In This Corner…

Here’s a shocker: Donald Trump said something outrageous! In keeping with his daily blathering of nonsense, the megalomaniac, orange haired rage monster said recently that he’d love to debate, “But I have to see the conditions”. Yeah…right! Given the Donald’s penchant for wrestling in the past, we here at the Bucket have an idea of what kind of debate he wants; a no holds barred wrestling match with Hillary. Just think of the ratings! But be sure to keep an eye on ol’ hound dog Bill and Melania at ringside(wink, wink).

Democrat Hillary Clinton puts Republican Donald Trump in a headlock in the first ever Presidential Debate/Wrestling Match while their respective mates, Bill Clinton and Melania Trump, get to know each other at ringside.
Democrat Hillary Clinton puts Republican Donald Trump in a headlock in the first ever Presidential Debate/Wrestling Match while their respective mates, Bill Clinton and Melania Trump, get to know each other at ringside.

Square Mileage ≠ Population

The election is less than three months away now and according to polls, Clinton has opened up a sizeable lead over Republican nominee, megalomaniac Donald Trump. But Donald Trump has a crafty plan; just claim the election was rigged and get his echo chamber at Fox News, a.k.a. the Republican Propaganda Network to relay and repeat the message ad infinitum to the sheeple who watch it and bingo! – any result that doesn’t turn into a Trump victory is invalid.

We saw this coming back during Con-a-thon 2012, when Donald Trump declared the election was rigged and said he would start a revolution. But we never dreamed in a million years he would actually become the 2016 nominee. He and all Republicans will no doubt use the same old inevitable con that conservative Republicans always use; look at the electoral map and say “Wow! Look at all that red! How could the Democrats have won, when the majority of the map is sooooooo red!” They once again take advantage of American’s poor math skills and inability to grasp that square mileage doesn’t equal population.

To truly grasp the electoral map, one needs to go to Nate Silver’s election site fivethirtyeight.com.  He has an electoral map that gives the true representation of what’s happening with the electoral vote, which is based on population, and not the square mileage. So yes, for example, Montana has a lot of square mileage(147,164), but there are more people living in the 372.4 square miles of San Diego California (population: ≈ 1.356 million) than in the whole state of Montana (population: ≈ 1.024 million). So these calls by Trump and his fellow con artist Republicans stating that there’s no way he should be losing are absolute bunk according to Nate Silver’s site. Trump is losing and losing badly. If you have any doubts, DO THE MATH!

Donald Trump and his conservative Republicans try to convince their gullible audience that square mileage equals popluation and that the election is rigged if Trump loses.
Conservative Republicans and their cohorts in the corporate media are trying once again to push the old square mileage equals population ploy on its gullible audience.

Sticks And Stones

Thanks to the disastrous Trump campaign, we’re given on a daily basis such a plethora of gaffes and blunders to choose from, the satire just writes itself. Take for instance, Mike Pence recently stating that name calling has no place in politics; this from the Vice Presidential candidate of a man who’s made his living for the last year calling his opponents childish nick names like Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco and Low Energy Jeb Bush. We think ol’ Puritan Pants is a bit irony impaired.

Irony impaired GOP President and Vice President candidates, Trumpy McSmallHands and Puritan Pants blather on about how name cailling has no place in politics.
Irony impaired GOP President and Vice President candidates, Trumpy McSmallHands and Puritan Pants blather on about how name cailling has no place in politics.

Slavery Was Fun!

Hey everyone! America’s favorite right wing blowhard at Fox News, a.k.a. The Republican Propaganda Network, Bill O’Reilly, has a new book out. O’Reilly, who has appointed himself as America’s history detective and has authored other ‘history’ books like Killing Kennedy, Killing Lincoln and Killing Reagan, assassinates more truth with his new book entitled Slavery Was Fun! In it, he backs up his recent claim that slaves who worked building the White House were well fed and happy. O’Reilly states that slavery wasn’t just fun, it was a laugh riot! He even got the black guy who works with him at Fox to write the foreward. This is a must have book for the racist or Trump supporter in your family. Get it now!

Fox News talk show host and America's history detective, Bill O'Reilly, whose only goal in life is to look out for you, has released a new book that explains that slavery wasn't just fun, it was a laugh riot.
Fox News talk show host and America’s history detective, Bill O’Reilly, whose only goal in life is to look out for you, has released a new book that explains that slavery wasn’t just fun, it was a laugh riot.

The Trumputin Bromance

As the Democratic National Convention wound up this week and the Democrats, the only sane party left in the United States, united to support their nominee Hillary Clinton, news surfaced that the Russians may have been involved in hacking the DNC email server. If that wasn’t enough, authoritarian demagogue, GOP nominee and comedian extraordinaire,  Donald Trump, “jokingly” hoped his pal Vladimer Putin hacked into Hillary’s email server to find missing emails. Way to go Trump! Nothing says patriotic like conspiring with the Russians and committing treason on your fellow American.This shouldn’t surprise anyone though because Republicans have been pulling this shit for the last half century at least. Remember Nixon sabotaging the Paris peace talks in 1968. Or how about St. Ronald Reagan’s secretive deal with Iran, behind the Carter administration’s back, in 1980. Then there’s the whole Watergate affair with Nixon again. And who could forget the malfeasance of the 2000 election, when the conservative leaning Supreme Court and Dubya’s brother Jeb, handed the presidency to George W. Bush. If you’re looking for filthy politics, look no further than your nearest Republican.

Then, to top it off, Trump then tried to distance himself from his hot bromance with Putin, by saying they’ve never met despite evidence to the contrary. What’s amazing (and frightening) is that there are still people who want this orange haired pathological liar to have his finger on the nuclear button.

Donald Trump thanks his pal, Vladimir Putin for hacking into Hillary's email server and awkwardly flatters him with a comparison to his lovely wife Melanoma.
The budding bromance between Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and U.S. President-Wannabee, Donald Trump, seems to be taking all kinds of awkward turns and twists these days.

The Art Of The Con 101

We’ve commented ad infinitum about our befuddlement over the fact that megalomaniac Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president and is somehow ahead in some polls, despite running an absolutely miserable campaign, and presiding over one of the worst Republican conventions in history. It really boggles the mind! Can Americans really be this dense?

It goes back to previous posts(here, here and here) about some lower income Americans seeing themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They see a rich man like Donald Trump and they buy his con that he’ll make things better and that all that wealth will come flooding in and tricking down(where have we heard that before). There’s a reason why Trump says he loves the poorly educated; they’re pretty easy to con. And you throw in the fact that most Americans are horrendous at math and you’ve got a world class swindle going on right now in the Republican party which could not only affect the United States but the world in a stupendously negative manner.

Take Donald Trump’s claim a few months back that he gave a million dollars to a veterans charity. On the surface that seems pretty generous. But when you consider that his estimated wealth is 4.5 billion dollars, the one million dollar gift is only 0.022 percent (not even 1% folks!) of his wealth. This is like a person with a $1,000 dollars giving 22 cents to the charity; not very impressive in reality. But that’s the beauty of this con and Republicans use it all the time. They claim that these poor billionaires pay millions in taxes every year. To most of the Republican party’s lower income blue collar white workers, this seems like robbery because a million dollars to these people is an absolute fortune. But to billionaires, it’s a drop in the bucket.

For simplicity sake, take a CEO who earns a one billion a year. If the tax rate is 30%, then he should pay $300 million a year in taxes. Most of us would scream bloody murder if we had to forfeit this much money. But this CEO still has $700 million dollars left. He ain’t hurting! He’s still living high off the hog while you’re scraping and scratching just to get by. When he complains and gets his tax rate lowered he’s taking that extra money and selfishly puts it into offshore tax havens or buying up more real estate and mansions. He’s not letting that money trickle down by any means. In fact, he’s leaving us to foot his portion of the tax bill, one that he easily could afford. Money is power and with great power comes great responsibility. The 1% in this country want all the money and power but none of the responsibility.  Instead, we, the middle and lower classes, are squeezed and the corporate lackey conservative Republicans the 1% pay off in Congress convince everyone it’s the Liberals or the Democrats fault. The Republicans claim loudly that the rich, like Donald Trump, would never con anyone. Hah! Just look into Trump University and his numerous failed businesses. If you’re supposed to run the government like a business, like many Republicans claim, then Trump is the wrong person to be CEO. The astonishing truth is that if you’re a Trump supporter and you make less than $125k a year, you’re voting against your own interests. In short, DO THE MATH!

Donald Trump claims to give a million dollars to chairty which accounts to a not so generous 0.022 percent of his $4.5 billion dollar wealth.
Thanks to the atrocious and pathetic math skills of Americans, authoritarian. megalomaniac con artist, Donald Trump, is on the verge of becoming President.

The Puritan Party

Well, the RNC has come and gone and it’s been every bit a clusterf*ck as predicted. Some highlights(or lowlights): Melania Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech – Trump’s campaign denied then admitted the fraud; the so called anti-Trump movement never really gets going; Pence bores everyone to sleep; a tepid endorsement from Paul Ryan; and the smuggest Senator alive, Ted Cruz, still licking his wounds from his defeat in the Republican primaries, refuses to endorse Donald Trump. When your top celebrity endorser is Scott Baio from Joanie Loves Chachi, you know it’s bad. To top it off, Trump delivered a lie filled acceptance speech in an effort to make his supporters shit their pants in fear.  Wow! What a sucky, sucky, suck ass Party!

But one thing that is incredibly disturbing is the platform adopted by the Republicans. It looks like it was written by extremist, far right wing, evangelical christians. You might as well call the Republican Party the Puritan Party now. Among the more dismaying platform points: appoint anti-choice Supreme Court justices; legalize anti-LGBT discrimination; pass an anti-choice constitutional amendment; end funding for Planned Parenthood; repeal environmental protection laws; ignore climate change; expand fracking and burying nuclear waste; privatize Medicare; cut food stamps; require bible study in public schools and (the worst one in our opinion) make christianity the national religion. Apparently, the Republicans want to go back to the ’50s…the 1650s! The Republican party platform also bears a strong resemblance to our fascist checklist we posted several months ago. If there was any doubt before there is no doubt now; with this party platform the Republican party has gone into hard core fascist mode.

Donald Trump introduces Indiana governor and everyone's Puritan pal, Mike Pence, as his ramrod straight, pole up the ass, Vice President candidate.
Donald Trump introduces Indiana governor and everyone’s Puritan pal, Mike Pence, as his ramrod straight, pole up the ass, Vice President candidate.

Brand Recognition

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, a.k.a. The Finest Dumpster Fire The World Has Even Seen, the RNC is busy preparing themselves for what looks to be a complete clusterf*ck. Donald Trump seems to have selected Indiana governor, christian soldier and blandest man alive, Mike Pence, as his running mate. Many prominent Republicans are not even attending the convention, preferring to distance themselves from Mr. Trump. Given this, the Republican party has decided to officially assent to the rise of Trump by re-branding the party with a brand new logo which more properly reflects its current ideology: a steaming pile of patriotic shit (note the dead elephant’s trunk sticking out on top).

On the eve of the Republican convention, the GOP has revealed its brand new logo which more accurately represents its current ideology: a steaming pile of patriotic shit.
On the eve of the Republican convention, the GOP has revealed its brand new logo which more accurately represents its current ideology.

Pander Express

It’s the first week in July and the good news for most of America is that there is only four months left in the farce that is Con-a-thon 2016. Polls show that Hillary has opened up substantial leads in the battleground states, which has given most sane Americans a reason to breathe a sigh of relief.  But there is a reason for pessimism. Let’s face it folks; Hillary is far from perfect and has lots of baggage. We’ve felt that she’s moved to the right and is for all intents and purposes a moderate Republican and Noam Chomsky seems to agree. Her coziness to Wall Street is why so many left leaning Democrats and Independents (like us) ‘felt the Bern’ this past year.

Hillary and Bill Clinton also have a history of pulling stupid gaffes at inopportune times. Of course, Bill’s infamous affair with Monica Lewinsky during his presidency stands out as the biggest blunder.  Bill Clinton almost hurt his wife yet again recently. He reportedly met with current Attorney General Loretta Lynch in secret during a layover in Phoenix recently with the FBI’s investigation of Hillary’s private email server looming.  Fortunately, for Hillary, the FBI found her to be ‘extremely careless’ but should not be charged of any wrongdoing.

In addition to Bill pulling boners (pun intended), Hillary has had a huge problem of appearing disingenuous to the American public. Recently, she talked about income inequality while wearing a $12,000 pantsuit. Several months back, while blatantly pandering to moderate Republican, she credited the Reagans for bringing awareness to AIDS, which is the exact opposite of what they did.

Throughout the debates and the primaries, Hillary and Bernie Sanders clearly distinguished themselves as the only adults in the room. If Hillary is to win the election, (and we here at the Bucket sincerely hope that she does now that Bernie Sanders is out), she’s going to have to cut down on the gaffes and change her duplicitous persona. She needs to aggressively attack Trump and the Republicans every chance she gets. She needs to play to win and not play not to lose, like her predecessors Al Gore and John Kerry. Fortunately, she seems to be doing that so far and Trump seems to be doing a pretty good job of self-destruction as well.

No doubt the Republicans will continue their witch hunt and character assassinations of Hillary. They’re already throwing a tantrum about the FBI findings. But it seems that fortunately, for her and America, she’s inherited some of Bill’s Teflon coating.

Hillary Clinton blatantly panders for moderate Republican votes, while the ghost of conservative icon, St. Ronald Reagan, makes a funny about the fallacy of trickle down economics, much to the delight of doting ghost wife, Nancy.
Hillary Clinton blatantly panders for moderate Republican votes, while the ghost of conservative icon, St. Ronald Reagan, makes a funny about the fallacy of trickle down economics, much to the delight of doting ghost wife, Nancy.

The Sun Is Setting On John McCain

Arizona’s Senior Senator John McCain keeps losing more and more respect by the day. Recently, he made headlines by boldly claiming that President Obama was ‘directly responsible’ for the Orlando shootings. In trying to clarify his fallacious statement he completely forgot that it was George W. Bush who created the power vacuum in the Middle East by invading Iraq, which allowed not only Al-Qaeda to thrive but also allowed the ISIS movement to be born.

Then McCain turned the ‘crazy’ knob to eleven and endorsed Donald Trump. If you remember, last year Trump questioned McCain’s war hero credentials and criticized McCain for getting captured. Now, almost a year later, McCain is going to endorse the man who insulted him. This (and his stubborn refusal to vote on a new Supreme Court justice) is apparently why support for his Democratic opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick has surged in recent polls, and even has her ahead in one. Our advice to Senator McCain(like he’s asking us): you’ve had a good run, but it’s time to retire to one of your seven or eight or twenty houses you own and start shooing kids off your lawn and away from your precious gold. We have no doubt you’ll be great at it.

Senator and crusty old coot, John McCain, blames Obama for the Orlando shooting and promptly endorses Donald Trump for President.
Arizona’s Senior Senator and crusty old coot, John McCain, demonstrates why he should retire from politics and start a successful new career of keeping kids off his lawn and away from his gold.