A funny Republican
by digby
Like the rare yellow-bellied sapsucker, they do exist in the wild:
"what digby sez..."
Month: October 2016
For the record, she cleaned his clock in all three debates
by digby
He’s out there claiming “everybody says” he won the second and third debate handily. ( I don’t know what happened to his claim that he won the first one — he used to say that too.)
Not that it wasn’t obvious to any sentient being. The man is a sniffing, whining, petulant, authoritarian enfant terrible who can’t be bother to learn about anything but what they’re saying about him on CNN and Fox News. She, on the other hand, is a seasoned professional politician who takes the job of president seriously.
Everyone saw that clearly in the three debates and have had to do a gut check about whether or not to put the most powerful job on earth into his hands. It’s still highly disturbing that so many millions of Americans are still willing to do that.
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Why a scammer like Donald Trump got over
by digby
… Because the conservative movement is nothing more than a con job itself. They’re used to it.
Look at this disgusting scam that just came to my email today. It’s aimed at the old people, of course:
The subject line on the emails says:
Born before 1960? You qualify to get free survival food
But you have to send in $9.95.
The hoax goes on, the con endures, the scam still lives, and the grift shall never die.
Nasty stuff
by digby
Right. Nasty:
You want really nasty? I’ve got nasty:
I’m sick from this nasty stuff.
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Hannity confused by all the things
by digby
For years, Sean Hannity has attacked Louis Farrakhan while portraying him as Barack Obama’s soul brother. For instance:
On February 28, 2008, Hannity tried to smear Obama as a black racist because Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s daughters gave an award to Louis Farrakhan and Obama did not denounce Farrakhan as thoroughly as Hannity thought was required. He yelled at Obama-supporter Marc Lamont Hill:
“Where is your moral courage?” Hannity interrupted, both fingers jabbing now. “Where is your moral strength and your integrity and your core values and your principles? (Farrakhan) has a history of anti-Semitism and racism and you don’t have the moral courage to condemn it and I find that reprehensible.”
On April 18, 2008, Hannity ignored Obama’s criticisms of Farrakhan while trying to smear the then-candidate as a black racist because he had attended Farrakhan’s Million Man March, 13 years earlier:
Hannity said, “We know where Farrakhan stands with the presidential election. He has publicly announced his support for Senator Barack Obama although Obama has publicly rejected Farrakhan’s endorsement. FOX News has tried to get a statement from Barack Obama’s campaign seeking further information about the Illinois senator attending the Million Man March in 1995. They have not responded. It is curious how the Illinois senator will not speak about his attendance at the march. This raises the question, just how much do we really know about Senator Barack Obama?”
That’s from this post by Crooks and Liars which catalogs a long list of Hannity’s hostile remarks about Louis Farrakhan.
But lookie here:
Wednesday night, after the last presidential debate, Hannity sang a completely different tune. Talking Points Memo wrote:
“I’ve always wanted to meet Farrakhan,” Hannity said early Thursday morning, after commentator Larry Elder said Farrakhan “has said positive things” about Donald Trump.
“I listened to hours and hours of his speeches. He’s mesmerizing. He’s an unbelievable orator,” Hannity continued. “What he says about individual responsibility and morality and being fathers and starting businesses is brilliant. Then he adds the racism and the anti-Semitism. If you took that away, this guy could have been such a powerful force in his life, but unfortunately his legacy is one of racism and anti-Semitism.”
How “unfortunate.” But really, how important is his racism and anti-semitism anyway? Trump’s a little rough around those edges too. C’mon Sean, where’s your tolerance? He likes your idol so he’s got some good points, amirite?
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What caused Trump to crater in October?
by digby
I wrote about Trump’s slump for Salon today:
The latest polls are looking good for Hillary Clinton and increasingly so for Democrats further down on the ballot. The ABC tracking poll, which Nate Silver designates as A plus, was released on Sunday, showing Clinton with a 12-point lead over Trump. That’s a bigger lead than in most other polls but the averages across the board have her percentage up by a comfortable margin that seems to be increasing.
Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has laid out four possible outcomes to the race at this point, with all but one featuring a Clinton win:
A Trump win, including cases where he loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College.
A narrow Clinton win, wherein she wins the Electoral College, but wins the popular vote by 3 percentage points or less. (Or wins the Electoral College and loses the popular vote.)
A Clinton win in the “Obama zone,” wherein she wins the popular vote by 4 to 7 percentage points — the margins by which President Obama won the elections in 2012 and 2008, respectively. Clinton is all but certain to win the Electoral College if she wins the popular vote by this amount.
Finally, a Clinton blowout, wherein she wins the popular vote by 8 points or more, which would almost certainly also yield a dominant performance in the Electoral College.
FiveThirtyEight’s model, which averages polls, shows that Clinton has an 85 percent probability of winning and is currently ahead by 6.6 points.
For its part, The New York Times Upshot has a 92 percent probability of a Clinton win and shows see side-by-side comparisons of all the predictions. They all have Clinton with 85 percent or higher. Using its customary metaphor, the Upshot compares the chances of Clinton losing “to the probability that an NFL kicker misses a 29-yard field goal.” That indeed happens (in fact, it happened on Sunday night) so Democrats should not get complacent.
And for down ballot races? Well, there always has been a decent possibility that the Democrats would win the Senate if they retain the White House, simply because this is a cycle when Republicans are defending more seats. Still, that outcome is anything but assured, and some analysts are insisting (without evidence) that this year will feature lots of ticket splitting (that is, people who vote for Clinton but also vote for a Republican incumbent senator, for example).
Still, this cycle is nothing if not unpredictable, so who knows?
Democrats had written off the House from the beginning: GOP gerrymandering all over the country makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to win a majority in the House until another round of redistricting after the 2020 census. Still, the possibility, however remote, is starting to be discussed.
Sam Wang from the Princeton Election Consortium said:
I estimate that Democrats must win the national popular vote by 8% to have any chance at taking control of the House. This large margin is driven by two major factors in equal measure: gerrymandering to pack Democrats into districts, and population patterns which they pack themselves. Therefore the magic number for House Democrats is a Clinton win by 8%. In national polls Clinton is currently ahead by 5% (7 polls starting on October 10th or later), and Obama outperformed his 2012 polls by 3%, so it’s not crazy to imagine. I’d give the House Democrats a 1 in 5 chance of making it over this bar. A long shot . . . but not a crazy long shot.
So what’s happening to make this dramatic shift in October? Clinton had been leading throughout the summer, but on Sept. 26, the day of the first debate, FiveThirtyEight had Donald Trump with a 51 percent chance of winning. The candidates were tied nationally at 45 percent, and the trend was moving in his favor.
The obvious answer is that Trump blew it when he made a fool of himself in the aftermath of the first debate with his 3 a.m. tweets about the former Miss Universe. Since then he has been accused by a dozen women of groping and assaulting them against their will. That “Access Hollywood” tape was a shocker. Most observers see the huge and growing gender gap as a result of all that grossness.
But something else happened as well. For about a month before that first debate the right-wing media and people in or around the Trump campaign had been spreading spurious rumors that Clinton had brain damage or Parkinson’s disease. This was barely covered in the mainstream media, but everyone in the media pays attention to Matt Drudge, who had been relentless with the story, so they were very much aware of such rumors.
When Clinton had her fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremony in New York, the press spent days feigning anger about her failure to keep them properly informed about the details of her doctor’s appointments and diagnosis. (That’s despitecampaign professionals saying they would never inform the press of anything like that, mainly because such illnesses are so common on the trail.)
Unfortunately for Clinton, the combined effect of the right’s relentless smears about some kind of disqualifying terminal illness and the press fulminating for days over her pneumonia advanced the idea that she lacked the “strength and stamina” required for the job. Coincidentally or otherwise, this was the very charge that Trump had been making for months. By the time of the first debate in late September Clinton had been off the trail for quite a bit, first recovering from her pneumonia and then doing debate prep, with Trump nipping at her heels.
When she showed up looking very healthy, sharp and aggressive, it changed the narrative overnight. Indeed, her ability to bait him into misbehavior had her dominating that debate from beginning to end, when she hit him with the Alicia Machado story that had him reeling for days afterward.
So it’s true that Trump’s poll numbers have been cratering for a month now, pointing to what may be a catastrophic loss for the Republicans. Much of that happened because of revelations about Trump’s horrifying misogyny and his ongoing inability to behave with any discipline.
But it’s a mistake to discount the huge effect of the debates, well beyond Trump’s predictably ridiculous performance. These were the first occasions since the Benghazi hearings for people to see what Clinton is made of, and it reminded them of the characteristics that make her a formidable leader. When she stood there, face-to-face with Trump, it was clear that one of them was a president. And it wasn’t him.
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The long arduous path to the presidency
by digby
A 1920 cartoon called A Woman’s Path To The Presidency:
We’ve been half the population this whole time.
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If I wrote for The Onion
by Tom Sullivan
If I wrote for The Onion:
Hillary Clinton strategists engaged in strategy
House Republicans launch investigation
The Onion has yet to call with a job offer, but the Wall Street Journal might be in the running:
The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.
Matt Yglesias tweeted:
The charge is that the Democratic governor of Virginia tried to help a Democrat running for Virginia legislature? https://t.co/xRauHQANmf— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 24, 2016
Dave Weigel piles on:
It definitely Raises Questions, such as: When did the Clintons obtain a time machine? https://t.co/pZtaeWFa2Z— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) October 24, 2016
We are going to see a lot of this “Six Degrees of Hillary Clinton” in the nest few years. Tina DuPuy predicted this years ago:
Here’s how to play: Find a horrible tragedy anywhere in the world and in six degrees or fewer—blame Hillary Clinton.
Several hundred Nigerian schoolgirls are kidnapped by the terrorist cult, Boko Haram. The media pays absolutely no attention to it. Weeks later after a social media campaign to highlight this appalling act of violence, the world finally notices: #BringBackOurGirls
Even Fox News picks up the story! Steve Doocy on Fox and Friends offers, “And who exactly made sure that they [Boko Haram] were not placed on the terror list? Hillary Clinton.”
Of course, you can play it with other politicians too.
Let’s see. The Pacific Coast Borax Company sponsored future president Ronald Reagan in Death Valley Days. His sponsor was later bought out by the Dial Corporation, a division of the German Henkel Corporation that paid reparations for using slave labor during WWII. As president, Reagan named a William Henkel as Special Assistant to the President and made a controversial trip to German military cemetery to honor the German war dead. Anyone can do it.
(Yes, that’s all snark.)
And so it goes:
Hillary was able to get $12m from King of Morocco to fight AIDS & Malaria. She clearly doesn’t understand how corruption is supposed to work https://t.co/ud0MjvmLAm— John Aravosis (@aravosis) October 24, 2016
The other side of the story
by digby
This election has been all about how everyone in the whole country hates everyone else and thinks the country is going to hell in a hand basket. It has struck me as a little bit simplistic from the beginning. Nothing’s that clear cut even when it comes to the hand basket of deplorables.
James Fallows has been following that story and has a different view:
Over the past year-plus my wife Deb and I have been arguing that the “build a wall!”-style anti-immigration furor in Republican party politics does not match the lived reality of the parts of the United States where immigration is having the biggest and most obvious effect.
That’s part of the case I made in a cover story in March; that I wrote about in Dodge City, Kansas, in July; and that Deb chronicled in a visit with a Syrian refugee family in Erie, Pennsylvania, in August. Through American history, immigration has always been disruptive—at many periods, much more disruptive than it is now. At nearly every point in its history, people already present have viewed whatever group is most recently arrived as “different” and “worse” than the groups that had previously assimilated and generally succeeded. But compared with most other societies, the process of assimilation has continued to grind on in the United States, and overall (as I argue elsewhere) has been to the country’s enormous benefit.
Now the Atlantic’s video team has put out a great video treatment of this theme. It’s produced by Nic Pollock and was shot this summer in Dodge City, Erie, and also the San Joaquin Valley of California around Fresno.
Basically, it takes leaders and institutions to make anti-immigrant fervor happen. That’s what Trump and the GOP have done.
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