Hit the links

Folks, I'm not feeling the best right now. A subtle dizziness has crept up on me throughout this week, and a couple of hours ago it became a lot less subtle. You might say that I'm a victim of pre-debate "spin."

There is some possibility I'll be revisiting the doctor again tomorrow. If I end up in another bloody hospital room, I just hope they don't stash me within earshot of the debate, because the sound of that man's voice is the surest emetic on the market.

I can't write as much as I would like right now, but I do want to mention some of the many stories out there which deserve your attention. So let's go rapidly tripping through the hyperlinks...

Trump has a history of lying under oath. And he usually gets away with it.

What is most disturbing in Trump’s sworn statements is the amount of nonsense he spouts as he mangles the English language into meanings no rational person could accept. An unsuccessful “development by Donald Trump” is not a “development by Donald Trump.” A successful project built by another developer who paid to have Trump’s name on the building is a “Donald Trump development.” A payment of $400,000 equals a payment of $1 million. An ownership stake of 30 percent is actually a 50 percent stake. In a single sentence, he says he knows some people’s names but not their identities, as if talking about Batman and Superman. He studied résumés, but he only glanced at them. The list goes on, with one point in common: Every one of his answers, while under oath, depends not on the truth but on whether it makes him look good.

You can find a big, big batch of carefully fact-checked Trump lies right here. Yet for some reason Hillary is the one who has the rep for non-transparency...!

I suspect that stories like these are a kind of psy-war. Trump is probably preparing for the debate as diligently as he can, but he would prefer for reporters to think that he's winging it. 

Although I don't trust Brian Ross, you should read his latest on Trump's ties to Russians.

As you know, Trump campaign head honcho Steve Bannon (of Breitbart ill-fame) was caught illegally registered to vote in Florida, listing a fake address. So now he has re-registered at another address. Bannon's alleged "roommate," one Andrew Badolato, is a very interesting fellow. He ties into all sorts of other interesting individuals: Spooks and crooks and even a key figure in the infamous Skyway "coke jet" scandal. Some of you may recall that I devoted several previous posts to that bust; the key investigator was and is the remarkable Daniel Hopsicker, who looks into Bannon and his bud here. It is remarkable stuff.

Stock fraud, for example, an increasingly popular pastime in Florida, which provided links between Badolato and names already notorious for being part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

The location varies between Sarasota and St. Petersburg, Florida, home to St Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport, where at least two Badolato associates were involved with companies owning drug planes, which took off with some regularity from there on flights down to South America and back.

From the very beginning, I've always felt that there was something ultra-suspicious about Breitbart's site. It was always extraordinarily well-funded from Day One, even though I could see no comprehensible business model. Where did the money come from?

Who is Steve Bannon?

Who, for that matter, is Palmer Luckey, the wealthy creator of Oculus Rift and the secret power behind the successful Trumpian effort to control Reddit, Facebook and other forms of social media? His main helper is white nationalist freak Milo Yiannopoulos, who simultaneously functions as one of Steve Bannon's main propagandists. Here's a story demonstrating the connection between Luckey and the racist right.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey financially backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit” in support of the Republican nominee.

Along with Luckey, Nimble America was founded by two moderators of Reddit’s r/The_Donald, which helped popularize Trump-themed white supremacist and anti-Semitic memes along with 4Chan and 8Chan. A questionnaire to become a moderator at r/The_Donald posted in March had applicants answer the questions “Is there a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy?” and “Was 9/11 an inside job?”

Also see The Verge.

Luckey still works at Facebook, the social network confirmed to The Verge, raising questions of objectivity within a social network that's been acting like a media company, with editorial teams and, more recently, algorithms defining the news its users see. Luckey is the second prominent person within Facebook's ranks to use their personal wealth to pull for Trump, after board member Peter Thiel pledged as a California delegate to the candidate and spoke in support of him at the Republican National Convention.

I don't know why Trump is even bothering with his massive final-month ad buy. TV no longer matters. Facebook matters, and Trump captured Facebook a long time ago.

A new Vox piece identifies Trump as part and parcel of a worldwide trend toward white nationalism.

These politicians share Trump’s populist contempt for the traditional political elite. They share his authoritarian views on crime and justice. But most importantly, they share his xenophobia: They despise immigrants, vowing to close the borders to refugees and economic migrants alike, and are open in their belief that Muslims are inherently dangerous.

These parties’ values are too similar, and their victories coming too quickly, for their success to be coincidental. Their platforms, a right-wing radicalism somewhere between traditional conservatism and the naked racism of the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan, have attracted widespread support in countries with wildly different cultures and histories.

The piece identifies France's Jean-Marie Le Pen as the father of today's international far-right movement.

In fact, the FN’s rhetoric is often quite similar to Trump’s. "Tomorrow the immigrants will move in with you, eat your soup, and they will sleep with your wife, your daughter or your son," Le Pen famously warned in 1984.

The party’s triumph that year proved that a new kind of far-right politics, with an electoral strategy rooted in xenophobic populism, could succeed in the postwar era.

"FN" stands for National Front, the infuriatingly successful quasi-neo-fascist party in France

We should always remember that Vladimir Putin now funds the National Front.

That shows the continent is moving toward a political realignment more favorable to the Kremlin, according to Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian multimillionaire whose former employees played major roles in Ukraine’s rebellion and who now advocates for closer ties with Europe’s far right.

“This is the start of the end of the system,” Malofeev said in Moscow.

Also see here.

Obviously, electing Trump would be Putin's crowning achievement. Although Trump has sent mixed signals on NATO, I think that he spoke his true feelings when he called NATO "obsolete" and seemed to welcome the breakup of the organization. Trump also seems to want rid of the United Nations.

Parting shot: Trump keeps increasing his numbers, slowly but steadily, while Clinton's percentage holds steady. It's clear that much of Trump's surge has come not from disaffected Clintonites but from Gary Johnson supporters. Heretofore, Johnson had captured both unhappy Democrats -- mostly BernieBros -- and unhappy Republicans. From what I've read, the major party voters who decided to go Libertarian were split about 50/50, D-vs-R.

That was the case until about a month ago. Alas, in more recent times, the anti-Trump Republicans began drifting back to Trumpland. Meanwhile, the BernieBros will never ever give up on their anti-Hillary tizzy fit.

After all, she gave speeches to Goldman Sachs executives. Unforgivable!

So now these snotty young purists have decided to vote for the Libertarian, who would remove all regulations from Goldman. Of course, any "liberal" who voted for Johnson is really voting for Trump. President Trump, being a dimwit, will no doubt hand over much of the workload to Steve Bannon -- formerly of Goldman.

I may be feeling lightheaded right now, but I can still see the world more clearly than can any of the ignorant, immature mucus-monsters who have joined the "Bernie or Bust" brigade.