Top 10 Weird and Unusual Uses for Toothpaste

While at the hair dressers the other day I was trying to explain how my hair just wont rest and often looks wild, and she told me that her husbands hair is the same, but he “tames” it with toothpaste! And if you thought that was a strange use for toothpaste, check this lot out…

Top 10 Weird and Unusual Uses for Toothpaste

10 – Dinner Mints

Now I am all for trying to save money here and there, but when it comes to after dinner treats that are made from freezing a tube of Aquafresh toothpaste and then slicing it into bite size treats I just feel it is taking money saving too far. Just get a cheap bag of humbugs instead .


Previous←                                                                                                  Next→   

Jesus wept: How can you call yourself a Christian if you voted for Donald Trump?

One of the hallmarks of Christian faith is charity, which is unfortunate for me, because, as a cradle Christian (and, lately, a recovering agnostic), I’ve been feeling less than charitable since Donald Trump won the presidential election. I don’t mean that I’m not in the spirit of giving to charities — I’ll be writing out a whopper of a check to the American Civil Liberties Union presently.

I am, however, having trouble giving the gift of slack to Christians who voted for Trump. According to a preliminary study of exit poll data by Pew Research Group, Trump won 52 percent of the Catholic vote, 58 percent of the Protestant vote, and, broken down further by race, a whopping 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote.

If you’re a Christian who voted for Trump, I understand your concerns — jobs, the economy, health care, national security, frustration with the political status quo. What I don’t understand is your heart. All factors considered, were Trump’s calls for massive deportation of immigrants, along with his anti-Semitic dog whistling, racist commentary, documented history of misogyny and his mocking of the vulnerable, worth overlooking in favor of his shaky promises to make things better in your world? If, as Christians, we’re supposed to love our neighbor, a vote for Trump seems a little suspect. Am I wrong? If so, tell me how.

When asked whether he thought his incendiary campaign rhetoric had gone too far, Trump responded, “No. I won.” What a guy. Now he’s staffing up with his own (unqualified) family and a website publisher who’s been accused of beating his wife and channeling white-supremacist ideology. In the space of two weeks, it feels as if we’ve shifted from a democracy to a triage center. Jesus wept.

Not all Christians were pro-Trump, of course. My sister, who has been a Presbyterian minister for almost 30 years, texted me when she found out in the wee morning hours of Nov. 9 that Trump had won, “God help us.” The New York Times feature last Sunday on post-election sermons features more than one pastor in clear distress. Minister Mihee Kim-Kort wrote on her blog, “We lost something on November 9th. More than an election. Something – call it humanity, compassion, hope – faltered and perished, and something in me, too.”

Still, to put it in theological terms, I’m pissed. I can’t stand the postelection suffering around me — more than one person I know has broken out in shingles from stress. Migraines and insomnia are the norm. Virtually everyone I know is walking around in a state of panic, dread and low-level rage. Including me.

Things that have made me angry: People smiling and saying, “Everything will be OK.” Anyone who suggests that we “get over it” or “wait and see what he does.” I was even angry at Anne Lamott because I thought her heartfelt postelection Facebook message was too soft. Our wise, comforting, radical-caregiving sister Annie! Being mad at Anne Lamott is like drop kicking a teddy bear. I need to get a grip.

It helps to maintain awareness that even among us huggy, lovey, Jesus-y types, resistance is afoot. In The Washington Post, Sarah Pulliam Bailey reported on a deepening divide within the evangelical Christian community, exacerbated by the election. She quoted Eugene Cho, the pastor of an evangelical church in Seattle: “The election has made things more hostile or given permission to people to be more aggressive on both sides.”

She also reported that Cho, who pledged to never endorse a candidate from the pulpit, joined a group of evangelicals who condemning Trump, arguing that his campaign “affirms racist elements in white culture.” The letter, which was also backed by about 80 other pastors and faith leaders, Pulliam wrote, “decried Trump’s comments on women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees and the disabled.”

Some evangelicals, disheartened by the strong turnout for Trump among their purported fellow believers, are prepared to jump ship entirely. Writer and activist Preston Yancey tweeted on election night: “So I guess I’m not an evangelical. Because I’m not whatever the hell this is.”

If it reassures me, perhaps it’s similarly comforting to nonreligious folk to know that while some Christians see Trump as America’s Great White Hope, the rest of us see an Anglo-Saxon pharisee with a spray tan. The fantastic tweet stream of the Rev. Broderick Greer, an Episcopalian priest, is a glorious model of righteous fire: “If it’s not good news for refugees, LGBTQ folks, and women — and people living at all of those intersections — it’s not the gospel of Jesus,” reads one tweet. Another declares, “To plaster ‘Jesus’ on heterosexism, sexism, racism, classism, militarism, or transantagonism is to betray all that he did and is.”

Calls to conformity are among the great pitfalls of organized religion, and it didn’t take more than a day after Trump’s win for a number of Christians on social media to issue a mandate to seek unity. Aristotle Papanikolaou, co-director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, issued a thoughtful rebuttal to the exhortation to blindly unite. “What Christians must avoid most is . . . a politics of dualism, a politics of us vs. them, a politics of demonization,” he wrote.

Donald Trump and the Ku Klux Klan: A History

or months, as Donald Trump developed his political repertoire, he adopted an uncharacteristic reply for questions about fascism and the Ku Klux Klan: silence, or something close to it.

 He used the technique as early as last August, when his opponents, and the press, still generally regarded him as a summer amusement. On August 26th, the Bloomberg Television anchor John Heilemann brought up David Duke, the former Klan Grand Wizard, who had said that Trump was “the best of the lot” in the 2016 campaign. Trump replied that he had no idea who Duke was. Heilemann asked if Trump would repudiate Duke’s endorsement. “Sure,” Trump said, “if that would make you feel better, I would certainly repudiate. I don’t know anything about him.” Changing tack, Heilemann pressed Trump about an article in this magazine, which described Trump’s broad support among neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and other members of the far right who were drawn in by his comments about Mexicans. Trump maintained a posture of indifference. “Honestly, John, I’d have to read the story. A lot of people like me.” The interview moved on to other topics.

It should be noted that Trump’s unfamiliarity with Duke is a recent condition. In 2000, Trump issued a statement that he was no longer considering a run for President with the backing of the Reform Party, partly because it “now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke.”

Throughout last fall and into the winter, Trump continued to accumulate support among white nationalists. In November, on a weekend in which he said that a black protester, at a rally in Alabama, deserved to be “roughed up,” Trump retweeted a graphic composed of false racist statistics on crime; the graphic, it was discovered, originated from a neo-Nazi account that used as its profile image a variation on the swastika. In January, he retweeted the account “@WhiteGenocideTM,” which identified its location as “Jewmerica.” Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, a pro-Trump robocall featured several white supremacists, including the author Jared Taylor, who told voters, “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people.” Each time Trump was asked on Twitter about his white nationalist supporters, the candidate, who is ready to respond, day or night, to critics of his debating style or his golf courses, simply ignored the question.

Only under special circumstances did Trump summon a forceful response on matters of the Klan: in January, BoingBoing unearthed a newspaper report from 1927 on the arraignment of a man with the name and address of Donald Trump’s father; the story was about attendees of a Klan rally who fought with police, though it wasn’t clear from the story why the Trump in the piece was arrested. Asked about it, Donald Trump denied that his father had had any connection to a Klan rally. “It’s a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took place.”

But recently, as Trump’s campaign has received much belated closer scrutiny, his reliable approach to the Klan problem has faltered. On Thursday, Duke offered his strongest support for the candidate yet, telling radio listeners that a vote for one of Trump’s rivals would be “treason to your heritage.” The next day, when Trump had hoped to focus on his endorsement by Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, a reporter shouted a question about Duke’s embrace, and Trump said, “David Duke endorsed me? O.K., all right, I disavow. O.K.?” For the moment, it worked, and the press conference moved on. Christie, in fact, bore the brunt of the Duke association: he appeared on the front page of the Daily News on Saturday, as the “MAN WITH A KLAN,” with his picture beside a group of hooded Klansmen. In a different spirit, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi news site that long ago endorsed Trump, awarded Christie the title “Heroic Deputy.” (Christie’s overnight evolution from trashing Trump to obeying him repulsed even the political class, a group that is usually more forgiving of self-rationalization. The technology executive Meg Whitman, who had been one of Christie’s top backers, called his alliance with Trump “an astonishing display of political opportunism,” and asked Christie’s donors and supporters “to reject the governor and Donald Trump outright.”)

Over the weekend, Trump’s purported indifference to support from white supremacists and fascists became an inescapable problem. He had retweeted a Mussolini quote from @ilduce2016 (which, it turned out, was an account created by Gawker to trap Trump)—“It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep”—and, when asked, on NBC, if he wanted to associate himself with Mussolini, he said that he wanted “to be associated with interesting quotes.” He added, “Mussolini was Mussolini. . . . What difference does it make?” On CNN, Jake Tapper pressed him about David Duke, and Trump, seeming to forget that he had given a one-line disavowal, reverted to a position of theatrical incomprehension: “Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, O.K.?” Tapper asked three times if Trump would denounce the Klan’s support, and each time Trump declined. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists,” he said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know—did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.”

By Monday, less than twenty-four hours before primary voting on Super Tuesday, his non-answers about the Klan were creating a crisis, and Trump introduced a new explanation: audio trouble. “I’m sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece that they gave me, and you could hardly hear what he was saying,” he said on the “Today” show. “But what I heard was various groups, and I don’t mind disavowing anybody, and I disavowed David Duke and I disavowed him the day before at a major news conference, which is surprising because he was at the major news conference, CNN was at the major news conference, and they heard me very easily disavow David Duke.”

There may be no better measure of the depravity of this campaign season than the realization that it’s not clear whether Trump’s overt appreciation for fascism, and his sustained salute to American racists, will have a positive or negative effect on his campaign. For now, his opponents are rejoicing. Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, pronounced him “unelectable.” Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, called Trump’s comments “just horrific.” But it is by now a truism to note that Trump has survived pratfalls that other politicians have not. A surprisingly large portion of Americans believed him when he pushed a racist campaign denying the birthplace of Barack Obama; a comparably chilling portion of Americans were attracted when he called Mexicans rapists. By the end of the day on Sunday, he had received the endorsement of Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, the first sitting senator officially to line up with Trump. Sessions was not likely to be bothered by Trump’s flirtations with the Klan. In 1986, he was rejected from a federal judgeship after saying that he thought the Klan was “O.K. until I learned they smoked pot.”

In the weeks to come, Trump is virtually guaranteed to accumulate additional endorsements from politicians like Christie and Sessions, who have divined their interests in drafting behind the strongest candidate for the Republican nomination. Whether driven by fear of irrelevance or attracted by the special benefits of being an early adopter, Christie seemed compelled to do it, and now the remnant of his political reputation is going from a solid to a gas. But the true obscenity of his decision, and those of other Trumpists, may take years to be fully appreciated. In an editorial last week, the Washington Post declared that “history will not look kindly on GOP leaders who fail to do everything in their power to prevent a bullying demagogue from becoming their standard-bearer.” That’s true, but history will judge even more harshly those who stand with Trump now that it is indefensibly clear with whom they are standing.

Donald Trump Exposed as Member of the KKK by Anonymous !

Several prominent US Senators and mayors have been outed as members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other racist groups by the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and the group hints that more politicians and public figures will be named in the near future.

Anonymous names US Senators Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), John Cornyn (R-Tx.), Dan Coats (R-In.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) as members of the KKK. Anonymous also outed several mayors of major US cities, including Madeline Rogero of Knoxville, Tennessee; Jim Gray of Lexington, Kentucky; Paul D. Fraim of Norfolk, Virginia; Kent Guinn of Ocala, Florida; and Tom Henry of Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

But in the grand finale Anonymous named none other than Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. They listed him as being with a well known underground New York chapter “The Original Folks Klansmen 333” or OFK333 have been around since they began in 1933 and have been said to have contributed millions to his current campaign. The leader of the OFK333 “Grandmaster Bruce Lane” who they worship as a God is said to have never been seen in person but pulls all the strings. It is well documented that Trumps father was an active member so it’s really not surprising that he followed in his footsteps.

Mr. Trump was asked about being exposed in an interview and he said:

“Everyone knows my dad was a Klansmen and it runs in the family but Look people…just because I’m an active KKK member doesn’t mean I’m a racist, I mean if Obama is a Muslim then why can’t I be apart of a brotherhood and have pride in my white heritage? If Obama shows me his birth certificate I will disassociate myself with the Klan, they do a lot of good for my community just like the people of Islam do on Obama’s behalf”

Clinton gives her take on Sanders supporters in leaked fundraising recording

Hacked audio of a conversation between Hillary Clinton and donors during a February fundraising event shows the Democrat nominee describing Bernie Sanders supporters as "children of the Great Recession" who are "living in their parents’ basement."

Speaking at a Virginia fundraiser hosted by former U.S. ambassador Beatrice Welters, Clinton says in a clip released by the Free Beacon that many of her former primary opponent's supporters sought things like “free college, free health care,” saying that she preferred to occupy the space "from the center-left to the center-right" on the political spectrum. 

During the conversation, Clinton confesses to feeling "bewildered" by those to her far-left and far-right in the election.

"There is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates," she said. "And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel."

While stressing the need to not serve as a "wet blanket on idealism," Clinton paints fans of the then-surging Vermont senator as political newbies attempting to deal with an economy that has fallen short of their expectations.

"Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement," she said. "They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future."

Clinton added: "If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing."

"I think we all should be really understanding of that," Clinton said.

The audio, which according to the Free Beacon was "revealed by hackers who breached the email account of a campaign staffer," surfaces the same week that Sanders hit the campaign trail to try to win those same young voters that Clinton has struggled to attract since clinching the Democratic nomination.

Young Mom Born With Virtually No Muscles Gives Birth To Miraclulous Baby

one could ever dispute that having a baby is no small or easy feat. It’s a round the clock job that requires tons of love, a lot of feeding, and many sleepless nights.

 

Sheree Psaila has spent her entire life defying expectations, based on her extremely rare condition.

Having been born with rthrogryposis multiplex congenita, meaning she has no muscle tissue in her arms or legs, her parents were warned that she wouldn’t live past her first birthday.

After 20 fairly unsuccessful surgeries, doctors suggested that she be put in a wheelchair and sent to study at a special needs school.
But she wanted to walk and took her first steps at age five, determined to rise past everyone’s bullying and low expectations and lead a normal life.

While studying at Tafe, Psaila met Chris, who has a hereditary condition that affects his lower spine. 
The two got married in March 2015, and were eager to try and start a family.

They first suffered through a miscarriage, but the loving couple preserved emotionally and went on to have a surprisingly successful pregnancy.
“The doctors told me I probably wouldn’t be able to have kids, although they didn’t give me a reason why not,” she said. 

At barely four feet tall, doctors considered it nothing short of a miracle that the baby was able to grow the fully inside Psaila.
After moving to Melbourne with Chris, she gave birth via a cesarean section.

There little baby Hayden was born being five and half pounds and completely healthy.
He has no disabilities or hereditary conditions.

The couple’s miracle baby is true testament to their strength and spirit, though the hard parts of parenthood are just beginning.

Because of her muscles, Psaila has a difficult time being able to tend to her baby and can barely hold him up.

Fortunately, she gets help from a carer who comes five days a week to help out with baby, though her husband is definitely takes primary care of him. 
“When we go swimming, I want to be able to hold him in the pool and do all of the stuff that Chris does with him,” she explained. 

See Also : 

 

Arizona Republic Backs First Democrat in 126-Year History With Mic Drop Endorsement of Hillary Clinton

The Arizona Republic newspaper has never, in its 126-year history, endorsed a Democrat for president—until Tuesday. The staunchly conservative editorial board of the reliably red state daily stressed its “deep philosophical appreciation for conservative ideals and Republican principles” before it noted “this year is different” and declared its support for Hillary Clinton for president. “The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified,” the endorsement reads. “That’s why, for the first time in our history, the Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for president.”

The endorsement, while not a full-throated backing of Clinton’s left-leaning policy prescriptions for the country, does not read as a reluctant or half-hearted declaration of support. The editorial board eviscerated Trump, much the same way the Union-Leader and some mainstream Republicans have criticized his bigoted run for the presidency as showing “a stunning lack of human decency, empathy and respect” and for being “beneath our national dignity” before cataloging its unprecedented support for Clinton. The thrust of the editorial board’s support is based on Clinton’s character, decency, temperament, and experience:

 The challenges the United States faces domestically and internationally demand a steady hand, a cool head and the ability to think carefully before acting. Hillary Clinton understands this. Donald Trump does not. Clinton has the temperament and experience to be president. Donald Trump does not. Clinton knows how to compromise and to lead with intelligence, decorum and perspective. She has a record of public service as First Lady, senator and secretary of state. She has withstood decades of scrutiny so intense it would wither most politicians. The vehemence of some of the anti-Clinton attacks strains credulity.

The unusually lengthy endorsement only briefly touches on Clinton’s well-covered mistakes, but then offers a comprehensive point-by-point comparison between the candidates that decimates Trump’s temperament and decision-making, as well as his unhinged foreign policy proposals. The paper also disavowed Trump’s immigration rhetoric and ideas. “Arizona went down the hardline immigration road Trump travels,” the editorial reads. “Arizona understands that we don’t need a repeat of that divisive, unproductive fiasco on the national level.” Here's the kicker:

In a nation with an increasingly diverse population, Trump offers a recipe for permanent civil discord. In a global economy, he offers protectionism and a false promise to bring back jobs that no longer exist. America needs to look ahead and build a new era of prosperity for the working class. This is Hillary Clinton’s opportunity. She can reach out to those who feel left behind. She can make it clear that America sees them and will address their concerns. She can move us beyond rancor and incivility. The Arizona Republic endorses Hillary Clinton for president.

See Also :

Trump Threatens to Skip Remaining Debates If Hillary Is There

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (The Borowitz Report)—Plunging the future of the 2016 Presidential debates into doubt, Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday morning that he would not participate in the remaining two debates if Hillary Clinton is there.

Trump blasted the format of Monday night’s debate by claiming that the presence of Clinton was “specifically designed” to distract him from delivering his message to the American people.

“Every time I said something, she would say something back,” he said. “It was rigged.”

He also lambasted the “underhanded tactics” his opponent used during the debate. “She kept on bringing up things I said or did,” he added. “She is a very nasty person.”

Turning to CNN, Trump criticized the network’s use of a split screen showing both him and Clinton throughout the telecast. “It should have been just me,” he said. “That way people could have seen how really good my temperament is.”

The billionaire said that debate organizers had not yet responded to his ultimatum, but he warned that if he does not get assurances in writing that future debates will be “un-rigged, Hillary-wise,” he will not participate.

“I have said time and time again that I would only do these debates if I am treated fairly,” he added. “The only way I can be guaranteed of being treated fairly is if Hillary Clinton is not there.”

There are five living U.S. presidents. None of them support Donald Trump

Nothing truly prepares you for the Oval Office. You can read about it. You can study it. But until you’ve sat at that desk, you don’t know what it’s like to manage a global crisis.

President Obama

There are only five people alive today who have ever sat behind the Resolute desk. And not a single one of them believes Donald Trump has what it takes to be our next Commander-in-Chief.

 In fact, only Democratic presidents—past and current—have publicly commented on the race. And they all support Hillary Clinton.

Barack Obama, at the Democratic National Convention, went so far as to say that, “There has never been a man or a woman—not me, not Bill, nobody—more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as President of the United States of America.”

 President Clinton didn’t seem to mind:

President Clinton said that Hillary is “uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face,” at the DNC. He went on to call her “the best darn change-maker I have ever known.”

As he put it, “You could drop her into any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way, she will have made it better. That is just who she is.”

And President Jimmy Carter offered a similar assessment: “As you know, Hillary has always shown a willingness to take on the most difficult challenges, and to get things done.” He continued his praise, calling her an advocate of human rights with a “steady hand” and a “strong heart.”

As for our two living former Republican presidents?

Neither showed up to Trump’s convention. Neither have been seen on the campaign trail. And neither is planning on making a presidential endorsement this election cycle.

That’s simply unprecedented. And it speaks volumes.

The first debate featured an unprepared man repeatedly shouting over a highly prepared woman

The first presidential debate featured a man who didn’t know what he was talking about repeatedly shouting over a woman who was extraordinarily prepared.

The debate was a collision between Donald Trump’s politics of dominance and Hillary Clinton’s politics of preparation.

Clinton’s politics of preparation won.

Trump did his best to be fair. He interrupted Clinton 25 times in the debate’s first 26 minutes. He talked over both her and moderator Lester Holt with ease. But the show of dominance quickly ran into a problem: Trump would shout over his interlocutors only to prove he had nothing to say.

Trump’s riffs were dotted by baldfaced lies of the kind the press will easily check, but, more consequentially, he spoke in a barely coherent stream of consciousness. Consider his answer when Holt asked him to defend his proposal to cut taxes on the rich. It’s worth quoting in full:

They are going to expand their companies and do a tremendous job. I'm getting rid of the great thing for the wealthy, it's a great thing for the middle class and for companies to expand and when these people are going to put billions and billions of dollars into companies and when they are going to bring $2.5 trillion back from overseas where they can't bring the money back because politicians like Secretary Clinton won't allow them to bring the money back because the taxes are so onerous and the bureaucratic red tape, it's so bad.

So what they are doing is leaving our country and, believe it or not, they are leaving because taxes are too high and because some of them have lots of money outside of our country and instead of bringing it back and putting the money to work because they can't work out a deal and everybody agrees it should be brought back, instead of that, they are leaving our country to get their money because they can't bring their money back into our country because of bureaucratic red tape, because they can't get together. Because we have a president that can't sit them around a table and get them to approve something, and here's the thing, Republicans and Democrats agree that this should be done. $2.5 trillion.

I happen to think it's double that. It's probably $5 trillion that we can't bring into our country, Lester, and with a little leadership, you'd get it in here very quickly and it could be put to use on the inner cities and lots of other things, and it would be beautiful. But we have no leadership. And honestly, that starts with Secretary Clinton.

There is virtually nothing in this answer that makes any sense.

First, it doesn’t address the original question. Trump has proposed a massive cut in income taxes for the richest Americans. His answer, as best I can parse it, is related to overseas corporate earnings. He seems to be blaming Hillary Clinton for tax rates on overseas corporate income, which is ... a strange thing to blame Clinton for.

But it’s hard to assess what he’s saying, exactly, because his answer is a half-informed ramble from someone who apparently didn’t listen to the original question.

And this just kept happening. Take Trump’s answer on cybersecurity:

As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we're not. I don't know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC.
She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don't know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people. By Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don't know, because the truth is, under President Obama we've lost control of things that we used to have control over. We came in with an internet, we came up with the internet.

And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they're beating us at our own game. ISIS. So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a, it is a huge problem.

I have a son. He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that's true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.

Compare that with what Clinton said on the same subject:

I think cybersecurity, cyber warfare will be one of the greatest challenges facing the next president, because clearly we're facing, at this point, two different kinds adversaries. There are the independent hacking groups that do it mostly for commercial reasons to try to steal information that they then can use to make money. But increasingly, we are seeing cyberattacks coming from states.

The most recent and troubling of these has been Russia. There's no doubt now that Russia has used cyberattacks against all kinds of organizations in our country, and I am deeply concerned about this. I know Donald been very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin.

But Putin is playing a very tough, long game here. And one of the things he's done is to let loose cyberattackers to hack into government files, to personal files, the Democratic National Committee. And we recently learned that this is one of their preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information. We need to make it very clear, whether it's Russia, China, Iran, or anybody else, the United States has much greater capacitty 

And we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information, our private sector information or our public sector information, and we're going to have to make it clear that we don't want to use the kinds of tools that we have. We don't want to engage in a different kind of warfare. But we will defend the citizens of this country, and the Russians need to understand that.

There’s just an astonishing gap in the coherence of these two answers. Neither, in my view, stands as a particularly great answer in the history of presidential debates. But Clinton’s is a basically logical, informed response to an obvious question; Trump’s answer is simply word salad.

Trump’s worst moment on the night came after Holt asked about Trump’s propagation of the conspiracy theory that President Obama was born in Kenya. As you read Trump’s answer, note that he says, in his answer, that he expected this question. This is what you get when Trump prepares.

HOLT: Just want to get the answer here. The birth certificate was produced in 2011. You've continued to tell the story and question the president's legitimacy in 2012, '13, '14, '15 as recently as January. So the question is, what changed your mind?

TRUMP: Well, nobody was pressing it, nobody was caring much about it. I figured you'd ask the question tonight, of course. But nobody was caring much about it. But I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate. And I think I did a good job.

Secretary Clinton also fought it. I mean, you know — now, everybody in mainstream is going to say, oh, that's not true. Look, it's true. Sidney Blumenthal sent a reporter — you just have to take a look at CNN, the last week, the interview with your former campaign manager. And she was involved. But just like she can't bring back jobs, she can't produce.

HOLT: I'm sorry. I'm just going to follow up — and I will let you respond to that, because there's a lot there. But we're talking about racial healing in this segment. What do you say to Americans, people of color who...
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: Well, it was very — I say nothing. I say nothing, because I was able to get him to produce it. He should have produced it a long time before. I say nothing.

But let me just tell you. When you talk about healing, I think that I've developed very, very good relationships over the last little while with the African-American community. I think you can see that.
And I feel that they really wanted me to come to that conclusion. And I think I did a great job and a great service not only for the country but even for the president, in getting him to produce his birth certificate.

Cut back to Clinton:

HOLT: Secretary Clinton?
CLINTON: Well, just listen to what you heard. And clearly, as Donald just admitted, he knew he was going to stand on this debate stage and Lester Holt was going to be asking us questions, so he tried to put the whole racist birther lie to bed.

But it can't be dismissed that easily. He has really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen. There was absolutely no evidence for it, but he persisted, he persisted year after year, because some of his supporters, people that he was trying to bring into his fold, apparently believed it or wanted to believe it.
But, remember, Donald started his career back in 1973 being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African Americans, and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy. He actually was sued twice by the Justice Department.
So he has a long record of engaging in racist behavior.

Here’s the thing about the coherence gap: It matters, because it speaks to a deeper difference between Trump and Clinton. My colleague Matt Yglesias wrote a piece on the difference between Trump and Clinton’s debate preparations (she was preparing, he wasn’t) that reads as nearly prophetic now:

Trump’s aides are probably underplaying his level of preparation to lower expectations, but on some level we all know in our hearts that it’s true — Trump is not sitting around studying briefing books and making sure he has accurate and detailed answers on everything that might conceivably come up. We’ve seen him in debates and high-stakes interviews before, and he almost certainly is going to more or less wing it and figure that it doesn’t really matter if that means he says things that are false or offensive.

Clinton is the one doing prep work. She’s prepping because the debate is important, and preparing for important moments is what sensible people do. And something that’s tended to get lost amid the frog memes and whatnot of 2016 is that working with a competent team to read briefing books and release white papers is a crucially important part of being president.
It’s a big, difficult job in which mistakes can have catastrophic consequences for the lives of millions of people, and where you don’t get to declare bankruptcy and start over again if you mess up. You don’t have to walk into the Oval Office knowledgeable about every issue under the sun on day one to be successful — nobody’s ever met that standard, and nobody ever will — but you do need a credible team, and you need to be able to get up to speed.

This difference will show up at the debate, allowing Clinton to give factually defensible and politically tenable answers to a range of questions on weighty matters. That’s hard to do, and Trump won’t be able to pull it off on the fly, which is why he has recently been working the refs to explain that debate moderators should let him get away with lying.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Toward the end of the debate, Trump questioned Clinton’s stamina. "I don't believe she does have the stamina," he said. "To be president of this country, you need tremendous stamina."

But the irony was it was Clinton’s stamina that won this debate, and behind that stamina was her preparation. Trump grew less and less coherent as the night wore on, and his early spree of interruptions flagged as he was quickly forced onto topics where he hadn’t done the work to feel comfortable. Clinton, by contrast, grew stronger as the debate wore on, because she had prepared for everything the moderators threw at her.

There were many differences between the candidates on display in this contest, but the most consequential one was that Clinton displayed the basic personal qualities necessary to be president. Trump didn’t. She had done the work to know what she was talking about and to survive a high-stakes encounter with an unpredictable opponent. He hadn’t done the work, and it showed.