The point is not at all to gloat at the failure of anti-Trump conservatives, but to explain the source of their error. You can’t heal an illness you’ve diagnosed improperly. Anti-Trump conservatives deluded themselves about the source of conservatism’s electoral appeal. Trump’s long list of deviations from party orthodoxy — on health care, abortion, support for the Clintons — would have destroyed a normal candidacy, the way Rick Perry’s support for humane treatment of undocumented immigrants killed his candidacy in 2012.
…
The most important analytical failure of the anti-Trump conservatives is their blindness to the centrality of white racial backlash. They simply cannot imagine how movement conservatism could result in bigoted authoritarianism, and their confusion produces absurdity. Erick Erickson, the conservative pundit who has fiercely opposed Trump, today defends Rush Limbaugh, even though Limbaugh is defending the candidate. Erickson argues that Limbaugh’s brand of conservatism is exactly what the party needed all along. “If Republicans lamenting Trump and hating on Rush had only listened to Rush and taken his counsel that he gives for free three hours a day, five days a week, the GOP would not be in this mess,” he reasons. Yes – Trump’s popularity clearly demonstrates that a racist, misogynist, conspiracy-mongering bully-entertainer has had too little influence.
...
The conservative intelligentsia is right about one thing. Trump is not a committed ideologue but a grifter who decided to use their voters for his own ends. Trump grasped from the outset that the birther issue gave him a connection to the Republican electorate. The conservative intelligentsia ignored the birthers, the freaks, and the transparent racists because they were embarrassing. It was far more flattering and heroic to imagine the whole thing was about the Constitution. The con artist swindled the perfect mark.
For a couple minutes, Obama attempted in vain to gain back control of the crowd as chants of "Hillary!" drowned out the protestor.
While the protester's identity and motives weren't clear, from Obama's remarks after he finally gained control of the crowd back, the protester appeared to be an older war veteran.
"This is what I mean about folks not being focused," Obama said. "Hold up. Hold up. First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military and we have to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we have had to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don't boo, vote!"
“You saw it today on television, right? He was talking to the protester, screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say, 'He became unhinged! He became – ' … And he spent so much time screaming at this protester, and frankly, it was a disgrace.”
The essential details are these. Not long after Trump claimed that a surge in Latino voting in Nevada was evidence of voter fraud, a man named Austyn Crites (later self-identified as a registered Republican who opposes Donald Trump) was in the arena, relatively near the front of the audience. There was some commotion. Trump noticed the commotion, accused Crites of "being from the Hillary Clinton campaign."
From the stage he asked Crites, "How much are you being paid? Fifteen hundred dollars?" and then called for security to "take him out."
(The idea that the Clinton campaign sends people to Trump rallies to instigate violent disruptions is an urban legend growing out of the latest James O'Keefe tape dump. There is zero evidence to support this. It is a sort of mass psychology version of projection.)
At this point Crites was apparently in the process of pulling out a sign of some sort which someone nearby thought was a gun. That person yelled "gun!" This tripped off a melee in which Trump supporters beat Crites fairly severely. Secret Service agents, seeing the melee and possibly hearing the cry of "gun", rushed Trump off the stage and took Crites into custody.
...
It made perfect sense for the Secret Service to escort Trump off the stage until they were confident there was no threat and that the area was secure. We should also bear that history in mind if we find ourselves chiding people for jumping to conclusions in the heat of the moment.
In any case, it was clear very quickly that there was no gun and that there was no threat. How do we know that? Because they allowed Trump to return to the stage very quickly. If there had been a gun or if they were not close to certain there hadn't been one, that would not have happened. The presence of a gun would have meant security had been breached and that likely would have been the end of the event. One gun can mean another gun. There are many examples of assassinations and assassination attempts were an initial commotion is used to distract from a subsequent attack etc. Letting Trump back on the stage only a few minutes later essential confirms the Secret Service knew very quickly that there had been no threat.
…
As I said, it was determined very quickly that nothing had happened. No attempt. No nothing. But this didn't stop the campaign from pushing out a storyline about an "assassination attempt" and a tale of Trump's bravery in immediately returning to the stage.
Next a CNN journalist went out from the press pen into the area where the incident had occurred to find out what happened. He was promptly verbally abused and physically assaulted, though seemingly to no great physical harm, mainly just shoved around.
…
Things got darker still when Trump arrived a short time later in Colorado. In Denver, Trump was introduced by Father Andre Y-Sebastian Mahanna, a Maronite Catholic priest who said Trump had just survived "an attempt of murder against Mr Trump."
He then blamed the press for incitement the non-existent assassination attempt.
The Trump campaign allowed this to happen and made no effort to correct the record. This was followed by another warm up speaker who joked about Clinton being a 'bitch.'
It’s come to this: The FBI, America’s premier law enforcement agency, just had to decide whether to investigate one of its own Twitter accounts to see if it had an anti-Hillary Clinton bias.
The account in question, @FBIRecordsVault, burst into the news earlier this week after abruptly posting records related to Bill Clinton’s last-minute — and deeply controversial — pardon of financier Marc Rich. An FBI official said in an interview that the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility referred the matter to its Inspection Division for a possible investigation into whether anyone in the FBI had intentionally released the documents to hurt Hillary Clinton.
…
Comey has since come under sustained criticism from law enforcement veterans and lawmakers from both parties who believe he broke with longstanding Justice Department policies by directly intruding into the presidential race — and potentially impacting its outcome.
“There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election,” George J. Terwilliger III, a deputy attorney general under President George Bush, told the New York Times. “Those guidelines exist for a reason. Sometimes, that makes for hard decisions. But bypassing them has consequences.”
But Comey isn’t the only member of the FBI stepping into the election. Earlier this week, unnamed sources within the bureau told the Wall Street Journal that some FBI agents believed they had enough evidence to begin an aggressive investigation into a potential pay-to-play scheme at the Clinton Foundation, but were overruled by more senior officials.
Another anti-Clinton leak came Thursday, when sources thought to be disgruntled FBI officials told Fox News that an indictment was coming in the Clinton Foundation case. The story gave Trump a new talking point, dominated Fox’s primetime news programming, and rocketed across the conservative media before being debunked by an array of other media outlets. By that point, though, the damage had already been done.
Taken together, it’s easy to come away with the conclusion that the FBI is out to get Hillary Clinton. The truth, though, is far more complicated. The FBI isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t the bureau as a whole that is targeting Clinton. Experts who study the FBI believe the leaks are coming from a small clique of agents who profoundly distrust Clinton and believe she deserves to be punished for what they see as a long record of ethically dubious behavior.
…
The recent series of FBI leaks are particularly worrisome because they raise the prospect of a state security agency equipped with the full resources and investigative might of the federal government working to interfere in the elections. The FBI is so powerful — it can, with court approval, issue subpoenas, tap phones, intercept emails and conduct round-the-clock surveillance — that even a small coterie of its agents can find ways of influencing the political process. That’s the kind of thing we normally see in autocracies like Egypt or Turkey, not here in the United States.
It’s impossible to know how many agents support Trump, and the anti-Clinton leaks are likely the result of only a tiny minority of the bureau. Still, the fact that a small fraction of the FBI’s workforce has felt free to take steps that could impact the election is profoundly alarming. Comey stumbled by personally entering the political fray. His bigger mistake may have come from signaling to other agents that they could do the same.
…
Two of Holder’s most recent Republican predecessors, Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey, have also accused the FBI chief of making a serious error in judgement.
…
Outside experts on the FBI say Comey has made a serious and perhaps irreparable mistake.
“His actions were unprecedented, unethical, shocking, and have apparently led to chaos within the bureau, an unprecedented number of leaks, and chaos in our election cycle,” said Douglas Charles, a history professor at Penn State.
Charles, the author of a book about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, said Comey has a long history with the Clintons that may have left him with a “personal grudge or underlying or subsumed political motive” to try to derail Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
Nate Silver unloaded Saturday on the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, who accused the polling guru and founder of the prediction website fivethirtyeight.com of “changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.”
...
According to Grim, however, Silver is “just guessing” and his “trend line adjustment” technique is “merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.” Grim also noted that FiveThirtyEight’s model -- due to his adjustments -- shows Trump more likely than not to win Florida, while the Huffington Post’s calculates her victory there as more likely.
And that, apparently, enraged Silver, whose track record of correctly predicting elections -- and explaining how he does it in painstaking, but accessible detail -- has made him a celebrity whose very name is synonymous with the art of data-driven prognostication, and whose model is widely considered the gold standard in election forecasting.
After dropping his initial f-bomb, Silver went on to argue why his model -- which, in its polls-only version, puts the odds of Hillary Clinton winning the presidential race at 64.7 percent -- is superior to those like the Huffington Post, which rates her election a near-certainty, at 98.3 percent.
Let me remind you of the math: Trump would need to be holding 90 percent of the GOP base and Clinton would have to be losing 15-20 percent of hers and he would have to be winning indies for him to be competitive. Let me be clear: None of those things are likely.
The Reid machine and the Hillary campaign did not spend two weeks turning out crossover voters. They know what they are doing. Trump is probably down 12-15 points in Clark County and 65-70,000 votes. You can't make that up unless Election Day turnout is so large and so GOP-heavy that he could. And with two-thirds of the vote in, and with Democrats not simply willing to roll over and not rev up the machine on Election Day, that ain't happening.
[Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC)], a Donald Trump surrogate and the first congressional candidate endorsed by the Republican nominee, was interviewed about FBI investigations into Clinton’s private email server and the Clinton Foundation on CNN’s “New Day.”
“She is under—facing indictment,” Ellmers told host Chris Cuomo. “We’re in a situation where the Clinton Foundation—”
“No proof she's facing indictment,” Cuomo replied.
“There is proof,” she insisted.
“There isn't any proof,” Cuomo pushed back.
“There is.”
“What's the proof?” he asked.
“The proof is the FBI investigators,” Ellmers said. “This is coming out everywhere. I'm hearing about it. I don't really have all that many connections and yet I'm hearing about the investigation.”
A widely-circulated Fox News report that Trump himself pushed on the stump cited two anonymous “sources with intimate knowledge” into the Clinton Foundation probe who said Clinton would “likely” be indicted. Fox later walked the report back, noting that a prosecutor must decide whether to bring an indictment against a potential defendant.
When Cuomo pointed that out, Ellmers remained defiant.
“You know what, people are talking,” she said. “So, the investigation is moving forward. Now, I do agree with you, there is someone who is trying to put a cover up in place here. And it's at the Justice Department level. That's where it is.”
“That's a conspiracy theory and that's fine for you to believe it. But you said she's facing indictment,” Cuomo said, adding that that implies “you know something that the FBI is about to do.”
“We have no basis of proof that that is about to happen. You may want it to happen, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen,” he went on.
,,,
Ellmers lost her reelection bid in North Carolina's Republican primary this June.
Latino voters are already showing up to vote this election and could cast ballots in larger numbers than Democrats saw in recent elections.
On a call with reporters Friday, Latino Decisions– a polling group focused on Hispanic voting patters– said that Latino turnout is on track to make history next week.
On the call, Gabriel Sanchez, a principal at Latino Decisions, pointed to early voting trends that show Latino early voting is up 100 percent in Florida, 60 percent in North Carolina and up 25 percent in Colorado and Nevada.
Sanchez said at this point, Latino Decisions is projecting that between 13.1 million and 14.7 million Latinos will vote on or before Tuesday– a major increase from 2012 numbers when the group estimated 11.2 million voted.
Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
In recent years, a large part of the foundation of the GOP strategy has been the assumption that, if you get base voters angry enough and frightened enough, they will show up to vote (even in off year elections) and they will never vote for the Democrat (even when they really dislike the Republican candidate).
Capitalizing on that assumption has always been something of a balancing act, particularly when you constantly attack the legitimacy of the electoral system ("The system is rigged!" "The last election was stolen!" "Make sure to vote!"). With the advent of the Tea Party movement, it's gotten even more difficult to maintain that balance.
Donald Trump suggested in a speech at a Colorado rally on Saturday that election officials will throw away mail-in ballots if they don't "like" them.
"I have real problems with ballots being sent," Trump said, according to a transcript by NBC's Ali Vitali and Emily Gold. "People say, oh, here's a ballot, bing. Here's another ballot, throw it away. Oh, here's one I like, we'll keep that one."
Trump claimed that there are "a lot of people" watching election officials.
"We're trying to have some pretty good supervision out there," he said. "We have a lot of people watching you people that collect the ballots."
A Des Moines woman has been arrested and charged with voter fraud after she allegedly voted for Donald Trump a second time out of concern that her first vote for Trump would be counted for Hillary Clinton instead. The Des Moines Register reports that 55-year-old Terry Lynn Rote was charged with first-degree election misconduct on Thursday after authorities discovered that she had cast early-voting ballots at two different locations in Iowa.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Rote told the Washington Post sometime after being released on $5,000 bond Friday. The registered Republican also told Iowa Public Radio that she was afraid that her first Trump vote was going to be somehow counted for Clinton. “I wasn’t planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment,” she insisted, also repeating Trump’s oft-made claim that “the polls are rigged.”
In Verona, Petruchio begins the "taming" of his new wife. She is refused food and clothing because nothing – according to Petruchio – is good enough for her; he claims perfectly cooked meat is overcooked, a beautiful dress doesn't fit right, and a stylish hat is not fashionable.
There should be a fancy Latin term for “arbitrarily chosen deal-breakers selected to reverse-engineer a justification for not voting for a candidate you’ve decided a priori you don’t want to support.” People who actually care about how the next president will affect environmental policy evaluate the candidates on environmental policy. People who want to effectively ignore environmental policy focus solely on fracking.
Her laundry list also serves to illustrate the utter stupidity of “dealbreaker” logic. “If Hillary Clinton favored a $15 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I might support her. But since she only favors a $12 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I’ll take my chances on Trump winning.” “I used to be a Democrat, but when I found out that Hillary Clinton is insufficiently woke on GMO labeling I can live with several decades of a Supreme Court where the median justice would have to turn to the left to see Antonin Scalia.” OK.
...
First of all, with the FBI director having decided to try to throw the election to Trump, this is an odd characterization. Clinton remains a favorite and probably an overwhelming favorite, but it would be wrong to say that Trump has no chance, and if Stein got any real traction he certainly would. But, hey, not only will it not be Sarandon who might die because she can’t get medical care or be unable to get an abortion or lose her legal marriage privileges or lose her welfare assistance or have no remedy for discrimination or be denied the vote if Trump wins, she stands to gain considerably from the Trump presidency she’s urging her fans to make more likely.
And it’s worth noting again that what utter chickenshit the qualifier is. At least the “heighten-the-contradicitons” crap she was peddling earlier is an argument — a really terrible argument in the vast majority of circumstances including this one, but an argument. “Vote Stein because it won’t matter anyway” just makes you a free rider patting yourself for what a special snowflake you are. Lamest. form. of. masturbation. ever. If you think that we can’t have an omelet without Trump breaking America’s most vulnerable then own it, and if not spare us.
