According to this piece in the New York Times, there were some people who waited twelve hours in the Deep Southern heat to see Donald Trump’s Friday night appearance at Ladd-Peebles Stadium, the home of the University of South Alabama Jaguars.
Just as an aside here, the jaguar is an interesting feline. Its jaws are so powerful that they can actually pierce turtle shells. And the jaguar has a killing technique that is unusual: “it bites directly through the skull of prey between the ears to deliver a fatal bite to the brain.”
This evidently explains a lot about the Trump gathering in Mobile.
Trump didn’t fill the 30,000 seat stadium, but he did attract at least one person who was willing to travel all the way from the Golden State to get a firsthand view of The Donald.
Although Mr. Trump has drawn criticism for unveiling few detailed policy proposals, many of his supporters said they were unbothered.
“When he gets in there, he’ll figure it out,” said Amanda Mancini, who said she had traveled from California to see Mr. Trump. “So we do have to trust him, but he has something that we can trust in. We can look at the Trump brand, we can look at what he’s done, and we can say that’s how he’s done everything.”
Hmmm.
Methinks that almost no one from the New York metropolitan area would look at the Trump brand and trust him to do anything but talk a lot of shit. Maybe his brand of bluster sells better the less time you’ve spent riding the train with abandoned copies of the New York Post. I don’t know.
Or maybe you just have to have a passing familiarity with the “classy” and “amazing” Trump casinos in Atlantic City.
Either way, you obviously have to have a short memory if you’ve forgotten that he ran around the country for a year accusing the president of being born in Kenya, which doesn’t even make any sense.
But for some of those in attendance on Friday night, the Birther thing is more of an asset than a flaw. For example, this landscaper has had it up to here with the competition from Kenyan Mexican immigrants.
Still, others said they had plenty of advice for the man they regularly identified in conversation as “Mr. Trump.”
“Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill,’ ” said Jim Sherota, 53, who works for a landscaping company. “That’d be one nice thing.”
Of course, Trump didn’t offer to set up the Mexican border as a human hunting ground with $25 permits and fifty bucks per pelt. I don’t think Mr. Sherota was disappointed though, and I am sure he’ll never give up the dream. Because, if there’s one thing you need to know about these Alabama folks, it’s this:
“When Alabama people believe in something, Alabama people go full force. We’re not a halfway state; it’s all or nothing,” said Tommy Hopper, 51, a petroleum cargo surveyor who lives near Mobile.
This is why they can actually fill Ladd-Peebles Stadium with 30,000 Alabamans to see a football program that was only established in 2009. Because they’re all or nothing, and football is all.
I was modestly comforted that the waiting audience didn’t grow so impatient as to begin roaring chants of “C.S.A.! C.S.A.!,” although that might have been more honest and forthright than that roaring chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” that actually occurred.
And the other nice thing is that Mr. Trump isn’t your standard run-of-the-mill politician who doesn’t have a clue. It’s so refreshing to listen to someone speak at a political rally without pandering to the crowd:
“As much as I love ‘The Art of the Deal,’ it’s not even close,” Mr. Trump said. “We take the Bible all the way.”
That’s just straight talk, folks, from a con-man-plus-Rotarian.
Donald Trump released that Art of the Deal book in 1987 when I was a senior in high school. I’m forty-five now, and I’m not telling everyone I can still hit a fastball or make a sophomore swoon. You know, I moved on. My knees ache and I’m losing my hair.
But it doesn’t matter. Trump’s got it all wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross: “the night was punctuated with plenty of forceful reminders, including roaring chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
“We take the Bible all the way,” Mr. Trump said.
Right in the political home base of Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
Yes, Senator Sessions was on that stage in Mobile with Donald Trump, and so I must remind you:
In 1986 (otherwise known as the year of Iran-Contra), President Ronald Reagan nominated Beauregard the Third to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. During the Judiciary Committee hearings on his nomination, it became clear that Sessions suffered from a common conservative fear: namely, mouth-rape.
Like so many of his Republican brethren, Sessions was terrified of having things “rammed down his throat” by the NAACP, ACLU, or some “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” guy who might decide to attack his home with a small arsenal.
When it became clear that Jefferson Beauregard the Third was not only named for the president of the Confederacy and one its more more effective generals, but actually held the same beliefs in common with those two gentlemen, the Judiciary Committee declined to send his nomination to the floor. Alabama Senator Howell Heflin decided that Sessions was simply too racist to serve on the bench in Alabama, and so Reagan had to go back to the drawing board.
But being too racist to serve as district judge is not the same thing as being too racist to serve in the U.S. Senate, and Sessions got his revenge. In fact, in a sign of the health of our country’s political discourse, Mr. Beauregard the Third actually spent more time talking in the Senate last year than Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The poster boy for “cracker” spent more time talking than either Sens. Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, who both waged long and delusional faux-filibusters for no coherent reason whatsoever.
Yes, the person who spent the most time speaking into the Senate chamber’s CSPAN cameras last year is a man who couldn’t serve in the judicial branch because of his racism. Nonetheless, he serves as the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts.
Because, GOP.
You’re welcome.
Sincerely,
Doremus Jessup
Can’t be bothered to dig up the link, but I remember a nearly identical NYT story from September (I think) 2008 about an adoring crowd waiting long hours and filling a football stadium to hear Sarah Palin speak. That was in Pensacola, Florida, about 60 miles along the coast east from Mobile. I’m sure there were plenty of proud, credulous CSA patriots who attended both events.
Which is to say, take away the intensity of modern celebrity culture and Trump’s act is not new. Nor was Palin’s. Grifters have been using religion, ignorance, and fear of The Other (all overlapping phenomena) to appeal to the marks ever since the Avesta. What’s “new” here isn’t Trump, but – as Boo has noted repeatedly – that his transparent grift is being taken at face value by much of the base of a political party that controls two-thirds of the branches of the federal government, and wants to control the third.
That base has been marinated in this stuff now for over a full generation. The only reason it didn’t happen sooner is that Gingrich and Huckabee (let alone McCain and Romney) couldn’t undo their pasts, and hustlers like Cain and Carson, who didn’t have such an identifiable political past, haven’t been skilled or white enough. If it wasn’t The Donald, it’d be some other rich white dude with a flair for recycling talk radio segments.
Perfect: rich white dude with a flair for recycling talk radio segments.
We’ve been long overdue for a Sinclair Lewis revival.
Or another Great Upheaval.
So, the knuckle-draggers are not only fine with a dictator, it’s exactly what they want as long as he’s a GOP old, rich white guy with dyed hair.
Liberals are supposed to care about our fellow citizens. We are supposed to be looking for ways to make the country better for all. These days, though, I look around and see my fellow citizens as enemies rather than neighbors. I don’t seem to have much in common with them and to the extent they act this way and are suffering, I am disinclined to try and help them.
Liberals like to say that low information voters are supporting politicians who don’t serve their own interest. We think that if only those people trusted democrats with political power, we would make their lives better.
And yet, the evidence is to the contrary. They don’t want us to make their lives better. They hate us. So why should we try? If these freaks want trump, they can have him. I’ll be fine either way.
They don’t want us to make their lives better.
Those that believe that their lives are materially good enough, believe they did it all on their own and it eats away at them that others are somehow getting a free ride. They, along with other rightwingers that don’t believe their lives are materially good enough, believe that materially their lives would be even better if the “takers” were forced to sink or swim on their own.
So, in their ahistorical little minds, they want the GOP way to make their lives better.
I agree. I’m to the point, though, where US politics and media are so utterly useless and despicable that it no longer makes any sense to pretend we can help. The progressive agenda – as inadequate as it is – is completely dead on arrival. This is what we all should be talking about. The fact is that the GOP is completely nuts and we still can’t beat them. Sad.
Who says we can’t beat them? As long as there’s another election coming up, there’s only one thing we know for certain: We can’t win if we don’t fight.
This is one key lesson that I often wish liberals would take from conservatives, because those fuckers never give up.
From the last Qunnipiac poll: Sanders tops Trump 44% to 39% in a general election.
They will, however, settle for the GOP making someone else’s life worse, and letting them watch.
Those low information voters are supporting politicians who define their self-interest in ways not primarily economic. Tribal. Religious. Racial. Regional. There are plenty of other self-identifications. And they overlap.
What do progressives offer in this line?
for all the talk of liberals being all socialist we tend to frame questions a lot in capitalist economic terms
What I find fascinating is that there hasn’t been a huge amount of blowback yet against Trump. He’s like Sarah Palin in the way they both lack successful political histories and they both get their way by sheer force of will, and that large numbers of people adore and admire them.
But they are both bluffers who will say or do anything to get elected. Trump doesn’t dress like trailer trash Barbie with f-me black pumps, but he strikes the solid gold successful businessman pose and pretends he’s never lost a dime. He talks out of both sides of his mouth and just by repeating the same rhetoric over and over, he drills his radical ideas into the empty heads of his followers.
Trump is like the circus geeks of old, the freak show where people are compelled to plunk down their money to see something odd and repellant. Trump is that freak; absurd, yet compelling. Unfortunately, there are too many rubes out there and pretty soon the freaks are going to run the circus. The clown car is already jammed, and Trump is the biggest clown of them all.
There is a qualitative difference between Trump and Palin. They played the same game, but Palin was successful in a small town then in a backwoods state. At the time she was nominated for VP she’d been governor for a short time and at that point pretty much all of Juneau had figured her out as a stupid, mean fraud. There are people like Palin in small towns around the world – successful business people who got that way by being pushy, creating key alliances, and breaking rules. None of them would survive any longer than Palin did in the national spotlight.
Trump, for all his many flaws, is worldly and media savvy. He’s been practicing at this for many decades.
Trump would never answer “all of them” to a question about what news sources he reads. If asked a question he didn’t know the answer to he’d just attack the questioner. Later, of course, Palin attacked the media for asking those questions, but only after she was revealed as an ignorant buffoon.
Interesting context.
“said Jim Sherota, 53, who works for a landscaping company.”
The red-blooded American is just not willing to compete on the job. And too much a coward to place the problem with his boss or his competitors who are hiring Hispanics for low wages. And playing peonage games with them. But the Jim Sherotas of Alamabama are why African-Americans no longer get those landscaping jobs either. Bosses love giving white guys the “favor” of a job at a lower wage than they were working. Builds work discipline and white solidarity at the same time. Oldest trick in the South. First used on indentured servants and court transports.
That landscaper may have just handed Trump a new business model.
I don’t support Trump. I don’t think he will be the R candidate. He peaked too early.
However, he has identified an issue. The immigration issue is an important one. There are too many illegals here. It is not enough to just blame employers. The employers would not be hiring the illegals if they were not here. And if you want to employer hiring of illegals, join me in support eVerify for all jobs. That would solve the entire problem – eVerify for all jobs, for all rentals, and for all hotels. And enough with the BULLSHIT CRAP about “Papers, please”. You go to Europe today, and you must present an identity document to get a hotel.
But the use of illegals in jobs that teens used to get means that teens do not get the job in the landscape company. These are jobs Americans want to do. I first did a job as a busboy. Today, there are probably a bunch of illegals doing those jobs. Also dishwashing, a good job for unemployed kids. And in those towns in which there are a lot of riots, if folks had jobs, there would be fewer riots.
Here is my solution to three problems at one time: We have a huge prison population. When these folks get out of prison, they go back to their home, find their buddies and get arrested again, since nobody hires felons. So, put those folks on farms to work off their period of probation. During this time, they will learn a useful skill. They would be out of the environment of the place and associations which led to criminal behavior in the first place. And they would get a job to put on their resume.
There are no jobs that Americans will not do. NONE. And the bullshit notion that there is just bullshit justification for the current state of disarray in immigration policy. We do not need the illegals. We can and should do those jobs ourselves. We just need to arrange resources, human and otherwise, to do this.
You don’t support Trump. How super for you!
Oops, you lost me at “illegals.” Thanks for playing!
Illegal, illegal, illegal.
Thanks for your stereotypic inability to actually engage.
Georgia and Alabama have already tried your solution. Google the crop losses.
So expand the H-2b visa program. Illegals have many types of jobs. 12% of them work in ag labor. And my solution is to use probabion and ex-prisoners for that.
Source: WP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/27/where-americas-undocumented-immigrants-work
/
Illegals take many types of jobs. Ag labor is a very small proportion. A FAR higher proportion works in construction, taking jobs from Americans that Americans want to do. This is SPECIFICALLY why working class voters no longer want to vote Democratic, BTW.
And why are there so many illegals in construction? Why, the reason is Bob Perry. Ol’ Bob, he built crappy houses in Texas, and decided to bring in illegals to build his crappy houses. He used the profits to fund “Swift Boat Veterans”.
Isn’t that amazing. If you are pro-illegal, you are on the same side as the guy who funded “Swift Boat Veterans”. That sure would make me uncomfortable, but I oppose illegals.
How about we make some laws that entraps lots of STEM workers and turn them into indentured servants for tech oligarchs. That would be a way to fix all the H-1B visa issue and shut up the whiners like you.
“And my solution is to use probation and ex-prisoners for that.”
Hmm, I see you did not bother to google.
prisoners and paroled, that’s slave labor, not at all the right direction to be going. private prisons undercutting actual workers – workers who need and want and previously did the work – is a big problem – and you want to add to that?
So, you prefer to use Mexicans as indentured labor. I prefer to give parolees a chance to learn a trade, get a job which pays wages, and gets them a reference.
Specifically what is wrong with farm labor? In some cases for parolees, they cannot get a job. I say we provide a trade for them.
Why is that a bad idea? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a job after prison?
Oh, go vote for Trump already. We’ll manage just fine without you.
Kiss my ass, honestly.
Just out of curiosity, can you point to a single comment of yours in which you have made a single constructive comment about immigration? I have made hundreds. I don’t expect you to agree, but they are constructive.
Yours are not helpful. Just sniping.
So, how about making a contribution? Just one? Just a single one which is not the standard liberal bullcrap about how wunnerfull all those illegals are.
Sure, here’s my constructive comment: Ciudadanía para 11 millones. I don’t give a crap how they came here, the fact is that they came here because there’s a place for them. If Americans would do the same jobs for the same wages, simple question: Why the fuck aren’t they?
But the honest truth is that I don’t care what side of the border someone was born on, and I don’t make any division between “us” and “them.” I’m from California, so to me Mexicans aren’t even foreigners.
Another thing about being from California is that we had this whole debate 20 years ago, and your side lost. They did win a battle in the short run, when they passed Prop 187, but it was a pyrrhic victory. Immigrant bashing is one of the main reasons the GOP is now defunct in this state.
And lastly, do you really think your comments are helpful? You’re not exactly winning friends and influencing people here, you know.
Prop 187 led to two results:
We started to lose the working class vote. It is clear that the Democrats care about illegals and their jobs and don’t give a flying fuck about American workers and their jobs.
What works in CA does not work in MI, IN, WI, PA, IL. All those states are now fully Republican, top to bottom.
And a lot of this has occurred due to the Democratic distortion of illegals. Look at OR – 2:1 vote against driver’s licenses for illegals.
So, CA goes one way, other states the opposite. We’ll see what happens in 2016. Immigration policy is important, and it cuts against Democrats.
What the hell are you talking about, “top to bottom”? It’s true that Illinois just elected a Republican governor, but the legislature is still controlled by the Democrats. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, has a Republican legislature but they just elected a Democratic governor. And each state has one Democratic senator and one Republican senator, and of course Illinois’s Republican senator is going to lose next year.
And you may have noticed that voters in Oregon didn’t exactly punish the Democrats even while they were voting down measure 86.
well, ex prisoners are free to apply for any job they like, including ag jobs. just as undocumented workers seek them. who is the “we” that you would have managing the work lives of ex-prisoners?
It’s called the parole system. A substantial number of ex-prisoners are on parole. Until they exit the parole system, which can take some time, they are managed, closely, by parole officers. This is unknown to you?
You appear to believe that I was talking prison wages of .25/hour. I am talking about real wages.
We need laborers in the fields. You “liberal” types are eager, disgustingly eager, to get anyone but an American out there.
Give a parolee a chance to get a job working for wages which can go on a resume. Get that parolee away from the milieu in which that person got into trouble. It’s a winner 3 ways.
You know, those farm workers are professionals and have incredibly motor skills. You do not pick up that discipline without a loooong period of practice. They start as children.
incredible
Exactly. Dumping urban folks on orchards and fields and expecting them to have everything necessary to perform the work at a level worth being paid a living wage is asinine. Plus they wouldn’t have a support network or even housing.
MOTHER OF GOD. What a moronic comment.
Of course, this would involve a training program.
There is something genuinely pathetic about the slavish devotion to illegal labor. Some say we can’t afford to pay real wages to farm labor. Of course, this is what they said about slavery. And that is what liberals are devoted to – slavery on the farm, slavery by illegals.
You would think that some liberal, supposedly the “open minded thoughtful” persons, might think outside the box. But that is not possible today. Illegals good. Grunt.
Who said illegal? The professional pickers are usually greencards. It is a joke to expect a farmer to see his crop rot waiting on novice pickers.
And incidentally, a lot of workers left Georgia and Alabama not because of their status, but because of harassment and profiling encouraged by the new laws. Usually, wages are per pound and a good picker might make $10-12 per hour.
And back in July, some in Georgia were amazed Alabama did not learn from their mistakes before its immigration law put its agricultural and construction industry in jeopardy. “It was like, `Good Lord, you people can’t be helped. Have you all not been paying attention?'” said Bryan Tolar, president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council. (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/10/07/338922/alabama-prisoners-immigrants-farm-labor/)
Actually, I think a country and its economy can work better for all without imported migrant workers. But I’m not enough of a moron to suggest that surplus labor in on location is fungible for work in another location and that a form of indentured servitude is anything this country should return to.
There are plenty of respectful ways that government can facilitate repopulating rural areas and developing the skills people in rural populations need to survive with dignity. However, no country that has industrialized has managed to do that — rural girls and boys leave the country because they are surplus farm labor. Then in urban settings they do the same thing their parents did — birthed too many children for the urban economy and in less than one generation they can’t go home again because they don’t have the right skills for living in rural areas either.
Even people who agree with you on some aspects of our current immigration policy (as I do) from wanting to engage in a discussion with you.
It is a racist pejorative term that does nothing to foster the engagement you claim you want.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid: Trump Fans `White Americans Who Feel Left Out of Obama’s America’
11:27 am, August 22nd, 20152229
Prior to Donald Trump`s (not-so-) massive Friday evening rally at an Alabama football stadium, MSNBC’s Joy Reid offered her take on who composes the majority of the billionaire developer’s support base.
“I think what you have with Trump, and what I see as his base, is not just the far-right, but the right,” she told Hardball host Chris Matthews, “and it’s a lot of Republicans who are disgruntled with the Republican party.”
According to Reid, there’s a racial element here as well:
It’s white Republicans. It’s mostly white male Republicans and it’s basically white Americans who feel left out of Obama’s America; who are peeved with the fact that their preferred party can’t seem to beat Obama; and who want to hear a guy be able to stand up and be as politically incorrect as they can’t be. They’d get fired from their jobs if they put on Facebook some of the things Trump said. But here’s a guy who can say what he wants to. Be a man’s man and get out there and be the kind of Ronald Reaganesque kind of America where we what we want, said what we want, pushed the world around, and told them to go to hell if we wanted to.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/msnbcs-joy-reid-trump-fans-white-americans-who-feel-left-out-of-obamas-am
erica/
The Trumpsters are noisy, but their numbers seem to be greatly exaggerated. Trum’ps best numbers so far are in SC and ranges from 31-34%. Recall that Newt won SC in 2012 with 40%.
So, at this point I see no reason to panic. As the GOP nominee he could easily do worse in the GE than McCain and Romney did.
That is a ridiculous point. At this point, there are 16-18 republican candidates. Of that huge field, Trump gets a vast number. As the field narrows, his numbers will grow.
However, I don’t see him staying. He is too undisciplined. He will get into trouble.
That does not mean the issue will end. The issue is here. Trump is merely doing better with it than others. You can bet that it will be part of the final discussion in 2016.
Democrats are today very stupid to not acknowledge the absolute failure of the open borders bullshit approach they are taking.
The herd isn’t going to thin anytime soon — at least not for those with SuperPac bucks and/or polling above 1%. Absent a portal into the minds of those currently supporting numbers two through fifteen, I don’t know where they’ll go if “their guy” drops out or they decide to bolt because it’s hopeless for their guy and/or they loathe one of the other serious contenders.
Unless Trump is the clear winner in IA, NH, and SC, most of the others stay in the race in the hope that someone else drops out and that mostly benefits him/her.
If Trump moves up and holds steady in the polling to 40% in IA, 35% in NH, and 50% in SC and has a double digit lead over the next contender, there will be (behind the scenes) forced departures, but only those that will lead that candidate’s supporters not to have Trump as their second choice.
That was true in 2004, 2008, and 2012. That is not necessarily what is true in 2016. Superpacs have changed the entire equation. Get a billionaire like Sheldon Adelson behind you, or be a billionaire, you can go on like a zombie for a long time.
OK, you said that. We are both saying the same thing.