Well after Trump's speech last night, Bernie supporters will flock to Hillary..

[Osmeric]

If Hillary wins, it's over for Ted Cruz.

That's pretty much the opposite of the truth.

[Orlong]

Wouldn't those people get more desperate and what about the people who don't abuse food stamps that are just going through a rough time? Welfare also helps the economy. I think more should be done to reduces welfare abuse but food stamps help the economy and people who are down on their luck. Certain demographics are over represented and there are changes we can make to make that harder but just plain cutting food stamps seems extreme.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/ar...stamps/260015/

Personally, I dont think we should eliminate the food stamp program because there are truly people that need it, however what I think they DO need to do is administer it like the WIC program, where we dont give them the ability to waste the money on garbage like Doritos and Mountain Dew. Its supposed to be a nutrition program so they should receive vouchers for specific brands and types of food like WIC does. Instead of getting $100 to blow on whatever they want, they should get a voucher good for 1 bunch bananas, 5 pounds of ground beef, 1 59 ounce bottle orange juice, 2 dozen eggs, 1 whole chicken, 10 cans of green beans, etc.... This would do three things.

1. It would make sure that people are using the money for its intended purpose (nutrition). The program is call the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program after all/
2. It would make those of us paying for the program feel better about how the money is spent
3. It would eliminate the ability for people to accept $50 from someone to spend $100 on food (selling food stamps)

- - - Updated - - -

There is literally less than 3% of fraud and it would LITERALLY cost more to get rid of the fraud than it would to just let it happen.

Its ok with me. To me its more about principles and justice and making sure nobody is getting over on us

- - - Updated - - -

I guess TV ratings are out. He barely beat out Romeny and was lower then McCain.

Probably because he didnt star speaking until after 10PM and was still speaking at 1130 PM on a weeknight and many people needed to get some sleep to work in the morning and not because of disinterest

[Super Friendly Kitty Cat]

That's pretty much the opposite of the truth.

Can you provide something more than this?

Explain why if Hillary wins, and it shows she wins by a slight margin, and it shows that with the support and endorsement of Ted Cruz, Trump might have won, that Ted Cruz will remain a factor inside the RNC, or even win re-election.

[Osmeric]

Can you provide something more than this?

Explain why if Hillary wins, and it shows she wins by a slight margin, and it shows that with the support and endorsement of Ted Cruz, Trump might have won, that Ted Cruz will remain a factor inside the RNC, or even win re-election.

If Trump loses, Cruz comes off as the politician who didn't sell his soul for a loser. Any attempt to say Cruz caused the loss will just be saying Cruz is powerful enough to have done that, which will be a compliment, not a condemnation.

[Pangean]

Probably because he didnt star speaking until after 10PM and was still speaking at 1130 PM on a weeknight and many people needed to get some sleep to work in the morning and not because of disinterest

Amusing since he claimed that he got the highest rating ever for such an event. And here you are making excuses. Here's the thing, guess who is in control of when Trump appears? Hmmmm. Trump is. He can't even get the simplest things right.

[Nfinitii]

Its irrelevant wether its the man or the company that goes bankrupt. Either went bankrupt 4 times because of shit management.
And that guys is gonna give you 2 lunches, no wait, the best trade deals evah! And the mexicans are gonna pay for it.. I heard they already gave their word.

He has hundreds of businesses and is worth billions. I don't understand y ppl r focused on 4 irrelevant bankruptcies.

[Super Friendly Kitty Cat]

If Trump loses, Cruz comes off as the politician who didn't sell his soul for a loser. Any attempt to say Cruz caused the loss will just be saying Cruz is powerful enough to have done that, which will be a compliment, not a condemnation.

Ted Cruz using the angle that he "didn't sell his soul", even with a Hillary Presidency will only work on people stupid enough to be Ted Cruz supporters in the first place.

The majority of Republicans, as well as the RNC will see it as disloyalty and the reason there is a Hillary Presidency in the first place.

[Pangean]

He has hundreds of businesses and is worth billions. I don't understand y ppl r focused on 4 irrelevant bankruptcies.

Irrelevant?

How Trump made money

Trump made money in Atlantic City through two primary means. One was extracting management fees from companies he was involved with, and the other was transferring personal debts to companies he controlled:

The pattern started with his very first Atlantic City venture, a partnership with Harrah’s for which he was paid a $24 million construction management fee.
Over the years, the Times reports, Trump "collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments."

In 1993, Trump Plaza casino sold more than $100 million in junk bonds and "more than half of the new money went to pay off Mr. Trump’s unrelated personal loans."

In 1995, the company staged an IPO, and then a week later "the new company began using some of the almost $300 million it had raised to clear Mr. Trump’s personal debts."

Trump’s casinos paid $300,000 a year for the right to use Trump’s jet to transport celebrities to gigs.

Trump appears to have bilked the shareholders of Trump Casinos and Resorts out of the opportunity to share in a $1 million profit related to the sale of shares in Riviera Hotel and Casino, keeping the money for himself instead.

What Trump did not do was run successful casinos:

"Revenues at other Atlantic City casinos rose 18 percent from 1997 through 2002; Mr. Trump’s fell by 1 percent."
"Had Mr. Trump’s revenues grown at the rate of other Atlantic City casinos, his company could have made its interest payments and possibly registered a profit."

The public company never turned a profit, leaving behind a trail of losses for shareholders and bondholders, and unpaid bills to contractors and subcontractors.
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/12/1190917...-city-business

It's not irrelevant at all. It demonstrates how he runs his businesses. Something he claims makes him capable of being president. In the end it shows he pillages companies for his own purposes and cares not for all the business people his bankruptcies hurt.

[Sky High]

meh, just tried and true fear mongering with hints of positive reform but lacking any and all substance to make that happen. AKA run of the mill GOP clap trap that they always eat up.

[alturic]

All I'm going to say is that I hope spanish-speaking Americans see through the cheap grab to get their support with having a guy speaking spanish, in America, where I swear English was the primary language.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Four times out of the hundreds of businesses he has owned

70% of people and businesses never go bankrupt once. Of the 30% that do, it's almost always just once. 4 bankruptcies out of almost a hundred (not hundreds) doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that he's gone bankrupt far more than most, displaying his sheer level of incompetence. The funny part is, those 4 bankruptcies just represent the businesses that he wanted to keep going, but needed to defer his debts. About half of Trump businesses and brands have just outright FAILED. They didn't file for bankruptcy, they just let it fold. Once Trump stopped trying to run businesses on his own, and began giving OTHER PEOPLE money to run businesses with his name on it, he started making money again.

Trump himself is a horrible business man. The only reason he has money now is that he has daddy's money to give to other people to make him money.

And that's all beside the point that he's a terrible human being.

[Pangean]

Here's an interesting article that links his scummy business practices with his links to Putin. It's long but worth a read.

Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing

Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support of Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

Let me start by saying I'm no Russia hawk. I have long been skeptical of US efforts to extend security guarantees to countries within what the Russians consider their 'near abroad' or extend such guarantees or police Russian interactions with new states which for centuries were part of either the Russian Empire or the USSR. This isn't a matter of indifference to these countries. It is based on my belief in seriously thinking through the potential costs of such policies. In the case of the Baltics, those countries are now part of NATO. Security commitments have been made which absolutely must be kept. But there are many other areas where such commitments have not been made. My point in raising this is that I do not come to this question or these policy questions as someone looking for confrontation or cold relations with Russia.

Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.

I'll list off some facts.

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post with one morsel for illustration ...
Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the projects has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."
Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschbank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the Pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russia political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which has most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on the assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the singlemindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy.

Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin's positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump's suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.

There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I've wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a heavy reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/...really-a-thing

[NecroSleetstorm]

Lots of commie scum ITT. Kids talking about fake politics and populism is amusing. The Hitler comparisons are hilariously wrong. History is no longer being taught therefore the day of the rope is coming. The coming Russo-American Alliance will stomp out the parasite that is Islam and dispose of those who will not assimilate to OUR WAY OF LIFE. All forms of degeneracy that erode society will be culled. The RWDS are coming!

I'm ready for war while most of you idiots will die a coward's death like those in the Bataclan Theatre who didn't fight back at all.


[Infracted]

[Pangean]

Lots of commie scum ITT. Kids talking about fake politics and populism is amusing. The Hitler comparisons are hilariously wrong. History is no longer being taught therefore the day of the rope is coming. The coming Russo-American Alliance will stomp out the parasite that is Islam and dispose of those who will not assimilate to OUR WAY OF LIFE. All forms of degeneracy that erode society will be culled. The RWDS are coming!

I'm ready for war while most of you idiots will die a coward's death like those in the Bataclan Theatre who didn't fight back at all.

Nice combo of old school racist bullshit with new school sucking up to Russia with touches of threatening violence. /golfclap.

[FeedsOnDevTears]

Irrelevant?

How Trump made money

Trump made money in Atlantic City through two primary means. One was extracting management fees from companies he was involved with, and the other was transferring personal debts to companies he controlled:

The pattern started with his very first Atlantic City venture, a partnership with Harrah’s for which he was paid a $24 million construction management fee.
Over the years, the Times reports, Trump "collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments."

In 1993, Trump Plaza casino sold more than $100 million in junk bonds and "more than half of the new money went to pay off Mr. Trump’s unrelated personal loans."

In 1995, the company staged an IPO, and then a week later "the new company began using some of the almost $300 million it had raised to clear Mr. Trump’s personal debts."

Trump’s casinos paid $300,000 a year for the right to use Trump’s jet to transport celebrities to gigs.

Trump appears to have bilked the shareholders of Trump Casinos and Resorts out of the opportunity to share in a $1 million profit related to the sale of shares in Riviera Hotel and Casino, keeping the money for himself instead.

What Trump did not do was run successful casinos:

"Revenues at other Atlantic City casinos rose 18 percent from 1997 through 2002; Mr. Trump’s fell by 1 percent."
"Had Mr. Trump’s revenues grown at the rate of other Atlantic City casinos, his company could have made its interest payments and possibly registered a profit."

The public company never turned a profit, leaving behind a trail of losses for shareholders and bondholders, and unpaid bills to contractors and subcontractors.
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/12/1190917...-city-business

It's not irrelevant at all. It demonstrates how he runs his businesses. Something he claims makes him capable of being president. In the end it shows he pillages companies for his own purposes and cares not for all the business people his bankruptcies hurt.

You're missing the big takeaway. Trump, who loves to brag about how great he is at business, is so bad a businessman that he can't make money running a casino. That's like the definition of incompetent.

But we really already knew that. Because he's such a bad nominee that he's losing to Hillary Clinton. It takes real talent to reliably fuck up sure things.

[Nillah]

I'm not voting for her in a million years. I haven't liked Trump much from the start but he's got my vote now, he's the lesser of two evils.

[Masark]

Lots of commie scum ITT. Kids talking about fake politics and populism is amusing. The Hitler comparisons are hilariously wrong. History is no longer being taught therefore the day of the rope is coming. The coming Russo-American Alliance will stomp out the parasite that is Islam and dispose of those who will not assimilate to OUR WAY OF LIFE. All forms of degeneracy that erode society will be culled. The RWDS are coming!

I'm ready for war while most of you idiots will die a coward's death like those in the Bataclan Theatre who didn't fight back at all.

"Hitler comparisons are wrong"

"We're gonna murder billions!!!"

[Trassk]

I doubt it. Donald Trump's speech was amazing.

You poor, poor thing.

[Breccia]

All I'm going to say is that I hope spanish-speaking Americans see through the cheap grab to get their support with having a guy speaking spanish, in America, where I swear English was the primary language.

Yeah! I mean, what else has Kaine done? What are his qualifications that make him so special?

I mean, other than being a civil rights lawyer for ten years. Oh right, he graduated from Harvard Law.
And a town council member.
And the mayor of Richmond.
And the Lt. governor of Virginia.
And the governor of Virginia. During which tenure he dealt with the Virginia Tech mass shooting, and gave the Dem response to Bush's State of the Union.
And a US Senator for Virginia.
And he's been on the Armed Service Committee. And the Foreign Relations Committee. And the Budget Committee.
And he chairs the "United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia and Counterterrorism".

Okay, so he has some experience. But his stance on the issues can't possibly be what the ticket needs, can it?
Oh, he's pro-choice.
And anti-gun.
And supports the ACA.
And supports same-sex marriage and LBGT rights.
And anti-smoking. He passed a smoking ban in Virginia. Twice.
And he's pro-environment, believes in climate change.
And he cut the Virginia budget without raising taxes.
And he's pro-education.

And he's co-sponsored a bill with a Republican.
And he went with John McCain, yes the war hero, to the Halifax International Security Forum to represent the US. The topics were Ukraine and ISIL.
In fact, he's so okay with Republicans that he's been married to the same one for thirty-two years.

Huh. Actually, this guy sounds pretty solid even without the Spanish. Oh, and the volunteer work in Honduras.

[OrcsRLame]

Yeah, as a long time Sanders supporter and someone that voted for him, Trump's speech plus the 20,000 emails from wikileaks has convinced me to vote for Trump. Before we suspected that the DNC was rigging things, now we have proof. At this point I no longer give a fuck about policy, I just want to watch DWS, the Clintons and their cronies burn for stealing this election from the American people, and Trump is the only one with a snowball's chance in fuck of making that happen.

Surprisingly, I don't see anything on mmo-champ about the leaked emails from yesterday, so, uh, here's the reddit megathread which has a direct link to the emails. https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/co...ak_megathread/

If you haven't heard of this before, educate yourself. Better yet, even if you have heard of this, educate yourself more. Don't just rely on my opinion or the opinions of others. Go read through the emails yourself and form your own opinion.