Month: November 2016

When he’s right he’s right

by digby

Bill Maher, that is:

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There was no assassination attempt

by digby

But the Trump campaign is saying that a protester who was

On Sunday, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway deflected when questioned over whether it was irresponsible for two top advisers to Donald Trump to suggest that an attempt was made to assassinate their candidate on Saturday night.

Almost immediately after a security scare at a Trump rally in Reno, Nevada, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and the campaign’s social media director, Dan Scavino, retweeted a message on Twitter that described it as an “assassination attempt” against the Republican presidential nominee. However, there is no evidence that the incident was anything close to an attempt to kill or even hurt Trump.

While speaking at the rally on Saturday, Trump was abruptly rushed off the stage by the Secret Service after a fight broke out in the crowd in front of him. When the scuffle began, someone in the audience yelled “Gun!”—sparking a swift response from the agents and law enforcement at the scene. However, no gun was found, and a few minutes later, Trump safely returned to the stage to finish his speech.

As of Sunday morning, there is still no evidence that an “assassination attempt” on Trump took place in Reno this weekend. (In March, Trump falsely claimed that ISIS had attacked him while he was on-stage at a rally in Dayton, Ohio.) The man at the heart of the scuffle, who later identified himself to press as Austyn Crites, claimed that the incident occurred after he raised his “Republicans Against Trump” sign. Crites said he was quickly attacked by a group of Trump supporters before the word “gun” was shouted.
“All of a sudden, because they couldn’t grab the sign, or whatever happened, bam, I get tackled by all these people who were just, like, kicking me and grabbing me in the crotch and just, just beating the crap out of me,” Crites said. “And somebody yells something about a gun, and so that’s when things really got out of hand.”

Conway artfully dodged the question of whether it was responsible for Trump Jr. and Scavino to retweet a description of the incident as an attempt to murder Trump, and said CNN and other outlets should first retract their purported recent reporting that Clinton has the election in the bag.

“I’m glad nobody was hurt, but it does remind you that in these closing days, especially as the polls tighten, many of us are getting more death threats, getting more angry messages on social media and elsewhere,” Conway said on CNN’s State of the Union. “It’s a pretty fraught environment there. I think that’s the real focus here.” 

Conway continued: “If you’re Don Jr. and you’re on a live TV set while you’re watching this unfold, it’s pretty rattling to think of what may have happened to your father, so I’ll excuse him.”

CNN host Jake Tapper pushed back, saying the individual—a Republican who is voting for Hillary Clinton and has donated to her campaign—was not trying to assassinate Trump.
“First of all, that’s really remarkable, I have to say, that that’s what the storyline is here,” Conway responded. “Is CNN going to retract all the storylines, all the headlines, all the breathless predictions of the last two weeks that have turned out not to be true? ‘The race is over. The path is closed. It’s going to be a blowout.’ You guys retract that and I’ll give a call to Dan Scavino about the retweet.”

Asked about the Nevada disturbance on a conference call with reporters on Sunday morning, the Trump campaign first demurred then implied the man was a Democrat masquerading as a Republican.

“We have very little data on it, very similar to what’s been made public, we don’t know a lot about [it]…speaking a lot about it too early is a mistake so we are going to be learning as we go today,” said Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie.
“We are told that he is a quote, Republican, who has canvassed for Hillary Clinton and donated money to her campaign,” Conway said on the call.

Some of Trump’s closest allies are more than happy to continue the “assassination” talk—again, with zero evidence from law enforcement officials, the Secret Service, or any reliable source that any such attempt was made on Saturday evening.

Ann Coulter, one of the biggest and hardest-working Trump boosters in conservative media, continued tweeting well into Sunday morning about those she’s dubbed “leftist assassins” such as Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth.

Great.

About those missing voters

by digby

So I’m watching the 8,766th story about the white working class voters in Ohio on This Week with pundits on TV going on and on about how the missing white voters Trump needs could be coming out in droves. Ok. Maybe.

But here’s the real story from Greg Sargent. He points out that there are lots of “missing” non-white voters too. Lots of them:

This is in part because of nonwhite voters. Of the voters who were registered in 2012 but didn’t vote (among whom Clinton leads by 42-33), there are more nonwhites than whites. And the voters who are newly registered (among whom Clinton leads by 47-33) are disproportionately young and nonwhite, many of them Latinos.

Now, the big question remains: Which of these voters who did not turn out in 2012 will actually do so this time, and what impact will that have?

We won’t have a sense of the answer to this until after Election Day, obviously. But the Associated Press reports that analysts in both parties are seeing signs in Florida’s early vote that Democrats are getting people who haven’t voted before to do so now in greater numbers than Republicans are. Meanwhile, the Latino share of the early vote is up (Democrats are struggling with flagging African American enthusiasm, but that may still get turned around, and Latinos may help mitigate that).

We don’t know why all of this is the case, but it’s plausible that Trump’s candidacy might have something to do with it. And in very close outcomes in these battlegrounds, marginal shifts in the composition of the electorate could matter.

The big potential flaw in Trump’s whole “missing whites” strategy has always been that the measures he’s apparently thought would help get those voters out — in particular, the relentless xenophobia and racist campaign — risked driving up turnout among nonwhites. It would be quite the ironic outcome if Trump’s “missing whites” strategy ended up making “missing nonwhites” matter to the outcome more than they otherwise would have if another Republican had been the nominee. Particularly if it helps deliver a Trump loss.

UPDATE: Since this piece ran, turnout has been exploding in the early voting among Latinos in several key battlegrounds, and crucially, many are first time voters, i.e., the missing nonwhite vote. As the New York Times puts it:

In Florida, at least 200,000 more Hispanics had voted early as of Friday than did during the entire early voting period four years ago, according to an analysis by Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who helped run President Obama’s two campaigns here.

The turnout has been particularly explosive in South Florida and Central Florida, where thousands from Puerto Rico and other regions of Latin America have migrated in recent years. And 24 percent of the Hispanics casting early ballots were first-time voters, the analysis showed….

In Nevada, which has the fastest-growing Latino population in the West, Democrats appeared to have built a fearsome advantage in Las Vegas’s Clark County at the end of early voting Friday, largely because of a surge of votes from Mexican-Americans…

As of the end of early voting on Thursday, five states with surging Hispanic populations — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Nevada — had already cast ballots equivalent to over 50 percent of their total turnout from 2012, according to an analysis by Catalist, a Democratic data firm.

Or, as Senator Lindsey Graham neatly put it: “So Trump deserves the award for Hispanic turnout. He did more to get them out than any Democrat has ever done.”

California Republicans tried to warn them. It happened here 20 years ago.You simply cannot go around insulting a gigantic minority or citizens and expect them not to vote against you. It just makes no sense, particularly when a substantial number of white people, Asians, and almost all black people, not to mention a huge number of women of all races are equally offended by your racism. It a multi-racial, multi-cultural society like our the numbers just don’t add up.

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It’s historic and it’s not yet Tuesday
by Tom Sullivan

Final early voting totals from the NC State Board of Elections.

If North Carolina’s early vote is any indicator, the national election on Tuesday may be as historic as the Cubs’ World Series win last week. Forty-five percent of registered voters have already cast ballots in the 17-day early voting period. Early vote totals across the swing state are 14 percent higher than in 2012. (Population overall has risen about 4 percent since 2012.) In Wake County (Raleigh), an historic 52 percent had voted early as of yesterday. In Buncombe County (mine), 55 percent voted early, up 28 percent from 2012. Across the state, 3.2 million have already voted. (In 2012, 4.5 million had voted at the end of Election Day.) But while African American registration is up 2.6 percent from 2012, turnout in North Carolina is down from 49.7 percent.

Yet Latino voting in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina is significantly up from 2012, according to CNN.

In Florida and Nevada, races are tight, but Democrats seem to have an edge:

Democrats took a slight lead in Florida’s all-important early voting period Saturday after trailing slightly on Friday, according to statistics posted by state election officials.

But the margin is hardly one to sit on, a little more than 7,000 votes out of 5.7 million cast so far. More than a million voters are not registered to either of the major parties.

[…]

Things are also looking up for Democrats in another top battleground state, Nevada, according to Dave Wasserman, who understands the numbers as well as anyone as an editor at the Cook Political Report.

Thirty-four states allow some form of early voting. Throughout the early vote period, friends have asked if I worried about the polls tightening. No, not when so many have already cast ballots. Votes cast days and weeks ago don’t “tighten.”

In an indication of how contested this election will be, equal percentages of Democrat and Republican registrants have cast ballots in North Carolina. However, Democrats’ 650k advantage in registration makes that count for 305k more Democrats turning out. Bill Busa at Insight-us has looked at how the independent vote might affect the outcomes on Tuesday and finds a mixed bag. Independent voters are still a wild card. “It’s complicated,” he begins. Half of independent voters who already cast ballots voted in the March primary, so their ballot choice gives a hint to their leaning. The rest are what Busa calls Invisibles:

Without indulging in complex (and statistically dubious) mathematical imputations, the most that can probably be said of Invisibles’ partisan lean is that it is likely to be roughly the mirror image of the Visibles’. Visibles and Invisibles each comprise about a half of all unaffiliateds, so that would imply that our unaffiliated early voters as a whole (including both Visibles and Invisibles) are split pretty much right down the middle, or roughly 50% D-leaners and 50% R-leaners – as one might well expect in this too-close-to-call purple state.

If anecdotal reports from the “Cesspool of Sin” are worth anything, people under 30 are turning out late to register and vote for the first time. And at the polls they are taking Democratic sample ballots. How much same-day registration will tip the election in North Carolina is unknown for now.

In its ranking of the top six governors’ races on Tuesday, the Washington Post ranks North Carolina’s governorship most likely to flip. Few here, even among the business community, will be sorry to see potty-fixated Pat McCrory go.

Saturday Night at the Movies

‘Til Tuesday: 5 election movies for neurotics


By Dennis Hartley

If you’re like me (and isn’t everybody?) you’ve either mailed your ballot or made up your mind already, so you’ve just about had it up to “here” what with the negative ads and the polling and gnashing of teeth. And this election in particular has me in an unprecedented state of anxiety as November 8 approaches. I’m not sure why, I mean, there’s not much riding it…except the future of American democracy, and the possibility of an orange fascist sitting in the Oval Office come January. However, being a glutton for punishment (and applying the inoculation theory), I’ve found that one of the best therapies for getting through the final several days of pins and needles before Election Tuesday is to dust off a few of my favorite election-themed movies and give them a spin:

Don’s Party– Oddly enough, my favorite election night film has nothing to do with American politics. Director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant) sets his story on Australia’s election night, 1969. Outgoing host Don and his uptight wife are hosting an “election party” for old college chums at their middle-class suburban home. Most of the guests range from the recently divorced to the unhappily married. Ostensibly a gathering to watch election results, talk politics and socialize, Don’s party deteriorates into a primer on bad human behavior as the booze kicks in. By the end of the night, marriages are on the rocks, friendships nearly broken and guests are skinny dipping in the vacationing neighbor’s pool. Yet, this is not just another wacky party film. David Williamson’s script (which he adapted from his own play) offers many keen observations about elitism, politics, and adult relationships. Savagely funny, brilliantly written and splendidly acted.

Election – Writer-director Alexander Payne and creative partner Jim Taylor (Sideways, About Schmidt) followed up their 1995 feature film debut, Citizen Ruth, with this biting 1999 sociopolitical allegory, thinly cloaked as a teen comedy (which it decidedly is not). Reese Witherspoon delivers a pitch perfect performance as the psychotically perky, overachieving Tracy Flick, who makes life a special hell for her brooding civics teacher, Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick). Much to Mr. McAllister’s chagrin, Tracy is running a meticulously organized and targeted campaign for school president. Her opponent is a more popular, but politically and strategically clueless jock (why does that sound so familiar?). Payne’s film is very funny at times, yet it never pulls its punches; there are some painful truths about the dark underbelly of suburbia bubbling beneath the veneer (quite similar to American Beauty, which interestingly came out the same year).

Medium Cool – What Haskell Wexler’s unique 1969 drama may lack in narrative cohesion is more than made up for by its importance as a sociopolitical document. Robert Forster stars as a TV news cameraman who is fired after he makes protestations to station brass about their willingness to help the FBI build files on political agitators via access to raw news film footage and reporter’s notes. He drifts into a relationship with a Vietnam War widow (Verna Bloom) and her 12 year-old son. They eventually find themselves embroiled in the mayhem surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention (the actors were filmed while caught up amidst one of the infamous “police riots” as it actually occurred). Many of the issues Wexler touches on (especially regarding media integrity and responsibility) would be more fully explored in films like Network and Broadcast News.

Shampoo – Sex, politics, and the shallow SoCal lifestyle are mercilessly skewered in Hal Ashby’s classic 1975 satire. Warren Beatty (who co-scripted with Robert Towne) plays a restless, over-sexed hairdresser with commitment issues regarding the three major women in his life (excellent performances from Lee Grant, Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie). Beatty allegedly based his character on his close friend, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring (one of the victims of the infamous 1969 Tate-LaBianca slayings). The most memorable scene takes place at an election night event. This was one of the first films to satirize the 1960s zeitgeist with some degree of historical detachment. The late great cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs infuses the L.A. backdrop an appropriately gauzy look that nicely mirrors the protagonist’s fuzzy way of dealing with his adult responsibilities.

Best of Enemies – In this absorbing 2015 doc, co-directors Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon recount ABC’s 1968 Democratic/Republican conventions coverage debates between William F. Buckley (from the Right!) and Gore Vidal (from the Left!), culminating in an apoplectic Buckley’s threat (live, on national TV) to give Vidal a right, and a left…after calling Vidal a “queer”. It was not only the birth of TV punditry, but the opening salvo in the (still raging) culture wars. Still, compared to the odious climate of the 2016 election cycle, it almost seems quaint. This is a “must-see” for political junkies.

Previous posts with related themes:

Weiner
The Manchurian Candidate
Dr. Strangelove
Frost/Nixon
In The Loop

More reviews at Den of Cinema

-D.H.

Holy shit (you’ve got to vote)


by digby

From the Funny or Die folks:

Hackers and G-Men, happy together

by digby

. This has been a shocking election in a thousand different ways. But this is what’s giving me nightmares. If Trump wins he has a private police force doing his political bidding. If Clinton wins she’s facing Trump’s private police force which believes she is an illegitimate president and deserves to be jailed. Jesus.

Joy Reid has a good piece up at the Daily Beast about this called “Why we should all fear the rot inside the FBI”

Most Americans presume that members of law enforcement tend to be ideologically conservative. But many Americans have watched in alarm as police officers across the country pose with the Republican candidate, even donning red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps with their police uniforms. Those acts, often criticized by the officers’ superiors, convey a clear message to people of color that the cops stand with Trump—the promoter of nationwide “stop and frisk,” whose “New Deal for Black America” is more police in our communities, unleashed to bring old fashioned, Nixonian “law and order.”. These officers clearly don’t mind if those they police know that they concur with Trump’s divisive, racially abusive message, which excludes and threatens black, Hispanic and Muslim Americans; not to mention women and members of the media. That doesn’t surprise many people of color. But it’s no less chilling, knowing that people sworn to “protect and serve” share Trump’s worldview.

FBI agents are, presumably, drawn from much the same pool as law enforcement generally: mostly white, mostly male, mostly right of center. If the agency is indeed, “Trumpland,” as The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman reports, God help Hillary Clinton. But God help the rest of us well. We want to believe that the agents investigating that church burning in Mississippi have more sympathy for the black parishioners than for the ideology of the man whose name was scrawled on the wall. The FBI, to be credible with the American public, needs us to.

We have entered an unprecedented new age when federal law enforcement demonstrates a willingness to go beyond each agent exercising his or her individual right to vote to massing its investigative powers against an individual for political purposes. That the FBI could become a tool in the arsenal of one party’s presidential candidate, perhaps even coordinating with that candidate through their mutual allies, is the most frightening development in a truly unnerving presidential cycle. It should be unnerving to their fellow FBI agents as well, and to anyone who cares about the agency’s reputation.

It compounds the calamity of last week’s “October Surprise” from FBI director James Comey, who threw a grenade into the middle of the presidential race eleven days out, with a vague letter casting aspersions on Hillary Clinton without evidence of wrongdoing. Clinton, after all, is not only Trump’s opponent; she’s the longtime nemesis of one of his key surrogates, Rudolph Giuliani, whom Clinton initially faced as an opponent for the U.S. Senate.

Back then, in 2000, Mrs. Clinton inveighed against the extrajudicial killings of 22-year-old Amadou Diallo and 26-year-old Patrick Dorismond by undercover police, and Giuliani’s reflexive defense of the officers who killed them. She did so in terms that echo the calls of #BlackLivesMatter today, telling black New Yorkers that Diallo, a West African immigrant shot 41 times as he reached for his wallet in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment, would have been alive had he been white; and excoriating Giuliani for maligning Dorismond in death by releasing his juvenile record.

Giuliani’s allies in the NYPD hated her back then. Based on the reports from multiple journalists, including Wayne Barrett, some of Giuliani’s friends in the FBI hate her still. But should they be able to use the badges the public pins on them to try and prevent her from winning a presidential election?

There’s more at the link.

I was on the other side of Reid when the Snowden story came down. She was very antagonistic toward him and I was sympathetic. My main reasoning, which I stated at the time, was because I knew that authoritarianism is carried out by people with badges and uniforms and … access to confidential information. The idea that the NSA could be probing personal correspondence of every citizen and keeping it on file was abhorrent for a number of reasons. But my greatest fear about that is that this ability of government and others to invade the privacy of individuals, average or powerful, would be used for political purposes. It’s been done in the past and it’s being done right now.

What we’re seeing with the Wikileaks selective leaks of private campaign emails of only one side, obviously timed for the purpose of helping Donald Trump, and now the FBI leaking information to the Trump camp completely validates my fears in this respect. These hackers are not legitimate whistleblowers like Snowden and their motivations are not benign. In tandem with right wing members of the government they are helping to put a fascist demagogue in the White House. And the media is happy to help them do it — not that they could stop it even if they wanted to.

This is a big problem. Radical transparency isn’t the answer, obviously, because it isn’t really “transparent” is it, if only one side of the issue is revealed and weird megalomaniacs are the ones deciding the agenda?  And God knows the government can’t be trusted — just look at what the FBI is doing. I don’t have the vaguest clue what to do about this. It’s uncharted territory.

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If only the James Comey ran a ship this tight

by digby

Popular costume at the Republican National Convention

Of course, his organization isn’t as important as this one so who cares:

Reality-TV kingpin Mark Burnett and his associates say that they aren’t pressuring anyone over a series of damaging leaks about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s behavior on The Apprentice. But three show staffers tell The Daily Beast that’s just not so. According to these sources, Burnett’s office has been warning his staff and Apprentice alumni that if they leak Trump-related news or footage to the press, they are putting themselves in dire professional—and possibly legal—danger.

“They’re not dumb enough to put anything in email right now—people in [Burnett’s circle] are on lockdown over this stuff,” one former Apprentice employee said, who spoke of receiving a phone call in the past two weeks. “They didn’t directly ‘threaten’ [legal action]… but the message was clear: Don’t talk to the media, don’t leak to reporters.”

“They don’t know [for sure] that I did [talk to you], but they got in touch,” a second Apprentice staffer, who’d previously talked to The Daily Beast last month on the condition of anonymity because of the multimillion-dollar non-disclosure agreement that person had signed, said on Monday. “Now don’t call me ever again… Thank you.”

Burnett’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Meanwhile, the FBI is leaking like the Titanic. Right wing authoritarian thugs want to put Hillary Clinton in jail not only for a crime she didn’t commit but for something that isn’t even a crime. They just hate her — for reasons that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with something dark and ugly inside themselves and their institution.  And this country.

Pete Wilson showed what would happen but they didn’t listen

by digby

Following up on my post below, here’s something I wrote back in August of 2015 for Salon:

Donald Trump is the harbinger of GOP doom: The devastating history lesson that Republicans are completely ignoring

(Credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall/Ricardo Arduengo/John Locher)

There was a time back in the day when I used to joke with Republican friends that I would happily support a constitutional amendment that would ban all presidential candidates from California if they would agree to ban all presidential candidates from Texas. The joke, of course, was that my home state, “the land of fruits and nuts” had recently produced two conservative Republican presidents, Nixon and Reagan, while Texas’s most recent contribution had been the man responsible for “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.” In those days of post-Vietnam liberalism, that trade seemed like an excellent deal for the left.

It’s hard to imagine now, but from Harry Truman until Bill Clinton, California voted for a Democratic president just one time, for John F. Kennedy in 1960. With a few exceptions here and there, California also voted for GOP governors and senators more often than not. Even though the state had a longstanding reputation for social tolerance and cutting-edge cultural change, politically speaking it was a conservative state, as red as Texas is now.

There were obviously many factors that contributed to California’s evolution into the deep-blue state it is today, from demographics to the culture war. But none of those things come close to the damage that then-Governor Pete Wilson did to the longterm interest of the California Republican Party in 1994, when he scapegoated Latino immigrants as the cause of all the state’s woes.

Wilson was running for re-election, and as part of his campaign to distract from the economic failure of his first term and increase turnout among his base, he ran on a platform promising to crack down on undocumented workers, and enthusiastically supported the infamous Prop 187, which set up a statewide system designed to deny any kind of benefits to undocumented workers, including K-12 education and all forms of health care.

(He also supported a constitutional amendment to repeal birthright citizenship, currently guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.)

Here’s the famous “they keep coming” ad the Wilson campaign ran that year:

Wilson ultimately won the race, and the proposition passed with a 57 percent majority. Nativists everywhere applauded and cheered.

Unfortunately, they apparently didn’t know how to count. They failed to recognize that Latinos were the fastest growing ethnic minority in the state, and knew very well that all this “concern” about undocumented immigration stemmed from a nativist impulse that had little to do with economics and everything to do with bigotry.

The reaction was swift:

The Rev. Jon Pedigo remembers he was so angry that he instantly started planning a march from his parish in Morgan Hill to St. Joseph’s Cathedral in San Jose.

“I said, ‘I’m going to take that frickin’ cross from the church and I’m gonna walk to the downtown cathedral and demand that something be done,’” said Pedigo, now pastor of East San Jose’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The next morning he led 250 people on the 21-mile walk.

“We filled the cathedral. We filled the park. It was amazing,” he said. “We said, ‘We will not put up with this, and we want God on our side.’”

I don’t know if God was on their side, but Latinos certainly did not put up with it. The Republicans lost the Hispanic vote in California and have almost zero chance of getting it back. The Hispanic population saw the ethnic hatred on display during that period, hatred which was enthusiastically stoked by the Republican Party of California.

The demographic trends in the state guarantee that the GOP will be in the minority in California for a very long time to come. And needless to say, if anyone thought that after 20 years a younger generation might forget why their parents rejected the Republicans and give them another look, the primal scream we are currently witnessing in the 2016 presidential primary is giving them quite a refresher course.

This story is almost a political cliche, repeated so constantly in the media that it has the taint of a moldy morality play rather than a true political lesson. Certainly it’s been an article of faith that the Republican Party simply cannot win nationally if they don’t find a way to attract some Latinos. This is what they themselves wrote in their post 2012 autopsy report:

If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay aityttention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percentof the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans,also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012.

As one conservative, Tea-Party leader, Dick Armey, told us, “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We’ve chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home.”

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, their base doesn’t care about their models and their projections; they are convinced that immigrants are the source of all their troubles. And that’s a huge problem. A recent analysis by Latino Decisions shows that Republicans need to get at least 47 percent of the Latino vote in order to win in 2016. (For reference, Mitt Romney won 23 percent.)

I’m going to take a wild guess that Donald Trump and the cowardly clown car that’s chasing him have just made achieving that 47 percent figure impossible. It’s very hard to imagine that they can put this nativist genie back in the bottle. Even Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican American, was out on the campaign trail talking about “anchor babies” yesterday. All GOP candidates are getting drawn into the vortex, whether they want to or not. And some of them are just diving in had first:

More from @RealBenCarson on border issues: “You look at some of these caves and things out there one drone strike, boom, and they’d gone.”

— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) August 19, 2015

In case it wasn’t clear, Dr Ben Carson, the man who is coming in second in many GOP presidential polls, is suggesting that the government use armed drones to kill undocumented immigrants. Pete Wilson was a bleeding heart liberal by comparison.

Wilson’s California Republicans are now a rump party of angry, white Tea Partyers and a handful professional operatives. It’s a very sad motley group compared to the political juggernaut that produced Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

There used to be an old saying “As California goes, so goes the nation” meaning that California was the modern, forward thinking laboratory of democracy which started the trends that everyone else would soon follow. If that holds true in this case of this Latino bashing, the Republicans are in for a long road back from the debacle of 2016.

Update: And in case you were worrying, Trump has put the final nail in the coffin of the California GOP. It is on the way to total annihilation in the largest state in the union. And some House seats are going to turn over here.

“I’ma keep running cause a winner don’t quit on themselves”

by digby

This stuff is powerful, don’t kid yourself:

Beyonce: I want my daughter to see a woman lead the country https://t.co/hFL5AvZ0Cx pic.twitter.com/rJYLdQLTQR

— CNN (@CNN) November 5, 2016

Eight years ago, I was so inspired that my nephew, a young black child, could grow up knowing his dreams could be realized by witnessing a black president in office … and now, we have the opportunity to create more change. I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman lead our country and know that her possibilities are limitless.

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