Beauty pageant contestant ordered to pay Donald Trump $5 million.

Former Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin inopportunely asserted that the Miss USA pageant was "rigged."

Donald Trump says he's suing Bill Maher for $5 million after Trump accepted his offer, making a valid contract.

The "offer," made last month, was to "pay $5 million to Trump’s charity of choice if he provided a birth certificate proving that he’s not 'spawn of his mother having sex with orangutan.'"

Maher was comically commenting on Trump's offer to pay $5 million to Obama's charity of choice if Obama releases his college records.

This lawsuit news is, of course, Trump, once again, hogging — orangutanning — the media spotlight. Fine. I don't care. But to actually file a lawsuit is: 1. An offense against free speech, and 2. An irresponsible appropriation of the public wealth that will be consumed processing the lawsuit.

“I don’t think he was joking. He said it with venom. That was venom. That wasn’t a joke. In fact, he was nervous when he said it. It was a pathetic delivery,” Trump said on Fox News.

Speaking of pathetic... go away, Donald. And take your hair with you when you leave. 

Wait. Is this all Trump was talking about?

Or is there some other thing, withheld? This is completely stupid and amounts to nothing. (Trump offering to give $5 million to charity if Obama releases his birth certificate, college records, and passport application.) I can't believe this clown is given attention for that, and I wonder if this is all he had all along or if the rumored story about cocaine dealing or divorce were in the works and, when the rumor smoked out too much negativity, Trump cooked up this new nonsense.

Trump's teaser was "I have something very, very big concerning the President of the United States." "Have" suggested some item of evidence damaging to Obama, but if you look closely at the words now, you can see he might always only have meant what we're hearing now. He has something concerning the President. Not something on the President.

What idiocy! What a waste of time!

MEANWHILE: Gloria Allred is still at large.

Is Trump's bombshell old divorce papers of Michelle and Barack Obama?

That's what the Daily Mail is rumoring. Unless there is a revelation of some significant misbehavior, this isn't big at all. It mainly makes Trump look small. And it's not helpful to Romney's cause for Trump to claim the spotlight, in the last 2 weeks of the campaign, over this.

Who cares about the internal workings of a political marriage? I always assume there's some phony PR to it. But the fact is they are together, they've played the public role of married couple, and they have 2 very real little girls who don't deserve to be hurt. And because of that, Trump's news, if this is what it is, will only make moderate, middle-of-the road voters feel compassion for Obama.

Trump should crawl back into his hole right now, before he does any damage.

Is this Trump's impending bombshell?

"Operatives close to the Romney campaign were contacted and rejected the information..."

“They didn’t want anything to do with it,” the source said. “They thought it was not anything they wanted to be associated with or anything their candidate would want to be associated with.”...

“The operatives close to the Romney campaign believed the man’s story would be the ultimate October Surprise but they got nowhere. People who would have taken the information to the highest levels of Romney’s campaign just wouldn’t touch it."

That's at Radar, linked in the top of the center column at Drudge with the teaser: "Romney says no to Obama cocaine hit..."

Meanwhile, Trump himself is teasing that he's got a "bombshell" he's releasing on Wednesday. It's "something very, very big... It's going to be very big. I know one thing - you will cover it in a very big fashion." It's "large, bordering on gigantic." So, I get it... huge, immense size.

"Donald Trump to endorse Mitt Romney for president today in Las Vegas, sources with knowledge of endorsement tell CNN."

Email just received.

Trump's a businessman. He can see who the winner is, and he's backing the winner. Rumors were that he was going to endorse Gingrich, as if Trump is all about conservatism (and Newt constitutes the conservative). Not so!

Donald Trump hurt Karl Rove's feelings.

"'Sloppy looking . . . hack . . . bad person . . . so-called pundit" — that's what he called me, snivels Rove in the Wall Street Journal.

Remember when Rove was the evil genius? When did he go all beta and start worrying that one of the other boys was calling him a bad person?

Trump...

... pulls out.

Reince Priebus on the Trump debate.

"I think that having a successful businessman serving as a moderator has a lot of value. But the issue here is whether the moderator should still be a person who’s still batting around the idea of running as an independent. I think that should give some of these candidates some concern."

Some concern. Please, it's absurd for a potential candidate to moderate a debate.

"Donald Trump Mulls Third-Party Bid as He Enjoys GOP Kingmaker Role."

According to the Wall Street Journal.

If that's his attitude, he should not be moderating a debate!

Donald Trump will moderate the Dec. 27th Republican debate.

How very strange... but interesting!

Trump won't run.

I'm posting about this for some reason, even though I didn't see the point of posting that Huckabee won't run. What does a man have to do to get attention for not doing something?

Trump...

... slump.

Trump on same-sex marriage: "It's like in golf... people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive."

Okay, it's an analogy, you know!

At one point, he compared his opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage to his reluctance to use a new kind of putter.

“It’s like in golf,” he said. “A lot of people — I don’t want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive,” said Mr. Trump, a Republican. “It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.”

He said that, should he run, he would offer himself as a “conservative with a big heart.”

Now, do you understand the analogy, wise guy? Before you get your panties in a twist? Think about it!

What's his main point? He's saying it just looks weird to him — the long putter and the same-sex marriage. It bugs him. He's not saying he hates gay people. It's the casual "I hate it" that means "It drives me nuts." Now, it's not all about him and how things make him feel — not if he means to acquire political power. (Which I'm sure he doesn't, even though he's saying he's decided "in my mind" to run for President. Or is it that he's decided to run for President in his mind?)

Anyway, I think that putter thing is rather self-deprecating. He's confessing that his mind has limits, but he sees and talks openly about the limits of his mind. That's actually refreshing!

Mayor Bloomberg's plan to repopulate Detroit: Let in immigrants — but they have to agree to stay in Detroit.

On "Meet the Press" today, a propos of nothing David Gregory asked and with zero follow-up from Gregory, Bloomberg came out with this:

This is a country that was built by immigrants, this is a country that became a superpower by--because of its immigrant population. And unless we continue to have immigrants, we cannot maintain as a superpower.

And I'll give you a good example of how you can fix some of the problems in America. Take a look at the big old industrial cities--Detroit, for example. Got a great mayor in Mayor Bing. But the population has left. You got to do something about that. And if I were the federal government, assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five or 10 years, start businesses, take jobs, whatever. You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here. We forget, we, we whip ourselves a little bit too much. We still are the world's greatest democracy. We still have hope for--if you want to have a better life for yourself and your kids, this is where you want to come. And you could use something like immigration policy, at no cost to the federal government, to fix a lot of the problems that we have.

We've been talking about this over in the Tree Bud Café. Irene said:

I thought this was very odd. "Gulag" came to mind.

Freeman Hunt said:

I'd comment on the Bloomberg comment, but it's hard to type with my jaw sitting on the keyboard.

Irene said:

Freeman, that was my reaction. Imagine if Donald Trump or Sarah Palin had said it....

Blooomberg = Trump after Finishing School.

Bloomberg has the Mr. Moderation act, but underneath it, perhaps he's out of his mind.

Obama was pretty funny at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

And the media would like us to believe he stuck it to Trump:



Hey, it's a victory for Trump that the President talked about him at all, and he talked about him a lot. And all these stories about how grim and grumpy Trump looked? Trump always has a grumpy expression on his face. I detected more of a shadow of a smile than usual.

Donald Trump, redefining presidential, sublimely entertaining, or...

... fucking stupid?

During a 30-minute stump speech focused mostly on foreign affairs, Trump blasted Obama's handling of Libya, Iraq, China and Afghanistan, and in one of his many curse-bombs, he lamented the nation's focus on building schools in war-torn Iraq, while neglecting education in the United States.

"In the meantime we can't get a f---ing school in Brooklyn," he said.

He also cursed the spike in gas prices: "We have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, you're not going to raise that f---ing price."

Trump even dropped what's considered the most offensive f-bomb when he promised to use swear words while negotiating with China.

"Listen you mother f---ers, we're going to tax you 25 percent," he said.

Trump also sprinkled in a number of insults directed toward the nation's leaders.

"Our leaders are stupid, they are stupid people," he said. "It's just very, very sad."

He knows what he's doing, but do we?

ADDED: It looks and sounds like this:



The audience loved it.

The NYT calls the "birther" issue "a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones."

The editors want to make sure you see the issue as racial:

[T]he birther question was never really about citizenship; it was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president’s legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race....

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

Inconceivable? Really?

There was a price to the party for keeping the issue alive; inevitably, it was picked up by a cartoon candidate, Donald Trump, who rode birtherism directly to the prime-time promontories of cable TV. The Republican establishment began to wince as it became increasingly tied to Mr. Trump’s flirtations with racial provocation, and Karl Rove told him to knock it off.

Oh! The evil Karl Rove is back... seemingly as a measure of how much more evil the birthers are.

"... Obama's political handlers decided to cauterize The Donald sideshow with a nifty piece of political choreography..."

"...releasing the 'long-form' birth certificate the very day Trump was wooing voters in New Hampshire."

Says The Daily News, crediting Obama with brilliant timing. Given the pro-Obama slant to the article, the poll in the sidebar over there has 74% of poll-takers saying the "birther" controversy is not over. Screen cap, just now:

"The White House released President Obama's original birth certificate Wednesday."

"The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether the president was born in the United States."

Trump gets results. So... is there anything surprising on it to suggest why this controversy wasn't nipped in the bud?

ADDED: See it and marvel!!!

AND: So it says "Certificate of Live Birth" at the top. Is this still the "short form" and not the "long form" that the "birthers" say they want?

ALSO: This is — according to the NYT — the "long form."

“Over the last two and a half years, I have watched with bemusement,” [Obama] said in brief remarks. “I’ve been puzzled by the degree to which this thing just kept on going.”

Mr. Obama said there would be a “segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.” But he said that he was “speaking to the vast majority of the American people as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”

Extra points to Obama for correct use of (a form of) the frequently misused word "bemused."

AND: Let me answer my own question. I'd say, the reason Obama did not release the long-form birth certificate before is that he thought it was to his advantage to allow other people to look bad or crazy in one way or another by going on in the birtherist mode. But there was a tipping point, as Trump got traction and polls showed huge numbers of Americans entertaining doubts. So, it was all political strategy. You could criticize Obama for wasting our time by not just releasing the damned thing earlier. But he could have thought it was demeaning to have to do this, so I'm inclined to give him a pass.