Month: November 2017

Trump voters like him. No kidding.by digby

One year after the 2016 presidential election, the vast majority of Donald Trump voters have no regrets.

According to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted on the eve of the first anniversary of Trump’s historic election, 82 percent of those who say they supported Trump last year would vote for him again if they had to do it over.

Only 78% of Clinton voters say they’d vote for her again in the general election so we can assume that if there was a rematch in 2020 he would win. Luckily, that won’t happen since the woman won’t be running again, although you’d never know it to watch Fox. In fact, if you didn’t know what was really happening watching any cable news would have you thinking that Clinton is a declared candidate for president and she’s running in 2018. And both parties are running against her.

But Trump says he is running and if he does we can expect that most Republicans will vote for him again.

I heard the NY Times’ Jeremy Peters on CNN saying that the only thing that will make Trump voters turn on him is if they think he’s part of the swamp. I had to laugh. Clearly they don’t care. Look at his cabinet. Look at his corrupt practices in office. Look at his policies. Look at the fact that he told them during the campaign that paying off politicians was the “smart” thing to do. Sure, he said he’d put an end to all that because he’s the only one who understands how it works. But let’s just admit that his voters don’t give a shit about any of that as long as he keeps doing things like attacking black athletes and talking about deporting Mexicans and Muslims. If he can make some liberals cry, it’s all worth it.

There is only one thing that will make Trump voters turn on him: if he is recorded insulting them the way he insults all the people they hate.

Other than that, though, his base is safe. Unfortunately for him 82 % of Republicans isn’t a majority and the Democrats are highly motivated to come out to vote against him.

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A proud patriarchal wingnut hit on 14 year old girls? No, that can’t be right.by digby
Bowl me over with a feather. Judge Roy Moore hits on young teen-age girls. Karoli at C&L has the story:

The bombshell story just out in the Washington Post should end Roy Moore’s political career forever, but it remains to be seen whether or not Alabama can cobble together a coalition of the decent to defeat the coalition of the greedy.

It reaches back to the 70s, when Moore was 32 and Leigh Corfman was 14. Yes. FOURTEEN YEARS OLD.

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

It wasn’t just Corfman, either. There are four different women all willing to put their stories and names on the record about Moore’s predilection for young girls.

Under Alabama law then and now, this conduct is not legal, as the Post notes:

The legal age of consent in Alabama, then and now, is 16. Under Alabama law in 1979, and today, a person who is at least 19 years old who has sexual contact with someone between 12 and 16 years old has committed sexual abuse in the second degree. Sexual contact is defined as touching of sexual or intimate parts. The crime is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail. 

The law then and now also includes a section on enticing a child younger than 16 to enter a home with the purpose of proposing sexual intercourse or fondling of sexual and genital parts. That is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

In interviews, Corfman said she hadn’t come forward because she had her own sordid past, which is typical of a culture where men are allowed to take whatever they want whenever they want while blaming women for taking it. It’s sad that she lived with this all these years and never said anything before because she didn’t want her life torn apart. Understandable, but sad.

Bannon and Breitbart are already ahead of the story, justifying their guy’s sexual predatory behavior, while sneering “smear!” at the Washington Post.

Here’s Breitbart’s page :

I wish I was sure that this would kill Moore’s candidacy but I don’t. McConnell and Flake both say he should withdraw but that’s not surprising. Trump bragged about grabbing women by the crotch and getting away with it and also was accused of oogling teen-age year old girls in the dressing rooms of beauty pageants:

Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant said Donald Trump walked into the dressing room while contestants — some as young as 15 — were changing.

“I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here,’ ” said Mariah Billado, the former Miss Vermont Teen USA.

Trump, she recalled, said something like, “Don’t worry, ladies, I’ve seen it all before.”

Three other women, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of getting engulfed in a media firestorm, also remembered Trump entering the dressing room while girls were changing. Two of them said the girls rushed to cover their bodies, with one calling it “shocking” and “creepy.” The third said she was clothed and introduced herself to Trump.

The story also reported:

Of the 11 (contestants) who said they don’t remember Trump coming into the changing room, some said it was possible that it happened while they weren’t in the room or that they didn’t notice. But most were dubious or dismissed the possibility out of hand.

Allison Bowman, former Miss Wisconsin Teen USA, cast doubt on whether it happened. “These were teenage girls,” Bowman said. “If anything inappropriate had gone on, the gossip would have flown.”

But there was also this:

Billado said she told Ivanka Trump (Trump’s daughter), about Donald Trump entering the room while the girls were changing their clothes. Billado remembers Ivanka answering, “Yeah, he does that.”

Trump’s words

Three days before Kind made his statement, CNN reported on comments Trump has made about women to radio talk show host Howard Stern over the years. In a 2005 interview, Trump talked about walking in on naked contestants — but that was in response to a discussion about the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, whose contestants are adults. Trump said:

Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. You know, I’m inspecting, I want to make sure that everything is good.

You know, the dresses. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that. But no, I’ve been very good.

Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to our requests for this item, but his campaign did issue this statement in response to the BuzzFeed story:

“These accusations have no merit and have already been disproven by many other individuals who were present. When you see questionable attacks like this magically put out there in the final month of a presidential campaign, you have to ask yourself what the political motivations are and why the media is pushing it.”

There is not evidence, however, that the accusations have been disproved — only that some of the contestants said they were not aware of the alleged incident, and some believed it could not have happened.

Despite that, Trump won Alabama with 62% of the vote. I suspect these sort of things aren’t something the state’s Republicans particularly care about. Unless it’s a Democrat in which case they would be banging on their Bibles and speaking in tongues.

We’ll see. maybe things have changed with all the sexual harassment and rape charges all over the place recently. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

According to Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale, GOP officials in Alabama are sticking with Moore:

“It was 40 years ago,” Alabama Marion County GOP chair David Hall tells me. “I really don’t see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. She’s not saying that anything happened other than they kissed.”

Me: “The story said she said he tried to get her to touch his genitals.” Hall: “Well, she said he may have TRIED to. But we’re talking something that somebody SAID happened, 40 years ago. It wouldn’t affect whether or not I’d vote for him.”

More Hall: “The other women that they’re using to corrobrate: number one, one was 19, one was 17, one was 16. There’s nothing wrong with a 30-year-old single male asking a 19-year-old, a 17-year-old, or a 16-year-old out on a date.”

After a long pause, Alabama Bibb County Republican chairman Jerry Pow tells me he’d vote for Roy Moore even if Moore did commit a sex crime against a girl.

“I would vote for Judge Moore because I wouldn’t want to vote for Doug,” he says. “I’m not saying I support what he did.”

“I really can’t comment until I have a chance to digest it,” says Tallapoosa County GOP chairwoman Denise Bates. “Nothing to say,” says Marengo County chairman Robert Duke.

Alabama Mobile County GOP chairman John Skipper: “It does not really surprise me. I think it is a typical Democratic – Democrat – ploy to discredit Judge Moore, a sincere, honest, trustworthy individual.”

“These allegations that surfaced today – to my knowledge, they’re all bunk. No credibility whatsoever,” Mobile County Republican chairman John Skipper tells me.

If these allegations against Moore were true, Mitch McConnell’s anti-Moore allies would have obviously found them and released them during the primary, Mobile County Republican chairman John Skipper tells me.

Xi’s got his number: flattery will get you everywhereby digby

Here’s your president in China, completely reversing everything he’s ever said before and sounding like Chauncey Gardner:

“Our meeting this morning was excellent discussing North Korea,” Trump said, seated across from Xi in the Great Hall of the People. “I do believe there’s a solution to that, as you do.”

Pomp and pageantry greet Trump ahead of talks with Xi

Looking Xi in the eye, Trump also acknowledged what he has called a greatly unfair trade relationship that has hurt American workers and businesses.

“We’ve gotten so far behind with China,” the president said. “I have great respect for you on that because you represent China … but we’ll make it fair, and it will be tremendous for both of us.”

Despite the warm words, there has been little indication of any substantive breakthrough on either front ahead of the summit here in Beijing.

But Trump seems to be banking on a sharply different tone toward China — and warmer personal relationship with Xi — to produce outcomes that frustrated his predecessor for eight years.

“My feeling toward you is an incredibly warm one. … There is great chemistry,” Trump told his host. “And it is a very very great honor to be with you.”

He added, “We have a capacity to solve world problems for many many years to come,” he said. “I believe we can solve almost of all of them –- probably all of them.”

CNN’s version:

Who can blame a country for being able taking advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?” Trump said as Xi watched on from a few feet away. Nervous laughter rippled through the crowd of Chinese and American business executives, whose firms are inking new deals here in a spectacle meant to demonstrate Trump’s negotiating prowess.

“I give China great credit,” he added. “In actuality, I do blame past administrations for allowing this trade deficit to take place and grow.”

It was a remarkable show of deference to Xi, who emerged from last month’s Communist Party Congress the most powerful Chinese leader in a generation. And while US officials downplayed the significance of the remark, it nevertheless laid bare the lengths to which Trump is prioritizing his personal chemistry with his counterparts here as he seeks to advance an agenda of isolating North Korea and brokering new trade deals.

Trump’s praise for his Chinese counterpart wasn’t limited to the remarks at the signing ceremony for the $250 billion in US-Chinese business deals. At the top of a bilateral meeting, the accolades dripped from Trump’s mouth as he expressed his gratitude for the welcome mat Xi had laid out.

They had an “absolutely terrific” dinner. It was a “very, very great honor” to be together. The military display was “magnificent.” And their relationship? “A great one.”

Trump did not avoid pointing out China’s “unfair trade practices” and its “theft of intellectual property,” but his conclusion that the imbalance in the US-Chinese trade relationship was the fault of his predecessors ignored the role of China’s system of state-run enterprises and limiting market access policies.

Trump’s discussions with Xi yielded no immediate signs that the structural changes needed to rebalance the relationship were coming.

“There was a little bit of tongue in cheek in that characterization, but there was also a lot of truth to it,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in explaining Trump’s remark. “I think what the President was just reflecting on is, look, we are where we are because previous administrations, whether through benign neglect — which is my own characterization of it — or for whatever reasons allowed this to happen.”

Trump’s absolution of Chinese blame on trade matters, a day after the anniversary of his election, were a stunning statement from the man who vilified China at every turn during the presidential campaign, accusing the country of having “raped” the US and branding it as an “economic enemy.”

They have his number. Put on a big show and treat him like he’s an Emperor and he’ll crumble at their feet. And he is happy to blame American presidents before him for whatever issues exist between the two countries which has to make adversaries of the United States laugh and laugh.

It’s always a delicate relationship but in the hands of this mental child we’ll just have to hope that he doesn’t screw things up so badly that we can’t ever come back to some sort of equilibrium.

And no, there will be no mention of China’s human rights policies. Trump envies them. He wishes he could do that too.

He just loves this stuff:

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Twofer! Trump’s latest attack on the free press and the rule o’ lawby digby

I wrote about this latest example of authoritarian presidential behavior for Salon this morning:

It’s not exactly news that Donald Trump has a big mouth. And it’s certainly not surprising that his big mouth has an effect on the world around him. He is, after all, president of the most powerful nation on earth, and people pay close attention to every word he says. His undisciplined bluster and divisiveness create a constant state of crisis in his administration. He still doesn’t seem to realize that when he spouts his unschooled opinions about legal matters, or attempts to interfere with the judicial system, he potentially affects the outcome and not always in the way he intends.

Back when Trump started running for president he cost himself millions of dollars in contracts when his xenophobic rhetoric proved to be too much for the retail companies and consumer goods that had licensed his commercial brand. Celebrity chefs backed out of restaurant deals, resulting in lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, because of his crude stereotyping of immigrants. Many groups and companies cancelled agreements to do business at his properties. Of course one might say Trump was simply betting that once he became president he could get new customers who wanted to pay him for his “services” rather than his products. So maybe it was just another one of his risky gambits that ended up paying off.

But the big mouth has definitely gotten him into trouble as president. It would take days to list all the gaffes and insults he has tweeted or spoken that have affected his ability to govern or be taken seriously on the world stage. But his careless interference in legal matters are among the most obvious.

For instance, Trump’s ugly commentary on the campaign trail about alleged deserter and five-year prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl, in which Trump repeatedly called for his summary execution, played a part in the military judge’s decision to let Bergdahl walk away with a sentence of dishonorable discharge and time served. Naturally Trump weighed in on that too, calling it a” disgrace,” having not learned the lesson that as president he should watch his words more carefully.

Shortly thereafter, the president tried to serve as judge, jury and executioner for Sayfullo Saipov, the man accused of the truck rampage in New York. Trump tweeted, “NYC terrorist was happy as he asked to hang ISIS flag in his hospital room. He killed 8 people, badly injured 12. SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!” Hours later he again tweeted “DEATH PENALTY!” Defense lawyers and prosecutors alike agreed that these public comments by the president of the United States were inappropriate and would undoubtedly be used to argue that Saipov cannot get a fair trial. They could indeed mean that the death penalty is off the table in this case.

Trump has been screaming for executions for more than 30 years. Before there was Twitter he took out full-page ads in newspapers. It’s obviously an obsession with him. He was just a rich blowhard then, and it made no difference what he said. Today he’s president and his public bloviation actually matters.

Now Donald Trump’s unhinged public ranting is causing another round of headlines. Luckily, in this one case it isn’t likely to turn into World War III or cause more divisions within our own country. But the implications are just as dismaying. This time his big mouth is affecting the fortunes of a couple of major corporations, which might be a good thing if the businesses in question weren’t media companies and the president wasn’t threatening the free press on a daily basis. I’m talking about the proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner, the latter of which owns CNN, the network Trump has repeatedly called fake news and intimidated with threats of lawsuits and investigations.

During the campaign, Trump opposed the merger on the grounds that it was “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.” That was read by some as a sign that the growing anti-monopoly movement was gaining bipartisan steam. It certainly burnished his allegedly populist image. Needless to say, his billionaire-laden plutocratic administration is not pushing any such policies. In fact, the newly installed head of Trump’s antitrust division said last year that he didn’t think there was any antitrust problem with the merger.

Maybe there are no “antitrust problems,” from Trump’s perspective, but there are definitely some “CNN problems.” On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that the Department of Justice has “called on AT&T and Time Warner to sell Turner Broadcasting, the group of cable channels that includes CNN, as a potential requirement for approving the companies’ pending $85.4 billion deal.” Since this would be a “vertical merger” of two companies that don’t compete, this was a peculiar request that took executives and observers by surprise.

It shouldn’t have. Back in July, the Times reported that the administration planned to use the mergers as “a potential point of leverage over their adversary . . . Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.” A source told Politico on Thursday, “The only reason you would divest CNN would be to kowtow to the president because he doesn’t like the coverage. It would send a chilling message to every news organization in the country.”

When Trump confidant Roger Stone launched into a series of Twitter broadsides against CNN after the Mueller indictments in late October, promising that there would be a “house cleaning” at the network after AT&T took over, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo decoded it this way:

Do I think AT&T will try to gut CNN? I have no idea. But is Trump pushing for it and grousing and gossiping about it with Roger Stone? I’d say that’s a pretty good bet.

For its part, AT&T said it had not contemplated selling CNN and would take the Justice Department to court. The White House insisted that “the President did not speak with the Attorney General about this matter and no White House official was authorized to speak with the Department of Justice on this matter.” DOJ spokespeople similarly deny being asked by the White House to demand this bizarre divestment. Well, nobody really needed to make that phone call did they? It has been clear for months what they wanted to do.

This merger deal may not close now, which isn’t the end of the world. They are two huge companies that don’t need to get any bigger. But the signal that’s being sent to the media with this specific request couldn’t be any louder.

Trump has interfered with the Justice Department from his earliest days in the White House. He tried to get FBI Director James Comey to lay off his wingman, Michael Flynn. He asked the Department of Justice to drop the case against disgraced sheriff Joe Arpaio, and then pardoned the man when prosecutors refused to do his bidding. Trump went on the radio last week and complained that he’s being prevented from personally “doing what he would love to do” with the Justice Department because he is president.

There is nothing he would “love to do” more than destroy CNN and any other media company that tells the truth about him. It’s not as if he hasn’t publicly said it over and over again. Given his track record, White House denials that he isn’t behind this latest attempt to subvert the rule of law simply are not credible

A party’s got to believe in something
by Tom Sullivan

“Sorry, Blue Cross, my business is going elsewhere today,” a friend wrote on Facebook yesterday. In states such as this one where the now-former governor peevishly rejected the Medicare expansion, prices have gone through the roof, as I noted a week ago. Health care costs are on a lot of people’s minds. Health care is at the top of a lot of voters’ lists of top election issues. Did I mention former NC governor Pat McCrory is a Republican?

The Washington Posts’ Editorial Board advises the Republican Party that its efforts to repeal and/or sabotage Obamacare put it hopelessly out of step with voters:

The health-care message was hammered home in Virginia and Maine by huge electoral margins. In exit polls across the Old Dominion, 2 out of 5 voters identified health care as their top concern — more than twice as many as named any other issue. Among those health-care voters, 77 percent favored the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, who supports Obamacare and expanding Virginia’s Medicaid program under the law; just 23 percent backed the Republican, Ed Gillespie, who opposes both.

In Maine, a referendum to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, which would extend health insurance to some 80,000 low-income adults, won in a landslide, 59 percent to 41 percent. That was a direct rebuke to the Republican governor, Paul LePage, who vetoed Medicaid expansion five times after it was approved, also five times, by the state legislature.

For all the administration’s efforts to kill Obamacare by a thousand cuts, including cutting off funds for enrollment assistance, sign-ups at HealthCare.gov for this year’s enrollment period have roughly doubled over last year. Eric Levitz writes at New York magazine, “Obamacare didn’t just survive its death panel — it’s come back thriving.”

An administration whose raison d’être is to jamb its fingers daily into as many eyeballs as possible just had its own poked in Virginia, Stooge-style.

CNBC reports on its exit polling of Virginia voters:

Exactly 50 percent of the voters polled said they support the Affordable Care Act, as Obamacare is formally known. A total of 39 percent of voters opposed the law.

Just 20 percent of voters said that Gillespie’s support of a Republican effort in Congress to repeal Obamacare made it more likely that they would vote for him, according to the survey. Another 44 percent said it would make them less likely to vote for Gillespie.

In contrast, 47 percent of voters said Northam’s opposition to the repeal effort made it more likely that they would support him, compared with 30 percent who said it would make it less likely they would vote for him.

Democrats have a winning issue on their hands if they’ll simply take it and run with it. People ask what Democrats stand for? Start with universal access to health care.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Election? What election?by digby

The Fox News web site today

lulz:

Harrowing, bracing moment when Tucker Carlson shapeshifted into an actual sad trombone and was forced to declare Northam the winner. pic.twitter.com/LmzsBB7RYT— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 8, 2017

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Trump’s old buddy Felix by digby

From a GQ election night tick-tock of the Trump campaign:

11:55 P.M.—Among the well-wishers and Trump associates eager to join in the celebration is Felix Sater, a Russian-born entrepreneur and sometime business partner of Trump’s, who’s helped locate potential real estate deals in the former Soviet Union. (Since the election, Sater’s links to Russia have come under scrutiny as it’s been revealed that he offered, in 2015, to broker a relationship between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin—one that he said could win Trump the White House. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote to Trump’s lawyer.)

Publicly, Trump has long sought to distance himself from Sater—even testifying in a 2013 deposition that he wouldn’t recognize Sater if the two men were in the same room together. On election night, they would have a chance to test that proposition.

From his home on Long Island, Sater orders a late-night ride from a car service. His destination: the invite-only victory party at the Midtown Hilton.

Driver (name withheld): I picked him up from his house on Long Island. And then, you know, I said, “Hi, how are you? And he said, “Do you know who I am?” And I said, “No, I don’t really know you.” He showed me his business card. I think, to show me that he’s VIP, an important person, and second, to tell me that he was happy that he won the election, because it’s unexpected.

So we talked about the election night. After that he just picked up his phone, and he talked all the way from Long Island to New York. He was talking to somebody in the Russian language.

Huh.

Obviously, Sater could have been talking to anyone so this proves absolutely nothing. Still… it’s a juicy little tidbit considering what Sater was trying to do.

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Yes, it’s a cultby digby

It’s been less than a week since anyone checked the temperature of the might Trump voter but the one year mark from the election does seem like a good time to go back and ask some of them how they feel today. Guess what? They still love him and theinly thing he could do to change their minds would be for him to become a decent human being.

When Trump won, people here were ecstatic. But they’d heard generations of politicians make big promises before, and they were also impatient for him to deliver.

“Six months to a year,” catering company owner Joey Del Signore told me when we met days after the election. “A couple months,” retired nurse Maggie Frear said, before saying it might take a couple of years. “He’s just got to follow through with what he said he was going to do,” Schilling said last November. Back then, there was an all-but-audible “or else.”

A year later, the local unemployment rate has ticked down, and activity in a few coal mines has ticked up. Beyond that, though, not much has changed—at least not for the better. Johnstown and the surrounding region are struggling in the same ways and for the same reasons. The drug problem is just as bad. “There’s nothing good in the area,” Schilling said the other day in her living room. “I don’t have anything good to say about anything in this area. It’s sad.” Even so, her backing for Trump is utterly undiminished: “I’m a supporter of him, 100 percent.”

What I heard from Schilling is overwhelmingly what I heard in my follow-up conversations with people here who I talked to last year as well. Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week, I revisited and shook hands with the president’s base—that thirtysomething percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” that “has nothing to do with him,” and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how readily these same people had abandoned the contract he had made with them. Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most.

“I don’t know that he has done a lot to help,” Frear told me. Last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for him again if he didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Last week, she matter-of-factly stated that she would. “Support Trump? Sure,” she said. “I like him.”

When I asked Del Signore about the past year here, he said he “didn’t see any change because we got a new president.” He nonetheless remains an ardent proponent. “He’s our answer.”

I asked Schilling what would happen if the next three years go the way the past one has.

“I’m not going to blame him,” Schilling said. “Absolutely not.”

Is there anything that could change her mind about Trump?

“Nope,” she said.

Why is that? Because the most important thing about him is that he hates the people they hate:

His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments. For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting. Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst—“obstructionist” Democrats, uncooperative establishment Republicans, the media, Black Lives Matter protesters and NFL players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players) whom they see as ungrateful, disrespectful millionaires.

And they love him for this.

“I think he’s doing a great job, and I just wish the hell they’d leave him alone and let him do it,” Schilling said. “He shouldn’t have to take any shit from anybody.”

This has been obvious from the start but for some reason a whole lot of people want to put these people on some sort of pedestal and say they were primarily motivated by their economic status. That’s not the real story. They geniunely like Trump and they like him for all the reasons the rest of us can’t stand him — the crudeness, the arrogance, the ignorance, the bullying and yes, the racism and the sexism and the xenophobia.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for people to accept that all those disaffected white people voted affirmatively for a celebrity millionaire who told them exactly what they wanted to hear. They like him. They really like him.

More than anything, what seemed to upset the people I spoke with was the National Football League players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Frear told me, “if I was the boss of these teams, I would tell ’em, ‘You get your asses out there and you play, or you’re not here anymore.’ They’re paying their salaries, for God’s sake.”

“Shame on them,” Del Signore said over his alfredo. “These clowns are out there, making millions of dollars a year, and they’re using some stupid excuse that they want equality—so I’ll kneel against the flag and the national anthem?”

“You’re not a fan of equality?” I asked.

“For people who deserve it and earn it,” he said. “All my ancestors, Italian, 100 percent Italian, the Irish, Germans, Polish, whatever—they all came over here, settled in places like this, they worked hard and they earned the respect. They earned the success that they got. Some people don’t want to do that. They just want it handed to them.”

“Like NFL players?” I said.

“Well,” Del Signore responded, “I hate to say what the majority of them are …” He stopped himself short of what I thought he was about to say.

Schilling and her husband, however, did not restrain themselves.

“The thing that irritates me to no end is this NFL shit,” Schilling told me in her living room. “I’m about ready to go over the top with this shit. We do not watch no NFL now.” They’re Dallas Cowboys fans. “We banned ’em. We don’t watch it.”

Schilling looked at her husband, Dave McCabe, who’s 67 and a retired high school basketball coach. She nodded at me. “Tell him,” she said to McCabe, “what you said the NFL is …”

McCabe looked momentarily wary. He laughed a little. “I don’t remember saying that,” he said unconvincingly.

Schilling was having none of it. “You’re the one that told me, liar,” she said.

She looked at me.

The NFL?

“Ni**ers for life,” Schilling said.

“For life,” McCabe added.

Last night in Bizarroworldby digby

Ben Mathis-Lilley of Slate watched a little FoxNews:

The biggest political story of the hour is that Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie went down big in Virginia after running a Trump-esque campaign fixated on inflammatory culture-war issues, losing to Democrat Ralph Northam by what looks like it will end up as a nine-point margin. It’s the biggest story of the hour, that is, unless you’re watching Fox News: As observed by political writer Chris Hooks, Donald Trump’s favorite network spent more than 90 minutes in prime time on Tuesday—Election Night!—between discussions of election results.

Just before 9 p.m., Tucker Carlson read an update about the loss in Virginia and another Democratic gubernatorial win in New Jersey. At 9, Sean Hannity took over and slipped in a comment about why said Republican losses don’t really count:

Those results in New Jersey and Virginia—not states Donald Trump won.

For what it’s worth, Northam appears to have exceeded Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in Virginia by four points; Hannity, in any case, spent the entire hour of his show previewing and broadcasting a Trump speech in South Korea. (Hannity described the president’s habit of referring derisively to Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man” as an example of “strength.”)

Laura Ingraham’s show began at 10, and Ingraham used the majority of her hour on segments about the armed civilian who attempted to intervene during this weekend’s Texas shooting, the question of why liberals are “so offended and bothered by prayer,” disgraced O.J Simpson detective Mark Fuhrman’s opinions about gun control, and Trump’s achievements in “confronting evil.” She finally made it to Virginia at 10:50, whereupon viewers learned that Gillespie lost because he actually didn’t imitate Trump enough:

Gillespie never jumped on board the Trump train. He’s an old Bush hand. I think he gave it his best shot. He is who he is—not a populist conservative.

Later in the segment, Ingraham noted that Democrats will overreact to Northam’s win because “they need something to be excited about,” adding that, and I quote, “Hillary’s emails!”

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He has all the best wordsby digby

A Trump toast in South Korea:

Together, our nations remind the world of the boundless potential of societies that choose freedom over tyranny, and who set the free. And we will free, and we will sacrifice, and we will hope, and we will make things beautiful, especially the aspirations of your people.

No that wasn’t a translation. It’s exactly how he said it.

In fairness, he was upset: