Ways to lose to Trump: Call him poor

The 2016 presidential candidates and their spouses hang out at a wedding.

The 2016 presidential candidates and their spouses at a wedding in 2005.

Who says Hillary Clinton isn’t the best candidate to address wealth inequality? Racists and bros, mostly—the rest of us know better. Here’s the presumptive Democratic nominee telling the New York Times that she’s open to considering Mark Cuban or another successful businessperson as her vice president:

“Businesspeople, especially successful businesspeople, who are really successful — as opposed to pretend successful — I think, have a lot to offer,” said Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign has begun taunting Mr. Trump with a #PoorDonald hashtag on Twitter, suggesting that he is not nearly as wealthy as he claims. Mr. Trump has cited an audit by the Internal Revenue Service as his reason for keeping his tax returns private.

Clinton supporters on Twitter have begun circulating the claim that Donald Trump is not a multi-billionaire, as he says, and that his net worth is actually less than $100 million. That would put him below the Clintons’ estimated worth of $110 million, nearly all of which they made after Bill became president. Surely, voters will flock to Hillary once they start thinking of her as the richer candidate.

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Mark Cuban inadvertently reveals massive Twitter conspiracy

So, what, it's like a TV Guide or something?

So, what, it's like a TV Guide or something?

The big news in news that covers the news is that robber baron of the DeBordian Spectacle Rupert Murdoch has threatened to opt out of Google, walling off all News Corp  properties from the search engine’s webcrawlers and generally ensuring that nobody gets anything he makes for free. That’s cool. If Murdoch really thinks that the traffic driven to his various internet properties—which include WSJ.com, FoxNews.com and the purchased-in-a-manner-analogous-to-getting-wasted-and-going-home-with-a-fat-girl Myspace—isn’t worth the irritation of knowing that Google is indexing them for free, he’s welcome to hitch his wagon to Bing. As Weston Kosova of Newsweek sarcastically points out, people are totally going to search for “Sarah Palin teeth vagina” on Google, see what comes up, and then head on over to Bing to see if maybe News Corp has anything else. It’s a terrible idea if you intend to use the internet as a tool to disseminate your news reporting, but if you only see the internet as a way to advertise the other media outlets through which you disseminate your et cetera, it’s great. Murdoch’s problem with Google is that it doesn’t tell anyone about his products without also giving them a way to access them for free. His frustration captures the irony of the internet’s relationship to newspapers and television; it increases their circulation exponentially, while simultaneously making increased circulation almost valueless. It’s a real pickle, and it explains why, six months ago, every conventional news outlet in America couldn’t wait to tell us about Twitter.

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