged elite, and share their interests and perceptions.

[quash]

Since nobody else wants to mention it (perhaps because it isn't "related to the election"), the US "accidentally" bombed Syrian government forces this week.

Now, you can live and die by Occam's razor if you want, and if that's what you want to do, I won't stop you. But in my professional opinion, having worked with multiple targeting cells, the likelihood of an accident of such strategic significance as this one is slim to none; it just so happened that our attack gave ISIS the window of opportunity it needed to advance on the airport nearby.

Between satellite imagery and AWACS, there is virtually no chance of us not knowing what was being bombed. That this happened during a cease fire only makes our plausible deniability even more dubious.

Even if you give the US the full benefit of the doubt (which at this point is, quite literally, dangerously stupid), we still aided ISIS when they needed it most. That alone should be enough cause for concern. But as per usual, the media is both under reporting and obfuscating the story, so I don't expect most of the public to really know what's going on.

But hey, keep railing on Trump's tax returns! Anything that distracts from your love of shedding tears for refugees whilst refusing to question exactly what it is they're fleeing.

[BulletMagnet]

Taking money and then doing favors in return for that money? Hundreds of examples?

If you're talking about the State Department/Clinton Foundation thing, if memory serves the closest thing to a "quid pro quo" anyone was actually able to find was Hillary getting someone a better seat at an event; most everything else falls into "she must have done it, but hid it so well we can't find it!" territory. Meanwhile, of course, we ought to be "accelerating" the guy who, just for starters, used mob connections to establish his business and paid off several state attorneys general to stay out of the Trump University debacle. And, until very recently, bragged openly about it.

I don't have enough hate left in me for interchangeable and disposable tv actors like the Clintons.

If you want to talk in such reverent terms about "clean objective" matters, not to mention "hundreds of examples" of things, statements like that one would seem to run contrary to your larger goal.

[BryanM]

But hey, keep railing on Trump's tax returns! Anything that distracts from your love of shedding tears for refugees whilst refusing to question exactly what it is they're fleeing.

God, I fucking hate the tax return angle. Every single year they do it. Every single year, no one cares. It's a boring angle. You're not gonna get eyeballs on your WrestleMania program by speculating about tax returns. You've only got so much air time, and you're gonna waste it speculating about tax returns. Put a dog on a pole or something, geez.

All you have to do to beat Trump is go on TV and repeat the words "Trump thinks wages are too high." Every single day. That's all it'd take. Boom bada bing, Hillary +3 points game over.

How do you fuck something so simple up so much.

[BryanM]

Here's Zyklon Ben's take on the recent strategy of the Clinton camp to spend a news cycle on attacking..... wait for it.... internet meme frog.



I like Zyklon Ben. He might be only two or three steps away from being a literal nazi. But at least his cartoons are fun to look at and sometimes different from all the other drivel out there.

One guy who I think is completely overrated, is Clay Bennett. That guy is a hack fraud with nothing to say.

[EmperorIng]

After actually reading honest-to-goodness articles about pepe the frog in The Atlantic, The Economist, and other newspapers and magazines last week, I kept on saying to myself:


I mean, sweet baby rayforce. What is going on in everyone's heads? Didn't Hillary's staff know that it would only increase that dumb frog's counter-culture appeal by expressly condemning a bunch of dank meme images on the net?

Clay Bennett

He misses that most important element of cartoons, in that they need to be fun to look at. It's like looking at nothing but the schmaltziest and inoffensive Hallmark cards, over and over. Whoever does the cartoons on politico is not too shabby, if a little dull, but I really haven't visited the site since the DNC email leaks showed the politico guy sending his emails to the DNC for review.

Hard to find decent news outside of WaPo, NYT, and my darling the Chicago Trib. Sometimes reading the National Review makes me feel like I am reading a better-written, right-leaning Slate or Vox. Ick. That's no good (other than the "better-written" part, because Slate/Vox writers are fucking garbage).

[BryanM]

Let's break down the man's latest masterpiece.



* The bottle on the left says Hillary Clinton has bacterial pneumonia. This is false - if she were infectious they sure as hell would not have her out at the 9/11 memorial and hugging little girls and possibly killing people. (The fact that she has aspiration pneumonia is a huge data point that proves she has an chronic underlaying condition. Parkinson's just being the best guess.)

* The bottle on the right is all like "Trump Crazy". Ok... so?

* The cartoon demands a prerequisite of its reader to a) know about the headline about Hillary's poor health and b) know what a "hillary" or "donald" is. A tall, tall order for 20 or 50 years from now.

So the cartoon exists to call Trump a name and say something false about Hillary. Ok. That puts him on the same level of other low class partisan hacks like Ramirez. At least Ramirez is offensive sometimes and you can get angry at him. You know, feeling an emotion and stuff.

Let us now compare it to this classic political cartoon from a hundred and 'aught years ago:



Beautiful, carnal, and nearly timeless.

Bennett's insistence on the single panel, no dialogue format is fundamentally wrong. That format means the cartoon must stand on its own decades from now (even Gary Larson used dialogue, for crying out loud). It is a format entirely unsuited for a pretentious hack fraud that just repeats the news with nothing to say.

[Giest118]

But hey, keep railing on Trump's tax returns! Anything that distracts from your love of shedding tears for refugees whilst refusing to question exactly what it is they're fleeing.

God, I fucking hate the tax return angle. Every single year they do it. Every single year, no one cares. It's a boring angle. You're not gonna get eyeballs on your WrestleMania program by speculating about tax returns. You've only got so much air time, and you're gonna waste it speculating about tax returns. Put a dog on a pole or something, geez.

All you have to do to beat Trump is go on TV and repeat the words "Trump thinks wages are too high." Every single day. That's all it'd take. Boom bada bing, Hillary +3 points game over.

How do you fuck something so simple up so much.

Unless his tax returns revealed something like financial ties to NAMBLA. That would probably be interesting, and would explain his reluctance to release them, and would also lose him all elections forever.

Of course, he could also be hiding his tax returns because he knows they're boring, and he's going to release them just before election day while saying "Look at this boring horseshit the liberal media wasted all that time on, lol!"

Is it November the 8th yet? I'm getting antsy waiting to find out whether the next presidential hopeful will get to use the "first woman president" line.

[Mischief Maker]

He's not going to release his tax returns because he's not really a billionaire.

He filed for a tax exemption in NY that you can only get if your income is below $500,000.

His entire ability to con people depends on his fictional reputation as this self-made successful businessman made up by his biographer/ghost writer Tony Schwartz in "The Art of the Deal." If he releases his tax returns and reveals just how much of his father's inheritance he's squandered on bad business deals, the jig is up.