Reporter who has covered Donald Trump for thirty years says the evidence strongly suggests that he is a traitor.

This is from an interview with Pulitzer winner David Cay Johnston posted over at Raw Story:

Let me be very clear and quotable about this. At an absolute minimum, Donald Trump has divided loyalties, and the evidence we already have suggests that Donald Trump is a traitor. In fact, I would say that the evidence we already have, the public materials such as emails for example, strongly indicate that Donald Trump is a traitor. However, I don’t even think he understands what he’s done.

I have said this before but I think at this point the evidence to support that allegation is incontrovertible.

If it walks like a traitor and talks like a traitor, it's Donald Trump.

Johnston also had a few more observations to share.

About his feelings about Christians:

I think it is very important for religious Americans to know that Donald Trump says that his personal philosophy of life is revenge. He has called anyone who turns the other cheek — which is a fundamental teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount — a fool, an idiot or a schmuck. Trump is a man who says things that are absolutely contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. He also denigrates Christians. Yet you see all of these ministers endorsing him. 

I’ve followed Donald for 30 years, I don’t see any evidence that he has changed and he certainly hasn’t repented, which is a fundamental Christian obligation. 

He is a racist through and through. He has been found in formal judicial proceedings to discriminate against nonwhites in rentals and employment. 

It’s important to understand that Trump is aggressively anti-Christian despite claiming to be one. He is bluntly a racist. Most importantly, he is literally ignorant about almost everything.

On Trump's removal from office: 

There is no good ending to the story. America will survive this, we’ll get past it, but whenever Trump leaves, there’s no good ending. If Trump is removed by impeachment or by the voters, whether in a Republican primary or a general election, I know what he will do. He’s already told us what he will do by his actions. Trump will spend the rest of his days fomenting violence and revolution in this country. 

He’ll be careful not to directly say “revolution,” but he will call the government illegitimate. He might even call it criminal, since he called Democrats who didn’t stand up during his State of the Union speech treasonous. If they’re going to impeach Trump, I believe they have to have a plan to indict, try, convict and imprison him. But Trump will be a role model for some people and there may well be violence over it.

Well, there's something to look forward to.

Keep in mind that David Cay Johnston has covered Trump for decades, and probably knows him better than just about any other journalist.

That cannot help but add weight to his predictions.

I will leave you today with these prophetic words from the great Carl Sagan.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and whats true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” 

Okay, that's just spooky.

This is why we need more scientists in politics.

They can recognize patterns and predict outcomes that most of us will never see coming.

(Source.)

Nostradamus had nothing on this guy.

A term that can no longer be used in this country is that the American people are smart.

No, no they are not.

Super pollster Nate Silver gives Hillary Clinton a 79% chance of winning the November election.

Chances of winning the election according to @FiveThirtyEight and @NateSilver538:
Clinton - 79%
Trump - 20% pic.twitter.com/LkCN7lBot5

— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 29, 2016

Courtesy of ABC News:  

This morning on ABC's “Good Morning America,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver predicted that Hillary Clinton will win the presidential election against Donald Trump. 

Clinton has a 79 percent chance of winning, compared with Trump's 20 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. 

Silver said "both candidates have a lot of room to grow," but the only recent candidate to blow a lead like the one Clinton holds was Massachusetts' then-Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Nate Silver is number crunching wunderkind, so this prediction holds serious merit.

However we once again need to remember that if we do not show up in overwhelming numbers that the GOP's penchant for voter fraud could still win the day for Donald Trump.

I seriously have no idea how any Independent or Democrat who failed to show up at the polls could live with themselves if that were to happen.

Moody's Analytics predicts a Hillary victory over Trump in the general. They have predicted every election correctly since 1980.

Courtesy of The Hill:

President Obama’s strong approval rating is bolstering Democratic chances of holding the White House, according to a closely followed election model. 

Moody’s Analytics is forecasting that the Democratic nominee, who is widely expected to be Hillary Clinton, will win the presidency in November over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. 

“President Obama’s approval rating has crossed over the important 50 percent threshold for the first time in almost four years,” said Dan White, a Moody’s economist who oversees the model. 

 Moody’s latest model shows for the third straight month that the Democratic nominee would take 332 electoral votes compared with 206 for the Republican nominee. The model has predicted every election correctly since it was created in 1980.

Well this is good news for the Democrats.

However, not to be Debbie Downer here, I think it important to remember that this election cycle has literally defied every pundit's predictions since it started.

Having said that I think that Hillary's chances are quite strong just so long as we maintain the kind of turnout we enjoyed in the last two presidential election cycles.

And you can predict THAT will be what the Republicans will work to prevent right up until November.

John Oliver presents a supercut of all or the premature predictions about the end of Obamacare.

Courtesy of Vox:  

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight created a supercut of premature declarations about the "end of Obamacare." It's a telling look at the manner in which political promises fuse with the news cycle to exaggerate reality.

Vox goes on to lay out a roster of false predictions since 2010. 

I don't know about everybody else but I found watching that video, and knowing how things have turned out, to be incredibly satisfying.

I think moving forward I will simply respond to every prediction made by a conservative with a hearty shout of "Bullshit!"

Should be easy since I have essentially been doing that for the last ten years already.

Forget Nostradamus, the real prognosticator was Nikola Tesla.

Nikola Tesla 1926:  

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." 

Almost ninety years ago this man predicted the future we are living today, including cell phones and the internet.

Tesla is one of my daughter's all time heroes, along with his contemporary counterpart Elon Musk.

What can I say? I raised her right. 

Just a reminder.

Democrats push back on Nate Silver's prediction of a "slight" Republican advantage in 2014.

Courtesy of the National Journal:  

Democrats aren't taking Nate Silver's latest Senate prediction lying down. 

In an unusual step, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee on Monday issued a rebuttal the famed statistician's prediction—made a day earlier—that Republicans were a "slight favorite" to retake the Senate. Silver was wrong in 2012, the political committee's Guy Cecil wrote in a memo, and he'll be wrong again in 2014. 

"In fact, in August of 2012 Silver forecast a 61 percent likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority," Cecil said. "Three months later, Democrats went on to win 55 seats." 

The DSCC memo took pains to compliment Silver, saying his work at newly launched FiveThirtyEight was "groundbreaking." And the group's main critique—that Silver's model relies on a smattering of haphazard early polling in battleground states—is one that he himself acknowledges is a limitation. 

But the comprehensive pushback from Cecil, the powerful committee's key staffer, is a testament both to the influence Silver wields and the sensitivity of Senate Democrats to the perception they're losing their grip on the upper chamber. Other outlets have suggested similar odds on the Senate, but none have earned this kind of rebuttal.

You know I have to say I am gratified to see the Democrats getting angry and pushing back against this perception that they are not motivated to turn out in 2014.

That is exactly the kind of defiance that we need to hang onto our seats, and perhaps even gain a few more. 

There are some who have suggested that this is just a case of reverse psychology by Silver in order to energize the Democratic base, but I disagree with that.

I don't know if Nate Silver is a religious man or not, but if he is I would bet that he prays to the gods of math, data crunching, and logic.

He is not somebody who would fudge numbers in order to make a point, he has too much respect for them to do that.

So I believe that he believes his calculations are correct.

The only question remaining is are the progressives out there willing to see a replay of 2010, or are they ready to make people like Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and now Nate Silver eat crow?

I know my answer.

The great Nate Silver says that the GOP is a "slight favorite" to take the Senate. Uh oh.

Courtesy of Salon:  

“We think the Republicans are now slight favorites to win at least six seats and capture the chamber,” Silver writes Sunday at FiveThirtyEight. “The Democrats’ position has deteriorated somewhat since last summer, with President Obama’s approval ratings down to 42 or 43 percent from an average of about 45 percent before. Furthermore, as compared with 2010 or 2012, the GOP has done a better job of recruiting credible candidates, with some exceptions.” 

Silver writes that he is “bullish on Republican chances” in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana and Arkansas, and that the GOP could take control of the Senate if it wins at least two additional races in Louisiana, North Carolina, Alaska or Michigan — states that are at the moment very much in play, he notes. Wins in Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire could be considered “backup options” for the GOP, according to Silver.

Now if you are like me, and place a great deal of credibility in what Nate Silver says, a man who had the single best track record in the last few elections cycles as picking the winner, you might feel as if you have been punched in the gut.

However before you start to panic, and I admit that panic started for me about two lines into the above paragraphs, first read this:

 As always, we encourage you to read this analysis with some caution. Republicans have great opportunities in a number of states, but only in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana and Arkansas do we rate the races as clearly leaning their way. Republicans will also have to win at least two toss-up races, perhaps in Alaska, North Carolina or Michigan, or to convert states such as New Hampshire into that category. And they’ll have to avoid taking losses of their own in Georgia and Kentucky, where the fundamentals favor them but recent polls show extremely competitive races. [...]

Okay well that's a little better, but it still has to serve as a not to be ignored warning that we have GOT to get off of our asses and vote this midterm, or we will be stuck in neutral for the next two years.

Or what's worse we may even start to go backwards, and lose some of the important progress that we have made.

This all comes down to turnout, and everybody expects turnout on the liberal side to be low.

We HAVE to prove them wrong. We HAVE to!

Here is what Digby suggests we need to do in order to inspire the young and minority voters:

For a young voter or voter of color, voting for Democrats isn't a matter of hope for a better future. It's basically a defensive crouch to prevent the insane sociopaths from taking over. To provide real hope, Democrats would have to start pushing for a $15 minimum wage, for basic universal income, for single-payer healthcare, for a green jobs Apollo Program, for student loan forgiveness, and similar policies.

I do not think that campaigning for single payer health care is an option at this point, but his other suggestions are more than valid.

We need to excite the base, and there are many policies the Democrats could introduce that would do exactly that.

Did Tina Fey predict Sarah Palin's future?

The Sarah Palin Network from Michael Pastor on Vimeo.
Okay this is just spooky.

There is a chance that something Sarah Palin predicted might come true, might just happen. Sign of Apocalypse, or simple coincidence? You decide. Update!

"Holy crap I was right about something!"

 Courtesy of Nostra-dumbasses Facebook page:

Yes, I could see this one from Alaska. I'm usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as “an extremely far-fetched scenario” by the “high-brow” Foreign Policy magazine. Here’s what this “stupid” “insipid woman” predicted back in 2008: "After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next."

Ooh, somebody's awfully proud of themselves now aren't they?

Of course the 2008 speech that Palin refers to is one in which she claimed that Obama's offer to engage with the leaders of Iran would embolden them to possibly attack Israel. Instead we now have a deal with Iran that essentially dismantles their nuclear weapons program.

She also stated that Obama was demonstrating a lack of respect for Pakistan's sovereignty by threatening to send troops in if there were credible information that Osama Bin Laden was hiding out there.

I think we all know how that turned out.

Yes Palin did also suggest that under President Obama that Russia might be emboldened to invade the Ukraine. However considering her shoddy record of making predictions, and the fact that the invasion is still relatively hypothetical, it does seem that it deserves a great deal of celebration.

After all even a broken clock is right twice a day.

By the way if Russia is indeed invading the Ukraine, it is possibly the laziest invasion on record.

Update: Now the Ukrainians are saying that they have repelled the invasion, and that the airports and roadways are back under Ukrainian control.

Okay so are we to believe that in just one day Russia invaded the Ukraine, and were repelled with no reported loss of life? That does not appear to be much of an invasion.

It seems to me that a certain half term Governor/Reality TV star may have shot her big stupid mouth a little too soon.

David Chappelle IS Nostradamus.

Okay you have to admit, that is one bizarre coincidence.

(For those who don't know who David Chappelle is.)

I was going to post something, but why bother since the earth has undoubtedly come to an end? After all, if you can't trust a Mayan just who CAN you trust?

So I am robo-posting this in anticipation that the earth just exploded and I have finally returned to the stardust from whence I come. However I realize that due to the time zones I may in fact be among the LAST people to realize that the earth done gone boom.

So anyhow if any of you wake up and realize that all of the predictions were the result of a bunch of overly excitable ignoramuses let me know and I will continue to do what I do.

I think my personal philosophy at times like this is best summed up by one Colonel Nick Fury.

Word!

Famous online Irish betting site calls election for Obama, starts paying off bets early.

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

With still more than two days to go before America votes, Paddy Power, Europe's largest betting company, is paying out to punters who backed President Obama to win the US election. 

Despite the national polls showing voters remain largely undecided with nothing more than a sheet of ballot paper between the two candidates, Paddy Power believes it’s a done deal and that Obama is a nailed on certainty to win a second term. 

The gutsy call sees the bookmaker put their neck on the line for over $650,000. Prior to paying out, Obama’s odds fell to a low 2/9 and over the past months Paddy Power have seen 75% of money staked go Obama’s way. 

A Paddy Power spokesperson said: “Romney gave it a good shot and is doing well in the popular vote, but we suspect he’s had his moment in the sun and is likely to be remembered more for his legendary gaffes than Presidential potential. The overall betting trend has shown one way traffic for Obama and punters seemed to have called it 100% correct. Despite Romney appealing to the large evangelical and senior vote, America‘s sticking with black and cool.” 

Paddy Power continues to offer betting right up to and including Election Day. One of the most popular bets currently on offer is predicting the winning margin of the successful nominee on November 6th.

You know I'm pretty confident myself, but I don't think even I have $650,000 worth of confidence. 

However these guys seem to have a pretty good track record, so you certainly can't dismiss this as nothing more than a publicity stunt. Especially since I'm pretty sure they could have drawn attention to themselves for a hell of a lot less than $650,000 after all.

Oh and by the way, that other famous gambler Nate Silver, is probably also willing to cash in his chips early if his latest projections are any indication.

Hmm, maybe I SHOULD place a bet.

Economist tells us not to worry because, despite what the polls may tell us, Obama has never NOT been winning this election.

I swear this guy looks and sounds like the stereotypical nerd from Hollywood's central casting, but he also really sounds like he really knows what he is talking about, and fall right in line with similar forecasts from our friend Nate Silver. Here give him a listen.

And along with this good news we also have the Salt Lake Tribune, Mitt's hometown paper, deciding to endorse President Obama. Ouch, that has to hurt!

Here is brief snippet describing WHY the paper made that choice:

But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal, and his oversight of the most successful Winter Games on record, that make him the Beehive State’s favorite adopted son. After all, Romney managed to save the state from ignominy, turning the extravaganza into a showcase for the matchless landscapes, volunteerism and efficiency that told the world what is best and most beautiful about Utah and its people. 

In short, this is the Mitt Romney we knew, or thought we knew, as one of us. 

Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?" 

The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.

Sounds reasonable to me.

More good news as President Obama extends his advantage over Mitt Romney.

Courtesy of Five Thirty Eight:  

Barack Obama’s standing in the FiveThirtyEight forecast reached its strongest position to date on Tuesday as a result of favorable polls in a set of swing states. The forecast model now gives Mr. Obama a 70.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, up from 69.0 percent on Monday and from 65.0 percent last Tuesday. 

Three of the polls were conducted by Quinnipiac University in conjunction with The New York Times and CBS News. The polls gave Mr. Obama leads of 6 points in each of Ohio and Florida, and an 11-point lead in Pennsylvania. 

In each state, the polls are at the high end of the range of numbers produced by other polling firms. As we frequently advise, no one set of polls — no matter how reputable the pollster — should be read as gospel. Differences in the numbers from survey firm to survey firm often reflect sampling error or methodological differences rather than any fundamental change in the condition of the race.

Now remember this is Nate Silver, the guru of election predictions, if he thinks that Obama is pulling significantly ahead of Romney, and that his chances for winning are promising, then you can take THAT to the bank.

Now all we have to do is keep the GOP from using Diebold machines, the Right Wing SuperPACs, or the fucking Supreme Court from stealing this election, and we should be home free.

Let me tell you right now, if Romney wins this election, we will know with absolute certainty that it was stolen. And THIS time we will NOT sit quietly by and let it happen!

Okay seriously the world is going to end in 2012. Would the Mayans lie to you?

So just in case you are wondering, yes this is another version of "magical thinking."

Only this time unless you are a New Age believer, an apocalyptic groupie, or a Mayan, you probably will not be insulted by having that pointed out.