Clinton v Trump - The Stretch Run Thread

[elucidator]

Casinos across the continent are not doing well. There are too many of them and the gambling revenue is too thinly spread. This isn’t a Trump failure, it’s industrynwide.

Monorails to the casinos! Monorail! Casino!

[Czarcasm]

@RickJay

Casinos across the continent are not doing well. There are too many of them and the gambling revenue is too thinly spread. This isn’t a Trump failure, it’s industrynwide.

How were casinos doing when Trump failed at the biz?

[ThelmaLou]

@MacCat

Told once by a genetic engineer about a project in England, too fantastical to tell before, but tanks of people with gills, little babies, gulping and clawing at the sides like turtles in the zoo. Humanoids crossed with fish and stuff! :eek: We’re screwed people, do you realize that? :mad:

Ahhh…that explains cousin Harriet…

[Fiveyearlurker]

@Merneith

plagarizing something if you’re just going to alter the meaning of the words?

So while it’s feasible that “Blumenthal” might have been the real Sidney Blumenthal plagiarizing Eric Eichenwald - it’s seems pretty unlikely. It would have been pointless and self-defeating.

OK, I get this now. So, the controversy is that Trump’s campaign is picking up bad stuff about Clinton from questionable sources, right?

[El_Kabong]

@Czarcasm

How were casinos doing when Trump failed at the biz?

This NPR article gives some insight into why the Trump Taj Mahal tanked:

@NPR

BRADY: It looked like Donald Trump was on top of the world, but really he was sitting on a huge pile of debt.

ROGER GROS: He was really overextended by that point. Even before the property opened, it was pretty much doomed.

BRADY: Roger Gros is the publisher of Global Gaming Business magazine. He says for the Taj Mahal to succeed, gamblers would have had to lose a million dollars a day there, and that was unheard of in Atlantic City at the time. Trump filed a prepackaged bankruptcy the next year, giving up half his ownership stake.

GROS: And then three bankruptcies later, he had completely exhausted all of his equity and really just had his name on the side of the building, had no responsibility for running it.

Trump Taj Mahal In Alantic City To Close Due To Loss Of Millions Of Dollars

[kenobi_65]

@Fiveyearlurker

OK, I get this now. So, the controversy is that Trump’s campaign is picking up bad stuff about Clinton from questionable sources, right?

And possibly being fed them by the Russian government, which would apparently be another log on the “Trump and Putin Are BFFs” fire.

[elucidator]

Ahhh…that explains cousin Harriet…

Didn’t GeeDubya warn us all years ago about animal/human hybrid experiments?

…Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos…

President Bush’s State of the Union Address
January 31, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/31/AR2006013101468.html

By God, the man had vision!

[Fiveyearlurker]

@kenobi_65

And possibly being fed them by the Russian government, which would apparently be another log on the “Trump and Putin Are BFFs” fire.

I see that’s the implication, but that’s not the simplest explanation which is just that someone at the Trump campaign picked up a Russian news article and it made its way into Trump’s tiny hands without proper vetting. Or any vetting.

Not that that’s good, but that’s pretty much the norm over there.

[Junior_Spaceman]

@Fiveyearlurker

I see that’s the implication, but that’s not the simplest explanation which is just that someone at the Trump campaign picked up a Russian news article and it made its way into Trump’s tiny hands without proper vetting. Or any vetting.

Not that that’s good, but that’s pretty much the norm over there.

Right. I’d be much more impressed by the connection if this was pre-internet, and Trump somehow picked up a pamphlet circulating around Moscow. Once something’s on the internet, anyone anywhere can get hold of it pretty easily.

ETA: And there’s no ‘news source’ more vile and full of falsehoods than Breitbart, and they’re a major part of his team!

[coremelt]

@El_Kabong

Not picking on you, specifically, but my understanding is that actually it’s quite easy to lose money running a casino. Make it too big, or one of too many, for the regional market, finance too much of it with leveraged money and put it in a place where no one wants to go during the winter.

Sure but a good businessman would do their due diligence and make sure they didn’t create something too big and saddle it with too much debt. Trump had to have the biggest casino in the world (at the time), so he financed it with junk bonds at a ruinous interest rate, then started the public company Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts which bought the Casino from him for $890 million, thus transferring the debt from him personally to the public company.

The Taj Mahal was doomed from the start, because Trump had burdened it with so much debt that it just couldn’t break even because of the enormous interest payments and massive wages such a large casino needed to pay. So yes it failed because of Trump’s enormous ego, a better business man would have created something sustainable. Several of the lower key casinos in Atlantic city are profitable because they created something appropriate for the local market.

[GIGObuster]

Ben Stein (Yeah, I know) throws in the towell:

Trump Must Go - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American...

But I am a Republican and we are supposed to stand for some kind of moral standard. We are the party of Dwight Eisenhower, who never had the slightest moral stain on his character. We’re the party of Reagan, whose charisma was based on his basic dignity. We’re the party of George W. Bush, who made terrible mistakes, but whose fundamental morality was never in doubt. He is a handsome man and was much sought after by women, but never even returned the gaze of flirting women. He was no prude, but he was dignified.

Now comes Donald Trump. He talked on a hot mike about the most lewd acts imaginable on women he had just met or maybe did not even know. He talked on a hot mike about grabbing women by their genitals and getting away with it because he was rich and famous.

He now says that Bill Clinton has said much the same and worse. So what? I wouldn’t want Bill Clinton to be leading the Republican Party either. I want someone clean, after eight years of Barack Obama mess and lies and deceit. I don’t want someone who talks like a dirty-minded eighth grader leading the greatest party on earth.

I disagreed with Trump on trade and taxes and Hispanics. But I stood up for him on TV and in print because he was a force for change and washing out the slop-filled stables of DC and because he was not afraid to be non-PC.

But this is too much. I do not claim to be a better person than he is. I’m not at all. But I’m not fit to be President either.

Maybe he finally got Clear Eyes… Wow!

To me it’s interesting how his racism was not enough to cause Stein to lose his support for Trump, nor his poison pill economic and tax plans; no sir, it is because Trump has a potty mouth, oh yeah, he noted now that Trump is also proud of his sexual assaults.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Things are looking pretty good for Hillary in the Electoral College: 2016 Election Forecast | FiveThirtyEight

[elucidator]

…He is a handsome man and was much sought after by women, but never even returned the gaze of flirting women…

That’s not a moral paragon, that’s a corpse.

[Truman_Burbank]

Anybody here know Ben Stein well enough to ask him if he’s ever heard the name Kay Summersby?Eisenhower Letters Hint at Affair With Aide - The New York Times

[Colibri]

@Elendil_s_Heir

Things are looking pretty good for Hillary in the Electoral College: 2016 Election Forecast | FiveThirtyEight

She hasn’t quite reached her post-convention peak in the polls-only, which was 89%, but since the nowcast is at 87% even before many post-pussygate polls have come out she may get there.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

Trump knows full well that the Russians are behind the hacking episodes. Why? Because he has been told so by senior intelligence officials at his briefings.

So Trump lied during the debate about not knowing who is hacking into the Democrat’s servers. He knows it is the Russians. He has been told.

Now we find that Trump is getting his talking points directly from Russian propaganda outfits.

Question: When does this become a major concern for US intelligence officials? Like a really MAJOR FUCKING CONCERN, when a candidate for president looks like he’s having his strings pulled directly by Russia? And lying about it?

I would imagine this is being discussed at very high levels at the moment.

[Derleth]

@Elendil_s_Heir

Things are looking pretty good for Hillary in the Electoral College: 2016 Election Forecast | FiveThirtyEight

She’s never looked bad, though. She’s never been indisputably behind Trump in the polls, as far as I can recall, and was only briefly tied or close to tied.

People seem to be taking this Hell Week as a turning point in the election, but it isn’t. It might well be a turning point for the GOP, or a turning point for the Trump brand and fortune, but the election was decided when the NeverTrump coalition failed to dig up anyone who could prevent Bonzo the dyspeptic chimp from seizing control of the party.

GIGObuster: Ben Stein lives down to expectations, although I will say that I enjoyed “Win Ben Stein’s Money” as a somewhat farcical quiz show.

[Voyager]

@El_Kabong

Not picking on you, specifically, but my understanding is that actually it’s quite easy to lose money running a casino. Make it too big, or one of too many, for the regional market, finance too much of it with leveraged money and put it in a place where no one wants to go during the winter.

NPR today had a story about an analyst who when the Taj opened predicted that it would do great business for the first the first four months and then crash in the winter. Trump went ballistic and when the guy refused to say the casino would do great forever, had him fired. He eventually won a judgement for I think $700K - from his boss, not Trump.

The Taj did great for four months but in the winter did so bad that Trump couldn’t make the interest payment.
Sad.

[coremelt]

@Euphonious_Polemic

Question: When does this become a major concern for US intelligence officials? Like a really MAJOR FUCKING CONCERN, when a candidate for president looks like he’s having his strings pulled directly by Russia? And lying about it?
I would imagine this is being discussed at very high levels at the moment.

They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Any statement from the intelligence community would be denounced as partisan interference in the political process.

[garygnu]

@Voyager

NPR today had a story about an analyst who when the Taj opened predicted that it would do great business for the first the first four months and then crash in the winter. Trump went ballistic and when the guy refused to say the casino would do great forever, had him fired. He eventually won a judgement for I think $700K - from his boss, not Trump.

The Taj did great for four months but in the winter did so bad that Trump couldn’t make the interest payment.
Sad.

The saddest part is that same analyst said he’s going to vote for Trump.