Month: November 2016

Trump’s YUGE endorsement

by digby

This could be the final blow in Clinton’s coffin:

The Crusader is one of the big Ku Klux Klan newspapers. (Yes there are more than one.)

Under the banner “Make America Great Again,” the entire front page of the paper’s current issue is devoted to a lengthy defense of Trump’s message — an embrace some have labeled a de facto endorsement.

“‘Make America Great Again!’ It is a slogan that has been repeatedly used by Donald Trump in his campaign for the presidency,” Pastor Thomas Robb wrote in the Crusader. “You can see it on the shirts, buttons, posters and ball caps such as the one being worn here by Trump speaking at a recent rally. … But can it happen? Can America really be great again? This is what we will soon find out!”

“While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What made America great in the first place?'” the article continues. “The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did — but because of who our forefathers were.

“America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great.”

It’s the big one.

But, you know, emails.

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by digby

I swear, the word “email” has taken on such a bad connotation that I flinch every time I hear it. I feel a little nauseous whenever I see the word in print.

Why? Conditioning:

Eric Boehlert:

Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1% of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4% of it,” wrote Harvard professor Tom Patterson.

And this is key: During that same summertime period, Trump received three times as much policy coverage as Clinton. Why the large disparity? “A major difference between Trump and Clinton’s coverage was that she had a news category entirely of her own—the emails that she sent and received as secretary of state,” Patterson explained. And as he noted, the vast majority of Clinton email coverage was negative.

So, during the convention weeks, the press spent eight percent of its time covering Clinton emails and half that amount of time covering all of Clinton’s policy positions. CNN’s The Situation Room seemed especially obsessed: Clinton emails represented 17 percent of the program’s Clinton coverage during the four-week summertime span.

Those numbers certainly suggest that the press spends so much time and attention covering Clinton emails that there isn’t room left for policy and issues.

And that imbalance was before the FBI email “bombshell” late last week, which produced an almost comical spasm of media hysteria, punctuated by an avalanche of man-on-the-moon type of coverage. “Email” has been mentioned more than two thousand times on the three cable news channels since last Friday’s FBI announcement, according to TVeyes.com.

“Over the last few days, I’ve watched the best journalistic minds of my generation devolve into madness, frothing at the mouth over a story that neither they nor the voters they’re successfully mis-educating seem to understand,” wrote Will Bunch at Philly.com

And let’s be honest, endless email coverage, most of which revolves around pure speculation, is just another excuse not to cover policy.

Last week, I highlighted the shocking revelation from Andrew Tyndall that the three network evening newscasts this year had aired just 32 minutes of in-depth campaign policy reporting. By comparison, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News devoted nearly three times as much coverage to the Clinton email story (100 minutes).

CNN is addicted to the story, beyond even Fox. (I watch them all so you don’t have to.) It’s pathological. Not that they even try to explain exactly what’s supposed to be the issue with the emails. It’s just accepted that she did something VERY, VERY WRONG, probably criminal and they wank over its effect and greater “meaning” obsessively, with their pundits weighing in with psychological “insights” into how this reveals her tremendous character flaws.

As I suggested in August, Clinton emails are the new Whitewater. Meaning, it’s a “scandal” in search of a crime and it’s a scandal production staged by Republicans with the eager help of the press. And yes you can substitute “Clinton Foundation” for “emails” and you get pretty much get similar results.

Part of that is because journalists are heavily invested in the emails storyline and have been since March 2015. Journalists want there to be a blockbuster story, just like it seemed clear so many journalists wanted the FBI to “reopen” its investigation last week. (They’re not.)

Part of that stems from a never-ending attempt to criminalize the Clintons. And part of that’s because the campaign press wants more spectacle to cover during the closing days of the election. (Especially anti-Clinton spectacle.)

“The media’s urgency to maintain drama in an election that was increasingly looking like a blowout” made the return of the email storyline “inevitable,” according to professors Matthew Baum and Phil Gussin, writing in The Washington Post. “A dramatic horse race in which the outcome is uncertain and continually fluctuating is perpetually novel. Additional stories about the candidates’ long-standing policy positions? Not so much.”

Obviously, the campaign press isn’t supposed to be in the business of trying to craft compelling storylines. Yet here we are. And so when journalists feel the need, they just lean on the email storyline.

What gets overlooked in the process? Substance.

“[E]nough is enough,” wrote Isaac Chotiner at Slate, while lamenting the media’s wildly disproportionate email attention. “We are extremely close to the most important American election since God knows when, an election whose reverberations are almost impossible to imagine, let alone measure. Let’s focus on that for a change.”

But sadly it’s too late for this campaign. The press picked its campaign priorities a long time ago and has rarely strayed from that agreed-upon narrative: Clinton = emails. Note that in eight of the ten weeks between July 11 and September 18, “email” was the word most Americans associated with the Clinton campaign coverage, according to Gallup.

The first woman to be nominated by a major party for president is defined, almost completely, by the electronic communication platform she used several years ago while serving as secretary of state. She’s defined by that and by the Republicans’ Ahab-like attempt to turn that story into a career-defining scandal.

And as Boehlert points none of the other politicians who have had similar email practices have been held to this standard. Certainly not the Republican Party which erased millions of the emails that had been held on their private RNC server in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq war. But then, who cares about all that stuff, amirite? Certainly not history.

Boehlert concludes:

It’s only Clinton who gets defined by emails. Because the press, reading off the GOP song sheet, says so. And because the press, alongside the GOP, has been trying to criminalize the Clintons for 20-plus years.

Oh, and fuck James Comey too.

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An endorsement from a celebrity that sounds like a real person is saying it

by digby

There are a lot of things he says that I don’t agree with in that. But he’s talking like a real person talks — like my neighbors talk about this election. It’s useful and I’m glad it’s going viral.

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A very welcome observation from the Prez

by digby

Can I just say how much I appreciate this?

President Barack Obama on Tuesday called on men to “look inside” themselves and think about bias if they have any doubt about voting for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“To the guys out there, I want to be honest,” Obama told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, at a Clinton campaign event. “You know, there’s a reason we haven’t had a woman president before.”

He asked male voters to think about their potential biases against Clinton, who would be the first female president in U.S. history.

“I want every man out there who’s voting to kinda look inside yourself and ask yourself, if you’re having problems with this stuff, how much of it is that we’re just not used to it?” he said. “When a guy is ambitious and out in the public arena and working hard, well that’s okay. But when a woman suddenly does it, suddenly you’re all like, well, why’s she doing that?”

Obama went on to praise Clinton. “She is so much better qualified than the other guy,” he said, referring to GOP nominee Donald Trump. “She has conducted herself so much better in public life than the other guy.”

Obama blasted Trump for his disrespectful treatment of women and said the behavior would continue should he be elected president.

“The only thing this office does is it amplifies who you are. It magnifies who you are,” he said. “If you disrespected women before you were elected, you will disrespect women once you’re president.”

In an interview with Samantha Bee on Monday, Obama said that positive attributes in men, such as ambition, are often seen as negative qualities in women. And even if Clinton becomes president, Obama said he expects she will continue to face sexism during her time in office.

It’s just nice to see a male leader acknowledge it. Good for him.

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When Justice Antonin Scalia died in his sleep at age 80 several months ago, I don’t think anyone thought it would be easy to replace him before the election. President Barack Obama’s appointing a justice to his seat would change the balance of the court, and that would be a fraught proposition regardless of the timing.

But it did come as a surprise when the Republicans didn’t simply delay hearings or drag their feet. Instead, they openly declared that a president in his seventh year had no right to name a Supreme Court justice at all. As it has done repeatedly in recent times, the anarchistic GOP is simply making up new rules to serve its interests and daring the Democrats to do something about it.

Despite numerous sanctimonious speeches and interviews by Republicans explaining that they simply wanted to ensure that members of the public could “weigh in” on the Supreme Court choice through their presidential selection (as if they hadn’t done that already by electing Obama twice) it now appears that at least a few Republicans are prepared to continue the blockade as long as a Democrat is in the White House. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye reported yesterday, GOP Sens. Richard Burr, Ted Cruz and John McCain have all made statements to that effect.

Cruz, as usual, made the most fatuous comments, claiming that there’s “historical precedent” for leaving the court short of a full nine justices for extended lengths of time. Historical is the right word. What he failed to mention was that it hasn’t happened since 1844 when the court only had eight justices for two years. Burr, on the other hand, just blurted out that he thinks the seat should be left empty for four years if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins.

This is all assuming the Republicans are able to maintain their Senate majority. In the past they might have been able to achieve this epic obstruction even if they were in the minority with the use of the filibuster.

But outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who clearly has gotten wind of this plan, explained that he has prepared the blueprint for a Democratic majority to nuke the filibuster for Supreme Court justices if they have to: “I’ve told ’em how and I’ve done it, not just talking about it. I did it in changing the rules of the Senate. It’ll have to be done again.” Added Reid: “They mess with the Supreme Court, it’ll be changed just like that in my opinion.”

But if the GOP fails to win the White House and maintains its Senate majority, there’s a good possibility that the Republicans won’t confirm any new justices appointed by Clinton, ever. Indeed, one can imagine if other justices retire or die, the court dwindling down in number for years. Keeping the Democrats from nominating Supreme Court justices is now a GOP litmus test.

And let’s face it, this is a foreshadowing of something even more disruptive and dangerous. Ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have increasingly seen Democratic presidents as illegitimate. They said Bill Clinton wasn’t “their president” because he won with a plurality rather than a majority (which may well happen this year as well). The GOP-led Congress spent years trying to drive him from office on trumped-up charges.

Many in the Republican rank and file believed that Barack Obama was ineligible for the White House because he was a secret Muslim who had lied about being born in America. Republicans’ decades-long “voter fraud” myth has created an underlying sense among their voters that our election systems are always tilted against them by Democrats’ attempts to steal elections.

But this election has taken it to an entirely different level. We’ve never seen a presidential candidate state in advance that he believes the vote is rigged and declare that he will only accept he outcome if he wins. Even if Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump ends up conceding in some technical sense, his voters will never truly accept his loss and he will be a martyr for their cause. In that sense, Trump has already won regardless of the actual vote count.

We’ve also never had a presidential candidate delegitimized before the election even occurs. Trump routinely claims that Clinton should “not have been allowed” to run because she is “guilty as hell” of unnamed crimes and has promised to imprison her if he wins the office. His followers are convinced this is true and chant “Lock her up!” and “Hang the bitch!” at his rallies. (The outrageous actions of the FBI director last Friday have made such people only more certain in that belief.)

On Tuesday night in Wisconsin, Trump declared that if Clinton wins the election “it would create an unprecedented crisis and the work of government would grind to an unbelievably inglorious halt.” In fact, he and the Republicans are now making that an explicit promise. Some, like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (who faces likely defeat in his re-election battle), are actually running on that agenda. He told a local newspaper this week that he believed Clinton will be impeached should she win the office.

I would say yes, high crime or misdemeanor, I believe she is in violation of both laws [related to gathering, transmission or destruction of defense information or official government record]. She purposefully circumvented it. This was willful concealment and destruction.

Unfortunately, Johnson is not the only one already talking about impeachment:

To hold on to their congressional majorities, Republicans should promise voters they’ll impeach Hillary by 2018.

— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) October 18, 2016

Sexism? What sexism?

by digby

It is an interesting fact of this campaign that despite it featuring the first woman nominee in our country’s history nobody seems to think sexism is really all that salient an issue. There have been dozens of long, in-depth, soul searching essays about the plight of the white working class Trump voters, their attitudes about race, their economic anxieties, their loss of social status and yet the fact that sexism might be playing a part isn’t much contemplated even as his voters are screaming “Trump that bitch” and wearing “Monica sucks but not like Hillary” and their own standard bearer is a card carrying misogynist pig.

But whatever. We do know that women are voting for Clinton in droves, many because they genuinely are excited to see a Democratic woman succeed President Obama. And there are undoubtedly a few Republican women who are so appalled by Trump that they are voting against their party to vote for Clinton.

But there is now some empirical evidence that much of the reason for Trump’s success is sexism:

Since the start of the Republican primaries, hundreds of thousands of words and hours of television airtime have been devoted to one question: What do Donald Trump’s supporters want? The 42 percent of Americans supporting Trump have been studied and caricatured and psychoanalyzed.

Explanations abound: They’re stricken with economic anxiety. They’re anxious about their social status. They feel left behind by the federal government. They’re authoritarians who want a forceful leader. They’re racists who oppose the changing demographics and norms of the US.

But there’s another important factor that these analyses have largely left out: sexism. Three political scientists who studied the connection between sexism, emotions, and support for Trump found that the more hostile voters were toward women, the more likely they were to support Trump.

Researchers Carly Wayne, Nicholas Valentino and Marzia Oceno, who wrote about their work for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, conducted their research before the revelation of the secret recording that captured Trump bragging about kissing and groping women without their permission, and before more than a dozen women came forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault in the aftermath of its release.

While it might not seem surprising now that Trump has galvanized sexists, their findings suggest that sexism played a much bigger role in his rise than most people realized or wanted to imagine.
How “hostile sexism” predicts support for Trump

Sexism has largely been overlooked as a major factor in voters’ decisions to support Donald Trump. That would be understandable if it were simply one factor among many — one prejudice among the many that Hillary Clinton called the “basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”

But Wayne, Valentino, and Oceno’s research, conducted in June, found hostility toward women was a major factor, predicting support for Trump more strongly than authoritarian attitudes and about as well as racial prejudice. The political scientists used a four-question survey to determine sexist attitudes, asking if people agreed with the following statements:
Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.
Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor women over men, under the guise of asking for equality.

The survey also asked how strongly respondents supported Clinton or Trump. The higher they were on the sexism scale, the more likely they were to support Trump and the less likely they were to support Clinton. Hostile sexism was nearly as good at predicting support for Trump as party identification was.

Sexism — and particularly anti-feminism — isn’t politically neutral. Many conservative women have come forward to say they’re horrified by Donald Trump, but sexism has been correlated with support for other Republican candidates as well. In studies of voters in 2008 and 2012, traditional beliefs about gender and hostility toward feminism were also linked to much lower support for Hillary Clinton.

“It’s the kind of sorting that people do to go into one party or the other,” said Wayne, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Michigan. Republicans “tend to have attitudes that are more traditionalist, more old-fashioned, less likely to want the kinds of changes that feminism, for example, is pushing.”

Wayne said she couldn’t compare how sexist attitudes nationally had correlated with support for Republicans in previous elections, so she couldn’t say if Trump made the situation better or worse. But Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, used the same survey as part of a poll in New Hampshire, and found that sexism was a much bigger factor in the 2016 election than it was in 2012:

Follow
Brian Schaffner @b_schaffner

Ran a hostile sexism battery on recent NH poll. Here is the effect of sexism on vote for Romney in 2012 & Trump in 2016. Big difference.
2:42 PM – 27 Oct 2016

229229 Retweets
186186 likes

Clinton’s candidacy is another piece of important context — it’s possible that strong support for Trump among sexists is in part a reaction to the first woman who could plausibly be elected president — but Schaffner’s findings back up the idea that Trump’s core supporters are unusually hostile toward women and feminism.
Trump isn’t just tapping into “traditional values”

Trump’s support among sexists doesn’t seem to be a function of the traditional, old-fashioned “family values” usually associated with the Republican Party.

In a survey in August, Wayne and her co-authors measured the impact of a different kind of “old-fashioned” view about women’s roles: the belief that women are different from men because they’re physically weaker and more morally pure. They asked survey respondents if they agreed with the following statements: 

• In a disaster, women should be rescued before men.
• Women have a quality of purity that few men possess.
• Men should be willing to sacrifice their own well-being in order to provide for the women in their lives.
• Every man ought to have a woman whom he adores.

The questions measure “benevolent sexism” — a traditional, chivalrous view of men and women’s proper roles. Benevolent sexism can still undermine women’s equality because it paints women as weaker and more in need of male protection. Unlike its more hostile counterpart, though, benevolent sexism didn’t correlate much at all with support for Trump, at least before the leaked Access Hollywood tape. (Unlike the study on hostile sexism, the researchers didn’t use a representative national sample but rather an online survey. But the results were weighted for partisan identity, and Wayne says it was a high-quality sample.)

“The hostile sexism is highly correlated, but the benevolent sexism really is not,” Wayne said. “I found this result particularly interesting in the aftermath of some of the fallout from Trump’s tape. … There were a lot of Republicans saying they were against Trump’s statements because of their daughters and wives.”

Trump, in other words, isn’t just drawing from a base of people who have traditional views about women’s roles. He’s getting support from people who are hostile toward women’s economic and legal equality and who think feminism is making America worse.
Trump’s sexism was hidden in plain sight

It shouldn’t be surprising that Trump is the candidate of choice for people who believe that allegations of sexism are mostly made up and that feminism is really a ploy to get men on the losing side of a zero-sum status competition between the sexes. Trump’s misogyny has been a core part of his public persona for a long time.

Long before many of the sexual assault allegations emerged, Trump made clear, in public and private, that women matter to him not as people but as sex objects. Even with women whom he supposedly likes and admires, he’s made clear that he values their looks above all else. He turned his attitudes into discriminatory policies in his offices, at his resorts, and on his TV show, harassing women he found attractive and urging his employees to fire those he did not.

The fact that Trump was virulently sexist used to be widely recognized. “His brand of self-aggrandizing, bewigged machismo was kind of de rigeur in the 80’s and charmingly old-timey in the 90’s, but now it’s just passé and exhausting and increasingly offensive,” Richard Lawson wrote in a post headlined “Donald Trump: A Sexist Dinosaur” for Gawkerin 2008. “And he never stops!”

In the vast American soul-searching over why people might want to vote for Trump, sexism has gotten short shrift. That might be because Trump’s blatantly sexist remarks were generally not a part of his political campaign or preferred policies, unlike his hostility toward immigrants and Muslims and his constant reiteration that African Americans live in a wasteland of crime and violence.

But even if his misogyny was more muted in the early days of the campaign, it appears to have found a receptive audience.

Or, to put it more succinctly, as Rebecca Traister wrote:

There is an Indiana Jones–style, “It had to be snakes” inevitability about the fact that Donald Trump is Clinton’s Republican rival. Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white, and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America. Trump is the antithesis of Clinton’s pragmatism, her careful nature, her capacious understanding of American civic and government institutions and how to maneuver within them. Of course a woman who wants to land in the Oval Office is going to have to get past an aggressive reality-TV star who has literally talked about his penis in a debate. 

I shouldn’t have had to be this hard. But it always is for “first” women who often have had to wait and wait and wait for their chance and then be chided for being old and ugly and washed up when they get there. But if they do get there, they are tough cookies who can take the heat. They have to be.

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Something to look forward to
by Tom Sullivan

Republicans have stopped short of declaring the only good Democratic president is a politically dead one. But they are getting into the spirit of things in time for the inauguration:

If the GOP wins either or both chambers of Congress next week, and Clinton takes the White House, she’s likely to come under investigation by Capitol Hill from Day One, or possibly before she’s even sworn in. FBI Director James Comey’s recent decision to revisit the probe of her email setup, and an assortment of Justice sources who’ve leaked to the press since Friday, have armed GOP lawmakers with more than enough ammunition to rev up their own investigations, say Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

The dynamic could sour relations between Clinton and Capitol Hill from the get-go, dousing any hope of even a brief honeymoon for Clinton should she defeat Donald Trump next week.

It’s the least they could do. If they could do less, they would.

And they are just getting warmed up:

Over the weekend, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr became the latest Republican to indicate that the Senate will continue its policy of what amounts to judicial nullification by blocking any justices nominated for the Supreme Court by a Democratic president. Speaking to a bunch of GOP volunteers at a private event, Burr promised that Merrick Garland, nominated by President Obama to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, will not get a confirmation vote even in the lame-duck congressional session after next week’s election. As for Hillary Clinton nominating a Scalia replacement after taking office in January, Burr said:

And if Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.

Just as Trump University was education in form but without substance, the GOP now presents a form of governence without any actual governing. The Republican Party has devolved into a child’s “dress up” version of how government works.

Perhaps it’s fitting. They have nominated for president a candidate who talks at a third-grade level, writes like a fourth-grader, and if he loses the election next week will throw a tantrum about how he’s been cheated. The man-child who insists his opponent “shouldn’t be allowed to run” because of a “very serious crime” he cannot specify might himself be disallowed from running for not having “attained to the Age of thirty-five Years” emotionally.

Should Hillary Clinton win the presidency next week, the world can look forward to the spectacle of Republican Party leaders acting out the political equivalent of holding their breath until their faces turn blue.

As if that weren’t enough:

After dropping out of the Republican Wyoming Senate primary in 2014, Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney is all but guaranteed to bring the family name back to Washington as she runs to represent Wyoming in Congress. Cheney’s name in itself paired with her tough conservative talk and her uncompromising support of Republican nominee Donald Trump could make her an instant star on Capitol Hill for a Republican Party that has long been looking for women leaders in the House. Cheney’s father was first elected to the same seat nearly 40 years ago.

Mom? Dad? Are we there yet?

They un-rigged the polls!


by digby

Trump’s back to reading his poll numbers again:

Donald Trump appears to have rekindled the flame for his on-again, off-again relationship with the polls, falling back in love with them just as they show him narrowing Hillary Clinton’s lead in the race for the White House. 

Trump was quick to tout a fresh ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll released Tuesday, showing him leading by a single percentage point, 46 percent to 45 percent, with just one week to go until Election Day. It’s the same tracking poll that put the Manhattan billionaire down 12 points earlier this month and his comeback story was cause for celebration on Twitter Tuesday morning.

“Wow, now leading in @ABC /@washingtonpost Poll 46 to 45. Gone up 12 points in two weeks, mostly before the Crooked Hillary blow-up!” Trump tweeted just before 9 a.m. Monday, a sharp turn from the weeks he spent on the campaign trail decrying “rigged” polls and suggesting that the election might be stolen out from under him by widespread voter fraud.

Clinton’s “blow-up” has picked up steam in recent weeks amid the daily trickle of emails hacked from the personal account of her campaign chairman John Podesta and as news broke that premiums on Obamacare health insurance policies will spike next year. But the Democratic nominee’s campaign was pushed fully back onto its heels Friday when FBI Director James Comey wrote a letter to Congress disclosing that the bureau is reviewing fresh evidence pertaining to Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

That announcement from Comey delivered to Trump a powerful rhetorical weapon with which to hammer Clinton in the campaign’s final days, bolstering his “crooked Hillary” talking points and re-raising questions about her ethics.

Well played James Comey, well played.

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“Obliviously incompetent if not actively partisan”

by digby

So the FBI decided this week-end to post on their twitter feed for the first time in over a year. They tweeted out links to a few innocuous documents including one anodyne one about Donald Trump’s father legally donating to political campaigns decades ago.

This morning came this one:

William J. Clinton Foundation: This initial release consists of material from the FBI’s files related to the Will… https://t.co/Y4nz3aRSmG

— FBI Records Vault (@FBIRecordsVault) November 1, 2016

Seriously. That investigation was run by James Comey and in an unusual step for him he closed it without making any public comment as prosecutors are supposed to do.

Here’s the FBI’s ludicrous explanation:

Just in: statement from the FBI on its release of documents today pertaining to the Marc Rich/Bill Clinton inquiry pic.twitter.com/SLBEmxNjmM

— Rebecca Berg (@rebeccagberg) November 1, 2016

Watch what legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has to say about this on CNN:

I guess it’s standard operating procedure now for federal police organizations to decide for us who gets to be president. Good to know. We can stop this charade about democracy and elections and find other ways to spend our time.

Cops really like Trump. The police, border patrol, ICE unions all endorsed him and polling shows he’s the favorite among their rank and file. The FBI is showing they’re willing to do what it takes to get their man in office. And why not? He’s an authoritarian who wants to take the gloves off.

For all those of the lefty persuasion who are enjoying Clinton being brought low by this, I’d think twice. They may hate her but they hate you even more. And they’re feeling very powerful right now.

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Turning Texas blue one billboard at a time

by digby

Here’s a Blue America mobile billboard for Tom Wakely who’s running for congress against Trump endorser Lamar Smith:

Howie sez:

Lamar Smith is the chairman of the House Science Committee and is the most dangerous Climate Change denier in the U.S. He’s an enthusiastic Trump backer– the first chairman to endorse Trump and the only member of Congress to contribute money to Trump. Because of Trump, Hillary is polling gigantically in the suburbs around Austin and San Antonio (Travis and Bexar counties, which make up the bulk of TX-21, where we’ve endorsed Berniecrat Tom Wakely, who beat a conservative Democrat in the primary.She’s even beating Trump in conservative Hays County. Perfect opportunity to start turning Texas blue for real instead of just talking about it.

If you’d like to contribute to Blue America’s billboard campaign to help Tom Wakely in Texas  and NV-04, where we expect Ruben Kihuen to beat NRA patsy Cresent Hardy, NH-01, where Carol Shea-Porter looks like she can end the political career of Trumpist Frank Guinta, and NY-02, where Suffolk County legislator DuWayne Gregory is on track to oust right-wing crackpot Peter King you can do so here.