National debt under Biden is up $7.65T and we are not yet done with his term.

Because the majority of that amount is accrued interest on money borrowed before he entered the White House.

But you knew that before you wrote that sentence, right?

Trump's about-face comes after Hurricane Helene left dozens dead and thousands temporarily pushed from their communities after widespread destruction of homes, roads and water supplies when the storm deluged the western part of the state in late September.

The 25 hardest-hit counties are almost all deeply conservative, places where Trump must rack up big margins to offset more liberal urban centers, such as Charlotte and Raleigh, that are likely to net voting gains for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Several Trump advisers said his campaign is worried that hundreds of thousands more Trump voters than Harris voters have been affected by the storm in a critical battleground that the former president must win if he is to regain the White House. Trump won North Carolina by just over a percentage point in 2020.

I wonder if Bill Johnson has anything to say about Trump wanting his affected voters to vote by mail-in ballots. Suddenly Trump isn't worried about voting by mail at all. Go figure.

No one needs Project 2025 to understand what the extreme anti-abortion GOPers are going to do next. Just look to what Justices Thomas and Alito have telegraphed from the bench.

His business career vaulted him to fame, and he had notable successes, perhaps most prominently the rehabilitation of the Commodore Hotel and the construction of Trump Tower. But he often reached further than he was able to deliver. His record in business was pockmarked with plenty of failures.

The Trump Shuttle airline? Failure. His dreams of building a Television City in Manhattan? Failure. A United States Football League franchise? Failure. The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump's Castle Casino Resort, Trump Mortgage, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Steaks, GoTrump.com? All failures.

His most spectacular flameouts came in the gambling mecca of Atlantic City, where he overextended himself building or buying three casinos that ultimately cannibalized each other's clientele as he failed to keep up with enormous debt payments. He filed bankruptcy for the Taj Mahal in 1991 and then for the other two casinos in 1992. He also filed bankruptcy in 1992 for the Plaza Hotel.

Even after recovering from that debacle, Mr. Trump failed again. His casino company filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and then again in 2009, for his sixth trip into that process. In his various bankruptcies, he was compelled to sell assets, and creditors were forced to write off some of his debt. But Mr. Trump has boasted that he still made money in Atlantic City even after leaving a trail of losses for nearly everyone else involved, including workers who lost jobs.

Mr. Trump played the game along the edge, and sometimes over the line, of propriety. To grease his path, he would hire a governor's son or a federal prosecutor's brother. Along the way, he was investigated time and time again. Federal, state and local authorities looked into his ties with the Mafia, found violations of money laundering laws and penalized him for skirting stock trade rules.

At one point when Mr. Trump was strapped for cash to make an interest payment, his father sent a lawyer to one of the son's casinos to buy $3.5 million in chips without placing a bet. New Jersey's casino regulators imposed a $65,000 fine for what amounted to an illegal loan.

But Mr. Trump makes a point of not admitting misdeeds or mistakes. Even his failures he portrays as triumphs. "I made a lot of money in Atlantic City," he once said, "and I'm very proud of it."

Letting men make decisions about women's healthcare is like letting your dog make decisions about maintaining your vehicle because he likes to ride in it sometimes.

In all the different ways that Mr. Trump has upended the traditional rules of American politics, that may be one of the most striking. He has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic. Not only survived but thrived. He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator.

His persecution defense, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him, resonates at his rallies where he says "they're not coming after me, they're coming after you, and I'm just standing in the way." But that of course belies a record of scandal stretching across his 78 years starting long before politics. Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.

His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.

He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.

He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.

Mr. Trump beat some of the investigations and lawsuits against him and some proved unfounded, but the sheer volume is remarkable.

He described his experience, which included death threats that upended his life and required the CIA to provide him with round-the-clock protection, in interviews over the past two months. The Washington Post is granting him anonymity because of the ongoing concerns for his safety and has confirmed his account with more than a half dozen former senior officials.

His story mirrors those of dozens of other bureaucrats, diplomats, intelligence analysts, FBI agents, politicians and military officers who stood up to what they saw as efforts by Trump to subvert the country's democracy. Some of these officials were fired or resigned in protest. Others sought to temper Trump's demands without alienating him and, in the process, protect themselves and their institutions from retribution.

Trump has routinely described these people as participants in a "deep state" conspiracy to destroy the country and rob his voters of their voice. If elected next month to a second term, he's vowed to purge them from government.

FTA:

I love HuffPost's headline about this:

TRUMP SCHWING STATE STRATEGY

Since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many states have made it all but impossible to get abortion care within their borders, and have done their best to isolate people facing unwanted or complicated pregnancies, making them afraid to reach out to medical providers or even to friends and loved ones who might help them. New laws have forced doctors to delay care in life-threatening situations and made women afraid to seek it, leading to preventable deaths. Did anyone really want this?

We asked people at the front lines of abortion access to help us understand how the new laws have filtered into their worlds. They answered our call with texts, audio messages, videos and pictures; some shared their stories anonymously out of fear of reprisal. Taken as a whole, their dispatches show us an untenable status quo, held together by sheer grit and determination. But for how much longer?

This presidential election will be the first since the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, when voters will be presented with a choice: to try to rein in the chaos unleashed by the ruling or to live in a country that continues to be shaped by it.

Freedom is indeed on this year's ballot for all of us, even if many have no earthly idea of that being the case.

At that point the DNC needed a primary. Nothing she's done qualified her to run for president.

I'm surprised the internet is available wherever you live because it must be so misinformed there that evidently history books are only used to place your dunce caps upon. The states run primaries, not the parties. The primaries were all finished. There is no mechanism nor regulation that if a party's presumptive nominee drops out, every single primary must be held again.

Think of how stupid it is to even raise this as a probability! Tell us Einstein, just how would that happen at the end of July? How long would it take to organize each state and territory for a single race ballot? Who's going to pay for this expense, the Republican Party? Dems sure as hell aren't.

Again - as you obviously don't know nor understand - the parties themselves determine how their nominees are chosen, not state governments. As Danforth informed you, the Democratic National Committee DOES have party rules for such a contingency and they were followed to a T! There was an open call for candidates to enter a convention nomination race with the delegates deciding. Only one candidate did, Kamala Harris. None of the 25 other 2020 candidates - nor anyone else - threw their hat in the ring. So Kamala received the votes from delegates to win and become the 2024 Democratic Presidential nominee.

And being the Vice President for 4 years is the ultimate qualification for becoming President. And again, replacing the President is the chief role of the Vice President to begin with. This is why they're elected in the first place and not fireable by the President. The Vice President is the only member of the entire Executive Branch that doesn't serve at the President's leisure, she serves as the first person selected to move into the Presidency should the need occur.

And that, my troglodytic misanthrope, is the most important qualification for becoming the President and its dictate comes from inside the US Constitution itself.

If she was doing so well why did she drop out?

Because she had no constituency from which to win the nomination and she had no money to continue her attempt. Does logic not visit whatever hovel you pollute with your toxic presence?

You're the moron running around putting lipstick on a pig.

At least I'm not sucking the mushroom of one like you are.

Harris is the elected Vice President. When the President can or does not want to continue his service, she's the FIRST ONE in line constitutionally to take over. Why is this so hard for pinheads to understand?

Biden stepped down, Harris stepped up. That is all that matters. If America felt her unfit to be President, they never would have elected her Vice President, something JD Vance is getting ready to learn firsthand.

Because she failed miserably in 2020.

So tired of this insipidly stupid talking point repeated by the ignorant.

Strawlighter is simply being who he is. There should be zero dispute over the article's title and all the substantiation showing it's accuracy in its comparisons.

[W]hen Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini's Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.

[Trump] has said of immigrants, "They're poisoning the blood of our country" and "They're destroying the blood of our country." He has claimed that many have "bad genes." He has also been more explicit: "They're not humans; they're animals"; they are "cold-blooded killers." He refers more broadly to his opponents - American citizens, some of whom are elected officials - as "the enemy from within ... sick people, radical-left lunatics." Not only do they have no rights; they should be "handled by," he has said, "if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military." Donald Trump's described his opponents as "radical-left thugs" who "live like vermin."

Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped "cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People." In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: "Jews are lice: they cause typhus." Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free.

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the "enemies of the people," implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be "subjected to ongoing purification," and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric.

Some prominent corporate leaders -- including Elon Musk, a founder of Tesla; the investors David Sacks and Bill Ackman; and the financier Stephen Schwarzman -- have been supportive of Mr. Trump's candidacy. Beyond pure cynicism, it's nearly impossible to understand why.

This week Donald Trump provided a stark reminder that this election is different. In remarks that ought to alarm any American committed to the survival of our democratic experiment, the Republican nominee again refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. That comes on the heels of remarks in which he declared that he regards his political opponents as an "enemy from within" and that he would consider deploying the military against them merely for opposing his bid for the presidency. The implication is that participation in the democratic process is treason, and the threat is a fresh indication that if he is elected to a second term, Mr. Trump intends to deploy government power in new and dangerous ways.

Right-wing populists often win elections by promising pro-business policies that will unleash economic growth. Once in office, however, they don't just fiddle with the knobs; they break the machinery. They undermine economic stability by attacking and delegitimizing people and institutions, inside or outside the government, who might challenge or correct bad economic decisions.

Mr. Trump's attacks on the integrity of federal data and on government experts are examples of the ways in which he already pursues these strategies. In August, for example, he claimed that a routine revision in employment data issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was manipulated to favor his opponent. Michael Strain, a conservative economist at the American Enterprise Institute, called this attack on the integrity of the agency "grossly irresponsible and completely inaccurate."

And he is not the man for moments of crisis. His management of the government's response to the Covid pandemic was disastrous. On China, his confrontational showmanship and his dismissive treatment of potential allies did nothing to improve America's strategic position. Is there any reason for public confidence in the ability of a Trump White House to wrestle with the ever more thorny and high-stakes issues posed by artificial intelligence technology?

This language isn't merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped "cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People." In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: "Jews are lice: they cause typhus." Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as "the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood."

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the "enemies of the people," implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be "subjected to ongoing purification," and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric.

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes ... "If you don't use certain rhetoric," he told an interviewer, "if you don't use certain words, and maybe they're not very nice words, nothing will happen."

His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist.

Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling - knowingly and cynically - that we are not.

"Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet." ---Maya Angelou

Trump could be announced dead and the Republican Party would still keep him as the presidential nominee and he wouldn't lose a vote.

which of her policy proposals that she detailed had you the most excited?

The one about keeping a 34 times convicted felon, tax cheat, charity fraudster, indicted classified document thief and insurrectionist, now promising to use the Justice Department, National Guard and active military go after citizens who don't agree with him out of the White House where he doesn't belong.

How about you?

This is the biggest story in the news right now and almost no one is paying attention.

Some of us are, that's why it's here. But isn't it curious who's completely absent from this thread - particularly posters who've unrepentantly forwarded some of the aforementioned Russian propaganda right here on this blog?

They really don't recognize the hard work and talent some one like Kamala has demonstrated her whole life. They think that they all just fall backassword into success like their heroes.

I've tried my level best to post factual information going back to the earliest part of her career, showing people that her 2019 campaign was a self-abort that actually propelled her to where she now is. And the fact she rightly pulled the ripcord when she had no money nor constituency from which to challenge the more popular and better funded Democrats only confirms she's a pragmatic - if not fortunate - politician, not an ego-driven selfish one.

And of course, the ignoranti who only looked at 2019, had no clue as they claimed she was nothing more than a DEI hire and had slept her way to success because she dated Willie Brown in the past. Even if Harris should lose, based on where she started to where her campaign lies today is a remarkable journey of success considering the unprecedented circumstances and political realities she's navigating in real time that no other modern politician has ever traveled before her.

Her besting and spanking Trump during the debate was not fluke. It came from her psychological studies on how to deal with charming sociopathic defendants in criminal courts, where the jury tends to like them. The prosecutors have to use the defendant's own ego and need to dominate others against them without upsetting jurors who otherwise might think the prosecutor is being too personal and harsh.

Trump never saw it coming, or if he did he had no effective counter maneuver, which is why he stood there like a stump when Harris called him things no other person on planet Earth ever had to his face before. And that's why he refuses to share another stage with her again. He knows the same dynamic will again emerge, showing him to be weak and defenseless against a woman who's spent a career incarcerating men just like Trump.

What does this Kamala Harris' video for the Catholic Al Smith dinner look Iike you Tony?

It looks like Kamala understood the purpose of the Al Smith dinner - levity and humor - unlike donOld Trump who droned on and on about his campaign grievances without any witticism in sight.

Since you know so little about America, let me explain to you what the Al Smith dinner is about. The dinner is supposed to be a political DMZ in the middle of a heated campaign that allows candidates to show humility, self deprecation, and the ability to laugh at the circumstances the American electoral experience forces candidate into.

It's so rich for the same people who've continually and repeatedly gaslit about Kamala lacking intelligence, lacking the ability to respond off-the-cuff, lacking the ability to articulate a message see all of that get blown up right before their very eyes when all they had to do was look accurately back at the past. Yes, Kamala's time was not 2020. Same for every other Democrat not named Joe Biden, but I don't see anyone claiming that Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren, Bennett, or any of the other candidates that Biden defeated are instantly non-viable in the future because they weren't successful then. Only Kamala - who went on to become Vice President and now the party's standard bearer for President, when none of those others threw their hats into the ring - as they could have - when Biden stepped down.

Kamala is 7-0 in elected politics, yet yabobs like Onenut can't recognize political talent when it smacks them in the face. When all is said and done, the political instincts and abilities Kamala has honed over her 3 decades of public service will show that Karl Rove in 2010 knew exactly what she was to become.

Nice article from 2019.

Not surprising, Trumpers live in the past because they're so frightened by a future where white privilege is no longer a thing.

It's basically a corollary to Dr. Martin Luther King's greatest speech: They're absolutely apoplectic when they're accurately judged by the "content of their character" since they repeatedly - and often with oblivious pride - continually show that they don't have any of depth by projecting their own hegemony as the targeted goal of those they fear will eventually succeed them.

Russia is the most active foreign threat to the 2024 election, according to U.S. officials. A pair of indictments unsealed in September alleged an expansion of Russia's influence operation: from crude, fake social media posts and bot networks in 2016 to more ambitious and successful recent campaigns. That includes laundering propaganda through seemingly independent U.S. actors, according to one of the indictments.

Experts fear Storm-1516 and similar groups have the potential to sway public opinion by undermining the credibility of democratic institutions, influencing U.S. policy and diminishing people's ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Russia is increasingly leaning on an advancing technology landscape -- including artificial intelligence and more sophisticated bot networks -- to spread its falsehoods. But Storm-1516's most valuable quality is persistence, according to Clint Watts, the general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.

"The danger comes with just the sheer volume of claims that they make, and it only takes one person, one influencer with outsized influence, to grab onto a video and amplify it in the United States," Watts said. "They may miss 99 times, but the 100th time they may get it just right."

The Storm-1516 campaigns rely on faked primary sources -- audio, video, photos, documents -- presented as evidence of the claims' veracity. They are then laundered through international news sources and influencers to reach their ultimate target: a mainstream Western audience.

At least 50 false narratives have been launched this way since last fall, according to a count NBC News assembled with researchers. The narratives aim to diminish Western support for military aid in Ukraine following Russia's invasion, a contentious issue in Congress. The videos also back the re-election of Donald Trump, who has pledged to halt military aid to Ukraine, while painting the former president as a victim of a "deep state." And they attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

In one fake video, a Ukrainian troll farm operative reveals the machinations behind a CIA plot to defeat Trump.

In another piece of propaganda, a woman says she was paralyzed as a child -- by Harris in a hit-and-run accident.

In a third, a "whistleblower" falsely claims Ukraine's leaders spent U.S. aid money on yachts.

The claims peddled by the actors and false primary sources in these videos fall apart upon basic inspection. Experts quickly identified Olesya, the Ukrainian troll, as an AI-generated fake. The 2011 hit-and-run never happened, according to San Francisco police, and KBSF-TV, the local news station behind the claims, does not exist.

And the companies that own the yachts told reporters they hadn't been sold. But the story spread anyway, and this time, far -- from small-time right-wing influencers to members of Congress, including Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, now the Republican vice presidential nominee.