Vox explains Pepe the Frog.

Pepe the Frog has been around the internet for years. Just a year ago he was so innocuous that celebrities like Katy Perry could tweet him without fear of backlash. But more recently, Pepe has morphed into something more insidious — a symbol embraced by the white nationalist alt-right, many of whom hang out on the forums where Pepe first originated years ago.

Pepe the Frog, in other words, is a dog whistle for the internet age, when the memes candidates post circulate far more broadly than any speech they ever make. Donald Trump Jr. says he didn’t have any idea what the frog meant. But his father, more than any other presidential candidate,

And then there’s the Trump “University” fraud.

The New Yorker was on it in June:

Following the release, earlier this week, of testimony filed in a federal lawsuit against Trump University, the United States is facing a high-stakes social-science experiment. Will one of the world’s leading democracies elect as its President a businessman who founded and operated a for-profit learning annex that some of its own employees regarded as a giant ripoff, and that the highest legal officer in New York State has described as a classic bait-and-switch scheme?

It’s certainly coming way too close. Why isn’t fraud and theft a disqualifier? Can we do something about that? Before 2020?

If anyone still has any doubt about the troubling

CNN on some of the small companies Donald Trump cheated.

“It was like we won the lottery,” Beth Rosser remembers. Her dad, Forest Jenkins, had just secured a $200,000 contract to work at the biggest prize in Atlantic City: Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal.

His company installed toilet partitions — not exactly glamorous, but important nonetheless. It was 1988, and a six-figure contract was huge.

They were all excited…but the check never arrived.

“We weren’t this big company,” remembers Rosser, who now runs the company with her brother, Steven. “We didn’t have tons of money in an account somewhere to cover things.”

Jenkins says his dad, who built the company from nothing, nearly lost everything.

The Taj Mahal, the most

Dan Rather on Facebook:

Donald Trump’s disdain, mockery, and antagonism of the press, whose freedoms are enshrined in the Bill of Rights and whose presence has provided ballast to our democracy since its inception, raises very serious questions about his fitness for the presidency of the United States.

For a long while, these thoughts have been coursing through my veins with concern and disbelief, and yet my abiding loyalty to the notion of fair, accurate and unbiased journalism held me in check from saying it out loud – much as I suspect it has muzzled the true feelings of many of my colleagues. But we must remember that Donald Trump knows this and cynically plays the press corps’ deep

GQ talked to five voters who have somehow managed not to decide which is worse, Trump or Clinton. Anonymous “Politics reporter, 42, Washington, D.C.:

I’ve struggled with this the entire election season. Some days I’m really tortured by it, and some days it’s, like, laughable. But I’ve never really felt this way as an adult human. And it’s really—it’s messing with me.

I cannot stomach Hillary Clinton. I just can’t get with her. Maybe because I know too much. I find so much of her world hypocritical, reprehensible. I think the rest of the country sort of gives her a pass, like, “Oh, she’s always been attacked by Republicans, it’s not that big a deal, email shmemail!” But I’m like,

Daniel Dale tweets a list of things Trump said in one interview today.

This is a list of things Trump said in one interview on CNBC this morning. pic.twitter.com/0KawkE4fZr

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 12, 2016

 … Read the rest

Do not elect this man to anything ever.

… Read the rest

Trump’s take on sexual assault in the military is, predictably, that it’s the fault of the damn fools who thought the military shouldn’t exclude women on account of how women are not some weird aberrant species.

Speaking at a candidates’ forum, Mr. Trump defended one of his Twitter posts from 2013 concerning the high number of sexual assaults in the military, and said that he had been “absolutely correct” in posting a message that said, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”

Right. So by the same token…the military should be all white, because white guys will inevitably get violent if non-white guys are allowed. By the same token, the military should be all … Read the rest

Apparently the news media are determined to help Trump win.

The NBC presidential forum on Wednesday night in Manhattan brought together the candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump to try to determine who has the strength, preparation and presence of mind to lead during a time of crisis.

It sure wasn’t Matt Lauer.

I’m not familiar with Matt Lauer. Apparently he’s on one of those morning tv chatter shows. Why get someone like that to interview candidates for president? Shouldn’t it be a journalist, or even an academic, rather than a chat show host?

Mr. Lauer interviewed the candidates in turn for a half-hour each. He began by asking Mrs. Clinton to defend her use of a private

Trump had a policy team in DC but it faded away because he refused to pay people. How presidential!

The Trump campaign built a large policy shop in Washington that has now largely melted away because of neglect, mismanagement and promises of pay that were never honored. Many of the team’s former members say the campaign leadership never took the Washington office seriously and let it wither away after squeezing it dry.

He cheats people. It’s what he does. He’s a crook and he cheats people.

Trump has never acknowledged the policy shop based in Washington that has been doing huge amounts of grunt work for months without recognition or compensation.

Since April, advisers never named in campaign press

That little slip-up where Trump appears to have bribed Florida’s Attorney General to decide not to investigate his not-university – that slip-up seems to be getting more journalistic attention. The Boston Globe for instance:

“A minor issue,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told NBC.

That’s disingenuous spin of the first order. It’s also illegal. The Donald J. Trump Foundation, which is organized under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code, clearly violated its tax-exempt status by making the contribution — a fact brought to light in March by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. But this is more than an accounting error. There’s a whiff of scandal that demands full attention from voters who might otherwise be trying

David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post last week:

Donald Trump paid the IRS a $2,500 penalty this year, an official at Trump’s company said, after it was revealed that Trump’s charitable foundation had violated tax laws by giving a political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general.

The improper donation, a $25,000 gift from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, was made in 2013. At the time, Attorney General Pam Bondi was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. She decided not to pursue the case.

Sigh. Trump gave the Attorney General money, and she dropped the investigation into fraud allegations against his fraudulent not-university. Why isn’t this an issue?

The sequence began when Bondi

Ok!

Texas Democratic Party… Read the rest

Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto isn’t helping Trump with his story about that pesky wall and who is picking up the tab for it. Trump says they didn’t talk about paying the bill, but Peña Nieto says they did.

“Who pays for the wall? We didn’t discuss,” Trump had said when asked by a reporter during a news conference following their meeting in Mexico City. “We did discuss the wall. We didn’t discuss payment of the wall. That’ll be for a later date.” But Peña Nieto later claimed the two had discussed the wall and who would pay for it — and he had “made it clear” to Trump it wouldn’t be Mexico.

https://twitter.com/EPN/status/771118159654891520

So that’s embarrassing.

In subsequent interviews

Trump is in full racist-xenophobic mode. He gave another “O come all ye racists” speech in Phoenix last night, thrilling his fans and making everyone else want to expel their dinners.

Mr. Trump added new detail to the idea of a special “deportation force” to carry out his plans. He once suggested that this force would be like the military units that deported more than a million immigrants, mostly Mexicans, during Operation Wetback in 1954. Mr. Trump has previously spoken with admiration of President Eisenhower for his carrying-out of that blitz.

Yeahhhhhh, that’ll be a good look.

Mr. Trump’s very first promise in his remarks on Wednesday night was a reiteration of his plan for a “great wall

The BBC introduces a story on online abuse directed at a BBC reporter:

While covering a Donald Trump rally, BBC reporter Rajini Vaidyanathan received a barrage of online abuse, some of it racist. Here she explains what happened, and how it sheds light on an ugly side to the US presidential race.

The abuse was sexist as well as racist,  yet for some reason the BBC editor who wrote that first paragraph didn’t mention the sexism. Example # 40 billion-whatever that sexism flies under the radar for a lot of people.

As is part of my job, I was live tweeting from the event, over the course of the evening. I’d spoken to several supporters to find out why

Guest post by James Garnett

Today on cnn.com I see that Donald Trump gave a speech in which he says that he will “fix the inner cities”. He complained about violence and shootings, declaring “we, as a society, cannot tolerate this level of violence and suffering”. It seems like he thinks that the problem of “the inner cities” is violence, and moreover that his solution is probably stricter sentencing, prison terms, etc.

But what really is the “problem” of the inner cities in America’s larger metropolitan areas? Surely there are many causes, but one that seems to be consistent is poverty. Violence always naturally follows where poverty takes root. It didn’t used to be like that, though—poverty was not always … Read the rest

Of course. Nigel Farage teams up with Trump to give the Two Worst White Assholes show.

Farage won cheers by sticking to his time-honed rhetoric of slightly shaggy populism, low on specifics but heavy with generalist calls to national pride and taking back control.

“I think that you have a fantastic opportunity here,” he told the crowd. “With this campaign, you can go out, you can beat the pollsters, you can beat the commentators, you can beat Washington. And you’ll do it by doing what we did for Brexit in Britain.

“My advice for you – if you want change in this country, you’d better get your walking boots on, you’d better get out there campaigning. And remember, anything

Amanda Marcotte picks up on a new and, of course, revolting theme in Trump’s campaign: the evil of ambitious white women who neglect to have ten children and thus hand the world over to the teeming Hordes of Color.

Donald Trump has a new obsession: comparing Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. During a Monday speech, Trump denounced the “massive immigration” to Germany under Merkel, for which he blames crime rising “to levels that no one thought would they would ever see.” He followed up this speech with press releases and a hashtag aimed at equating Clinton and Merkel.

The choice is an odd one on its surface because most Americans don’t have an

Someone who uncritically swallows the claim that J D Vance explains why the white working class loves Trump, apparently without noticing its extreme thinness: Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, who interviews Vance.

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book. 

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles