Month: September 2016

It’s not about her “health”

by digby

Hopefully her debate performance set some minds at ease but I doubt it will have affected many men’s point of view on this. It’s not about “health” it’s a that a woman doesn’t have balls and they mean that literally. They just don’t think a woman has can do a “man’s job.”

The “stamina,” the “look”: A new poll suggests voters are buying in to Donald Trump’s insinuations about Hillary Clinton’s health. They’re ignoring the medical reports.

Voters — especially men — have more confidence that Trump is healthy enough for the presidency than Clinton, according to the Associated Press-GfK poll.

It’s a disconnect considering Clinton has released more medical information than Trump, and that outside doctors who’ve looked at the available data say both candidates seem fine. But it shows the political points Trump scored after the Democratic nominee’s much-publicized mild case of pneumonia.

Another gender divide: Nearly half of women but just 4 in 10 men think Clinton’s health is getting too much attention, found the poll, which was taken before the presidential candidates’ debate on Monday.

“Everybody gets sick,” said Sherri Smart, 56, of New York. She said she hasn’t decided who to vote for but wishes the candidates would discuss issues instead of sniping about who’s most vigorous.

“What’s important is, what are you going to do for me?” Smart said.

The AP-GfK poll found 51 percent of voters are very or extremely confident that Trump is healthy enough to be president. In contrast, just over a third of voters — 36 percent — had the same confidence in Clinton’s health.

Men are more likely to question Clinton’s physical fitness for the job, with 45 percent saying they’re only slightly or not at all confident compared to 34 percent of women. Men and women are about equally likely to express confidence in Trump’s health. More Democrats are confident of Trump’s health than Republicans are of Clinton’s.

Health is a legitimate issue as the nation is poised to elect one of its oldest presidents. Trump, 70, for months held off disclosing much about his own fitness while stoking questions about a woman in the White House with his assertion, repeated on national TV Monday, that Clinton lacks the look and stamina for the job. (As for his apparent sniffles during Monday’s debate, he blamed a bad microphone.)

“Stamina is a code word for maybe not physically up to the job,” said New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan, who has called for an independent panel to certify the health of presidential candidates. “There’s something of a bias about men versus women that subtly Trump has played to, that men are more fit, tough enough to do the job.”

Clinton, 68, last year released more detail about her own health history only to buy trouble earlier this month by refusing to take a sick day until a public stumble forced her to reveal the pneumonia diagnosis. But Monday she rebutted Trump’s talk of stamina by wondering if he could match her grueling schedule as a secretary of state — traveling to 112 countries, negotiating peace deals, spending 11 hours testifying before a congressional committee.

What exactly do we know about their health? Neither has released their actual medical records, just a summary from their personal physicians with no way to know if anything important was left out.

Yet another disconnect: The AP-GfK poll found nearly 4 in 10 voters don’t consider such a release important, and another 2 in 10 say it’s only moderately important.

Trump’s gastroenterologist in December released a four-paragraph letter saying the GOP nominee would be “the healthiest individual ever elected.” Earlier this month, Trump took to “The Dr. Oz Show” to say he felt great, while releasing a bit more detail, such as his cholesterol levels and cancer screenings.

Bottom line: Trump takes a cholesterol-lowering statin medication and a baby aspirin, has some mild plaque in his arteries and is overweight — but was declared generally in good health.

Last summer, Clinton’s internist released a two-page letter detailing her family history, prior exams including lab test results, and some prior ailments that have healed — including a 2012 concussion and blood clot Clinton suffered after becoming dehydrated from a stomach virus and fainting. This month, a second letter outlined the mild pneumonia and revealed some updated check-up results.

Bottom line: Clinton takes a blood thinner as a precaution given a history of blood clots, as well as a thyroid medication and allergy relievers — but also was declared generally in good health.

Meanwhile, Trump’s obvious mental problems are no big deal and neither is the fact that his primary care “doctor” is a gastro-enterolgist who looks and acts like a character from an R. Crumb comic. This raises no red flags for these people, apparently. But then he has reassured them that he has a huge dick and his testosterone level are through the roof!

This is Drudge’s doing all the way.

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And Trump had the nerve to call women pigs

by digby

I would call him and his disgusting surrogate Rudy Giuliani pigs but it would be an insult to the animals which actually have a much higher level of intelligence:

The former New York City mayor made the remark, captured on video and posted to Twitter by Elite Daily writer Alexandra Svokos, in response to a question about Clinton’s attack on Trump’s past comments about women. Giuliani defended Trump, labeling him a “feminist” because of how he treats the women he employs, and said he would have responded to Clinton’s attacks much more harshly than the GOP nominee did.

“I sure would’ve talked about what she did to Monica Lewinsky, what that woman standing there did to Monica Lewinsky, trying to paint her as an insane young woman when in fact Monica Lewinsky was an intern,” Giuliani said. “The president of the United States, her husband, disgraced this country with what he did in the Oval Office and she didn’t just stand by him, she attacked Monica Lewinsky. And after being married to Bill Clinton for 20 years, if you didn’t know the moment Monica Lewinsky said that Bill Clinton violated her that she was telling the truth, then you’re too stupid to be president.”

I asked Giuliani if Trump is a feminist #DebateNight pic.twitter.com/xWvkgVuKXV

— Alexandra Svokos (@asvokos) September 27, 2016

Back when his marriage to Donna Hanover fell apart in 2000, Hanover cited Giuliani’s relationship with a staffer just hours after Giuliani suddenly announced their separation. From the Times back then:

Three hours later, Ms. Hanover appeared outside Gracie Mansion and, with a wavering voice and tears in her eyes, said: ”Today’s turn of events brings me great sadness. I had hoped to keep this marriage together. For several years, it was difficult to participate in Rudy’s public life because of his relationship with one staff member.”

Joannie Danielides, Ms. Hanover’s press secretary, said Ms. Hanover was referring to Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas, Mr. Giuliani’s former communications director who is now president of NYC and Company, the city’s tourism bureau. Friends of Ms. Hanover’s said yesterday that she had described the relationship between her husband and Ms. Lategano-Nicholas as intimate while Ms. Lategano-Nicholas worked at City Hall. The mayor has denied having had a romantic relationship with Ms. Lategano-Nicholas, who left City Hall last May and married Nicholas Nicholas, a sports writer, in February.

Apart from the allegation made by Hanover, Giuliani was also having an affair at the time with Judith Nathan, who later become his wife. It was later reported by Politico’s Ben Smith, during Giuliani’s 2007 presidential run, that Giuliani had been billing “obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons.”

This is merely the latest example of top Trump advisers and supporters broaching a topic that Trump himself hasn’t yet embraced for a whole host of reasons — not least of which are his own indiscretions.

Giuliani’s sex life was the subject of tabloids for years as was Trump’s. These old white guys have a lot of nerve making moral judgments.

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TTIP “trade” agreement talks indefinitely suspended

by Gaius Publius

Count this as a victory. It looks like the Atlantic version of TPP, called TTIP, has failed.

Background: The U.S. corporate world has been aching to pass three “trade” mega-deals — TPP, TTIP and TiSA.

• The first, TPP, ropes in nations bordering the Pacific, including the U.S. Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile and much of Asia (but deliberately not China). 

• The second, TTIP is the same kind of treaty on the Altantic side and includes the U.S., the U.K, and the European Union. 

• TiSA, a more or less global “trade in services” agreement, is the worst of the three and deserves its own, separate treatment. TiSA would radically open local markets to foreign companies that offer “services” — everything from law firms to companies that supply imported contract labor.

  (Think about that — companies that supply imported contract labor. Under TiSA, I think unions are instantly dead. You don’t have to export jobs to slave labor, very-low-wage, countries if you can import the slave labor here under treaty-mandated expedited visas.)

The citizens of the U.S., both on the left and the right of the political spectrum, have been opposed to these kinds of agreements for years, ever since the devastation caused by Bill Clinton’s NAFTA became apparent. Both the Trump campaign and the Sanders campaign were strongly opposed (or in Trump’s case, said they were strongly opposed), which accounts for much of their ascendancy.

Opposition to corporate-written “trade” agreements is a huge part of what makes this election a “change election.”

Now, thanks mainly to the frustration of the negotiators in Europe — and strong opposition from European citizens — TTIP talks have not just broken down; they’ve been indefinitely suspended.

This is not complete victory; they could be revived. But momentum has definitely stalled, and this could well be the death knell for this one. Michelle Chen writing at the The Nation:

Another Free-Trade Deal Bites the Dust

Negotiations surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership have been indefinitely suspended.

What if a trade deal died and nobody noticed? The presidential campaign trail has been awash in angry backlash against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the latest in a slew of controversial free-trade deals that symbolize to American voters the evils of corporate globalization. But another trade deal collapsed silently on the other side of the globe. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was supposed to be the Atlantic world’s analog to the TPP, but after three years of frustrated negotiations, it was just pronounced dead by key ministers, or at least temporarily moribund, overwhelmed by a phalanx of populist opposition across the continent. How’d that happen?

Chen goes on to explain:

Though smaller in scope than the TPP, TTIP paralleled the Pacific agreement in that it built on trade-agreement proposals that had stalled in previous discussions, ultimately collapsed during the round of World Trade Organization negotiations that began in 2001, and have fizzled out in the years since. EU and US trade ministers had hoped to sell it as a boon to global trade. But an increasingly cynical European public wasn’t buying it, seeing it instead as another pathway to more deregulation and corporate impunity.

Following months of gridlock and protests, and despite a meeting scheduled for next month in New York to continue discussions, negotiations have effectively ground to a halt. (October’s meetings are apparently aimed at redirecting talks toward a smaller-scale, preliminary pact as a substitute to the full TTIP. This is seen as progress, if not outright victory, for campaigns mobilizing against the EU free trade agenda deal by deal.)

It could be that corporate lobbyists and ministers are just hoping for a more opportune political climate, but the demise of this version of TTIP illustrates that, in real-life political terms, trade deals could mostly prove useless at best for trade and devastating at worst for democracy….

“Another pathway to more deregulation and corporate impunity” it certainly is — in fact all of them are that. Makes you wonder why any U.S. president would push so hard to pass them. Isn’t that person sworn to “protect and defend the Constitution” and not subvert it? But things are what they are, as are the people doing them. We each have our tasks, I guess.

I would call victory on this one and celebrate. The Europeans brought down TTIP. Can we do the same for TPP? One down and two to go. Onward.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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A citizen and a voter
by Tom Sullivan

I so proud and inspiration to be a U.S. Citizen! I'll be Voting! All my power and my support become with my next President @hillaryclinton Miss Housekeeping and miss Piggy Can Vote @realdonaldtrump A photo posted by Alicia Machado (@machadooficial) on Aug 19, 2016 at 8:54am PDT

Digby linked yesterday to a video about Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe whose treatment by Donald Trump became an issue late in Monday’s debate. Clinton unnerved Trump when she brought up how he had called Machado “Miss Piggy” after she gained weight after the 1996 pageant, and “Miss Housekeeping” in reference to her being a Latina.

Clinton’s mention of Alicia Machado got so under his Trump’s skin that on Fox and Friends Tuesday Trump doubled down on the decades-old weight-shaming smears that led to years of anorexia and bulimia for Machado.

The Guardian profiles how Machado and her struggles figure into the presidential campaign:

But it isn’t 1996 any more; Machado, far from being a girl, is a 39-year-old woman, and if body-shaming constituted good press for Trump’s fledgling beauty pageant business then, it seems less of a good look for his presidential campaign today. It’s a similar case with his continued insistence on how right he is to call women out for their weight. Machado understands this, perhaps even more acutely than Clinton, because she’s lived it; and she is willing to relive and keep reliving this painful episode if it means shedding light on a man she feels has no business anywhere near the Oval Office.

On a call organized by the Clinton campaign on Tuesday afternoon billed as a chance to let Machado respond to Trump’s most recent attacks, the former beauty queen was much more interested in talking about his Democratic rival, whose mention of her story in the debate the night before had moved her to tears. She “never imagined it would matter to someone so powerful”, she said.

But as someone who straddles two powerful voting blocs this election cycle, Machado is a double threat to Trump, and she feels that her celebrity means she has a responsibility to speak up about her experiences when they can help people. “If I can be a voice for my Latino community in this moment, I will do it,” she told the Guardian.

For a man so focused on appearances and weight, Trump is in no position to criticize. There are lots of less than good looks to his candidacy:

The late inning slump

by digby

This one’s a doozy:

I don’t know about you but she looked pretty energized to me.  On the other hand, by the end of the debate he was slumping and hanging on to the podium like he’d been hit with an animal tranquilizer dart:

I’m just saying. Between that and his ongoing sniffling problem is it irresponsible to question whether his “report” from his quack doctor might not be telling the whole story? As Peggy Noonan famously said, it would be irresponsible not to.

*By the way, Trump’s sniffing is something he does all the time. It’s actually a verbal tic, like “uhm” or “you know.” But after the way his campaign has behaved and the despicable way the press treated her when she caught the bug going through her campaign, the least they can do is follow their usual “both sides do it” in this one case. Just because he’s a strapping man doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be questioned as thoroughly. He is orange, after all. That’s really not normal.

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Oh look, a policy

by digby

I know that people find Clinton’s Tracy Flick wonkiness to be boring and wish she wouldn’t get into the weeds the way she does, but this is important and I am really glad she’s engaged the subject and brought it up before more than 80 million people last night:

It came after moderator Lester Holt asked whether or not police are implicitly biased against black people.

“I’ve met with a group of very distinguished, experienced police chiefs a few weeks ago,” Clinton said. “They admit it’s an issue.”

And according to the police chiefs Clinton consulted, a second pressing problem for law enforcement officers is insufficient training on how to interact with mentally ill constituents in crisis situations. While this is a separate issue from race, discrimination against the mentally ill is widespread and extends beyond policing.

“Police are having to handle a lot of really difficult mental health problems on the street,” Clinton explained. “They want support, they want more training, they want more assistance. And I think the federal government could be in a position where we would offer and provide that.”

If elected, Clinton promises to allocate $1 billion of her first federal budget to law enforcement training programs to reduce implicit bias, according to NPR.

Law enforcement training on bias is actually part of Clinton’s larger mental health plan, which calls for more funding for community mental health centers, increased research on the brain and behavior, and better access to care and insurance coverage for psychiatric disorders.

The police are right to want more training in this regard. According to a Washington Post investigation tracking fatal shootings by police last year, one in four police killings involved a person with mental illness.

In fact, police officers typically only receive about 16 total hours of de-escalation and crisis intervention training, compared to approximately 60 hours of firearms training, according to a 2015 survey by the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum.

Even worse, some techniques that police are taught, such as yelling commands and pointing their weapons at suspects, can backfire.

Such tactics are “like pouring gasoline on a fire when you do that with the mentally ill,” Ron Honberg, policy director with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told The Washington Post.

Some police forces have increased their crisis intervention trainings to a 40-hour program, which includes scenario-based training and techniques to diffuse potentially violent interactions between officers and mentally ill community members. But for now, there are no national requirements on CIT training for new recruits.

Trump, who angered critics by touting New York City’s controversial and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy, didn’t mention mental health in the context of policing and doesn’t have a policy about it on his website.

I hope that some people heard this and saw that she was showing compassion for mental health sufferers and the dangers they face in our mean streets, but also compassion fro police who are often charged with dealing with such problems without training and support. Between this and the proliferation of guns we have a terrible epidemic on our hands. And Clinton is showing leadership by proposing a multi-dimensional set of possible solutions. That ought to be worth something.

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QOTD: Richard Engel

by digby

MSNBC had their expert reporters do some fact checking of the debate last night and NBC’s top foreign correspondent Richard Engel came in looking rather shell shocked by what he’d heard. He had a lot to say but this stuck out at me because it tracks with one of my greatest fears about all this lunacy:

A lot of things Donald Trump was proposing were frankly destabilizing, dangerous, dangerous to the United States, dangerous to the world order, if you will. The United States foreign policy is based on agreements often long negotiated agreements sometimes negotiated over decades and longer.

If you listen to the debate he’s basically saying that he’s a business man and he’s going to tear up the old agreements and negotiate better deals. If you’re a foreign country and you’re listening to this and you’re listening to this and you have an agreement whether NATO or a nuclear deal or a protection agreement or a sovereignty agreement or a trade agreement and you suddenly think, “is the leading world power just going to tear up the agreement that we’ve had for decades?” What is that going to mean for me? Are my neighbors going to invade?

There are dozens of reason why Trump must be defeated but this, I believe, is number one. If he wins we will wake up the morning after the election to a changed world and it’s unlikely to be changed in a positive way. In fact, it’s likely to be the beginning of a very dangerous military build-up.

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Many eyeballs

by digby

Monday night was the most-watched debate in American history.

More than 80 million people tuned in to see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off, setting a new record in the sixty year history of televised presidential debates.

The final numbers are still being tallied by Nielsen. But the debate averaged a total of 80.9 million viewers across 12 of the channels that carried it live.

Nielsen traditionally measures viewers who watch via traditional TV at home. That means people who watched the debate at parties, bars, restaurants, and offices were not counted.

Nor does the 80.9 million viewer total include PBS and C-SPAN. Ratings for PBS will be available later Tuesday.

Many millions also watched the debate via the Internet.

Various live streams on YouTube together registered more than 2.5 million simultaneous viewers. Live streams on other sites also reached millions of people.

This means the actual total audience is significantly higher than 80 million.

On the TV side, CNN and other cable news channels saw big increases over past election years. So did the broadcast networks.

NBC had the biggest audience overall, partly because “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt was the moderator of the debate. Upwards of 18 million people watched the debate on NBC.

Nielsen data confirms that viewership stayed high the entire time. Contrary to some speculation, there was not a big drop-off after the first hour of the 98-minute debate.

The first Obama-Romney debate in 2012 averaged 67 million viewers.

The debate viewership number to beat was 81 million, set back in 1980, when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan debated just once before the election.

Anticipation for the Clinton-Trump meeting had been mounting for months. On Monday nightTwitter said it was the “most tweeted debate ever.”

On both Twitter and Facebook, Trump was a livelier subject than Clinton. Twitter said the “final share of conversation around the candidates on stage” was 62% for Trump and 38% for Clinton.

On Facebook, the results were even more lopsided, with Trump earning 79% share of conversation and Clinton having the remaining 21%.

I guess any publicity might be considered good publicity but it really doesn’t appear that the “conversation” about Trump is generally positive. That big audience saw an arrogant, lazy, belligerent, petulant ignoramus “debating” an intelligent, mature mainstream politician. Sure, a large number of Americans probably prefer the ignoramus. They like that in a person. But it’s hard to imagine that a majority does.

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The Real Donald

by digby

Here he is:

When @realDonaldTrump grabs my wrist, tells me to “put that down” and pushes my phone away #Debates2016 pic.twitter.com/0puNWFfhwC

— Alexi McCammond (@leximccammond) September 27, 2016

I asked, “How would you respond to young women who are nervous about voting for you?” This question was inspired by the countless students I spoke to earlier that day who told me they were nervous about the future of women’s rights if Trump were elected. My phone was out and already recording in anticipation of the answer Trump would hopefully give me to my question. Instead, another reporter behind me yelled a question to him (something about what he’d say to the people of Westchester, New York). He then looked at me, grabbed my right wrist (which was the hand holding the phone), said, “Put that down” and pushed my hand down.

I should be clear that it didn’t hurt — physically or emotionally, as some on Twitter have blamed me for the incident saying I “woke up as a victim waiting to happen.” It’s my job as a reporter to point out what happens at these types of events, and I take what I do very seriously.

So Trump never verbally answered my question about how he would respond to women who are nervous to vote for him, but I got the answer I needed.

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About “Miss Housekeeping”

by digby

When Clinton brought this up last night it rattled Trump so badly that he started stammering:

Donald Trump called her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.”

Her name is Alicia Machado. #DebateNight pic.twitter.com/0wrISjJe6z

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 27, 2016

Apparently he went on Fox & Friends this morning and said she was “a problem” and “gained a tremendous amount of weight” and was the worst Miss Universe they ever had.

Let’s just say that isn’t something that women appreciate hearing. Or Latinos. Or any decent person.

He treated her like a piece of meat.

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