Sam Bee is our voice
by digby
Boy is this ever right on:
This is why there are secret Hillary groups all over the country.
"what digby sez..."
Month: November 2016
“I waited 96 years”
by digby
TOMORROW. #ElectionDay pic.twitter.com/CZpA6eumoQ— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) November 7, 2016
Check out this wonderful website:
American women lacked the right to vote until August 18, 1920, when the final state ratified the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Now thousands of women born before that date are proudly casting their ballots for the candidate they hope will become our first woman president.
Witnesses to a century of history, these voters are an essential reminder of our nation’s possibilities as we strive to form a more perfect union.
The site currently profiles voters from more than half the states (see map), and we hope to include all fifty. Click on the photos to read their inspiring words.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, click over and take a look at the lives these ladies have led!
They’re all voting for the first woman president of course. And it’s a powerful, powerful moment for half the population.
.
16 years ago today
by digby
It seems like only yesterday. And yet like ancient history. Let’s hope tonight ends as decisively for Hillary Clinton as it did that night.
.
The Hillary Coalition
by digby
It’s all over but the voting now. But if the polling is correct, Hillary Clinton should pull out a win. The main mystery at this point is where and by how much. But it was close enough in the important battleground states as of Monday night that anything can happen. So don’t forget to vote!
Assuming the surge of Latino voters continues, the African-American vote meets its targets and the younger voters turn out, the Obama coalition should comfortably reassemble. But there are some changes to it, and they could be significant. For the first time since polling began, a majority of white college-educated voters, an overwhelming number of them women, say they are voting for the Democratic nominee. There’s been a trend in this direction for some years, but in 2016 it seems to be surpassing expectations.
And yes, as you may have heard, Clinton is not doing well with the non-college-educated white voters who make up the Donald Trump electorate. Polling even suggests that white working-class women are all in for Trump. This is a large faction of the American public, to be sure, but it is a minority and it has been trending toward the Republicans for more than 30 years.
So what is happening is an acceleration of a longstanding trend realigning voters by class, race and region. The Democrats still have their base of African-Americans, urban liberals, single women, etc. But if Clinton wins on Tuesday night in Nevada, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia (and possibly others), it will be because the new Democratic electorate leans more heavily on Latinos and college-educated whites in states where those populations tip the balance. From the looks of it, this coalition will include American Muslims, Asian-Americans and Native Americans as well.
Trump’s polling well in Ohio and he closed out his campaign in Michigan, so there is some thought that he might do better there than people had anticipated. If he carries either or both of those states, it might signal a real shift for both parties, exchanging the white working class for white college-educated voters and moving the center of gravity of both parties to different regions, the Democrats to the Sunbelt and the Republicans to the Midwest.
But regardless of what happens today,demographic trends are clear. This electorate is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse at the same time that a larger proportion of whites are going to college. And despite non-college-educated white women gravitating to Trump in bigger than expected numbers, the overall gender gap between the parties has been huge for some time and continues to grow. The 2016 Democratic Party is a coalition of non-college-educated, working-class people of color; middle-class people of all races and ethnic backgrounds; younger people; college-educated white people; and a large majority of women. The Republicans, on the other hand, are now the party of non-college-educated white people and a small sample of everyone else.
Yet for some reason the lesson of this election, at least among the pundit class, isn’t that we have this new diverse majority that coalesced behind the first African-American president and now behind the first woman. That’s an exciting story, representing a sea change in American culture and political life. Who are these people, and what is their common set of values? What makes a Latino mechanic in Tucson vote for the same person as the college-educated female small business owner in Vermont? Why are middle and upper-class African-Americans still loyal to the Democratic Party? Why do so many more women vote Democratic? Almost nothing has been said about any of this throughout this endless election season.
Instead, the media are obsessed with the other group, the white non-college-educated minority, particularly the angry white men who followed Trump. There have been dozens of articles trying to figure out what makes them tick. Meanwhile, a large coalition of voters who want to take the high road in dealing with some of the thorniest problems that are currently vexing other nations — problems like immigration, assimilation, pluralism and religious freedom — is of no interest. A majority of Americans is on the cusp of validating the idea that equality, opportunity, tolerance and inclusion are the values we endorse, and it might as well not be happening.
According to the mainstream media, the message from this election is that the Democrats have let down oppressed white men and they must work to get them back in the fold if they want to be seen as legitimate. For instance, here’sChris Matthews on “Meet the Press” talking about the lessons Democrats supposedly have to learn from this election:
[I]f this election goes as your polls [are] showing it going with Hillary winning, there’s still a huge minority of the country, almost 50-50 and probably more, that would’ve voted for Trump if it weren’t for Trump. His issues were powerful. He tapped into anger. It was trade. It was uncontrolled immigration. Wars we probably shouldn’t have fought … But the fact is the Democrats ought to recognize that they didn’t win the argument. They didn’t win the argument if they win the election. And they better be careful about that.
Actually, they did win the argument, if you understand that the Trump campaign ran on the premise that all of our problems are caused by “the other” — meaning something other than white males. He told them the clock could be turned back to a time when it was acceptable for men to treat women like objects and for white people to act as if they owned the country and everyone else was just visiting. This election isn’t a referendum on the white working class, at least no more than it is an referendum on women’s equality or working-class Latinos’ economic concerns or Black Lives Matter or health care or climate change or anything else. Indeed, the proposition that the top priority of the new government, regardless of who wins, is to pass the Trump agenda is simply bizarre.
If Clinton wins tonight, her policies for the working class of all races and ethnicities go far beyond anything that Trump had to offer with his crude nativism and empty promises. If she is able to deliver, all these Trump voters will benefit even if they despise her. And they are, of course, welcome to join the coalition with the immigrants and the Muslims and the African-Americans and the uppity women and all the others if they like.
I suppose it’s predictable that the message pundits like Matthews would take from the election of the first woman president, by the most diverse coalition in history, would be that white Republicans aren’t getting the attention they deserve. That doesn’t make it true. The angry working-class white folks who support Trump have always been regular Americans, just like the rest of us. They just didn’t know it until now. Welcome to our world.
GREAT moment just now during Hillary’s final speech. pic.twitter.com/rVn4FDQcfg— John Aravosis (@aravosis) November 8, 2016
Final Pitch of the series
by digby
Go vote people.
.
Honoring Susan B Anthony
by digby
People are standing in line at Susan B Anthony’s grave to put their “I voted” stickers on it. They’re bringing their little daughters.
This is the Livestream:
.
Be the Vote
by Tom Sullivan
Kick ass.
Take names.
That is all.
How and Why to Report Men With Guns at Polling Places
By Spocko
If you spot some of Trump’s “Poll Watchers” with their guns at polling places, text GUNSDOWN to 91990.
You will receive information on a national voter protection hotline (866-OUR-VOTE) operated by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Appropriate reports will be passed on to law enforcement and election officials, and voters will have the opportunity, if they feel safe doing so, to share photos of voter intimidation on social media.
There has already been an incident in Virginia.
Note this comment, “Voters will have the opportunity, if they feel safe doing so, to share photos of voter intimidation on social media.”
Compare to how the right-wing acted when they had video of a New Black Panthers member with a night stick in 2008.
The right-wing didn’t hesitate to put up the videos, they also sent a reporter to the location to get more video and have a confrontation, because that makes good TV. (Why is it a black man with a night stick is so scary and a white man with a gun is not? I can’t quite put my finger on it. )
Will Fox News do the same kind of story about voter intimidation when it is a white man with a gun? No.
But the mainstream media will cover it. We will see them go thought all the same steps they did in that Huffington Post article.
 |
| COURTESY ERIKA M COTTI A man carrying a weapon outside of Loudoun County Registrars Office in Leesburg, Virginia. |
- Was it legal? Yes.
- What did the authorities do? Nothing.
They checked with election officials, “They said that there’s nothing they could do, that he was well within his rights to be carrying his weapon,” said Judy Brown, Loudoun County registrar.
The Huffington Post called Republican party officials to see if they had a problem with this. (Would they disavow it and condemn it? Nope.)
Estrada said he doesn’t want to specifically ban his volunteers from carrying weapons.
“It’s a free country,” Estrada said. “I’m a NRA life member myself. So long as no laws are being broken, I’m not going to tell someone they can’t. But I’ve told all of our volunteers that we’re here for our candidates, we don’t want us to become the story.”
- Was the person who was voting intimidated? Yes, but she is a politically active person (she was quoted in the Washington Post!) so that allows people to dismiss her concerns. (The Huffington post writer noted that the man who promoted the New Black Panther video is now an operative working for Trump about election issues. )
Why did the Republicans push that New Black Panther story so hard? Because the modus operandi of the right-wing is to find an example of a few people on the left doing things that the RIGHT does all the time. It’s their “man bites dog” story method and it’s pushed up to the MSM so they can use it as an example for their “both sides do it” stories.
Democrats should push this incident in Virginia hard–with a goal in mind. We need bills created to make carrying guns around polling places illegal in all states before the next election. Now is the time to gather evidence to show that gun carrying at polling places is blatant intimidation. (I’ll expect the right to brag that nobody was shot. Good! That doesn’t mean people weren’t intimidated.)
Trump is going to go on about the rigged election for years and his people will be passing laws behind the scenes to make rigging them EASIER (because that is what they do, just like the NRA gets laws passed to make getting guns easier and carry them in more places behind the scenes.)
The story ends with the line:
Friday’s incident in Loudoun County, involving a white Republican, seems pretty unlikely to attract the same type of attention.
Eight years ago, not everyone had a video camera in their pocket and a way to gather and then distribute the footage to millions. Now we all do. If we want something to “get attention” we need to realize that the so-called liberal media is not going to do it for us. We need to. Social media is one way.
We also need to understand the continuing amplifying affect the right-wing media has within its own world. They will keep pushing their stories into the MSM. But what works for the right, when it comes to pushing stories, doesn’t work the same for the left.
The “so-called liberal media” isn’t going to give us the same kind of treatment they give to the right. Partly because when the right is busted lying, THEY DON’T CARE. If news broken by the left is on a real issue you can expect the MSM will apply rules on how they cover our stories that they don’t apply to the right. We need to be prepared.
This election there might be photos, videos and footage of men with guns at polling places. The stories will be accompanied by quotes about how it’s “perfectly legal.” But that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.
Start drinking now: A mixtape for election eve
By Dennis Hartley
Well, this is it.
We find out tomorrow if we still have a future. Drinks/meds on standby? Excellent! I brought chips ‘n’ dip. And tunes. Let’s rock:
1. Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention – “Plastic People”
2. Barry McGuire – “Eve of Destruction
3. R.E.M. – “It’s the End of the World”
4. King Crimson – “Epitaph” (isolated vocal track version)
5. The Youngbloods – “Darkness, Darkness”
6. Roy Orbison – “It’s Over”
7. The Doors – “The End”
8. John Martyn – “I Don’t Want to Know”
9. The Ramones – “I Wanna Be Sedated”
10. Styx – “Come Sail Away”
PLEASE VOTE.
On the last day these were your candidates
by digby
Hillary Clinton made her closing argument to voters on the eve of the election with a sober warning, telling supporters in Pittsburgh, “We don’t have to accept a dark and divisive vision for America. Tomorrow you can hope for a hopeful, inclusive, bighearted America.”
Donald Trump, at his own rally in Florida, held up a rubber mask of his own face and complained about obscenity in rap music.
Or as the NY Times put it:
That sounds about right.