I gotcher wall for ya right here
by digby
That’s the taco truck “wall” of protest in front of Trump hotel in Las Vegas, where the candidate spent the night.
Down in Texas, taco trucks are registering Latino voters. They’ve awakened the sleeping taco truck giant!
(If you’re confused about the Taco trump meme, it comes from this.)
Wavering women in Real America
by digby
You wouldn’t know it from this year’s election reporting but there are tens of millions of women who are voting enthusiastically for Hillary Clinton because of her stand on the issues and the fact that she’s going to be the first woman president which is a meaningful milestone to them. Very few people have bothered to profile them or look into what they’re thinking. (There’s so little time for that what with the need to focus, as we do in every election, on the much more important angry white males who are voting Republican.) These women are the invisible people in this election just like they are often the invisible people in this world. But whatever, they are working to get her elected and they will vote and then go back to doing whatever it is they do that nobody gives a shit about.
Meanwhile, it’s making the difference in places where Trump is supposed to be the strongest:
Vigo County [Indiana] is as good a bellwether as any place in America. It’s voted for the winning presidential candidate all but two times the past 128 years, and hasn’t missed since 1952, choosing neighboring Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower—and even then it missed by a margin of only .07 percent. And signs are, in 2016, Vigo, situated in the home state of his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence, is firmly in the Trump column.
But on this day inside Pizza City, as members of a France 2 television crew hovered boom mics over the proceedings, Trump’s Indiana team wasn’t playing offense, but defense. A dour mood filled the air. Only days before, video had surfaced of their candidate bragging about his prowess in assaulting women, and the subject had overtaken the matter of early voting as the topic of conversation. Polls weren’t looking as rosy as they once had, either. In August, Trump led Hillary Clinton in Indiana by 11 points. But only a week or so before today’s visit, a WTHR/Howey Politics poll in the field from October 3 through October 5 had Trump up with only a 5-point margin in Pence’s own backyard, 43 percent to 38 percent. Meanwhile, a Monmouth University poll released a few days later would show Clinton trailing Trump here by a margin of 4 points.
All was not well in Importantville, as Trump himself had dubbed the state during Indiana’s decisive primary. As political gossip around Terre Haute had it, Trump’s comments about women had caused a surge of female voters registering in the waning hours before early voting began. Could Trump lose Vigo County? And if he did, that could mean, well, he couldn’t lose here, could he? That was the question that hung in the air, in the background of the political chatter that could be heard on sidewalks and in libraries and the town’s bars during the time I spent in the county last week.
And then there was this bit of data: At a drive-through voter registration event at the Vigo County Courthouse the day before, about 150 voters registered. I spoke to one volunteer who worked the event, and she told me that 90 percent of them were women who planned to vote for Clinton.
The whole piece is interesting, showing how the air has gone out of the Trump Balloon generally. And not all women are coming around. Like this one:
Lisa Reed, 58, a landlord, said she wasn’t bothered by Trump’s comments, especially compared to the specter of a Clinton presidency. “She’s for everybody else but my gender and my race,” she said. But she admitted that if a man said to her what Trump had said about women, she wouldn’t take it sitting down. “I got a gun. I’ll shoot your ass.” Even Trump? “Even Trump,” she said.
“And if Trump is president, you’ll still have your gun,” Jaworowski interjected.
People nodded.
Afterward, Reed told me that she wasn’t against the idea of a female president. “I’d love to see a woman president—I’d just like it to be a real woman,” she said. Did she think Hillary Clinton was not a real woman? “If you can’t satisfy a man enough to keep him home, than you are not a real woman. I always thought the best female president would have been Condi Rice,” she said, apparently unaware that, days earlier, in the wake of the Access Hollywood video leak, the former secretary of state had called for Trump to withdraw. (“Enough! Donald Trump should not be President,” Rice posted on Facebook.)
But this too:
Women for Trump aside, though, rank-and-file female voters with whom I spoke across town seemed generally turned off by Trump.
The night before the gathering at Pizza City, at a League of Women Voters candidate forum, I could find only one female Trump supporter. “I’ve worked with a lot of men, and I realize how men are,” Laura Wilkey, 65, told me. “It’s crude language, but he wasn’t in mixed company.” (At another forum later in the week, the BBC broadcast a debate between Trump’s Indiana team and two Clinton supporters from a local watering hole. Clinton’s side of the room at the forum sat substantially more women than Trump’s side did.)
“This election is insane,” Sue Bentrup, an 80-year-old retired nurse who planned to vote for Clinton, told me. “I feel sorry for the Abraham Lincoln Republicans. I’m nervous.”
Personally, I don’t think it’s the “pussy” video itself that caused it. It’s the accumulation of all of it. And it’s always possible that a few of these women, ridiculous as it obviously is, might even think Clinton will make a pretty good president.
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Conway shows how a true liar gets it done
by digby
Trump has invited Obama’s Kenyan half brother Malik who is a Trump supporter to the debate. He is very disappointed in his half-brother and Hillary Clinton:
He’s also annoyed that Clinton and President Obama killed Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy, whom he called one of his best friends.
Malik Obama dedicated his 2012 biography of his late father to Khadafy and others who were “making this world a better place.”
“I still feel that getting rid of Khadafy didn’t make things any better in Libya,” he said. “My brother and the secretary of state disappointed me in that regard.”
But what bothers him even more is the Democratic Party’s support of same-sex marriage.
“I feel like a Republican now because they don’t stand for same-sex marriage, and that appeals to me,” he said.
Obama believes strongly in the institution of marriage — so strongly that he has at least three current wives, although press reports have put the number as high as 12.
Kellyanne Conway was on MSNBC this morning and lied so smoothly about all this that it actually scared me:
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle: Help me understand why bringing President Obama’s half brother tonight, how does that help voters know who they want to elect as the next president of the United States?
Conway: That’s all right. he wanted to come and we’re happy to give him a ticket and accomodate him.
Ruhle: You guys are friends with him?
Conway: I’m not personally friends with him, I’ve never met him.
Ruhle: Donald Trump is friends with him?
Conway: But, yuo know, we’re very inclusive.
Ruhle: To me, inviting president Obama’s brother, are you not ringing some conspiracy theories? Are you not winking at the birther issue again?
Conway: What? No …
That’s not spinning. It’s pathology.
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Trump’s trusted media sources
by digby
In recent days, Donald Trump stood in front of riled-up crowds and argued that both candidates should undergo drug tests before the final presidential debate Wednesday. Why? Because Hillary Clinton, he claimed, is taking performance-enhancing substances.
“I don’t know what’s going on with her, but at the beginning of her last debate, she was all pumped up at the beginning, and at the end it was like take me down,” he said. “She could barely reach her car.”
He provided no evidence for any of this. In fact, he seemed to be purposely mixing up Clinton’s debate performance with her recent bout with pneumonia. (In a much-viewed video, her knees buckled as she departed early from a 9/11 commemoration in New York.)
But here’s how Roger Stone, Trump’s ally and longtime dirty-trickster, described Clinton’s second debate behavior, in a recent interview with Alex Jones, the syndicated radio host and proprietor of InfoWars, a website that thrives on far-right conspiracy theories.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump believes there’s a global conspiracy to stop him from becoming president – but it’s not the first time he’s pushed unfounded theories. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
“Look, of course she was jacked up on something. I assume some kind of methamphetamine.”
[It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump]
It sounds like a perfect circle of disinformation: Stone provides unfounded allegations to InfoWars, and lately, Trump has been using InfoWars like a news source.
Let’s be clear: If InfoWars is news, the yowling of feral cats is classical music, and Trump University the best place to invest your hard-saved tuition dollars.
InfoWars was founded by Jones, a purveyor of various crackpot notions, including that the Sandy Hook massacre of tiny children in 2012 was a government hoax intended to promote gun control. (It was all done with actors, Jones claims.)
And the California drought? Made up. InfoWars is also a great place to go for 9/11 “truther” rumors; Jones proudly calls himself a founder of those.
But Trump seems to be a fan: He did an interview with Jones last year, telling the host his “reputation is amazing.” Which is indeed true, but not in the complimentary way Trump intended it to be taken.
[What could a future Trump TV venture look like? Tune in here.]
“InfoWars is poisonous, and its journalistic value is negative,” said Rick Perlstein, the historian who has chronicled the modern conservative movement in books about Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. He called the circularity of Trump referring to Roger Stone’s interview in InfoWars as “a burlesque version” of Dick Cheney’s planting a story in the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq War and then citing that story on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Perlstein wrote about the Jones/Trump connection in Salon in the spring, calling Jones “a lunatic,” observing that Trump was citing Jones’s denials of a California drought.
It’s well known, of course, that Trump increasingly is campaigning against what he calls “the corrupt media,” slamming news organizations for “false stories, all made up . . . lies, lies.” He calls reporters “scum” and insists that they are all tools of the Clinton campaign.
Still, he makes a few exceptions. He borrowed his top campaign executive, Stephen Bannon, from Breitbart News, the far-right website which is practically a wing of his campaign, often referred to as Trump Pravda.
Read on. It’s a great story and should inform Villagers of some stuff of which they are obviously unaware.
She did miss one piece of the story. Stone didn’t make up the drug thing. That came out of the Mercer family “Defeat Crooked Hillary” PAC which formerly employed both Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie. This ad was put online before Trump mentioned it on the stump:
The last debate. Thank God.
If there is any justice in this world, Wednesday night will be the last time we will ever see Donald Trump on the presidential debate stage. What’s remarkable about typing that sentence is that his presence on that stage and in this race seems just as surreal today as it did a little over 14 months ago when the Republicans held their very first presidential debate of the 2016 cycle in Cleveland. Political junkies gathered excitedly to see if this unlikely frontrunner was going to fall apart or make an irreversible gaffe before the whole country. We’re still doing that. Give the man his due: He’s a high-wire act who has managed to keep up all riveted for more than a year, just waiting for him to fall.
It’s tempting at this late date to be jaded and say that Trump’s unpredictability has always been overhyped. But it really wasn’t. This man has said and done things in presidential debates that nobody else has ever done. He was completely unprepared, crude, arrogant and seemingly without any awareness that he was making a fool of himself. And he just kept going, winning primaries by hook or crook, all the way to the end. To call him a rule-breaker is inadequate. His debates have been train-wrecks from the very beginning. In the primaries, at least, that seemed to thrill a substantial portion of the Republican electorate.
The first primary debate in Cleveland foreshadowed every Trump debate to come. I wrote at the time, “Nobody really knows how Trump did. The normal rules of politics don’t seem to apply to him, so although he didn’t seem as commanding on the stage as his fans may have hoped, you just never know. For what it’s worth, if my local news was any guide, Trump was triumphant: ‘He stood his ground and apologized for nothing.’” And so it has gone ever since.
But looking back, his Achilles heel was evident in that first debate. Megyn Kelly was the moderator and famously confronted him about his treatment of women. His reaction the next day, launching a public feud with Kelly, seems to have been noted by the Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton skillfully baited Trump when they met in the first general election debate, and he never recovered.
The Republicans held 12 debates during the primary season and they were all roughly the same. Trump crudely insulted his rivals, said many stupid things, showed himself to have bigoted and authoritarian views — and thrilled his voters each and every time. In the early days there were so many candidates that he got less airtime. But he always dominated. Here are some of the highlights:
Sept. 16, 2015, Simi Valley, California:
Standing before Ronald Reagan’s Air Force One at the former president’s library, Trump let fly. He insulted Rand Paul’s looks and Jeb Bush’s wife. He said he thought Carly Fiorina had a beautiful face when the moderator brought up a quote where Trump had — insulted her face.
Trump got angry at the moderator, John Harwood, for suggesting that he was running a “comic-book campaign.” The whole group had a hissy fit that the debate questions were unfair.
Trump asked the moderator to stop Carly Fiorina from interrupting him. He dismissed John Kasich as an unworthy opponent who got lucky when Ohio discovered fracking.
Dec. 15, Las Vegas:
As I wrote at the time, Trump “reiterated his call to kill the relatives of terrorists, at one point even petulantly bellowing, ‘So they can kill us, but we can’t kill them?’ He also proved that he had no idea what the ‘nuclear triad is and suggested that you can ‘shut down certain areas’ of the internet.”
Jan. 13, 2016, North Charleston, South Carolina:
The bromance between Trump and Ted Cruz finally ended, with Cruz attacking Trump’s “New York values” and Trump responding with his best line in the whole campaign: “The people of New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death — the smell of death was with us for months.”
Jan. 28, Des Moines, Iowa:
Trump was still mad at Megyn Kelly so he didn’t show up, holding a veterans fundraising event instead. He had to be publicly prodded, months later, to fulfill his pledge to donate the money.
Feb. 6, Goffstown, New Hampshire:
Trump went full barbarian, saying, “I mean, we studied medieval times — not since medieval times have people seen what’s going on.” Apparently he meant what was going on in Iraq and Syria with ISIS, although it wasn’t entirely clear. “I would bring back waterboarding,” he said, “and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
Feb. 13, Greenville, South Carolina:
He called everyone on the stage liars to their faces, and hit Jeb Bush for his brother being asleep at the wheel on 9/11 and wrongly invading Iraq. The pundits all said he’d gone too far, that you couldn’t say that in South Carolina. He won the primary.
Trump said no one on the stage had done as much for Israel as he had. After the debate, he claimed the IRS was auditing him because he’s such a “strong Christian.”
This was the night Trump talked about his penis: “Look at those hands, are they small hands? And, he referred to my hands — ‘If they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.” This was also the debate in which he insisted that the military would follow his orders without question, even if those orders were to commit war crimes, which he openly endorsed.
March 10, Coral Gables, Florida:
The final debate with the final four: Marco Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and Trump. It was the scariest of all because they were all composed, civil — and completely insane. Trump had triumphed over the Republican Party. It was obvious he was going to win the nomination.
Hillary Clinton easily won the two previous general election debates. At this stage in the campaign people expect the candidates to be knowledgeable and prepared. Donald Trump is capable of neither. It’s always possible he could throw Clinton off-balance with his usual antics, so everyone still has that breathless sense of anticipation wondering if the whole thing is going to turn into even more of a freak show than it’s already been. It’s made for good TV, but it’s been a travesty for our country. Let’s hope this encounter in Vegas is the last debate of its kind.
Five climate questions (plus one) for the next Presidential Debate
by Gaius Publius
As you may have heard, the topics for the next presidential debate have been chosen:
and quelle surprise, not one is about the climate. Unless, of course, Brad Johnson has sussed this one out.
Good to see global warming on agenda of final debate. #VoteClimate https://t.co/yX8lpImMFp pic.twitter.com/0Zj4NC0r7K— Brad Johnson (@climatebrad) October 13, 2016
At Media Matters, though, Andrew Seifter has figured out how climate can enter the debate after all. His piece is longer than just these questions, and worth reading in full, but as debate prep for viewers, consider his list of climate questions under five of the six topics chosen:
Topic: Immigration
Possible Debate Question: Studies show that climate change worsened the extreme drought in Syria that contributed to the Syrian refugee crisis, and that the effects of climate change on crop yields will drive millions of Mexicans to seek entry into the United States in the coming decades. Will you incorporate climate change into your immigration policies, and if so, how?
Topic: Economy
Possible Debate Question: A 2016 survey of 750 top economists found that climate change is now the single greatest threat to the global economy. What will you do to protect our economy from the effects of climate change?
Topic: Supreme Court
Possible Debate Question: Following a 2007 Supreme Court ruling and a scientific assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA is legally required to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change under the Clean Air Act. Will you implement the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of the EPA’s emissions reduction strategy, and if not, how will your administration fulfill the Supreme Court’s mandate to cut greenhouse gas pollution?
Topic: Foreign Hot Spots
Possible Debate Question: The Pentagon has determined that climate change will “aggravate existing problems — such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions — that threaten domestic stability in a number of countries.” To what extent do you believe climate-related risks should be integrated into military planning?
Topic: Fitness To Be President
Possible Debate Question: The scientific community is nearly unanimous in saying that global warming is happening and caused by burning fossil fuels, yet many politicians refuse to acknowledge this is the case. Will you listen to the scientists on climate change, and do you believe that those who refuse to do so are unfit for our nation’s highest office?
These are almost softball questions, and Chris Wallace could easily ask them:
You can tweet Chris Wallace at @FoxNewsSunday. But that’s just five of the six debate categories. I think I can offer one more, and it’s no softball.
A “Debt and Entitlements” Question
I have a final question, one for the Debt and Entitlements section, and it’s a whopper. Not at all a softball question.
Consider what happens if humans fail to significantly limit atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases through, say, 2060. That is, what if our “leaders” give it a try — enough of a try that none of them is villainized (or thrown out of office) — but sorry, they just couldn’t get there because of “constraints” of some kind.
That scenario — halfway sorta getting “there” — is similar to what the IPCC used to call its “A2 scenario,” a world that reaches 600 ppm CO2 by the end of the century, but not the almost-1000 ppm CO2 predicted by the IPCC’s worst-case scenario, A1FI (the “FI” stands for “fuel intensive).”
Now consider this evaluation (pdf) of the world-wide cost of all climate impacts, calculated both with and without human adaptation to them, assuming we do little to mitigate those impacts — do little, in other words, to “soften the punch” of global climate change ahead of time and merely try to “absorb the blow” as it comes.
The title of the study referenced above is Assessing the costs of adaptation to climate change: A review of the UNFCCC and other recent estimates, published in August 2009. After looking at all of the ways climate change will cause damage (“impacts”), and assessing the total costs of each of those impacts, they have arrived at a number, or rather a range of numbers.
From Table 8.1 of that study, there is “very high” confidence that the world-wide total cost of the damage (net present value in 2000 dollars) will be in the range of … ready? … $270 trillion to $3,290 trillion, with a mean value of $1,240 trillion if we spend no money on adaptation — that is, if we, the species, just let it happen to us and try to roll with it. (That’s a distinct possibility, by the way, that we will do not much to adapt until it’s too late.)
On the other hand, if we fail to “soften the punch” of climate change (no mitigation) but do succeed at some adaptation to the blow (anticipate and prepare, in other words), those numbers improve … to a very high confidence range of $170 trillion to $2,340 trillion, and a mean of $890 trillion.
Let’s average those means to something like a world-wide cost of climate impacts of about $1,000 trillion.
Huh.
With that in mind, my suggested “debt and entitlements” climate question is this:
Topic: Debt and Entitlements
Suggested question: The world-wide total cost of the damage from climate change, its world-wide impact, has been credibly estimated by a peer-reviewed study as something like 1,000 trillion dollars. Again, that’s one thousand trillion.
Clearly, most of that cost will not fall on the United States, but a good percentage of it will. Let’s say conservatively that only 10% of that cost, or $100 trillion, will be borne by the U.S. If we amortize that cost to the U.S. over the rest of this century, the price of not “softening the blow” of those impacts, not mitigating the damage ahead of time, comes to about $1.1 trillion per year.
So my question for each of you is two-fold. First, given those numbers, do you plan to treat climate change as a WWII-style emergency as a way to bring those cost numbers down? And if you don’t, how do you propose we pay for our failure to treat it as one? Where will that $1.1 trillion-per-year come from?
I don’t know if those numbers got your attention, but they certainly got mine — just as they did in 2009, when they were first reported.
(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)
GP
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A cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese
by Tom Sullivan
More from the man who’d push the red button to prove how big his “hands” are.
With just 21 days to go before Election Day, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly on the campaign trail that the election is being “rigged,” tweeting on Monday specifically about “large scale voter fraud” being a problem.
Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016
ABC News reached out to the top election official in all 50 states to find out if they agree. Of the 26 state officials who immediately responded, all maintained that the presidential election has not and will not be rigged in their state.
And since Republicans control so many state legislatures, Think Progress observes, “If the election is really rigged, 33 states are rigged by Republicans.” (Image at top.)
The Guardian:
It will comes as little surprise to those who have paid even the slightest attention to the post-truth campaign of Donald Trump that these claims of voter fraud and ballot rigging are almost entirely fact-free and lacking in evidence. One legal scholar dedicated years to studying the issue and could find only 31 cases of voter fraud out of more than a billion votes cast. As the ThinkProgress thinktank has noted: “Iowa’s Republican secretary of state uncovered zero cases of voter impersonation at the polls during a two-year investigation.” Even the hard right Breitbart website – so close to Trump that its boss, Steve Bannon, is the chief executive of the Trump campaign – had to admit that, “given the sheer variety of jurisdictions that run a typical presidential election, the nationwide effect of voter fraud may be much harder to measure, and probably small”.
Post-truth campaign is right. The party that in the “do your own thing” 1960s started accusing the left of moral relativism now practices factual relativism. Conservatives insist on believing their own thing. Whoo-EEE! Facts are for losers. Winners make up their own. Evidence not required.
Getting especially tired of this BS (as defined by Wikipedia):
Proof by assertion, sometimes informally referred to as proof by repeated assertion, is an informal fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes, this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases, its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.
A form of brainwashing, in extreme cases.
RationalWiki provides an example:
It is a very simple formal logical fallacy that has the following structure:
X is true.
In practice, arguments by assertion tend to take the “rinse and repeat” approach to logic:
X is true.
No really, X is true.
Actually, X is true.
But X is true.
What’s frightening is how much post-truthiness has infected the entire culture. A fairly lengthy article by a 3rd Degree Berner that flashed across Facebook the other day (can’t find it now) had a virtually identical structure. “The primary was rigged. No really, it was rigged. You can tell it was rigged because of how rigged it was,” etc. No evidence offered. None required.
It’s the logic of a cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese.
Clovis man makes stuff up
by digby
Whatever it takes to justify their loss, regardless of the truth:
In a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Monday night, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump drilled down on his new favorite talking point — warnings that the election may be “rigged” against him.
In the speech, Trump alleged that “it is possible” that illegal votes from undocumented immigrants (who, although they pay taxes, are not allowed to vote) may have won President Obama the state of North Carolina in 2008.
“It could have provided the margin of victory,” Trump said.
There’s no credible evidence backing up Trump’s claim. Nonetheless, his campaign is backing him up — with even more misinformation.
In an interview with local Boston radio, Trump’s campaign co-chair Sam Clovis was asked if Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about North Carolina were “irresponsible.” Clovis said that instead, “it raises an issue.”
“I’ve done a lot of work and study in this area, so here’s what happens: you have the opportunity for illegal immigrants to come to the state, and the state loosens its laws to provide for individuals to get drivers licences in the state, illegal or otherwise,” Clovis said. Then, he alleged, once the undocumented immigrants have the photo ID, “what happens sometimes is that you are able to register to vote because you establish residency.”
Clovis’ defense of Trump’s comments is based on a wholly false premise: North Carolina does not allow undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licences.
They’re just saying anything that comes into their heads now.
Her brand is in crisis
by digby
Try as she might Ivanka Trump cannot hide the fact that her family name is now the most loathed brand in America:
Her social media provides, in the progressive parlance her father likely abhors, a safe space. In an election season in which there seems to be no escape from the campaign — where it is difficult, if not impossible, to make it through a 24 hour stretch without reading, thinking, or talking about the election — Ivanka’s pages may well be some of the only internet real estate where November 8th (or 28th, or 35th) is just another day to be a woman who works.
References to the campaign are fleeting, restrained: A picture of the op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal about her father’s plan for working mothers, of Ivanka giving a speech at a campaign event. Though her father’s name appears a few times, like on the sign outside his just-opened Washington, D.C. hotel, his face is scarcely seen, save for a few snapshots from the night he accepted the GOP nomination. For the most part, Ivanka’s color palette skews less republican red and more ballet pink.
Ivanka’s brand is for middle class working women. They are the last people who will want to own anything with the Trump name on it ever again. He messed everyone in the family up with ridiculous run for president but none more than his darling daughter. She’s toast.
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Democrats are together
by digby
A group of influential progressive intellectuals are giving Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton their seal of approval ― and urging fellow progressives, including those who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primaries, to do the same.
In a letter that went public on Tuesday and was provided in advance to The Huffington Post, more than 50 progressive economists and other policy experts endorse Clinton’s candidacy ― not simply as a way to defeat GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, but also as a way to advance a liberal economic agenda.
The letter warns that “drastic increases in income inequality have created a deep malaise among many Americans who are increasingly excluded from the promise of a better future.” Then it offers an overview of Clinton’s proposals ― including a higher minimum wage, big spending on infrastructure and new early childhood education programs ― that are designed to bolster economic fortunes for the poor and middle class.
Many, and probably most voters don’t know about Clinton’s agenda. And those who do may not have faith she’ll pursue those policies in office. This is particularly true for voters who supported Sanders in the primary and know Clinton primarily through her associations with Wall Street and her public statements in favor of her husband’s legislative achievements, including the expansion of free trade and imposition of time limits on welfare.
Stay informed with the latest news and video. Download HuffPost’s news app on iOS or Android.
The letter does not mention Sanders explicitly. But Martin Carnoy, a Stanford economist who helped draft and gather signatures for the letter, said one of his goals was “to reassure progressives that Clinton is committed to the [progressive] agenda we have listed.”
The figures behind the letter may help with that. Carnoy’s partners in the enterprise were Robert Reich, a former labor secretary who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, andDerek Shearer, a former ambassador to Finland who is now a professor at Occidental College.
Reich and Shearer’s ties to the Clintons go back in the 1960s, when they first met Bill Clinton at Oxford. They also have strong progressive bona fides. Reich, in particular, became famous forarguing with more conservative advisers in the Clinton administration ― and, more recently, for endorsing Sanders in the primaries.
I think you would be safe to say that almost all these names are in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.Stanford economist Martin CarnoyInformed progressive observers will recognize many of the letter’s signatories, starting with Stephanie Kelton, a University of Missouri-Kansas City economist who has been a top adviser to Sanders. Among the other notables are Economic Policy Institute President Larry Mishel, who was beating the drums about wage stagnation before it was fashionable; Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, an early advocate for treating free trade more skeptically; and Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez, who is among the world’s most influential experts on inequality.
The list also includes a few people with White House experience ― among them, University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson, an Obama administration veteran perhaps most famous for her advocacy of generous work-family supports.
“I think you would be safe to say that almost all these names are in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” Carnoy said. “They are all deeply concerned with issues of inequality and social justice.”
Of course, vouching for the progressive elements of Clinton’s agenda is one thing. Vouching for her commitment to enacting them is quite another. In Washington, progressives have made clear they plan to apply political pressure, should Clinton become president, to make sure she doesn’t walk away from her policy commitments ― or fill her administration with appointees uninterested in pursuing an aggressively liberal agenda.
But Shearer, for one, thinks Clinton may surprise skeptical progressives.
“I’ve long felt that Mrs. Clinton would make a more progressive president than her husband,” Shearer said.
Hillary Clinton is dominating Donald Trump among millennial voters, according to a new USA Today/Rock the Vote poll released Monday.
Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, has 68 percent support among likely millennial voters, and Trump, the Republican nominee, is backed by only 20 percent, according to the survey.
Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson has the support of 8 percent of likely voters, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein is backed by 1 percent.
Now it’s about turnout.
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