Trump Peddles Google Conspiracy Theory

Donald Trump on Wednesday touted a long-debunked conspiracy theory that the most popular internet search engine suppresses negative headlines about his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Trump didn’t cite a source to back up his claim, but the most recent report alleging this came from Sputnik News, a Russian state-owned news agency.

“Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton,” Trump said, apparently referring to Google searches during the first presidential debate on Monday night.

Trump’s remarks Wednesday night came two weeks after Sputnik News, a Russian government-controlled news agency, published a report claiming that Google search results are biased in Clinton’s favor. Conservative news outlets, including Breitbart News, whose chairman became Trump’s campaign CEO last month, linked to the report.

Trump has been repeatedly criticized for being too praiseworthy of Russian President Vladimir Putin and for promoting foreign policies that would benefit Russian interests around the world. And several of his top advisers — most notably his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort — have extensive ties to Russian government officials and oligarchs.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment asking where Trump sourced his claim.

But the remark was not an off-the-cuff ad lib — it was included in the prepared remarks Trump read from during his rally speech Wednesday night.

The conspiracy theory first popped up in a viral video dating back to June, in which the pop culture site SourceFed claimed Google actively altered search recommendations to benefit Clinton’s campaign, which search engine optimization experts quickly debunked.

Despite what you might have seen online, Google is not manipulating its search results to favor Hillary Clinton.

Google also rebuked the claim in a statement last June.

“Our autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person’s name,” a Google spokeswoman said. “Google autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how autocomplete works.”

(h/t CNN)

Donald Trump Tells Non-Christians At Rally To Identify Themselves

After boasting about his support among Christian conservatives at a Iowa rally on Wednesday, Donald Trump asked non-Christians to identify themselves.

The Republican nominee first asked the crowd in Council Bluffs to raise their hands if they were Christian conservatives. The crowd cheered loudly and a sea of hands went up.

“Raise your hand if you’re not a Christian conservative,” Trump then said. “I want to see this, right? Oh there’s a couple people, that’s all right.”

“I think we’ll keep them, right?” Trump asked the crowd. “Should we keep them in the room, yes? I think so.”

While the Republican nominee’s jocular tone suggested he wasn’t seriously suggesting throwing non-Christian attendees out of the event, he has made similarly off-color “jokes” before.

(h/t Talking Points Memo)

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iz1J_klSNo

 

Trump Campaign Manager: He Didn’t ‘Lie’ About Lester Holt, He Spoke Without Knowing the Truth

When confronted with the fact that Donald Trump falsely accused NBC host and Monday night’s debate moderator Lester Holt of being Democrat, his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway insisted on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Trump didn’t lie, he just spoke without knowing the truth.

“He said Lester Holt was a Democrat. Lester Holt is a Republican. How could he say such a thing that just black-and white factually incorrect?” asked guest and Bloomberg Politics host Mark Halperin.

“I don’t know that he knew what Lester Holt’s voter registration is,” Conway said.

“Without knowing then, he asserted he was a Democrat?” Halperin asked.

“First of all, if you tell me the media are not overly populated with Democrats, that’s false,” Conway argued.

“I’m asking about a very specific thing,” Halperin said. “He made a factual claim about the moderator who deserves the right to be treated fairly and it was just wrong. And it’s a metaphor for his frequently in public stating things with no basis, that are wrong.”

Conway replied that they were happy with Holt as moderator, and went on a long defense of NBC’s Matt Lauer‘s handling of the presidential military forum. “This is a filibuster,” host Mika Bzrezinski said partway through.

“You’re not answering what I asked you,” Halperin said. “I’m asking you how someone running for president can assert on the eve of the debate that the moderator is a Democrat, which is factually incorrect? How can he do that?”

“Should he have asked him his voter registration?” retorted Conway, somewhat condescendingly.

“He shouldn’t have asserted– he didn’t say, ‘I don’t know what he is, but I think he’s biased,’ he said he’s a Democrat,” Halperin insisted.

Conway again pivoted, and attacked Hillary Clinton for her own working of the refs ahead of the debate and attacked the media coverage of the campaign. “I don’t understand what that has to do with Mark’s question,” Brzezinski said when she was finished.

“We are frustrated by media coverage,” Conway replied.

“We were asking why he lied about Lester Holt.”

“I don’t think he lied,” Conway said.

“Um, I think he did,” said Brzezinski.

“Mika, a lie would mean he knew the man’s party registration,” argued Conway.

“So as president, would he say things that are false without knowing the truth?” asked a disbelieving Halperin. Unfortunately, co-host Joe Scarborough cut in then to wrap up the discussion, and he never got an answer.

(h/t Mediaite)

Media

Trump Cites Hacked and Fake Online Polls to Prove He Won Debate

Part of Donald Trump’s persona is that he “wins all the time.” So what happens when he objectively loses in the first presidential debate in virtually every scientific poll by a far more prepared opponent? Apparently Trump goes into full denial and finds every online poll that supports the outcome he desired and it doesn’t help that pro-Trump media like Fox News joins him.

However there are a couple of problems with using online polls for gauging election results. First, they are not restricted to likely voters, so an 8-year old who is not of age can cast their vote. Scientific polls look for sample demographics that are in-line with the national population, online polls do not. Also, most online polls do little to prevent duplicate votes. For example, you can vote on a laptop, then a phone, then an iPad. You can also open the poll and vote in different browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. If you turn on a browser’s “privacy mode” then browser cookies are disabled, which are used to track your activity on a website, and this opens up to hacking using automated programs called “bots” which can continuously cast votes.

On top of the issues with online polling, each online poll Trump cited is either faked, didn’t exist, or was the victim of a coordinated hacking attack.

For example, the morning after the debate Trump called into Fox and Friends and claimed:

“I won Slate,” Trump insisted on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning. “I won Drudge in almost 90% of the vote in the poll, I won Time Magazine. I won CBS. I won every single poll other than CNN.”

Trump also made the same claim at his event in Miami, Florida the same day. The reason why this is so strange is that CBS never held an online poll, they did however conduct a focus group of undecided voters, and Clinton came out ahead.

Later, Trump tweeted out an image of 11 online surveys which he felt backed up his claims.

Again, outside of the inherent problems with online polling, some of the numbers did not even match up. The white supremacist site Breitbart.com held a more scientific poll which had Clinton winning at 48% to Trump’s 43%, a far cry from Trump winning at 75% as he claims.

But most important, every single one of these polls were the victim of a coordinated attack by hackers on 4chan, who used automated bots to vote multiple times and skew the results.

4chan-first-debate-online-poll-hack

In the end, even Fox News had to remind employees that unscientific online polls “do not meet our editorial standards,” and had to go so far as to reprimand Trump spokesperson Sean Hannity for continuously using online polls to justify his belief that Trump won.

Even so, Sean Hannity still continues to push these online polls on his show in defiance of ethics and standards.

In Post-Debate Interview, Trump Again Criticizes Pageant-Winner’s Weight

At the end of Monday night’s presidential debate, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of taunting one of his former Miss Universe contestants about her weight.

Clinton said the Republican nominee’s criticisms of Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan who won the Miss Universe contest in 1996, was “one of the worst things he said” about women. “He called this woman Miss Piggy. Then he called her Miss Housekeeping because she was Latina.”

While Trump appeared to dispute Clinton’s accusation on the debate stage, he called into Fox and Friends Tuesday morning and once again called Machado fat.

“I know that person. That person was a Miss Universe person,” Trump told the Fox News morning show. “And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible,” he said. “She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem. Not only that, her attitude.”

With his past statements about Machado playing into critiques Clinton wanted to make at Monday night’s high-profile debate, the Clinton campaign was quick to pounce. An hour after the debate ended, her campaign tweeted a two-minute video about Machado’s experience with Trump.

“He was very overwhelming. I was very scared of him,” she says in Spanish. “He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me ‘you look ugly’ or ‘you look fat.’ Sometimes he’d ‘play’ with me and say ‘Hello Miss Piggy, hello Miss Housekeeping.’ ”

The Clinton campaign’s video also includes archived footage of Trump telling reporters “she weighed 118 pounds, or 117 pounds, and she went up to 160 or 170. So this is somebody who likes to eat.”

Articles at the time confirm Trump’s comments.

  • In 1997, Donald Trump told Howard Stern that Machado was an “eating machine” who “ate a lot of everything.” “You whipped this fat slob into shape,” the radio host told Trump. “I don’t know how you did it. I see all these diet plans, everything else. God bless you.” When asked if Trump had “gotten her down to 118,” he said she is going to be there soon.
  • Around the same time, Trump told Newsweek: “We’ve tried diet, spa, a trainer, incentives. Forget it, the way she’s going, she’d eat the whole gymnasium.”
  • Machado told the Washington Post at the time she was caught by surprise about reporters being present. “I asked him to please send me to a trainer or a nutritionist or something because I needed some orientation, and he sends me to a gym in New York,” she said. “When I get there, there are 80 reporters waiting to watch me sweat. I thought that was in very bad taste.”
  • Donald Trump wrote in his 1997 book Art of the Comeback, “I could just see Alicia Machado, the current Miss Universe, sitting there plumply. God, what problems I had with this woman. First, she wins. Second, she gains 50 pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her. Fourth, I go to the gym with her, in a show of support. Final act: She trashes me in The Washington Post — after I stood by her the entire time. What’s wrong with this picture? Anyway, the best part about the evening was the knowledge that next year, she would no longer be Miss Universe.”

Machado told the campaign that the experience led to long-term eating disorders. “I wouldn’t eat, and I would still see myself as fat, because a powerful man had said so.”

“He always treated me like a little thing. He always treated me like trash,” Machado said Tuesday in a conference call organized by the Clinton campaign.

She said she was caught off-guard when Clinton talked about her Monday night. “I started to cry because I never imagined that someone so important would care about my story,” she said, speaking in Spanish.

“I’m very sorry that I might be an uncomfortable person for Mr. Trump,” Machado said, “but that’s how things happen, that’s how things go.”

(h/t NPR)

Media

Links

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/05/17/when_donald_trump_humiliated_miss_universe_for_gaining_weight.html

At Debate, Trump Says He “Did a Good Job” On Racist Birther Issue

Hillary Clinton sharply criticized Donald Trump for pushing a “racist birther lie” about President Obama during a heated exchange at Monday night’s presidential debate at Hofstra University.

Moderator Lester Holt asked Trump to explain his yearslong campaign supporting the conspiracy theory questioning Obama’s citizenship and birthplace.

“I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate, and I think I did a good job,” Trump said.

“We’re talking about racial healing in this segment,” Holt interjected. “What do you say to Americans, people of color, who…”

Trump cut him off. “I say nothing,” he said, again congratulating himself for getting Obama to release his long-form birth certificate from Hawaii in 2011.

Rather than answer the question, Trump set off on a fantastical diversion. He reiterated the lie that Clinton started the racist Birther conspiracy. Then he went further to claim that Clinton’s campaign manager in 2008 admitted it on CNN last week:

“[H]er campaign manager, Patty Doyle, went to — they were in the campaign, her campaign against President Obama, fought very hard – and you can go look it up and you can check it out – and if you look at CNN this past week, Patty Solis Doyle was on Wolf Blitzer saying that this happened.”

That didn’t happen, Trump is misrepresenting what was said in the Wolf Blitzer interview. Here is the video on CNN where Solis Doyle explained that a rogue staffer sent out an email promoting a birther conspiracy, and that person was promptly fired, which does not match at all what Trump described.

“There was a volunteer coordinator, I believe in late 2007, I think in December. One of our volunteer coordinators in one of the counties in Iowa, I don’t recall whether they were an actual a paid staffer, but they did forward an email that promoted the conspiracy.”

“The birther conspiracy?” Blitzer asked.
“Yeah. Hillary made the decision immediately to let that person go. We let that person go, and it was so, you know, beyond the pale, Wolf, and you know, so not worthy the kind of campaign that certainly Hillary wanted to run or that we as a staff wanted to run that I called David Plouffe, who was obviously managing Barack Obama’s campaign in ’07, to apologize and basically say this is not coming from us.”

Trump also brought up longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal pushing birtherism to McClatchy, thereby tying Hillary to the conspiracy theory. However there is no direct proof of this, and even as McClatchy concedes, is ultimately a case of he-said-she-said which can’t be considered as strong evidence.

Trump said that “Blumenthal sent McClatchy — a highly respected reporter at McClatchy — to Kenya to find out about it. They were pressing it very hard.”

According to James Asher, an editor in McClatchy’s Washington bureau in 2008, Blumenthal suggested the news organization look into Obama’s roots, and Asher said he asked a Nairobi-based reporter to look into the tip. McClatchy last week reported that there is no direct proof that Blumenthal shared the birther rumor, though Blumenthal did share other ideas about Obama with Asher. Asher has said he recalls the conversation clearly, but has no record of it.

Blumenthal told Fox News earlier this month “This is false. Never happened, period,” adding: “Donald Trump cannot distract from the inescapable fact that he is the one who embraced and promoted the racist birther lie and bears the responsibility for it.”

(h/t Yahoo, DailyKos, McClatchy)

Media

During Debate Trump Claims He Didn’t Call Climate Change a Chinese Hoax, He Did

Hillary Clinton called out Donald Trump at their first debate for labeling climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

Trump denied saying that. But his own Twitter feed contradicts him, with the real-estate magnate tweeting back in 2012 that global warming was a hoax.

Trump’s tweet said, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

(h/t MarketWatch)

Reality

There is nothing in the scientific literature that can back up Donald Trump’s claim. On the contrary there is overwhelming scientific evidence that carbon dioxide [CO2] is a pollutant.

For anyone who disagrees with the empirical evidence that CO2 is a pollutant ask yourself; Would you ever think it is safe to breath in the exhaust from your car for an extended period of time? (Prius and Tesla owners pretend you have a Chevy.) You absolutely wouldn’t because tragically hundreds of people die each year from carbon monoxide [CO] poisoning. Along with carbon monoxide, cars release carbon dioxide [CO2], hydrocarbons [HC], nitrogen oxides [NOx], and other particulates which are all pollutants, have proven contributions to climate change, and are harmful to your health.

Science has been aware for over 150 years that carbon in the atmosphere will retain heat. The year was 1859 to be exact, and it was scientist John Tyndall who made the discovery that carbon in the atmosphere trapped heat. Then in 1896 Svante Arrhenius calculated that, based on this simple principle of physics, higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise global temperatures. These discoveries are the cornerstones of climate science, in 150 years have yet to be disputed, and instead continues to be confirmed by observation.

To explain further, the science, in short, says the following. CO2 lets through short wave light, the kind that passes through our atmosphere, but traps long wave radiation, the kind that is reflected and travels back into space. This experiment can be done in a laboratory, and should you have the time you could see it for yourself.

The site at this link has compiled a list of just a handful of the published scientific papers of laboratory measurements of CO2 absorption properties, ranging from 1861 all the way up to 2008. Knowing this evidence, scientist reached a consensus a long time ago that CO2 is indeed a contributor to global warming.

Just to reiterate here, Donald Trump’s acceptance of science predates the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War, and the First Transcontinental Railroad. This is the equivalent trying to attack a state-of-the-art military drone with a Civil War era musket.

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Trump Pledges to Sign Anti-LGBTQ ‘First Amendment Defense Act’

Donald Trump has been courting the LGBTQ vote throughout this presidential election, claiming he would be the better choice for the community than opponent Hillary Clinton and promising to protect them from terrorism in his Republican National Convention speech.

That argument gets harder to believe by the week, as he gave speeches at anti-LGBTQ events, stuck up for homophobic and transphobic legislation and surrounds himself with bigoted politicians and advisers. Now we have a new offense to add to the list.

Trump has pledged to sign the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), if passed by congress. It was first introduced in the House on June 17, 2015 and would effectively legalize anti-LGBTQ discrimination across the board, including among employers, businesses, landlords and healthcare providers, as long as they claim to be motivated by a firmly held religious beliefs.

It would act to overturn the executive order signed in 2014 by President Obama prohibiting anti-LGBTQ discrimination among federal contractors.

The statement, added to Trump’s website on Thursday under the title “Issues Of Importance To Catholics” and the subtitle “Religious Liberty,” reads:

Religious liberty is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution. It is our first liberty and provides the most important protection in that it protects our right of conscience. Activist judges and executive orders issued by Presidents who have no regard for the Constitution have put these protections in jeopardy. If I am elected president and Congress passes the First Amendment Defense Act, I will sign it to protect the deeply held religious beliefs of Catholics and the beliefs of Americans of all faiths. The Little Sisters of the Poor, or any religious order for that matter, will always have their religious liberty protected on my watch and will not have to face bullying from the government because of their religious beliefs.

FADA’s text reads:

Prohibits the federal government from taking discriminatory action against a person on the basis that such person believes or acts in accordance with a religious belief or moral conviction that: (1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.

Defines “discriminatory action” as any federal government action to discriminate against a person with such beliefs or convictions, including a federal government action to:

  • alter the federal tax treatment of, cause any tax, penalty, or payment to be assessed against, or deny, delay, or revoke certain tax exemptions of any such person;
  • disallow a deduction of any charitable contribution made to or by such person;
  • withhold, reduce, exclude, terminate, or otherwise deny any federal grant, contract, subcontract, cooperative agreement, loan, license, certification, accreditation, employment, or similar position or status from or to such person; or
  • withhold, reduce, exclude, terminate, or otherwise deny any benefit under a federal benefit program.

Requires the federal government to consider to be accredited, licensed, or certified for purposes of federal law any person who would be accredited, licensed, or certified for such purposes but for a determination that the person believes or acts in accordance with such a religious belief or moral conviction.

Permits a person to assert an actual or threatened violation of this Act as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding and to obtain compensatory damages or other appropriate relief against the federal government.

Authorizes the Attorney General to bring an action to enforce this Act against the Government Accountability Office or an establishment in the executive branch, other than the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, that is not an executive department, military department, or government corporation.

Defines “person” as any person regardless of religious affiliation, including corporations and other entities regardless of for-profit or nonprofit status.

(h/t LGBQT Nation)

On The Debate Stage, Trump Lies About His Iraq War Support

At the first Presidential debates, Donald Trump lost his temper and flew into a sharp defense of a question from moderator Lester Holt that he supported the Iraq War. Trump was defiant, calling it “main-stream media nonsense,” and that “the record shows that I am right!”

Trump gave his own timeline of events, saying he did an interview with Howard Stern in 2002 an when asked about the Iraq War he said “very lightly, I don’t know, who knows… essentially.”

Except that is not at all what Trump said. When asked by Stern about the war, Trump’s exact quote was, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

Trump then said he did an interview with Fox New’s Neil Cavuto after the war began where they talked about the economy, but Trump willfully neglected to mention that called the Iraq War a success when he said the invasion “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint, and I think this is really nothing compared to what you’re going to see after the war is over.”

After more blustering Trump told the media to call Sean Hannity because they had private conversations where Trump opposed the war and Hannity didn’t. So the media did and Sean Hannity, the informal advisor and public supporter to Trump, said this was true.

However when asked for actual evidence, Hannity said it was no longer available because they switched syndication and stations.

Reality

Taking someone at their word alone is not strong evidence. It wouldn’t even be admissible in a court of law, they would have it dismissed as hearsay.

What is evidence is the audio recordings that exist of Donald Trump supporting the Iraq War before and after the beginning of the invasion.

We can lay out the timeline of events, and we can see that Trump is indeed lying when he said he was always against the Iraq War.

Media

Trump’s Companies Made $1.6 Million Off the Secret Service

Donald Trump is making millions off his own Secret Service detail, and your tax dollars.

The Service is tasked with protecting high-ranking government officials and presidential candidates (among other duties) like Trump. Since this protection is mandatory, it’s common practice for the Service to reimburse campaigns for travel expenses. But it looks like the $1.6 million the Service recently paid the Trump campaign went right back to Trump’s business interests, according to Politico.

The business mogul and his security detail regularly fly on the Trump-owned jet service, TAG Air. The firm also manages Trump’s fleet of private planes. So the money the Service pays back goes right back to his business. Politico reviewed Federal Election Commission filings and found that TAG has already made $6 million off Trump’s campaign.

For comparison, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton charters planes from a private company called Executive Fliteways, one where the Clintons do not have any ownership interest, Politico reported.

It’s not the only way that Trump has been profiting from his White House run.

Last week, he finally admitted President Obama was born in the United States at his hotel in Washington, D.C., earning free media coverage for what CNN’s Jake Tapper later called a “political rick roll.” Trump’s campaign has spent major sums on rent at his hotels and buying copies of his own books, too. He’s even previously stated that he may wind up actually making money from his presidential bid.

(h/t Fortune)

Reality

Donald Trump’s critics have questioned whether the Republican nominee, who points to his business acumen as a case for his candidacy, is trying to do what he has suggested he would in 2000 when he mulled making an independent run: “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

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