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Month: September 2016

The truth hurts

The truth hurts

by digby

Looks like Clinton didn’t screw the pooch after all. Imagine that:

It was supposed to be her “47 percent” moment.

When Hillary Clinton said that half of Donald Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” Republicans thought they just might have found her campaign-crushing-blunder.

The gaffe, they hoped, was a way to cement an image as an out-of-touch snob, just as Democrats did four years ago to Mitt Romney after he said “47 percent” of voters backed President Barack Obama because they were “dependent on government.”

But a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds that Clinton’s stumble didn’t have quite the impact that Trump and his supporters wanted. Instead, it’s Trump who’s viewed as most disconnected and disrespectful.

Sixty percent of registered voters say he does not respect “ordinary Americans,” according to the poll. That’s far more than the 48 percent who say the same about Clinton.

The reason for that is that it’s obvious to anyone that Trump is an odious pig and that many of his supporters cheer on his odiousness. There’s no better example than the GOP partisans at the RNC shouting “lock her up!” in unison over and over again. Millions saw it. It’s obvious. And they’re proud of it.

They hear what they want to hear

They hear what they want to hear

by digby

When Robin Roberts asked President Obama for debating advice for Hillary Clinton, this is what he said:

“Be yourself and explain what motivates you. I’ve gotten to know Hillary and seen her work, seen her in tough times and in good times. She’s in this for the right reasons. There’s a reason why we haven’t had a woman president before, so she’s having to break down some barriers. There’s a level of mistrust and a caricature of her that just doesn’t jive with who I know — this person who cares deeply about kids.”

CNN’s Gloria Borger characterized his comments this way:

He wants her to try to be more like herself because she has a hard time doing that. 

I don’t think that’s what he was saying. In fact, he was saying something else altogether. But they’ve got a narrative and they’re sticking to it.

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Looks like Cruz is the weasel we always knew he was

Looks like Cruz is the weasel we always knew he was

by digby

After the RNC I wrote that Ted Cruz had made a calculation that Trump was going to lose and he would be seen as the man who walked into the lion’s den and faced down the boos in order to preserve his place as the man who stood up when others stood down. It showed some courage.

Oops:

Multiple sources close to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) say he will finally endorse Donald Trump as soon as Friday, according to Politico. 

It is unclear wither Cruz plans on just pledging to vote for the GOP presidential nominee or offering more substantial backing.

Looks like Kasich is the last man standing. Jeb’s not going to run again (I never thought he really wanted it)  and the rest have all shown themselves to be without any principles at all.

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For Gloria and Mary

For Gloria and Mary

by digby

Clinton’s new ad:

Gloria is one of my oldest friends and she and her mother Mary are from upstate New York and huge Clinton fans just like that woman.  They always say “she’s our girl” too.  There are a lot of women like them out there with a ton of enthusiasm for her.  They’re just not the kind of people that anyone pays attention to. They do vote though.

And this ad might motivate some people with daughters and it’s really important. The sexism I battled in my working life was very difficult but I really thought it had gotten a lot better. The last few years have been a revelation. Of course there have been improvements since I was a young women. But there is a whole lot of work to do. If this country could produce a man like this as a possible president we still have big problems in this area:

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Nothing left but the dogwhistle

Nothing left but the dogwhistle

by digby

I wrote about the conservative movement’s last breaths for Salon today:

That day 15 months ago when Donald Trump descended that escalator to announce his candidacy, it was obvious to me that whether or not he won, he was going to turn the race into something we had never seen before. He had massive celebrity and a lot of money, and he was tapping into a groundswell of anger over immigration that had shocked the political world just a year earlier when the incumbent House majority leader (Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia) was defeated in a primary largely because of that issue. It was foolish for political insiders to laugh at the possibility that Trump could go all the way. But they did. And they’ve had to play catch-up ever since.

The mainstream Republican establishment was knocked for a loop. They had offered up a dazzling array of GOP all-stars for the public to choose from: former and sitting governors and senators, movement heroes, policy wonks, tough guys, pious religionists, a world renowned neurosurgeon and even a famous high-tech businesswoman. It was beyond their imagination that this crude and inexperienced demagogue could beat any of them, much less all of them.

But as much as political insiders and establishment leaders should have been a more savvy about the potential of a populist celebrity billionaire to throw a grenade into a presidential campaign, it was entirely reasonable for many conservative movement leaders to be shocked that a man like Trump could capture the imagination of their movement so quickly, and without any serious commitment to their cause. After all, the last we heard, the Tea Party was still running the congressional asylum. Those folks may have a flair for the dramatic, but they’re true believers in the conservative movement. There was every reason to believe that the millions of Republican voters who supported them were too.

What conservatives found out was that all those years of carefully and patiently educating their voters in the nuances of small government, traditional values and strong national defense, to the point where they could elicit ecstatic cheers by merely uttering the words “tort reform” or “eminent domain” turned out to be for naught. The voters really only heard the dog-whistles.

This has been a rude awakening for conservative intellectuals who’ve spent their lives developing their elaborate ideological framework only to find their millions of supposed adherents never really cared about it. Zach Beauchamp at Voxinterviewed one such leading intellectual, a professor of political theory at George Washington University named Samuel Goldman, about the state of the movement in the age of Trump. Goldman admits that the conservative movement is “doomed,” or at least it is no longer viable as a majority, and rightly attributes the problem to the fact that conservatives no longer attract anyone but white people:

The answer has to do with the adoption of a fairly exclusive vision of American nationalism — which sees America not only as a predominantly white country but also as a white Christian country and also as a white Christian provincial country. This is a conception of America that finds its home outside the cities, exurbs and rural areas, in what Sarah Palin called the real America. 

If you project yourself as a white Christian provincial party, you’re not going to get very many votes among people who are none of those things. That’s what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years.

Goldman says this is the result of a demographic delusion in which conservatives believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their idealized vision of the Real America was literally true.

I’m confused as to why he thinks this trend only goes back 10 or 15 years old, however. This idea that “real Americans” are white small-town folks, hard-scrabble farmers, blue-collar workers and small-business owners who live somewhere in the heartland has been around a lot longer than that. And it’s been used specifically in politics since the late 1960s, when Richard Nixon first coined the phrase “silent majority” and the political press began to notice that its own experiences were not necessarily reflective of the nation at large.

I previously noted this piece by Joseph Kraft, a famous newspaper columnist of that era, because it illustrates the point of view that began to pervade the political establishment in the wake of the upheavals of civil rights, the counterculture and the anti-war movement. He wrote it right after the famous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago:

Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans – in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and presidential candidates who appeal to them. 

To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.
The most important organs of media and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.
In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.

From there flowed decades of “plenary indulgence” toward this white, provincial Real America by both parties, in which politicians were required to pledge fealty to “heartland values” and ensure that such folk were treated with the deference and respect they required.

In other words, this isn’t new. The only thing that’s changed is that the people Real Americans resent — African-Americans, women, recent immigrants and LGBT folks — are now assuming positions of prominence and power, and the provincial anger, stoked for so long by the Republican Party, has finally boiled over. Donald Trump is telling those folks what they’ve been wanting to hear, exactly the way they’ve been wanting to hear it for a very long time.

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NC breaking left? by @BloggersRUs

NC breaking left?
by Tom Sullivan

Three nights of protests in Charlotte have given new meaning to North Carolina being a battleground state. Other cities across the country have seen large-scale protests against police killings of black men: Ferguson, New York, Baltimore. The list goes on. Now Charlotte joins them. Last night the mayor issued an order for a midnight curfew.

Police insist that Keith Lamont Scott posed “an imminent deadly threat” when officers shot and killed him on Tuesday.
After viewing police recordings from the scene yesterday, Scott’s family requested police release the footage. But as protesters chanted “Release the tape! Release the tape!” police refused:

Kerr Putney, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief, said that video footage of the encounter did not give “absolute definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun,” but he said that the footage and other evidence “supports what we’ve heard” about what happened.

[…]

“You shouldn’t expect it to be released,” Putney said during a news briefing Thursday. He added: “Transparency is in the eye of the beholder. … If you think I’m saying we should display a victim’s worst day for public consumption, that is not the transparency I’m speaking of.”

The protests have attracted national attention both from social justice activists and the presidential campaigns:

Charlotte organizers have been holding protests, creating coalitions and leading discussions about police brutality against the African-American community for almost three years, since a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer shot Jonathan Ferrell, an unarmed black man who had wrecked his car, in September 2013. But until this week, the violence that erupted in cities across America had not come to Charlotte.

Now, leaders of some of those protests, such as Michael McBride, a California minister who leads the Live Free campaign against mass incarceration, and Traci Blackmon, an organizer of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Mo., traveled to Charlotte.

Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NAACP branch, said Thursday that Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, including Chief Kerr Putney, have worked with local groups to build the kind of relationships that could improve treatment of African-Americans and build trust.

Donald Trump blamed the unrest on drugs, telling an audience in Pittsburgh, “If you’re not aware, drugs are a very, very big factor in what you’re watching on television at night.” Trump suggested Thursday he would address violence and black-on-black crime using stop-and-frisk tactics already declared unconstitutional. Trump said of police in a town hall appearance with Sean Hannity:

But, basically, they will — if they see — you know, they’re proactive and if they see a person possibly with a gun or they think may have a gun, they will see the person and they’ll look and they’ll take the gun away.

The 2nd Amendment is sacrosanct, but only as it applies to white people. The NRA stuck its fingers in its ears and heard nothing. Today, Trump will be back to warning people it is Hillary Clinton who wants to take their guns.

Hillary Clinton responded to the killing and protests, tweeting:

Politico wonders if the protests in Charlotte could have an effect on North Carolina Republicans’ prospects on November 8:

North Carolina political operatives are skeptical that, unless the chaos in Charlotte continues for weeks, the issue will make a substantial dent in the race. But Republicans and some Democrats do say that the dynamic creates an opening for Trump to further shore up and energize the GOP base—something he has struggled to do—predicting voters will respond to his campaign’s law-and-order message and his staunch defense of police, even amid national concerns over institutional police racism. A senior adviser to the Trump campaign said only that Trump had been in the state earlier this week and “we have not yet announced the date of our next trip back to the state.”

“I certainly think unrest feeds into Trump’s narrative that ‘America’s falling apart, we need to make America great again,’” said Tom Jensen, a Democratic pollster whose firm is based in North Carolina. “My sense is, most white North Carolinians who would be really repulsed by what’s going on in Charlotte would be in Trump’s camp. I doubt it moves the needle a lot, but the race is just about tied … something like that is never going to move the race by 3 or 4 points, but it can change the race on the margins, and we’re on the margins.”

But one thing that’s not obvious from 30,000 feet is that while the protests might help turn out Trump voters in rural North Carolina by a percentage, that’s not where the real untapped cache of votes is. Charlotte may be the state’s largest city, but Charlotte-Mecklenburg County is the 2nd largest block of registered voters in the state, just behind Wake County (Raleigh). Its voter turnout numbers in recent statewide elections, however, have been anemic, falling below state averages, and ten percent below Wake’s in 2014. Sen. Kay Hagan might still be in the United States Senate if Mecklenburg had simply matched average state turnout numbers in 2014.

Because of Mecklenburg’s size, it is possible that a large African-American turnout spurred by the shootings and protests could actually help Democrats more than the protests help Trump. In North Carolina’s largest city, a percentage or two increase in voter turnout counts for a lot more votes than it does in rural counties. The question is whether Democrats can get their act together enough to turn out voters for Hillary Clinton who actually supports the kind of reform people have taken to the streets to demand. Whether the state goes blue in November might depend on it.

Contrarianism for dummies

Contrarianism for dummies

by digby

One of Robert Kennedy’s speech writers wrote a bizarre screed for Politico making the so-called “liberal” case for Donald Trump on the basis of his alleged pacifism.  Yes, it’s as daft as it sounds. Today, another RFK associate, Peter Edelman, talks some sense:

Writing as a former legislative assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and an enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Clinton for president, I was disappointed to see in Politico the screed written by my former colleague, Adam Walinsky, excoriating Clinton’s record on foreign policy and national security and going on to conclude that Donald Trump should therefore be elected president. It is one thing to disagree with Secretary Clinton, which Walinsky does heatedly, and quite another to turn to Donald Trump.

We should be clear that Walinsky’s critique is not confined to Clinton. He lays out (and massively overstates) a dark view not just of Clinton but also of President Obama and almost the entire Democratic Party. The analysis is overwrought, but even one who buys the argument defies all logic in imagining that the solution is Trump.

The question is not whether there is a military-industrial complex in our country. President Eisenhower called us out on that and there is enough responsibility to go around among both parties for it. The 21st century version begins with the Iraq War, which was originated by a Republican President. I am not interested in adjudicating the issue of which party is the war party except to say that Presidents Obama, Clinton and Carter have stood for peace in important and tangible ways. The question here is whether Donald Trump can claim in any way that he is the candidate who stands for a foreign policy of restraint and the answer is that he cannot.

Walinsky finds in Trump a rationality and consistency that do not exist. Any reasonable observer of the presidential campaign has seen that at one moment, Trump will represent himself as an isolationist who wants to end ties with NATO and other allies; at another, he will lash out at any perceived insult to the U.S. or to himself, and pledges that America’s pride needs to be vindicated militarily. “America First,” Trump says regularly, bringing the isolationism of Charles Lindbergh to mind—before excoriating President Obama for not using greater force in any number of venues and then insinuating that he has a secret plan to obliterate the Islamic State.

To compare John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy to Donald Trump is—well, I won’t finish the sentence. Yes, Robert Kennedy turned against the Vietnam War, but not because he felt that America should retreat from the world. He opposed the war because it was unjust and was based on a flawed notion of American interests. The result, as we know, was the death of Vietnamese and Americans and others who should not have died. JFK and RFK were internationalists. They understood that World War II left the United States with a responsibility to play an active and constructive role in the world. They understood that America must stand together and dependably with allies who also are committed to pursue a peaceful world. They understood that the use of force was sometimes necessary and that brave men and women would be put at risk. They made those difficult, often excruciating, decisions carefully and as transparently as possible, never rashly, impulsively, or vindictively.

Walinsky quotes Robert Kennedy’s statement that if any member of the ExComm other than John F. Kennedy had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we would have had a nuclear war. Ask yourself what a President Trump might have done in that moment. “Restraint” is not the word that comes to mind.

This is a man who said he would order the military to kill the families of Muslim terrorists and use interrogation techniques worse than waterboarding and opined that the United States should have seized Iraq’s oil resources as “spoils to the victor.”

Yes, we have put too much power in the hands of militarists and profit seekers in both the public and private sectors. But electing Donald Trump is not the answer; it would only compound the problem in new and dangerous ways. The answer is an active citizenry that speaks out against the inappropriate use of force and opposes interference in conflicts that involve neither American security interests nor egregious human rights violations—a topic in which Donald Trump has shown an ostentatious indifference, as his fondness for Vladimir Putin reflects.

All the evidence, provided again and again by Donald Trump’s own mouth, tells us not that he is a man of peace, but that he is a man of no principle—a man who will say, and possibly do, whatever happens to cross his mind at a given minute. He is like the weather in New England: If you don’t like it, wait a minute. We do not know what he believes because he does not know what he believes. We do not know what he knows because, from all we can see, he does not know much.

I don’t know when it was that corrupt businessmen with violent, authoritarian oligarch tendencies became acceptable to liberals but it seems to be a thing at least among a few. I think they will come to regret that if he wins. First they came for the undocumented immigrants and I did nothing …

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“I am your voice” — Donald Trump

“I am your voice” — Donald Trump

by digby

This nice lady is who Trump is representing:

“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this. I’m in the real estate industry. There’s none. Now, the people with the guns and shootin’ up neighborhoods and not being responsible citizens—that’s a big change. And I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America. I think that’s all his responsibility. And if you’re black, and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault.”

“I think [if you’re black] you have a real advantage because you had all the advantages—going to college. You had all the advantages because they got into schools without the same grades as a white kid. So I think that when we look at the last 50 years, where are we and why? We have three generations of still having unwed babies, kids that don’t go through high school. I mean, when do they take responsibility for how they live? I think it’s due time, and I think it’s good that Mr. Trump is pointing that out.”


She’s now resigned as an official Mahoning County Ohio campaign chair for Trump. But she’s not alone.  When they say “he tells it like it is” this is what many of his voters are talking about.

Don’t kid yourself. Its what his campaign has tapped into and it’s not just older people like her:

Update: Here’s the whole video. Fascinating stuff:

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QOTD: Trumpster

QOTD: Trumpster

by digby

He promises not to bring up Clinton’s health in the debate:

“We’ll see what’s going on with her,” he added. “Because there’s something going on that a lot of people are trying to figure out.”

 Then he added that he would be very respectful towards the sick old dame:

“I think she deserves that. I’m going to be nice. If she’s respectful of me, that’ll be nice. We’ll have something I think people will respect as a debate.

I guess nobody really cares much about his raging misogyny. After all the monster will probably start WWIII so we’ll all be dead anyway.  But it’s annoying to some of us.

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