Television makes stars…
Didn’t we learn this during the MTV era, when suddenly Duran Duran came out of nowhere and started selling prodigious amounts of product? Some consider “Off The Wall” to be superior to “Thriller,” but the latter far outsold it. Because of the videos, because of the airplay, it became a phenomenon. And although it was Michael himself who came up with the moniker “The King of Pop,” he was certainly the most famous and successful musician in the world at that time.
Politics is show business for ugly people.
And these ugly people – usually better educated with greater powers of reasoning than the faces on TV – believe they rule.
But they don’t, not in the consciousness of America.
The political class has disconnected from the populace; Washington, D.C. is in a bubble; the average person is clueless as to Congress, maybe not even knowing the name of their own representatives. However they’re aware of Donald Trump, because he’s on TV.
Furthermore, despite being deep into his 60s, Trump understands the modern star paradigm, which is to keep yourself in the news day after day, to create story. Funny how Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump are smarter than all the marketers in Hollywood, yet they’re excoriated for it. But not by the public, the people they’re appealing to adore them.
And you know television… You beam into people’s homes and they think they know you, even if this is far from the truth.
Sure, some of the people on TV have become wealthy. However those with the money, like the Koch Brothers, like every billionaire in America, believe that cash is king.
But that is untrue.
Personality is king. Identity is king.
We adhere to those we know, and if you’re an unknown you’re kept at a distance. We are family in America, it’s a tribal country, and Donald Trump has a huge tribe.
He’s educated and worldly and somewhat intelligent. This is not a nincompoop who hasn’t been around the block, who’ll ultimately kill his chances with an inane comment betraying his lack of sophistication. That’s Ben Carson, who might have gone to Yale, but when he started pontificating on the pyramids…he lost us.
And in today’s world you don’t admit your mistakes.
If caught in a lie you might ultimately laugh about it, but then you move on. This is another place where Hollywood has it wrong. If you’re going to rehab for an offense, doing a mea culpa, you’ve already lost. Does Kanye apologize? No, he keeps doubling down. The public is sick of wimps. They want someone to take a stand.
And Donald Trump has.
It’s irrelevant if what Trump’s spewing is rational or doable.
Most people know that D.C. is gridlocked, no one individual can have that big an impact. So, they figure why not give this guy a chance? He’s not one of the usual suspects.
Unlike the lifers in D.C. who are confused as to whether they’re selling experience or popularity. This is the vortex Hillary finds herself in. Instead of just listing her CV, putting her accomplishments on LinkedIn, she’s trying to be touchy-feely, she’s trying to triangulate, and that’s so ’90s. Today you bite back. We can take it. It’s only those inured to the old game who are offended.
As for the rest of the media, do you really expect struggling outlets which are all about subterfuge and link bait and advertorial to stand for truth, justice and the American Way?
They’re not Superman, they too are enthralled by money and fame, which is why Judith Miller helped lead us into the Iraq war. The public trusted the Times, little did people know that Miller was not on their side.
And I know it’s a head-scratcher, on so many levels because Trump is not on the little guy’s side. But compared to the establishment, compared to Mitt Romney, compared to Antonin Scalia, compared to elected officials, never mind lobbyists, he’s a paragon of purity.
Come on, Scalia takes a free trip to shoot birds with Bohemians on the property of someone who got a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court?
And you expect the public to trust the congresspeople who keep lauding him?
Most of America tuned Romney out when they found out he transported his dog on the roof of his car.
You can’t harm a pet, can’t put one in jeopardy, and expect to maintain the public’s trust.
Furthermore, it’s not just about Trump, once again it’s about television. Pollster John Dick found out that voters prefer Mark Cuban to Donald Trump, check it out.
But Cuban’s not running.
Not that he’s ruled it out in the future.
And if you’re waiting for a return to normalcy, you’re probably anticipating a return of respect for lawyers, which plummeted in the aftermath of Watergate and has never recovered.
It’s about constant messaging – and a dollop of truth – and they haven’t had that spirit in the GOP for oh so long.
Trying to get the poor to vote against their interests by trumpeting moral causes… But the truth is everybody has a gay relative and most people like government sponsored health care. And cutting taxes on the rich hasn’t helped them one bit. The GOP needs a new message.
Now Donald Trump is laughing all the way to the bank.
Arguably his brand has increased in value more than he’s spent on his campaign.
You shouldn’t be surprised. Entertainers have been heroes for decades.
But that was back when income inequality wasn’t rampant and people believed their elected officials represented them.
The joke is on us.
We liked the Trump story.
The media liked selling it to us, for the ratings, for the advertising.
Sure, he’s got unfavorables. Then again, everybody wanting to be liked has faded in the rearview mirror, today it’s about displaying your edges and consolidating your adherents. This is what the Democrats can’t understand about the Tea Party.
I don’t know if Trump will win the nomination. It’s a crazy year where data statisticians have been wrong time and again. Because despite the computerization of our society it comes down to people.
And media/technology.
Who would have predicted Rubio would turn into a robot, quashing his chances?
Not someone living in the past, who doesn’t realize we live for train-wreck YouTube videos. Best to be yourself and fly off the cuff as opposed to appearing inhuman as you play a game we deplore.
Does Mitt Romney really expect the public to jettison Trump after nearly a year’s worth of wall to wall coverage?
Then he’s probably expecting Kanye to fade too. A man who has made one outrageous comment after another, but is still in the public eye.
And both take their message straight to the public. Actually, they play both sides, they manipulate the media too.
How long did it take Trump’s competitors to tweet?
Furthermore, the Donald had already accumulated followers. His competitors may have been laying pipe in politics, but he’d been collecting followers for years, and it’s these followers who’ve put him in the position he’s in.
Who knows if he says what he believes.
What we do know is Donald Trump realizes politics is a game.
And right now he’s playing it better than any of the established players. Because he realizes the rules have changed, whereas they keep wanting to go back to the past, like a record company insisting people buy CDs and artists complaining about streaming.
You deal with the hand that’s dealt you.
Past may be prologue, but tech has taught us every few years an unseen product comes along and wipes the slate clean.
Bob Dylan had it right all along…
He not busy being born is busy dying.
Excellent! And in a period when networks couldn’t come up with a single
program to renew from this year to next they get their golden goose….when
the writers put up crap on tv and people found out you don’t have to pay
the cable companies to be entertained they get their golden goose…
when the only thing people aren’t dvring are live sports the networks find
their golden goose. 23 million people watching 11 guys debate issues the viewers
never ever cared about? are you serious?
Donald is like the wizard of oz. Everyone worships him til the curtain is
pulled back and we see that he’s nothing but a con man who’s only god is the
greed of money. Lefty…it will happen…the curtain is going to be
pulled back but the question will be who will be the next person to mesmorize
the fools many have become.
I invited some buddies over to the basement rec room , otherwise known as Underneath the Balczak, to watch the Republican debate. The discourse matched the name of the room in which we watched…hell Donald Trump even bragged about the size of his member! This is politics now. I would say I weep for my country, but I think this spectacle demonstrates that perhaps no one should win this election.
Based on all the pundits, political strategists, politicos, and news wonks, telling us the strategy by which each client can win, and the time already allocated to making a profit, it’s a wonder the elction has not already been called.
In short, Donald matters because he is proving why Citizens United doesn’t matter, lest we think of Bush is our money leader, having spent thousands per vote. Trump does not keep his billions in his checking account. He doesn’t. However, it still costs money to jet around the country, give speaches, and still fly home every night to spend time with his wife, also an import. In other words, since Trump Tower is not for sale, Trump is incurring debt, and he may be self-funding, but his independence will be questioned. In short, Trump and Cruz are the protest candidates of a Republican Party who, like the Democrat Party, think the Tea Party is dead. The first observation is an open question of how many Trump voters are Democrats that are either voting in Republican Primaries because they have no real choice, or because they want to influence the opposition candidate. For a solution here, check the difference between the open and closed primaries. Who carries what? The second question, heard on the street, is whether or not it will spell the end of the Republican Party. It won’t. The real question is what will happen to the Democrat Party. Since the FBI is not in the habit of granting immunity in civil cases or in general investigations, someone needs to ask immunity from what, criminal prosecution? So, what happens to the Democrat Party when it appears they nominate what could be a potential felon. Believe me, they too will survive. It takes a balance. Both sides have their funding, from Koch to Soros. For students of history, this election will make interesting reading, no matter who wins.
wrong cowboy….Harley has called it.
Hillary wins as Hispanics spell doom for trump.
In 2012 I predicted exact electoral count. Glaze has never done anything close
to that with his phony math.
Probably in august I will give the exact numbers and be spot on again.
I’m more accurate than the tv announcers…pundits…strategists cause all those
pigs want to do is get viewers to believe this will be a close race.
They need to keep telling us it will be close….by way Hillary is up 15 points over
trump in Michigan…and she’s going to spend 80 million in that state alone so
trump better start collecting his nickels and dimes from the
“low information” trailer dwellers who back him.
Also…before castro got his job at HUD I predicted he would be the
VP candidate for Hillary. That prediction is looking pretty good right now.
if hearne has the guts to print this….this is the first you’ll hear about trump and his
mob and Chinese and Mexican mob connections. Sorry trump supporters get ready
for 8 months of stories like this…..your boy is a con artist……….greed kills!
Ghosts of the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia swirled up from Donald Trump’s past as he blustered on toward a future few could have foreseen.
The Klan ghosts were roused by Trump himself when he failed to reject immediately an endorsement by former KKK grand dragon David Duke.
“I’d have to look at the group,” he told CNN on Sunday.
He afterward tweeted, “I DISAVOW,” including a video clip from Friday in which he had indeed disavowed Duke, if not exactly the Klan.
But that only deepened the mystery of why he had hesitated to disavow Duke and the Klan on Sunday. It is especially puzzling given reports that somebody with Trump’s father’s name, listed as living at the father’s address, had been arrested at a KKK protest turned “near riot” in Jamaica, Queens, on Memorial Day in 1927.
The police had moved in after the Klansmen broke a promise not to march in their robes and hoods. The Klansmen later papered the neighborhood with handbills declaring, “Americans Assaulted by Roman Catholic Police of New York City.”
“Native-born Protestant Americans clubbed and beaten when they exercise their rights in the country of their birth,” the handbills said. “Liberty and democracy have been trampled upon when Native-born Protestant Americans dare to organize to protect one flag, the American flag… one language, the English language.”
As reported by The New York Times, Fred Trump of 175-24 Devonshire Road, Jamaica, Queens, was arrested. He subsequently appeared in a Jamaica court and was freed without bail by Judge Thomas Doyle, who was almost certainly Catholic.
The arrest and address are confirmed by the precinct logbook, though Fred Trump’s age is given as 25 when he was 22 at the time. Donald Trump has flatly denied that the incident ever occurred.
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“He was never arrested,” Donald Trump told the Daily Mail. “He has nothing to do with this. This never happened. This is nonsense and it never happened. This never happened. Never took place. He was never arrested, never convicted, never even charged. It’s a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took place.”
If it was in fact all a mistake, you would think that Donald Trump would have been repulsed by any association with the KKK, even if the rhetoric in that long ago handbill did contain some of the same sentiments he has voiced to such effect during the present presidential campaign.
Fred Trump certainly had no problem dealing with Catholics as well as Jews of the Brooklyn Democratic machine as he made his fortune with the help of tax abatements and subsidies. The machine was inextricably linked to the Mafia, which also essentially controlled the construction industry.
In fairness, all major New York builders had to deal with mob-linked firms and unions well past the time Donald Trump built his signature tower. The same was true in Atlantic City when he built his casinos. Trump’s dealings there went beyond Mafiosi to include at least one member of a triad. A U.S. Senate report suggests he had no trouble working with the Chinese when it came to this alleged organized crime member (PDF).
On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz sought to rouse the mob ghosts of Donald Trump’s earlier days, saying on NBC that “ABC, CNN, multiple news reports have reported about his dealings with, for example, S&A Construction, which was owned by ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, who is a mobster who is in jail.”
Trump did deal with S&A Construction in the early 1980s, though not necessarily out of choice.
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S&A was indeed owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese crime family, but he was sentenced to 100 years in prison back in 1986 and died behind bars in 1992.
So an apologist might just shrug and say it was what everybody had to do back in the day in order to build anything at all.
A Trump supporter might even suggest that he and indeed all his fellow builders were victims of the mob in that era.
But few of the builders who accepted S&A concrete as an offer they could not refuse actually met with Salerno, as Trump is said to have done in the office of Roy Cohn the lawyer and fixer, who represented The Donald as well as the Don.
The Smoking Gun also reported that the now-extensive licensing of Trump name began with two lines of glamorized Cadillac limos — the Trump Golden Series and the Trump Executive Series — produced by Dillinger Coach Works, which was itself apparently named after the famous gangland figure John Dillinger. The company was owned by two convicted felons, one of whom, John Staluppi, has been identified by the FBI as a member of the Columbo crime family.
And only Trump helped a lady friend of a mob-connected union boss secure financing for three duplex apartments priced at nearly $10 million directly beneath the Trump penthouse in the signature Trump Tower. Verina Hixon’s complex included the building’s only private swimming pool, an addition that required structural alterations to the building.
As reported by Wayne Barrett in his book Trump: The Deals and the Downfall and confirmed by law enforcement officials as well as by people who worked on Trump Tower, the beautiful Hixon was a close pal of union boss John Cody, an avowed admirer of Jimmy Hoffa and also close to Cohn.
The value of Cody’s goodwill became clear when his union, Teamsters Local 282, called a citywide strike just as Trump Tower was near completion. The Trump site was exempted.
The danger of Cody’s displeasure became equally clear when Trump grew so weary of Hixon’s demands that he finally said no. Concrete deliveries ceased not just at Trump Tower but at sites across the city. Hixon soon got what she wanted.
Then Cody was sentenced to federal prison in 1984 for extortion and for attempting to murder the man who took over the union following his arrest. The extent of Cody’s fall became clear when Hixon was forced out of the tower. Trump no longer had her beneath his 68th-floor aerie, which is in truth on the 58th floor, the numbers in the tower’s elevators going from 1 to 6 and then 16 to 68 to make it all seem huger.
As he expanded into the casino business in Atlantic City, Trump agreed to pay twice the market value for land occupied by a bar owned by the sons of two Philadelphia Mafia bosses, the boys having made a name for themselves as part of a crew called the Young Executioners. The purchase, also reported by Barrett in his book, was reportedly routed through the secretary of Paddy McGahn, a thrice-wounded Marine war hero who had become as influential in his city as Roy Cohn was in New York.
In bringing high rollers to Atlantic City, Trump used a helicopter service owned by Joseph Weichselbaum, a mob-connected drug smuggler who lived in a Trump apartment while awaiting sentencing on narcotics charges in 1987. The case was prosecuted in Ohio but was moved to New Jersey for reasons that remain unclear.
As reported by The Smoking Gun, the case was then assigned to The Donald’s sister, federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. Some serious ghosts would soon be rising from that supposed coincidence had somebody not thought to quickly shift the case to another judge. Barry’s now-deceased husband, John Barry, often served as The Donald’s lawyer in New Jersey.
Trump’s dealings with mob figures appear to have included at least one member of Chinese organized crime. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Government Affairs reported in 1992 that Danny Leung was both a vice president for marketing at Trump’s Taj Mahal casino and an associate of the 14K Triad.
“He was formerly a business partner with Eddie Louie, a 14K Triad member and the brother of Nickie Louie, aka Louie Yin Poy, a former leader of the Ghost Shadows Gang,” the committee reported. “Leung has also given complimentary tickets for hotel rooms and Asian shows to numerous members and associates of Asian organized crime.”
The committee notes, “The 14K Triad comprises over 30 subgroups which include an estimated membership of over 20,000… The 14K engages in a variety of criminal activities including heroin trafficking, alien smuggling and counterfeit credit card manufacturing, and has connections in the United States for all of these purposes.”
More recently, Trump was joined in building the Trump SoHo by the son of a convicted extortionist described in court papers as a Russian gangster. Court records also show that the son has himself been convicted of felony assault and of bilking investors out of millions in a stock scheme.
Trump has insisted that he only had minimal dealings with the felon, Felix Sater, and was unaware of the man’s record until it was reported in the newspapers. Trump has also insisted that he had minimal dealings with John Cody, telling The Daily Beast that “I barely knew him,” describing the union boss as “a bad guy.” Trump has further denied ever encountering Salerno, though the encounter has been described by a Cohn assistant and there is no disputing that Trump did business with the mobster’s firm.
Just the name of the long-dead mobster was enough for Cruz to rouse the ghost of the Mafia from Trump’s past. Trump himself roused the ghost of the KKK, by chance on the very day that three people were stabbed at a Klan rally that turned into a near riot, too reminiscent of that long-ago one where a man with the same name and address as Trump’s dad was arrested.
Not that the smilingly spooky Donald Trump seems even slightly scared by any of the ghosts of his past as he continues to scare so many of us on the way to Super Tuesday.
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sorry but there’s fire here….and its going to gdt worse for your boy!!!!!!!!!!
good grief, Harley… take a breath. or a med. or something….
just brought out the facts miket. which you as an old tired man may not
care to read. You can’t refute the facts so you try to take on the
messenger who only copied and pasted the true facts.
So next time you want to say something intelligent get some facts/data to
back up your statement…because you’re just a low information fool
who has nothing to contribute to the conversation and you’re too old and
lazy to make us believe you know what you’re saying. All your comments
are foolish old tired worn out crap just like your buddies k/glaza and cowboy.
Getting old like you is sad!
hm. to reply or not to reply? that is the question! miket. chooses to reply because as an ‘old tired man’ I’ve nothing better to do and no energy to do it with.
so, first harley, I wasn’t TRYING to refute the facts. my comments were intended to make fun of your long-winded response.
saying something intelligent doesn’t always rely on facts and data. this you should know to be true. it does, however, require the ability to speak, form thoughts and opinions based on experience, education and observation, and have an IQ higher than a Mr. Potato Head. i’m guessing you fall into that category?
a ‘low information fool’ am I? indeed, you are partially correct on this point – if I understand what you mean by “low information.” in this context, i’ll define it as having little information. there are certain topics that I have little interest in beyond the headlines and sound bites. politics is one. congress, lobbyists, big money donors, and advisors of all kinds both left and right, tend to be great equalizers. in the end, we get more of the same, the difference between shaken and stirred blurred to all but the most partisan. how much information do i really need? “if you want a revolution, well, you know, we’re all doin’ what we can…”.
buddies. i’m pretty sure Cowboy, Glazer and k-rac would disavow me as a “buddy” faster than trump disavowed david duke. now, i do have respect for their opinions and often enjoy their comments or posts, with some exceptions. (k-rac’s constant drone about the swiss and “good ol’ days” of the nfl gets tiresome, but he’s got good taste in music, cars, and audio equipment!)
and finally (because i really do have things to do like shop for friggin’ health care insurance and determine if early retirement is the place to be for me!), getting old like ME IS sad, harley. you have no idea just how sad it is.
‘Making America Great Again’ one state at a time
President Trump 2016
🙂
hey k….notice polls in Michigan both sanders and Hillary up at least 13
points on trump. And all total the dems will spend at least 70 million
in Michigan. I see a huge win in the general and so goes ohio/florida/
and if you didn’t see the latest Hispanic numbers they are skyrocketing!
Now write something to prove the great Harley wrong!
Speculate all you like. In the end one thing is certain the American people lose. The dysfunction of the status quo remains.
Four good reasons for dumping the STAR.
Yeal, Barbara, Jenee and Lewis Diuguid.
They make for pretty expensive birdcage liner.