I have maintained a consistent posture of not caring who wins the presidential election — but during the last debate, I had moments where I viscerally wanted Trump to win. (I have never felt that way about Hillary Clinton.)

One of them was where he talked about how ugly Hillary Clinton’s views are on abortion. He was inarticulate and ill-informed, but the basic idea was there, and was true: there are literally no restrictions on what she would accept.

Another was listening to her lie about the Second Amendment. She pretended to be in favor of the individual right to bear arms. She was lying, and it was obvious.

It was almost enough for me to forget what a cretin Trump is. How little I trust him. How I think he would promote leftism.

I just wanted her to lose. And to have a hope at conservatism for the next four years.

I think that’s how a lot of you feel. I just don’t think, on reflection, that it’s realistic.

Each side gets a turn. If we take our turn with Trump, that’s it for the next 12-16 years. We’ll waste four to eight years with his bullshit, and then get four to eight years of a Democrat, and real conservatism will never happen in my lifetime.

If he goes down in flames, we keep our heads down, and in four years, maybe we’ll get four to eight years of a turn that actually matters.

In the end, console yourself with this thought: it doesn’t matter what Patterico thinks. It doesn’t matter what I think. What is going to happen is going to happen. It’s not like you have a say in how you’re ruled.

Right?

Do you feel better now? Good.

UPDATE: In case I was not clear: the feeling was brief and quickly passed.

The Trump name, which is Donald Trump’s primary business asset, is now so toxic that his company is running away from it as fast as possible. Travel and Leisure reports:

Amidst reports that occupancy rates at Trump Hotels have slipped this election season, the company has announced that new brand hotels will no longer bear the Trump name.

The newest line of luxury hotels, geared towards millennials, will be called Scion, the company said.

“We wanted a name that would be a nod to the Trump family and to the tremendous success it has had with its businesses, including Trump Hotels, while allowing for a clear distinction between our luxury and lifestyle brands,” Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger said in a statement.

Although Trump Hotels has said the new name has nothing to do with the eponymous businessman’s presidential campaign, empty rooms at the hotels have caused officials “to reduce rates during the peak season,” according to New York Magazine.

Millenials don’t like Donald Trump? You don’t say!

The company has experienced genuine difficulty since Trump announced his presidential bid:

Nightly rates at the newly-opened Trump International Hotel in D.C. plummeted below $500 while practically every other five-star property was sold out for the International Monetary Fund conference two weeks ago. And after his remarks about Mexican immigrants, two celebrity chefs backed out of their contracts to open a restaurant in the hotel.

According to Hipmunk, bookings at Trump Hotels plummeted 59 percent during the first half of 2016 and data from Foursquare shows a 17 percent drop in foot traffic at Trump properties since June 2015, when the reality TV star announced his presidential bid.

I can personally attest to being one person who actively avoids Trump properties. As I wrote this, I am looking out the window of my home down at a Donald Trump golf course, far down the hill. In the past, when guests would come into town, we would often take them to breakfast at the restaurant on that property. Then we would go for a walk in the park and hike down to the beach. It never really occurred to me that I might be putting money in Donald Trump’s pocket.

Since late 2015, we have gone elsewhere. I’m not saying we’ll never go there again. We might. But we might not. The idea of giving Trump even a dime of my money has so far outweighed the pleasure we might get from eating there. (And it’s a public park, and we can still hike to the ocean there without spending anything.)

Well, the brand name will catch fire once Donald Trump is elected president.

Stop laughing!

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

Jennifer Haberkorn has a piece at POLITICO that, as far as I can tell, is billed as a news piece by the site’s “senior health care reporter for POLITICO Pro.” However, with its loaded language, its built-in assumption that Obamacare is a good law, and its open hostility towards Republicans, it could have been written by any flack at the DNC.

I thought it might be a useful exercise in identifying media bias to take this piece apart and examine its loaded language. I’ll note at least some of that language in bold below.

GOP rebuffs Obama’s entreaties to fix health law

President Barack Obama on Thursday called for Republicans next year to pass legislation to repair Obamacare. The GOP response? No.

Democrats have long held out hope that with a new president, the political winds would shift, creating an opening to pass badly needed legislative repairs.

But Republicans have been bashing Obamacare for more than six years and there is no sign that they’re going to break that habit — let alone vote for legislative repairs. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that the law “can’t be fixed.”

Already, we are told that the legislation is “badly needed” to “repair” a law that “Republicans have been bashing.” The idea that Obamacare was a bad idea to begin with, and that the only “repair” is outright repeal, is apparently a view so out of the question, it does not even occur to this reporter that anyone could believe it.

And yet, the problems with Obamacare are legion, and familiar to most on the right. Indeed, the law’s deficiencies are outlined in the earlier chapters of an excellent book called The Primal Prescription, by Robert P. Murphy and Doug McGuff. If an entire book is too much, the problems with the law that were predicted by free market economists are outlined by Murphy in this 2013 article, and include spikes in premiums, people losing their plans, and job losses:

We are now seeing many of the undesirable effects of the ACA. These are typically being described as “unintended.” However, this adjective is a bit of a misnomer, since these outcomes were entirely predictable, and in fact were predicted by many free-market economists in the debate leading up to the passage of the ACA. Cynics can justifiably speculate that at least some of the proponents of the ACA knew full well the outcome would be untenable, leading the public to embrace even more federal intervention in health care down the road.

The most obvious result is a large spike in premiums for many people, once the mandates on health coverage are fully phased in.

. . . .

Another predictable outcome is that many Americans will not be able to keep their previous plan. Millions of Americans who bought insurance in the individual market (i.e., not via their employer) will find that their plan doesn’t meet the standards of ObamaCare.

. . . .

Besides rate hikes (and ultimately, government rationing of medical care), another major downside of the ACA is the job losses it will cause.

The only solution for all this is not “badly needed repairs” but full repeal. As soon as possible. But the clueless Haberkorn plows on nonetheless:

Republicans are almost gleeful when talking about all of Obamacare’s problems: Many insurers have left the exchanges, premiums in some parts of the country are going up dramatically, and most of the co-ops have failed.

All as predicted. And yet we are sourly informed that “Republicans are almost gleeful” — and isn’t that just appalling, Jeeves, given that we have such a wonderful law that has done such great things?

The political problem for Republicans, though, is that the law has dramatically reduced the number of uninsured — from 16 percent in 2010 to 9.1 percent last year. Real Americans are getting health insurance for the first time because of Obamacare.

“The Affordable Care Act has done what it was designed to do,” Obama said Thursday.

The phrase “real Americans are getting health insurance for the first time because of Obamacare” is phrasing that any DNC flack would love to have penned herself. Again, though, this is billed as a news piece by a news reporter.

Of course, real Americans are also losing their jobs, losing their health care plans, and losing their money as premiums skyrocket — while Obamacare’s “benefits” primarily result from an expansion of Medicaid, which has notoriously been ineffective at improving health outcomes — and is often worse than no coverage at all.

In summary: how dare Republicans not repair a terrible law that is causing unemployment, skyrocketing premiums, and little to nothing to actually help people stay healthy.

Those damned Republicans.

P.S. I am breaking my usual rule about linking POLITICO in this post, because the cached link does not contain all the language I wanted to quote, and I’m willing to provide a link to the full piece for the purpose of showing its bias.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

Donald Trump was booed at the Al Smith Dinner last night — a fundraiser for Catholic charities helping children. Politicians often attend these dinners and tell self-deprecating jokes and point fun at their opponents. But at a certain point, Trump just wasn’t funny — and it hurt to watch.

Here’s the video of Trump’s remarks. The bad times begin around 9:59:

Here’s a transcript of where Trump started to run into trouble:

Now, I’m told Hillary went to confession before tonight’s event, but the priest was having a hard time, when he asked about her sins, and she said she couldn’t remember 39 times.
(LAUGHTER)

Hillary is so corrupt, she got kicked off the Watergate Commission.

(BOOING)

How corrupt do you have to be to get kicked off the Watergate Commission? Pretty corrupt.

Hillary is, and has been, in politics since the 70s. What’s her pitch? The economy is busted? The government’s corrupt? Washington is failing? “Vote for me. I’ve been working on these problems for 30 years. I can fix it”, she says.

I wasn’t really sure if Hillary was going to be here tonight, because I guess you didn’t send her invitation by email. Or, maybe, you did and she just found out about it through the wonder of WikiLeaks.

(LAUGHTER)

We’ve learned so much from WikiLeaks. For example, Hillary believes that it’s vital to deceive the people by having one public policy —

(BOOING)

— and a totally different policy in private. That’s okay. I don’t know who they’re angry at Hillary, you or I. For example, here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics.

Now some of you haven’t noticed, Hillary isn’t laughing as much as the rest of us. [Editorial note: nobody was laughing at this point.] That’s because she knows the jokes. And all of the jokes were given to her in advance of the dinner by Donna Brazile. Which is – everyone knows, of course, Hillary’s belief that it takes a village, which only makes sense after all in places like Haiti, where she’s taken a number of them.

(BOOING)

The second he called her “corrupt,” this is the scene. Check the dude on the right side of the screen:

It was . . . awkward. I felt bad for Trump, the way you do when you watch any comic bomb. I didn’t think he was intending to be nasty, necessarily. The ethic at this thing is, you tell some jokes at your expense, and some at your opponent’s expense. Trump’s sin wasn’t so much that he was criticizing Hillary as that, at this particular moment, he wasn’t being funny. I wonder if maybe these were the jokes he had written for himself. I watched his entire performance — and hers too — and they both had some good lines written for them. Here are some of Trump’s that worked well:

And even tonight, with all of the heated back and forth, between my opponent and me at the debate last night, we have proven that we can actually be civil to each other. In fact, just before taking the dais, Hillary accidentally bumped into me and she very civilly said, “Pardon me.”

And I very politely replied, “Let me talk to you about that after I get into office.”

. . . .

You know, last night, I called Hillary a “nasty woman,” but this stuff is all relative. After listening to Hillary rattle on and on and on, I don’t think so badly of Rosie O’Donnell anymore.

These two were my favorites:

These events give not only the candidates a chance to be with each other in a very social setting; it also allows the candidates the opportunity to meet the other candidate’s team — good team.

I know Hillary met my campaign manager, and I got the chance to meet the people who are working so hard to get her elected. There they are — the heads of NBC, CNN, CBS, ABC — there’s the New York Times, right over there, and the Washington Post.

. . . .

Oh, this one’s going to get me in trouble.

Not with Hillary. You know, the president told me to stop whining, but I really have to say, the media is even more biased this year than ever before — ever. You want the proof? Michelle Obama gives a speech and everyone loves it — it’s fantastic. They think she’s absolutely great. My wife, Melania, gives the exact same speech —

— and people get on her case!

Those were genuinely funny, and people laughed. Hillary had some good lines written for her too — and while she delivered them in that annoying Hillary way, I still laughed at a few things:

And, Donald, after listening to your speech, I will also enjoy listening to Mike Pence deny that you ever gave it.

. . . .

Now, you notice there is no teleprompter here tonight, which is probably smart, because maybe you saw Donald dismantle his prompter the other day. And I get that. They’re hard to keep up with, and I’m sure it’s even harder when you’re translating from the original Russian.

. . . .

And look at this dais — we’ve got Charlie Rose, and Maria Bartiromo, and Chris Matthews, and Gayle King, and Nora O’Donnell, and Katie Couric — this counts as a press conference, right?

. . . .

There is nothing like sharing a stage with Donald Trump. Donald wanted me drug tested before last night’s debate. And look, I’ve got to tell you, I am so flattered that Donald thought I used some sort of performance enhancer.

Now, actually, I did. It’s called preparation.

. . . .

Now, look, I have deep respect for people like Kellyanne Conway. She’s working day and night for Donald and because she’s a contractor, he’s probably not even going to pay her.

Not everyone was amused. She told this joke about Rudy Giuliani

Now, many don’t know this, but Rudy actually got his start as a prosecutor going after wealthy New Yorkers who avoided paying taxes. But, as the saying goes, “If you can’t beat them, go on Fox News and call them a genius.”

Here was his reaction:

None of this is going to change anyone’s vote. Trump voters probably didn’t watch this — and if they hear that a bunch of elites in tuxes booed Trump, especially for criticizing Hillary, so much the better.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]