The smaller the balls, the bigger the ... debts

Russ Choma at Mother Jones has done remarkable reporting on Donald Trump's finances all year, and Monday he produced another excellent piece, this time on Trump's extensive debts and his biggest lenders.

Choma points to some $700 million in Trump IOUs. While plenty of these debts stem from expected sources such as hotels, office buildings and condo towers, a hefty slice is related to that favorite pastime of populists across the Rust Belt. Golf.

MoJo shows Trump is dealing with some massive greens fees.

From Deutsche Bank:

$125 million for two mortgages on his Trump National Doral golf course in Miami. Both were taken out in 2012.

From Investors Savings Bank:

In 2010, Trump combined an earlier mortgage on his Westchester County, New York, golf course into a much larger $23 million mortgage that also leveraged his ownership of condo units in the Trump Park Avenue building in New York City.

From Amboy Bank:

 In 2010, Trump took out a mortgage on his Trump National Golf Club-Colts Neck in Monmouth County, New Jersey, for $16 million from Amboy Bank, a tiny New Jersey bank.

From Chevy Chase Trust Holdings:

In 2009, Trump purchased a golf course in Loudon County, Virginia, for $13 million. To make the deal happen, he borrowed $10 million from the land development company that previously owned the property.

From Royal Bank of Pennsylvania:

In 1995, Trump purchased a lavish estate in Westchester County, New York, and in 2000 he refinanced that purchase with an $8 million mortgage from the Royal Bank of Pennsylvania. Trump originally planned to turn the large estate into a golf course, but opposition from local residents blocked the project. The property has been used as a family retreat and a playground for Trump's two oldest sons.

Though Choma didn't break this out, it appears as if at least $150 million of this $700 million in Trump debts are tied to golf, which, as Reuters pointed out last summer, may have become something of a money pit for the PEOTUS.

If Trump is losing money on golf, there's a perfectly good reason; golf is dying, as Karl Taro Greenfield told us last year in Men's Journal.

By any measure, participation in the game is way off, from a high of 30.6 million golfers in 2003 to 24.7 million in 2014, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). The long-term trends are also troubling, with the number of golfers ages 18 to 34 showing a 30 percent decline over the last 20 years. Nearly every metric — TV ratings, rounds played, golf-equipment sales, golf courses constructed — shows a drop-off.

And the bleeding continues. More recent figures reveal another 600,000 golfers picked up and left the game in 2015, driving the total number of golfers down to 24.1 million.

Doesn't seem like a good industry in which to be heavily leveraged just now. Yet that is exactly the sand trap our next president finds himself in. One could speculate on the temptation for Trump to use the power of the Oval Office to curry favor with certain banks and certain governments for some, er, assistance when his golf bills come due. Please do.

This is where Nov. 8 has gotten us. The very fate of our nation may depend on a man with a history of sexual peccadilloes and an oddball obsession with military men (though he never served himself) orchestrating a miraculous turnaround of the doddering, hobbling golf market.

No, not Trump.

This guy.

Lurleenia

The guy loves his family, but Ivanka is a girl, and the older boys have their hands full resurrecting all of those once-dead deals.
Barron, his favorite, is unfortunately just too young to take over the country should anything untoward happen.
That leaves the wife.
Yeah, she'll do fine.

And when it's all said and done, she'll have a nice community college in Queens named after her.

Nathan Bedhead Forrest

Just so this is here for posterity...

This is our new overlord.

Shiddy Shmiddy and the Great Email Caper

Days 1 and 2 of the new Trumpian order elicited finger-pointing, threats, grief and a whole lot of anger all across the liberal internet over Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat at the hands of a wrestling heel. Many asked some form of the same question: What detonated the IED on Clinton's road to history? Was it the Bernie Bros? Voter suppression? The DNC? Clinton's overconfident campaign?

Here's a theory: Michael Schmidt's highly questionable New York Times email stories bled the Clinton candidacy for more a year and a half, and left her wounded and vulnerable to the sexist and racist infection that ultimately killed her campaign.

Perhaps the sexism and racism needed no help from the Times; President-elect Donald Trump (yes, this really is a thing) inspired the worst in white America and encouraged not only racism and sexism, but anti-Semitism of the kind the country rarely sees in the open. That may have been all it took for rural and exurban whites to vote their most irrational fears and hatreds. We'll never know.

But we do know that the Times' initial, horribly flawed reporting coincided almost precisely with a critical election inflection point--the spring and summer of 2015, which saw Hillary's favorability rating dive below her unfavorables for the first time.

As this HuffPo graph shows, during her tenure as Secretary of State, Clinton was viewed positively by well over half the American people. The Benghazi hearings in the fall of 2013 began to drive her unfavorables up, but she managed to stay more positive than negative for months afterward.

Then Schmidt's first major email story, revealing Clinton's use of a private server, landed March 3, 2015, with her favorables barely outpacing her unfavorables. The lines cross over the next month, never to re-cross, and they diverge dramatically after the second major story on July 23, which claimed two inspectors general had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department. For the rest of the election cycle, she was among the "most unpopular candidates ever to run for the presidency," a phrase that became standard in reporting about the race.

It didn't matter that both Schmidt stories were wrong on the facts and in their emphasis, as Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald pointed out at the time. The emails were an ongoing part of the so-called "Clinton trust narrative" now, chased constantly, if fruitlessly, as part of the media quest to balance out the barrage of negative Trump news, and used by GOP operatives to generate soundbites that in turn generated negative coverage of Clinton.

While Bernie Sanders avoided cynically piling on during the primaries, famously saying America was "sick and tired of hearing about (her) damn emails," the press wouldn't let go, goaded by Trump's "Crooked Hillary" exhortations.

FBI Director James Comey put a bow on the trend lines when he created 10 days of 11th-hour email stories beginning Oct. 28. Those FBI stories, like Schmidt's early reporting, turned out to be nothingburgers (or perhaps nothingweiners).

But the damage was done. Clinton's favorables never recovered. And America got President Trump.
.

What does it take to stay disgraced?

Americans are a forgiving lot. Or at least some Americans are forgiving of some folks, not only allowing cutthroats, mountebanks and boors to go on with their lives after egregious behavior, but inviting them into public to purvey their wisdom.

There is Bob Knight, leader of men, throttler of boys, who took the stage to rally the Drumpfvolk in Michigan this week. Michigan? I thought they hated Knight there. In any case, Knight certainly hates Michigan fans. Still. (He conveniently didn't mention Michigan State; Tom Izzo pretty much owned him.) But Trump believed this was a sound campaign strategy in a state where he's down eight points head-to-head. And he did earn the Republican nomination, so...

Moving on, the New York Times sees no evil in giving the last word to Roger Stone, ratf**ker extraordinaire and, as you may or may not remember, a man well-qualified to head the American branch of the Stasi. 

By day, Stone says, he was working as a scheduler for Nixon surrogates. "By night, I'm trafficking in the black arts. Nixon's people were obsessed with intelligence." So at one point, Stone placed a mole in the Hubert Humphrey campaign, who ended up becoming Humphrey's driver. His source reported back all kinds of information--mostly libelous--which Stone kicked up the chain.

His Wikipedia page makes a convincing case that Stone is the worst person in American politics. And yet, here he is in the Times, calling accusations that he's helped the Russians and Julian Assange distribute hacked DNC material "the new McCarthyism." I get the need to be fair. But a simple "Stone couldn't be reached but has denied the accusations" with a link to the Breitbart story would have sufficed. As a bonus, it wouldn't have spread groundless charges, which is the entire point of Stone's life.

But he is given equal time, and a parting shot, to boot. All is forgiven.

Two stories every sports writer should read, for different reasons

Some days, you're better for having read the web. Today is one of those days.

Wesley Morris's NYT Magazine piece on white folks' fear of the black man's genitalia, "Last Taboo," sounds uncomfortable. It's not. It is brutally frank, at times hilarious, but throughout, it treats the topic with the respect it deserves--and calls out Seth MacFarlane in the process:

Officially, there are no penises in “Ted 2,” the comedy written by, directed by and starring Seth MacFarlane that was a hit last summer. And yet they’re everywhere — scary black ones. Mark Wahlberg plays a New England knucklehead named John, who swears that you can’t use the internet without running into one. When a mishap at a fertility clinic leaves him covered in semen, a staff member tells him not to worry; it’s just the sperm of men with sickle-cell anemia, a disease that, in the United States, overwhelmingly afflicts African-Americans. John’s best friend, Ted — a nasty animated teddy bear — gets a huge kick out of this: “You hear that? You’re covered in rejected black-guy sperm,” it says. “You look like a Kardashian!"

The sperm bank is the pair’s Plan B. Plan A entails Wahlberg and the bear breaking into Tom Brady’s house and stealing some of his spunk as he sleeps. When they lift the sheets, staring at his crotch, they’re bathed in the golden light of video-game treasure. In another movie, this might be a clever conceit. Here it feels like paranoid propaganda, a deluxe version of what entertainment and politics have been doing for more than 200 years: inventing new ways to assert black inferiority. Now a teddy bear has a greater claim to humanity than the black people it mocks.

Just read it all.

In a piece that really was uncomfortable, Deadspin spun out an obit for/tribute to Jennifer Frey, the one-time superstar sports writer who succumbed to alcoholism in March at the age of 47. Every reporter of a certain age who covered national sports ran into Jennifer. I attended one of her March Madness-tub-full-o-liquor-post-deadline parties. And everyone, even those who didn't know her, had an opinion about her. Not all of them were altogether positive. But everyone acknowledged her talent. What the story touches on, but doesn't quite delve into, is the pervasiveness of drinking in journalism--an old, sad story.

Speaking for myself, but I suspect for a whole lot of other writers, there but for the grace of God...

Crickets

Suppose they gave a Charter vote and nobody came?
That appears to be the intent of the leaders in our fair city of Plattsburgh. Tuesday night, five entire human beings showed up to hear a presentation at Stafford Middle School on whether the city should change its form of government so that it's run by a city manager.
Sounds boring, and speaking as the former chair of the 2015 City of Plattsburgh Charter Commission, I can attest it kinda is. But it's no idle exercise.
The question is on the November ballot. 'Burghers can opt for a professional manager, as nearly half of all local American governments do, or keep the current system, in which the elected mayor oversees all government administrative functions, everything from planning to snow removal.
The depressed turnout was depressing, especially given that a similar forum the week before attracted only 11 hominids. That means a total of 16 people out of a population of 20,000 came to the forums.
Even worse? The people who should really care about this stuff, Mayor James Calnon and city council members, didn't deign to show--with the notable exception of Councilman Dale Dowdle, who attended the Oct. 19 session.
The media were equally neglectful. The Press-Republican covered the first forum--and that was it. No reporter from any outlet came to the second.
You could blame the poor attendance on general civic apathy, or Trump-Clinton fatigue, or the Cubs. But you'd be wrong.
I blame the mayor. Last year, the Charter Commission initially decided to let voters weigh in on three issues in November of 2015: Should the City Council and mayoral terms be staggered so that no more than three of the seven positions would turn over in a given election? Should the ancient Charter language be cleaned up and the document updated? And should the city change to a city manager model from the current strong mayor system?
But Mayor Calnon lobbied publicly and privately against the wording of the city-manager question, until eventually the Commission reversed itself and took the city-manager issue off the table in 2015. In return, Calnon promised to put city manager before the voters in 2016.
But for some reason, Calnon waited until late August to ask the council to put it on this year's November ballot. And he almost lost. Then, he had no plan to get the word out to the public. Former Commission Secretary Rod Sherman jumped on the grenade, and worked hard (for free) to arrange the information-packed public forums on an insanely tight timetable.
Turns out it was too tight. Nobody came. And almost nobody knows the question is even on the ballot, or that a manager wouldn't come into the job until 2021, or a hundred other facts, big and small, that would be useful to voters. The city wasted the time of two city-manager experts, one from Fairport, New York, and the other from Ossining, who drove five hours each way to deliver their knowledge to an empty room.
But there's the Internet, you say! Yes there is. And it's a big, cold, endless labyrinth. Anyone seeking information on the city website must go spelunking; the front page reveals absolutely nothing about the ballot proposition. (If you don't like online scavenger hunts, take this shortcut.)
However, the mayor is crystal clear in his reelection campaign that he doesn't want the proposal to pass. Apparently, he doesn't want anyone to know it exists, either.
An attendee at the Tuesday session wants to drum up a Vote Yes campaign for the manager idea, so the proposition could get an airing for a week or two. Better late than never, and better than nothing, and not nearly as good as it should have been.
To paraphrase Charlie Pierce, this is your democracy, Plattsburgh. Cherish it.

Elise Stefanik grows old

Elise Stefanik, the GOP rep from my district, New York’s 21st, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, anointed as the future of the party before she even won the seat. Fawning conservative media laud her as a winner who can woo women and Millennials with youthful ideas, and ideals.

As an undergraduate at Harvard a little over a decade ago (like I said, she’s young), she shamed Harvard undergrads in a column about the dearth of women in leadership positions at campus organizations. 

She also threw shade, as the kidz say, on Harvard students who disrupted CIA and Homeland Security speakers during a campus forum on counter-terrorism. "Yesterday was the first time that I was both embarrassed and ashamed to be associated with my fellow Harvard students," she wrote. 

More recently, she’s been the proud co-sponsor of a bill to protect sex-crime survivors.

And yet, Elise Stefanik clings like a zebra mussel to Donald Trump.

Stefanik has refused to drop her support for the GOP presidential candidate despite a dozen allegations that Trump sexually battered, assaulted or harassed women. While Stefanik criticized Trump’s now-infamous bus conversation with Billy Bush, she stands by the GOP’s man—even as many of her colleagues, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, are fleeing him.

Indeed, Republicans last week released a poll showing Stefanik crushing her Democratic and Green Party challengers. Would dumping Trump jeopardize that lead? The congresswoman evidently thinks so. She’s not taking any chances.

Stefanik certainly showed some idealism in her Harvard days. And these days, she says she takes her responsibility as a role model for young women and girls seriously. But her real lesson for all the kids out there is that when you’re a 30-something grownup, you learn to accept certain things, unpleasant things, maybe even criminal things, if you want to get ahead.

No use letting ideals trump a paycheck. 

Return to Glory

There are 21 days until we know the fate of the republic. And so must I emerge from a long bloggy dormancy to chronicle these precious three weeks from my unique perch in my once-in-a-generation voice. Because history demands it.