In a bizarre new attack on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump claims Clinton got “schlonged” by Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries. Watch.
Your argument that there is a legitimate historical preservation interest in leaving Confederate monuments in place across the South isn’t helped when you join forces with revanchist outfits like the Sons of Confederate Veterans to sue the city of New Orleans. TPM’s Tierney Sneed talks to the SCV leader in Louisiana and offers some lovely samples from the group’s Facebook page. Worth a read.
Today we’re publishing the fourth and final installment in our four part series on the growth of income and wealth inequality in the United States. Brad DeLong looks at the decline of North Atlantic social democracy through the prism of the debate over Thomas Piketty’s hugely influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It is another must-read. And I want to thank everyone involved in putting together this series as well as series sponsor AFSCME for making it possible to put something together on this scale.
If you’ve missed the earlier installments you can see them here, starting with my editor’s note on the series.
We got more details now on self-described Trump supporter William Celli of Richmond California who was arrested over the weekend for making threats to attack local Muslims and allegedly making at least one explosive device to follow through on those threats. Police seem to have gotten at least two and possibly more tips about Celli’s threats and possible bomb making.
So yesterday Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton going to the bathroom is “disgusting” and that she was knocked out of the 2008 primary race by an over-sized penis.
For my money, the comment about Hillary going to the bathroom is more offensive than “schlonged.” But obviously there’s plenty to choose from. Regardless, I’m sure the GOP operatives charged with winning the general in 2016 are just amazingly happy about this.
A few weeks ago I said that it actually seemed possible – not likely but possible – that we’d reach our goal of 3,000 new Prime members in our annual drive which ends on December 31st. Now I’m pretty confident that we will. We now need only 86 more sign ups by December 31st. That is definitely possible. So I’m posting this afternoon to ask you to help us get to that goal, which not far off at all. As I said a few days ago, from my experience, the biggest block for regular readers signing up for Prime is actually just that hassle of pulling out your credit card, typing in the number, the expiration date, the little security number and the rest. I feel like that way all the time. So if you’d like a cleaner, faster version of TPM and most importantly to support our independent journalism, I want to ask you to take a moment right now. Just … like literally right now, pull out your wallet and take the plunge. It’s a huge thing for us. If you’re ready, click right here.
And seriously, thank you.
Jim Newell has a good discussion here of why New Hampshire, which has sort of been in decline as a president-picker ever since Bill Clinton lost it and then won the presidency in 1992, could really end up being pivotal this year. The Iowa Republican party is very, very right-wing and more than a little weird. So it kind of makes sense that Cruz or Trump will win it. But it also kinda doesn’t matter since Iowa has a terrible history of picking presidents. Barack Obama is really the exception that proves the rule in recent history.
I’m a bit out on a limb here. But I’ll keep the person’s identity a secret. So I hope I don’t get in too much trouble. An acquaintance of mine just wrote the following on Facebook …
Not to make too fine a point of it, but when I was growing up on Long Island, not too far from where Donald Trump grew up and around the same time, “shlonged” was a pretty commonplace verb meaning, roughly, “thoroughly defeated.” It had nothing to do, at least in the minds of anyone I knew, with the Yiddish noun shlong, meaning penis.
Maybe the etymological evolution of the verb is similar to the American slang word, “screwed,” meaning badly wounded, which has become so commonplace that it regularly appears in polite print even though the word’s slang usage is originally sexual.
I wanted to follow up on my overnight post noting that rapidly emerging “schlong” revisionist analysis of Donald Trump’s statement which now – a mere dozen hours later – has emerged into a full-fledged “schlong truth” movement. Trump himself is doubling down on “schlong” and has enlisted Jeff Greenfield who is vouching for the normalness and non-sexual meaning of the phrase. It was unclear to me at first from Greenfield’s tweet whether he was basing this on personal experience as a New York Trump contemporary (Greenfield is only slightly older than Trump but, according to Wikipedia, grew up in tonier Manhattan, not the outer boroughs or Long Island) or based on new research. But I got a reply from Greenfield below which clears up any question on that front.
Since our initial post we have had a number of TPM Readers (generally men born between 1940 and 1952 in Queens and Long Island) who have clear testimony about what we might call the “Trump/Schlong” usage (aging Jewish male readership finally comes in handy!).
I wanted to discuss a couple questions I keep getting asked.
First, couldn’t Trump’s sky-high poll numbers just not pan out if he has no ground game in the early or even the primary states?
No, this is not the case.