I noticed that hours before Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke was calling for ‘pitchforks and torches’ he was complaining on twitter about how long the background check took for the new AR-15 he just bought.
I was just reading through my email and TPM Reader MMD sent me a couple Dylan videos that I don’t think I’d ever seen before, along with touching on some topics we’d both remember as kids growing up in Southern California in the 1980s.
I’m sort of surprised that I’d never seen these videos before because not only am I a big Dylan fan (which you know) but I’m also a big, big Letterman fan. Or at least I was in his early years. I was really into Letterman from the very beginning. In fact, before he got the late night show he had some kind of morning or daytime show that I vaguely remember watching too.
As I write this Trump book I’ve been discussing, I’ve been going back over notes, posts and thinking a bit more deeply about various topics I write about here on an on-going basis. One of those topics is the shrinking electoral base of the Republican party.
We needed will.i.am to make a “grab’em by the pussy” election song and video. Or maybe we didn’t. But he has. And it’s fairly glorious. And you can see it after the jump.
In the latest episode of my new podcast, I talk to The New Republic’s Jeet Heer about the historical roots of Trumpism.
Since there’s been such an avalanche of campaign news today we’ve kept the feature well open for breaking news. But I wanted to tell you about this fascinating article we just published today in The Arch about the historical origins of the progressive tradition in North Carolina and how it’s tied to the University of North Carolina system and a man named Frank Porter Graham. It’s a great read and an illuminating backstory to the election battle over this critical state. Check it out.
So the Trump campaign has put forward a British man who says he was on the plane in the first class cabin on the flight on which Jessica Leeds claims Donald Trump groped her. He is the campaign’s evidence that Leeds is lying because the man says Trump didn’t do anything. The man’s name is Anthony Gilberthorpe. He’s 54. So he is claiming to remember an uneventful flight more than 35 years ago when he was in his late teens.
And there’s something else: Gilberthorpe has a record of outlandish claims and taking cash from tabloids to set people up. Yes, really. He’s the Trump campaign’s official pushback. Here’s the story.
Lenny Bruce was a “sick comic” from the 1950s and early 1960s who was arrested for drugs and obscenity and was appealing a four-month jail sentence when he died in 1965. He was a genius. One of his bits, about a comic who plays the London Palladium, perfectly sums up what has happened to Donald Trump in the fall election. (Click on the link to hear it.) It’s about Frank Dell, a third-rate comic who plays Las Vegas lounges, but who tells his agent he wants to play a “class room” like the London Palladium. The agent tries to discourage him, but Dell insists — “I’m going to murder these people” – and the agent gets him booked there.
Trump rages at the unfairness, why doesn’t some woman accuse President Obama of attacking her? Video after the jump …
Now that Trump has picked Carlos Slim as his Dr. Evil-like international villain, let’s remember that not long ago he had a deal with Trump to create a Trump Family reality show.