The world needs healing

https://youtu.be/m9AwjZWboIk.

Humanity needs Bernie Sanders to be the Next President of the United States of America!
The corruption, hate, bigotry, and lies of the other two candidates is despicable.
#feelthebern #nevertrump #amoraldecision #neverhillary #neveracorporatepuppet  #americaneedshealing #saynotohate
#realtime #billmaher

Blabbing Trump - tiny hands

In his November editor’s letter, Graydon Carter reveals the presidential candidate’s thin-skinned response to a favorite 25-year-old epithet.

BY GRAYDON CARTER

The myriad vulgarities of Donald Trump—examples of which are retailed daily on Web sites and front pages these days—are not news to those of us who have been living downwind of him for any period of time. I first encountered Trump more than 30 years ago. Back then he was a flashy go-getter from an outer borough eager to make his name in Manhattan real estate. Which he succeeded in doing in the only way he knew how: by putting his name in oversize type on anything he was associated with—buildings, yes, but also vodka, golf courses, starchy ties, and even a sham of a real-estate school. Most people who own private planes include their initials as part of the tail number. Not Trump. On his campaign jet, a Boeing 757, his name runs from the cockpit to the wings—in gold letters, 10 feet high.

Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret. Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago. To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump.

There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby. The most recent offering arrived earlier this year, before his decision to go after the Republican presidential nomination. Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: “See, not so short!” I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, “Actually, quite short.” Which I can only assume gave him fits.

If Trump is like a feral forest animal on the campaign trail, his Democratic counterpart is a razor clam with a sharp mind and a long memory. They are like matter and anti-matter and really could not be more un-alike. Trump says whatever he wants, takes advice from no one, and so far seems politically unaffected by any of his loathsome boasts and put-downs. Whatever one thinks of Hillary Clinton—and, goodness knows, everyone has an opinion—she knows a lot about government. But she seems to rarely say what she thinks and has surrounded herself with a secretive phalanx of control-freak viziers. At this point, as Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison points out, you’d need to apply the famous Turing Test to see if any authentic human “Hillary” can be distinguished from the machine version that has been in development for more than three decades.

In “Fortress Hillary,” Ellison describes the tight-knit group of advisers and surrogates that has grown up around Clinton like a coral reef. It once consisted mainly of women, but now is about evenly split between the genders. Some of them, like Mandy Grunwald and Huma Abedin, have formed part of Clinton’s defensive shield for almost a quarter-century. Hillary Clinton has been embattled ever since she entered public life, sometimes for reasons of her own making (and sometimes not). The wall around her is now high and thick. As Ellison notes, this wall creates its own set of problems—it’s like the Maginot Line.

The State Department e-mail scandal is Exhibit A—the Clintonian zest for prophylactic secrecy is the root cause of the issue that has mired her campaign in the muck of the recent past. The wall also keeps information from getting in. During the dark days of the Whitewater investigation, one adviser told Hillary to stop reading the newspapers—her aides would tell her what she needed to know. How isolated is Clinton? Most of us would find a single day of full-time Secret Service protection to be intolerable. Hillary, Ellison writes, has had it for 23 years. No other recent presidential candidate—not Obama, not Bush, not even Nixon—has been as inaccessible as Hillary has been from day one of her campaign.

What mystifies V.F. columnist Michael Kinsley about Clinton’s opposite in the presidential sweepstakes is how his fellow Republican candidates—and, frankly, the political media—ever allowed him to sprint onto the playing field as if he were a serious candidate, or a serious anything. In business circles, few take him seriously. Even other real-estate developers give him a wide berth. As Kinsley writes in “Fool’s Paradise,” Trump’s opponents’ strategy from the start has been to engage with him, and debate him, on the “issues”: immigration, ISIS, China, health care, taxes—what have you. At a stroke, it elevated Trump to legitimacy. Too late now, but a better strategy would have been to speak the simple truth:

Trump is unqualified for the job by temperament, experience, and character. “That’s why his campaign is a joke,” Kinsley writes, “not the merits or otherwise of his alleged policies.” Fortunes will be lost on bets as to when the wheels on the Donald Trump bandwagon will fall off. He’s certainly lasted longer than his detractors would have initially guessed. He may be giving the American political system the roughing up it so sorely needs, but even the remote possibility that one of those tiny fingers could be within reach of the nuclear hot button should give any sane Republican the chills.

21 Questions to Donald Trump. By David Cat Johnston

21 Questions for Donald Trump. By David Cay Johnston.

1. You call yourself an “ardent philanthropist,” but have not donated a dollar to The Donald J. Trump Foundation since 2006. You’re not even the biggest donor to the foundation, having given about $3.7 million in the previous two decades while businesses associated with Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment gave the Trump Foundation $5 million. All the money since 2006 has come from those doing business with you. How does giving away other people’s money, in what could be seen as a kickback scheme, make you a philanthropist?

2. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman successfully sued you, alleging your Trump University was an “illegal educational institution” that charged up to $35,000 for “Trump Elite” mentorships promising personal advice from you, but you never showed up and your “special” list of lenders was photocopied from Scotsman Guide, a magazine found at any bookstore. Why did you not show up?

3. You claimed The Learning Annex paid you a $1 million speaking fee, but on Larry King Live,you acknowledged the fee was $400,000 and the rest was the promotional value. Since you have testified under oath that your public statements inflate the value of your assets, can voters use this as a guide, so whenever you say $1, in reality it is only 40 cents?

4. The one-page financial statement handed out at Trump Tower when you announced your candidacy says you’ve given away $102 million worth of land. Will you supply a list of each of these gifts, with the values you assigned to them?

5. The biggest gift you have talked about appears to be an easement at the Palos Verdes, California, golf course bearing your name on land you wanted to build houses on, but that land is subject to landslides and is now the golf course driving range. Did you or one of your businesses take a tax deduction for this land that you could not build on and do you think anyone should get a $25 million tax deduction for a similar self-serving gift?

6. Trump Tower is not a steel girder high rise, but 58 stories of concrete. Why did you use concrete instead of traditional steel girders?

7. Trump Tower was built by S&A Concrete, whose owners were “Fat” Tony Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, head of the Gambinos, another well-known crime family. If you did not know of their ownership, what does that tell voters about your management skills?

8. You later used S&A Concrete on other Manhattan buildings bearing your name. Why?

9. In demolishing the Bonwit Teller building to make way for Trump Tower, you had no labor troubles, even though only about 15 unionists worked at the site alongside 150 Polish men, most of whom entered the country illegally, lacked hard hats, and slept on the site. How did you manage to avoid labor troubles, like picketing and strikes, and job safety inspections while using mostly non-union labor at a union worksite — without hard hats for the Polish workers?

10. A federal judge later found you conspired to cheat both the Polish workers, who were paid less than $5 an hour cash with no benefits, and the union health and welfare fund. You testified that you did not notice the Polish workers, whom the judge noted were easy to spot because they were the only ones on the work site without hard hats. What should voters make of your failure or inability to notice 150 men demolishing a multi-story building without hard hats?

11. You sent your top lieutenant, lawyer Harvey I. Freeman, to negotiate with Ken Shapiro, the “investment banker” for Nicky Scarfo, the especially vicious killer who was Atlantic City’s mob boss, according to federal prosecutors and the New Jersey State Commission on Investigation. Since you emphasize your negotiating skills, why didn’t you negotiate yourself?

12. You later paid a Scarfo associate twice the value of a lot, officials determined. Since you boast that you always negotiate the best prices, why did you pay double the value of this real estate?

13. You were the first person recommended for a casino license by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Gaming Enforcement, which opposed all other applicants or was neutral. Later it came out in official proceedings that you had persuaded the state to limit its investigation of your background. Why did you ask that the investigation into your background be limited?

14. You were the target of a 1979 bribery investigation. No charges were filed, but New Jersey law mandates denial of a license to anyone omitting any salient fact from their casino application. Why did you omit the 1979 bribery investigation?

15. The prevailing legal case on license denials involved a woman, seeking a blackjack dealer license, who failed to disclose that as a retail store clerk she had given unauthorized discounts to friends. In light of the standard set for low-level license holders like blackjack dealers, how did you manage to keep your casino license?

16. In 1986 you wrote a letter seeking lenient sentencing for Joseph Weichselbaum, a convicted marijuana and cocaine trafficker who lived in Trump Tower and in a case that came before your older sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry of U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, who recused herself because Weichselbaum was the Trump casinos and Trump family helicopter consultant and pilot. Why did you do business with Weichselbaum, both before and after his conviction?

17. Your first major deal was converting the decrepit Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Station into a Grand Hyatt. Mayor Abe Beame, a close ally of your father Fred, gave you the first-ever property tax abatement on a New York City hotel, worth at least $400 million over 40 years. Since you boast that you are a self-made billionaire, how do you rationalize soliciting and accepting $400 million of welfare from the taxpayers?

18. You say that your experience as a manager will allow you to run the federal government much better than President Obama or Hilary Clinton. On Fortune Magazine’s 1999 list of the 496 most admired companies, your casino company ranked at the bottom – worst or almost worst in management, use of assets, employee talent, long-term investment value, and social responsibility. Your casino company later went bankrupt. Why should voters believe your claims that you are a competent manager?

19. Your Trump Plaza casino was fined $200,000 for discriminating against women and minority blackjack dealers to curry favor with gambler Robert Libutti, who lost $12 million, and who insisted he never asked that blacks and women be replaced. Why should we believe you “love” what you call “the blacks” and the enterprise you seek to lead would not discriminate again in the future if doing so appeared to be lucrative?

20. Public records (cited in my book Temples of Chance) show that as your career took off, you legally reported a negative income and paid no income taxes. Will you release your tax returns? And if not, why not?

21. In your first bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, you told how you had not gotten much work done on your first casino, so you had crews dig and fill holes to create a show. You said one director of your partner, Holiday Inns, asked what was going on. “This was difficult for me to answer, but fortunately this board member was more curious than he was skeptical,” you wrote. Given your admission that you used deception to hide your failure to accomplish the work, why should we believe you now?”