It’s almost time. I’ve got Bloomberg TV fired up; they promise to do fact checking while the debate goes on.
Lester Holt is on. OK, here’s the candidates.
Achieving Prosperity: Jobs. Let’s go.
Hillary has a granddaughter! Who knew?
So far, so good for Hill. Raise minimum wage, fairer economy, do more to help those struggling to balance family and work. Paid family leave. Debt free college. Wealthy pay fair share; close corporate loopholes.
Trump: Jobs fleeing country, going to Mexico, China, and Trump is sending them. No, he didn’t say that. Thousands of jobs are leaving, etc., says he agrees with Hillary on child care. I think reasonable Trump is trying to show up here.
Cutting taxes on business to expand business? That hasn’t worked in the states.
Hillary — Donald is proposing trickle down economics. He started his business with 14 million dollars from his father. The more you help wealthy people the better things are? I don’t believe that.
Invest in the middle class! She’s been reading Bernie’s speeches.
Trump says his father gave him only a little money.
Trump’s a one-note speaker — foreign countries stealing jobs.
He’s talking about tariffs. Tax goods coming in.
Oh, she’s taking it to him. He rooted for the housing crisis. He admits it. “That’s called business, by the way.”
Independent experts say that Trump’s plans would cost jobs and start another recession, she says. My plan would grow the economy.
He is interrupting her; she ignores him and keeps talking.
He says Obama doubled the debt. Fact checkers? He’s talking about trickle down economics; giving companies tax incentives to invest. Doesn’t work.
He’s losing it. He’s screaming about NAFTA. He’s interrupting her. Lester needs to reign him in.
Go to HillaryClinton.com for the facts, she said. Your plans would add $5 million to the debt. Raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for investments.
This has to be stopped. He’s on the edge crazy. He wants to cut taxes on the wealthy to help create jobs. Companies are fleeing because taxes are so high. They can’t bring their money into the country because of bureaucratic red tape? He’s not even making sense.
Broad-based inclusive growth is what we need in America, she said, not more benefits for the wealthy. He’s got nothing to say except everything is awful and it’s her fault.
Lester Holt asks him about his tax returns. He says he’ll be happy to release them someday. He says he can’t release the taxes because he’s being audited. Holt says that doesn’t stop him from releasing taxes.
Audience cheers Trump. They shouldn’t have live audiences in these debates.
Clinton — he doesn’t want the American people to know he has paid nothing in federal taxes. “That makes me smart,” he says.
My suspicious is that people who actually like Trump think he is winning. He’s really good at complaining about all the stuff that’s wrong,
She’s going into all the people Trump has stiffed. You’ve taken their labor and taken the work they produced, and you stiffed them.
He’s saying that you can’t blame him for cheating his suppliers because the laws of the U.S. let him do it.
Race — He’s calling for Lawnorder, like Nixon. He’s not addressing racial problems except in terms of disorder.
He’s calling for stop and frisk! Unreal!
She really is doing very well in this debate. I haven’t yet seen her put a foot wrong.
Lester Holt asked Trump about birtherism. He’s now blaming Clinton for birtherism. Now he’s not even making sense.
My guess is that this debate won’t change the trajectory of the polls that much. She’s doing very well; he’s an idiot. But I think the people who are stupid enough to have believed Trump all along are still going to like Trump.
He thinks we should have taken the oil?
He thinks Iran was about to fall? He just makes shit up.
The Donald keeps sniffing. There’s already an Internet rumor that he’s on cocaine.
Lester Holt is insisting that Trump was for the war in Iraq in 2002. He denies it.
I think Clinton has landed some blows during the segment on national security.
China should go into North Korea? And why would China do that?
He saying the Iran deal should have included something about North Korea? WTF?
Trump has been losing it in this last segment. I think several of his rantings in this last segment are going to come back to bite him.
Well, that’s it. In some ways it wasn’t as awful as I had feared. Clinton did very well and hit all the right notes, I think. As the night wore on Trump got more and more defensive and more and more irrational. He didn’t help himself at all, I don’t think, although he probably didn’t drive his core supporters away. She probably helped herself just by demonstrating she doesn’t really have fangs dripping blood, but I don’t think she made any mistakes.
Donald is starting to delaminate…:)
Thanks, Maha.
I’m sure I’ve been spared some ‘unbelievable’ torture tonight. Have been skipping around other liveblogs, and really enjoying the evening. Over the year it’s been a struggle for me to avoid that face and that voice. My protective filter worked so far and I’m feeling good about the debate.
I’ll be looking forward to your analysis.
I really want to minimize my exposure to Trump, so – I know it’s a tough job, and I’m glad you’re doing it, and not me. Glad to hear HRC is doing well – this should go a long way toward quashing wingnut insistence that she’s about to keel over.
I lasted an hour.
And yet, he never gave the “strawberries” speech I was waiting for.
Maybe one of his aides got a hold of his balls – his steel balls, if you remember the movie.
Maude handed Archie Bunker his ass. God, she did very well, he came off like a completely unprepared one trick pony . On crack. It was wonderful.
I now have a case of hives. I get them when I get stressed.
Hillary has a granddaughter! Who knew?
I knew! I also knew that Chelsea’s father-in-law and Ivanka’s father-law both did time as inmates at Club Fed- Maxwell AFB. Small world ,huh? I guess not everybody who goes for the brass ring gets it.
I made myself watch the first hour – I think she did extremely well. Importantly, she made him look, dare I say it, impotently angry with her. (I was watching on a split screen – both faces on the screen at the same time.)
It’s kind of a shame that no politician ever really answers a question. It made Donald Trump’s behavior less amazingly obviously incompetent. Has a moderator ever followed up with “Okay, so you have no opinion on X, since you didn’t say anything remotely relevant?”
Hillary did a fine job. Even if I didn’t already know what a big bag of shit Trump is and I was just tuning in for the first time, tonights debate( if you could call it that) would thoroughly convince me that Trump is a big bag of shit.
I got a big kick out of Trump answering Hillary’s statement about the Justice Department bringing a lawsuit against Trump for racial discrimination. He claimed he settled the suit without an admission of guilt..not realizing that settling the suit ‘was’ an admission of guilt. That’s why on citations the have a little box on the back where you can check Nolo Contendere. You can admit guilt without admitting guilt, but you’re still guilty as far as the penalty is concerned..It makes you feel good but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re guilty.
Sorta like Bill O’Reilly settling his lawsuit for sexual harassment..He paid millions of dollars to settle but he wasn’t guilty. I mean, really!
Obama cannot have doubled the debt – the Constitution says all monetary bills must originate in the House. He cannot spend money not appropriated by the Congress…
Not that Americans would ever know that.
I told my husband we should watch the debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and he answered that he did not know who they were …. (he has Alzheimer.) So I helped him to bed then watched the whole show. I live in Georgia, north of Atlanta, in Newt Gingrich’s county. I believe that it does not matter what Trump says, or what lies he tells, many people around here will vote for him. There are many Trump signs in yards all around our road. The fanatical Republicans here believe that only Republicans are patriotic and even if their candidate is an incompetent Big Pumpkin (another orange type) they still will vote for him/it. In Atlanta, it is different, but all around Georgia (the white people that is) vote Republican. Even if Trump falters in a debate, they don’t care about that, he is their man. They believe everything he says – they forget that he won’t be able to do much without congressional approval. The hope is that the diverse population and young people in cities like Atlanta, Savannah, etc. will not vote for him, but there are many young (uneducated) white rednecks too. I am from Europe, and actually, Trump and his followers scare me more than anything – they sound like the fascists of olden days and act like it too – as when protesters in Trump rallies are being beaten up. In this debate I think Hillary came out as qualified, and Trump as … bizarre.
One time I seemed to be surrounded by professional wrestling fans, so I watched an event on TV just to see what it was all about. I might have managed a half hour of it. Poor Donald tried his hand in that arena, and probably should have stayed there.
It makes me sad that the Republican party keeps providing a haven for these grifters. I’m through listening to them.
Regarding the offshore money what corporations can’t bring into the country because of ‘red tape’, HRC missed a home run ball. “Corporations put that money offshore to avoid taxes, they want to bring that money into the US without paying taxes, and as I said before, Donald, I think you still aren’t paying any taxes! “Smart” is what you call it – freeloading is what I call it – this country won’t survive if the billionaires and corporations can avoid taxes and the burden of paying for this country falls entirely on the working class. You’re a tax freeeloader, Mr. Trump – you and your friends. You can’t cut taxes on the ultra-rich and balance the budget, but you don’t intend to. Remember the last time there was a balanced budget? There was a Clinton in the White House.”
Um. Swami, nolo contendre isn’t an admission of guilt, per se. It’s a willingness to be treated as guilty, recognizing that “officially” you’re guilty, but maintaining your innocence. It’s not always allowed – sometimes part of the guilty plea is giving answers and information (“…and I did X, Y, and Z, so you can close those cases, too…”). I’m not sure the precise purpose(s) of that plea – I’d once guessed that it meant that you couldn’t be held (civilly) liable for the crime, but that is a pure-D guess.
A lawsuit settlement is even further out from an admission of guilt. Defending against a lawsuit is expensive and gets you in the news. A settlement might mean nothing more than “we decided that this loss is roughly equivalent to our expected losses, including things like bad press, loss of opportunities while the suit progresses, etc., if we continue the suit.”
This is one of the reasons why every contract you sign these days will include a statement of “by the way, we’re powerful, and you’re not, and don’t forget it! To remind you of this, you’ll have to use a pathetic means of trying to get justice from us: arbitration. You won’t be allowed to demand discovery, you won’t be allowed ot choose the venue unless you pay for the arbitrator, and your damages will be capped to what an arbitrator thinks is fair. What? No, they don’t cap damages because they want our business. They cap damages because they want *EVERYONE’S* business. No one will use an arbitrator who decides against big business and provides huge damage awards!”