“It has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me. I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars," Trump remarked. "I came into Manhattan, and I had to pay him back, and I had to pay him back with interest. But I came into Manhattan and I started buying properties, and I did great."
Good to see that Republicans are consistent. Romney's advice to students in the last election cycle was to simply ask your parents for $20,000 ($80,000 in 2012 dollars) to start a business.
That handed-down Trump money is the result of hard work. Donald Trump's grandfather built the original family fortune running a brothel in the Yukon during gold rush. In fact the more that Trump is around his fellow Republicans, the more likely it is that he'll use this as an example of how he can relate to working class women.
So the riders in the Clown Car spend their (free) prime-time (sorta, if you count CNBC as prime) opportunity (a) criticizing the media and the moderators; (b) playing gotcha with each other with few mentions of the Democratic opposition; (c) criticizing Obama who isn't up for re-election; (d) presenting zero policy positions; (e) lying about things easily refuted.
It wasn't like they actually answered any of the questions. So if any one of them had said, "Look, if I were elected President, here would be my priorities, and here is what I would attempt to get done and how I would go about it. I can't do everything by myself, and I can't do everything with constant opposition from Congress. So the best way to get Congress out of gridlock and get things done in the best interest of the country is to elect me and re-elect the Republican majorities in Congress." What demographic would that not appeal to? And anybody doing that would be scary, too, because they just might win the general. Thank goodness they're all idiots.
Christie is sleazy, corrupt, mean-spirited, and obnoxiously rude even by NJ standards, but I gotta give him props for two comments:
In the debate, he pointed out incredulously that with all the other issues in the US (some of which of course he made up), "...and we're talking about fantasy football!?"
After the debate, he criticized his fellow candidates who were whining about the moderators, saying "if you can't take this, how are are you going to deal with Hillary ... or Putin"? and "If you can't take it get out of the race."
In any operation, certain base costs are what they are. The only way any private company can do a public service type job less expensively than the government is by cutting out something. So I'm not buying that private prisons are inherently (or even actually) tax savers. And yes, private prisons have escape issues, security issues, CO training issues, etc., but it's not like public prisons are shining examples of caring competence, either. Anyway, it looks like about 135,000, or 8.4% of the overall federal and state U.S. prison population is in private prisons, with 19.1% of the federal prison population and 6.8% of the U.S. state prison population in private prisons. The worst thing about the prison companies seems to be their work with ALEC, trying to push legislation that increases the flow of low-risk, low-cost guests into their establishments. Otherwise, I'm not sure I understand how the problem is so significant as to hold Hillary's (or some other candidate's) feet to the fire on this issue over other, possibly more wide-reaching, issues.
Vrede too wrote:I doubt that she will be affected much one way or the other, this is more about holding private prison feet to the fire.
Why limit the feet fire-holding to the private companies? Conditions in most prisons, federal and state, are generally pretty awful. Too many get incarcerated that don't belong there and spend longer time than is reasonable. In many, if not most, life for all is violent, de-humanizing, and health-endangering. I'm no expert, but I've been into (not "in") the CCA unit at Lake City and the Florida prison in Starke. I'd be hard put to argue Starke isn't worse. Both, as well as a few county places I've seen, are pretty scary places to have to live in.
