I ran into this absolutely hilarious blog by a 22yo architecture student that makes fun of McMansions and other houses with terrible, tacky design. Her comentary has me laughing my ass off.

Clinton was excluded, probably on the basis that she'll never be able to show her face in public again if she blows this one.

https://morningconsult.com/wp-content/up...ines-1.pdf

GOP: 
Pence - 13 
Ryan - 11
Kasich - 11 
Cruz - 10 
Rubio - 8
Trump - 7  
Cotton - 1

DEM: 
Warren - 16
Kaine - 10 
Cuomo - 6
Booker - 5


A.) Fucking LOL, the current Republican nominee is in fifth place and losing to his current running mate in first. That might give Pence ideas about sabotaging things this year.

B.) The fact that a boring white dude like Kaine is in second on the Democratic side ought to give those alt-righties who believe that the Democrats are becoming a minority-only Party pause.

C.) Liz fuckin' Warren. If the GOP had nominated any other candidate, and the Court weren't on the line, it'd almost be worth taking a loss.

Keep your fingers crossed that the next Prophets can beat these shitheads. Core Millies are getting pretty tired of shouldering these big fights alone and the Prophets can't come along soon enough.

http://www.vice.com/read/donald-trump-white-supremacy

Quote:...

Even if a Trump loss doesn't spark violence, reawakening outright racism can still have plenty of undesirable effects. Another branch of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Teaching Tolerance Project, works to help schools provide a diverse and equitable education. Maureen Costello, director of the program, says the "Trump Effect" is having a profoundly negative impact on schools nationwide. Costello explained that in the current climate students feel less constrained when it comes to acting on their worst impulses. Numerous racially inflammatory incidents among children are being chalked up to behavior first modeled during stump speeches and debates.


"Our mission is to fight intolerance," Costello said. "We began to notice news stories popping up in March about incidents at sporting events." Costello described a basketball game between a predominantly white school and a predominantly Latino school during which the white students began to chant about Trump's fanciful southern border wall. Costello said that if such behavior was on display in the gym, then it was happening in cafeterias and classrooms too. (Two such incidents occurred during basketball games in Indiana and Iowa, and another took place at a girl's soccer match in Wisconsin.)

This campaign season has seen an uncommon increase in the use of stereotyping—most of it by Trump, said Costello, adding that "this is something we, and most teachers, literally tell kids not to do. Any kid who reaches high school will have had several lessons explaining not to use a broad brush to paint minority groups."

Seeking to take the racial temperature of America's classrooms, Costello and her co-workers put a survey on theTeaching Tolerance website. The questions, the director said, were open-ended, and she stressed that her group's website heavily selects for people interested in nurturing diversity. Still, Costello was overwhelmed by the reaction to the survey. More than 2,000 teachers posted more than 5,000 comments, almost all of them decrying the impact the election was having. Many teachers reported increased hate speech, the taunting of minority students and discrimination against Muslims. A North Carolina teacher reported that her Latino students were carrying their birth certificates and Social Security cards because they were afraid of deportation. Other teachers reported even their African American students were fearful of being "deported back to Africa."

"I think there are rational reasons to be dissatisfied with government," Costello said. "We're in a period of enormous change. Look at technology, demographics. American schools will be 51 percent non-white for the first time in 2015/16. That transition is rough. There's always a reactionary movement away from that, and Trump has given that feeling a name: immigrants, Muslims. We're seeing a real disagreement about what American reality is. When you have people disagreeing on the fundamental nature of reality, those disagreements don't go away."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...s-is-more/

Quote:The expansion of choice is the cumulative result of decades of economic growth alongside social and technological change. Rising affluence has stoked demand for ever-more options. Technological improvements—both in manufacturing and information technology—have drastically lowered the cost of production while also introducing a flood of new gadgets to buy. Thanks to the Internet’s “infinite shelf,” businesses and services are accessible no matter how small or how far. Against this backdrop, cultural attitudes have grown more individualistic: With more choices come elevated expectations that every person can have something unique.

In recent years, however, the unbridled enthusiasm surrounding choice has cooled. More options inevitably mean higher production costs and risk making brands look unfocused. For consumers, evaluating all these options can feel more like a time-wasting burden than a privilege; the average American makes 70 decisions a day. In The Guardian, columnist Stuart Jeffries says what’s happening now evokes visions of The Simpsons’ Monstromart: a mega-supermarket whose slogan is “Where Shopping is a Baffling Ordeal...


http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...s-is-more/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...ign=buffer

Quote:In nearly half of two-parent households in the U.S. today, children are raised by parents who both work full time. Yet most Americans say that children with two parents are better off when one of them stays home to tend to the family, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

The survey, conducted June 7-July 5 among 4,602 adults on Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel, found that 59% of U.S. adults believe that children with two parents are better off when a parent stays home, while about four-in-ten (39%) say children are just as well off when their parents work outside the home...


http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...ign=buffer

Sometimes Democracy Now really scores a bulls-eye. Today they had on Henry Giroux, author of American at War With Itself. He's an early Boomer-war baby cusper born Sept. 18, 1943 (but still has great hair    )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Giroux

I wish I was as articulate an author and speaker as he; who knows? But I'm glad to discover another spokesman for the real Awakening with its legacy still going on; another visionary for our times. An author who understands what's going on and what our needs are. Bravo!

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/14/i..._result_of

He says we are sliding toward authoritarianism because we are living in a state of imposed ignorance. We can't have a democracy if our people have no civic knowledge and literacy, and if our imagination is schooled out of us. The rise of Trump is a sign of our times.

America has declared war on itself in the war on education and dissent. Schools are modeled on prisons, he says. Dress code violations are criminalized. How do we understand what's happening? The punishing state is taking over. Ours is a culture of the immediate and celebrity, which paralyze us and kill the radical imagination. Trump is a symptom of a decline of a culture that can form thoughtfulness about justice. Money has corrupted politics, and we can't equate capitalism with democracy. If the ethical imagination dies, then we live in a state of terrorism.

Today younger people are mobilizing and linking issues together. Violence and militarism are linked; modes of repression are global. Politics is local and power is global. Schools should be places where children learn to imagine a world that's a better place. Our schools instead teach to the test and see students as the work force; a place to make kids boring and ignorant. Schools can't take education seriously when they are under assault with charter schools and school choice as Trump and Republicans want, and Obama goes along with.

Was "America great" as Trump proclaims? Camus wrote that democracy and freedom depend on memory. We forget about the ways America was not great. The progressive left has failed in some ways, especially about schooling. School is about changing consciousness, to make what we learn relevant to our lives. We need to see how issues are related.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...CMP=twt_gu

Quote:Mies van der Rohe was born first, in 1886, in Aachen, Germany. Le Corbusier arrived the following year, and 250 miles to the south, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Mies went on to become the godfather of the steel-and-glass international style; Corbu, enamored with the possibilities of concrete, essentially created brutalism. Which means that not only were the two architects great builders in their own right; they were also responsible for creating the greatest sibling rivalry in the history of architecture.

Le Corbusier’s brutalism took an early lead, not least because of concrete’s cost advantage: it is cheap and abundant, the second most consumed material in the world, after water. Brutalism also had the art-historical advantage of fitting easily into a centuries-long narrative. The monumental brutalist vaulting of the Washington Metro, for instance, is uncannily similar to that found in largest concrete dome in the world – the 2,000-year-old Pantheon, in Rome...



https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...CMP=twt_gu

Donald Trump used more than a quarter of a million dollars donated to the Trump Foundation to settle lawsuits against his for-profit businesses, among other ventures. This is, needless to say, highly illegal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/...story.html

Quote:Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the height of a flagpole.

In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.

In another case, court papers say one of Trump’s golf courses in New York agreed to settle a lawsuit by making a donation to the plaintiff’s chosen charity. A $158,000 donation was made by the Trump Foundation, according to tax records.

The other expenditures involved smaller amounts. In 2013, Trump used $5,000 from the foundation to buy advertisements touting his chain of hotels in programs for three events organized by a D.C. preservation group. And in 2014, Trump spent $10,000 of the foundation’s money on a portrait of himself bought at a charity fundraiser.

Or, rather, another portrait of himself.

Several years earlier, Trump used $20,000 from the Trump Foundation to buy a different, six-foot-tall portrait.

If the Internal Revenue Service were to find that Trump violated self-dealing rules, the agency could require him to pay penalty taxes or to reimburse the foundation for all the money it spent on his behalf. Trump is also facing scrutiny from the New York attorney general’s office, which is examining whether the foundation broke state charity laws.

More broadly, these cases* also provide new evidence that Trump ran his charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy.

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Washington Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in awhile,” Tenenbaum said.

The Post sent the Trump campaign a detailed list of questions about the four cases but received no response.

The Trump campaign released a statement about this story late Tuesday that said it was “peppered with inaccuracies and omissions,” though the statement cited none and the campaign has still not responded to repeated requests for comment.

The New York attorney general’s office declined to comment when asked whether its inquiry would cover these new cases* of possible self-dealing.

What we know about Trump's charitable giving  Play Video1:24
Trump founded his charity in 1987 and for years was its only donor. But in 2006, Trump gave away almost all the money he had donated to the foundation, leaving it with just $4,238 at year’s end, according to tax records.

Then, he transformed the Trump Foundation into something rarely seen in the world of philanthropy: a name-branded foundation whose namesake provides none of its money. Trump gave relatively small donations in 2007 and 2008, and afterward, nothing. The foundation’s tax records show no donations from Trump since 2009.

[In 2007, Trump had to face his own falsehoods. And he did, 30 times.]

Its money has come from other donors, most notably pro-wrestling executives Vince and Linda McMahon, who gave a total of $5 million from 2007 to 2009, tax records show. Trump remains the foundation’s president, and he told the IRS in his latest public filings that he works half an hour per week on the charity.

The Post has previously detailed other cases in which Trump used the charity’s money in a way that appeared to violate the law.

In 2013, for instance, the foundation gave $25,000 to a political group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi ®. That gift was made about the same time that Bondi’s office was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. It didn’t.

Tax laws say nonprofit groups such as the Trump Foundation may not make political gifts. Trump staffers blamed the gift on a clerical error. After The Post reported on the gift to Bondi’s group this spring, Trump paid a $2,500 penalty tax and reimbursed the Trump Foundation for the $25,000 donation.

In other instances, it appeared that Trump may have violated rules against self-dealing.

In 2012, for instance, Trump spent $12,000 of the foundation’s money to buy a football helmet signed by then-NFL quarterback Tim Tebow.

And in 2007, Trump’s wife, Melania, bid $20,000 for the six-foot-tall portrait of Trump, done by a “speed painter” during a charity gala at Mar-a-Lago. Later, Trump paid for the painting with $20,000 from the foundation.

In those cases, tax experts said, Trump was not allowed to simply keep these items and display them in a home or business. They had to be put to a charitable use.

Trump’s campaign has not responded to questions about what became of the helmet or the portrait.

 
After the settlement, Trump put a slightly smaller flag farther from the road and mounted it on a 70-foot pole as seen in this Nov. 1, 2015, photo. (Rosalind Helderman/The Washington Post)
The four new cases of possible self-dealing were discovered in the Trump Foundation’s tax filings. While Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns, the foundation’s filings are required to be public.

The case involving the flagpole at Trump’s oceanfront Mar-a-Lago Club began in 2006, when the club put up a giant American flag on the 80-foot pole. Town rules said flagpoles should be 42 feet high at most. Trump’s contention, according to news reports, was: “You don’t need a permit to put up the American flag.”

The town began to fine Trump, $1,250 a day.

Trump’s club sued in federal court, saying that a smaller flag “would fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump’s . . . patriotism.”

They settled.

The town waived the $120,000 in fines. In September 2007, Trump wrote the town a letter, saying he had done his part as well.

“I have sent a check for $100,000 to Fisher House,” he wrote. The town had chosen Fisher House, which runs a network of comfort homes for the families of veterans and military personnel receiving medical treatment, as the recipient of the money. Trump added that, for good measure, “I have sent a check for $25,000” to another charity, the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial.

Trump provided the town with copies of the checks, which show that they came from the Trump Foundation.

In Palm Beach, nobody seems to have objected to the fines assessed on Trump’s business being erased by a donation from a charity.

“I don’t know that there was any attention paid to that at the time. We just saw two checks signed by Donald J. Trump,” said John Randolph, the Palm Beach town attorney. “I’m sure we were satisfied with it.”

 
Excerpt from a settlement filed in federal court in 2007.
In the other case in which a Trump Foundation payment seemed to help settle a legal dispute, the trouble began with a hole-in-one.

In 2010, a man named Martin Greenberg hit a hole-in-one on the 13th hole while playing in a charity golf tournament at Trump’s course in Westchester County, N.Y.

Greenberg won a $1 million prize. Briefly.

Later, Greenberg was told that he had won nothing. The prize’s rules required that the shot had to go 150 yards. But Trump’s course had allegedly made the hole too short.

Greenberg sued.

Eventually, court papers show, Trump’s golf course signed off on a settlement that required it to make a donation to a group of Greenberg’s choosing. Then, on the day that the parties informed the court they had settled their case, a $158,000 donation was sent to the Martin Greenberg Foundation.

That money came from the Trump Foundation, according to the tax filings of both Trump’s and Greenberg’s foundations.

Greenberg’s foundation reported getting nothing that year from Trump personally or from his golf club.

Both Greenberg and Trump have declined to comment.

Several tax experts said that the two cases* appeared to be clear examples of self-dealing, as defined by the tax code.

The Trump Foundation had made a donation, it seemed, so that a Trump business did not have to.

Rosemary E. Fei, a lawyer in San Francisco who advises nonprofit groups, said both cases* clearly fit the definition of self-dealing.

“Yes, Trump pledged as part of the settlement to make a payment to a charity, and yes, the foundation is writing a check to a charity,” Fei said. “But the obligation was Trump’s. And you can’t have a charitable foundation paying off Trump’s personal obligations. That would be classic self-dealing.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-br...-grows-up/

Quote: Writers beware: Marketing categories can be destiny. Few people in America know this better than the handful of writers gathered under the banner of the “Brat Pack.” The membership is now middle age and frankly a little testy about still having to deal with the label. “That whole ‘brat pack’ thing—Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis and whoever else was supposed to be a part of it—was a myth,” Ellis told The Paris Review in 2010. “It never existed...



https://www.thenation.com/article/the-br...-grows-up/

These people are fucking fascists and must be stopped.

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/13/fox-busi...t-accuser/

Quote:Jessica Leeds, the 74-year-old former traveling businesswoman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her three decades ago on a first-class flight to New York, is now the target of a high-reaching doxing campaign.


Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Thursday retweeted Leeds’ phone number and address as indication of her ties to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign, according to Business Insider.