This is the man you want controlling nuclear weapons? His aides don't feel he's responsible enough to have his Twitter account. This is the man you want at the helm during major international crises? It’s just terrifying. Yes, I’m a Democrat, and I’ve had this blog for eleven years. You never saw me write a post like this about Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or even George Bush. But this is different. This is life-threatening.
But Vega and other voters said that at least in this swath of suburban Dallas – in the dense and diverse neighborhoods where they live and work – things didn’t feel especially different. “We all want to live in peace,” he said, walking out of a bustling community college here.
A couple miles away, a Pakistani immigrant, who asked not to be identified, told a similar story. She’d driven in her minivan to her neighborhood’s Islamic community center, which happened to double as her polling place. “We just want peace,” she said. Asked about the effects of Trump’s candidacy – and a potential Trump presidency – on her neighborhood and the local Muslim community, she stiffened and said it made no difference, for better or worse. “We just wanted to be treated fairly, no matter what we worship.”
She didn’t want to say for whom she cast her ballot. Still, she was giddy about having cast it. With her 5-year-old, Texas-native son in tow, she described how she’d walked into the mosque’s near-empty gym, clad in an ornate tunic and hijab, and handed her ID to the elderly white poll workers. When she told them it was her first time voting, she said, they burst into applause and cheers.
The parting jab occurred on Saturday evening, when Republican Nevada chairman Michael McDonald darkly hinted at a Trump rally that there was wrongdoing by election officials in the state to advantage a “certain group.” It was clear that he was referring to Latino voters.
“They kept a poll open ‘til 10 o'clock at night so a certain group could vote,” said McDonald, referring to Clark County, which is 30 percent Hispanic. “You feel free right now? You think this is a free or easy election?”
Trump echoed this sentiment, alleging, without evidence, some form of misconduct at “certain key Democratic polling locations in Clark County.”
“Folks, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged system. And we’re going to beat it,” Trump said.
Organizations that have spent years encouraging this “certain group” to vote immediately cried foul, accusing Trump of suggesting that the citizenship of Hispanic American matter less than others.
“Donald Trump’s campaign has been one defined by its dog-whistle statements of communities of color, and this is no exception,” said Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino. “Donald Trump has continually tried to make Latinos feel less than American with his insistent attacks against our community… Party officials like Chairman McDonald are again showing just how out-of-touch the GOP is about welcoming new voters into its party by discouraging people from casting their ballot.”
NC GOP Brags About Low Black Turnout–After Lobbying To Limit Early Voting
A state GOP press release on the state's early voting numbers highlighted that African American early voting turnout was down by 8.5 percent from 2012.
Back in August, the News and Observer reported on an email sent by North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse to local elections officials urging them to limit early voting opportunities, including Sundays, which are used disproportionately by African Americans, and particularly those participating in black churches' "soul to poll" voter drives.
“Our Republican Board members should feel empowered to make legal changes to early voting plans, that are supported by Republicans,” Woodhouse wrote. “Republicans can and should make party line changes to early voting.”
Since then, more emails from GOP operatives making similar arguments to elections officials emerged. The county elections boards -- which are made up two-to-one of GOP appointees -- were debating their early voting plans for the extra week of voting effectively restored by an appeals court decision over the summer. More than a few of those officials took the state party's advice and proposed plans that would have severely limited early voting opportunities, particularly for black and student voters. Civil rights groups challenged many of those plans, and the state elections board ameliorated some, but not all, of the cutbacks to early voting.
While other Southern states have seen a uptick in black early turnout this cycle, North Carolina's is down, with University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald, noting that "it seems like something went awry in North Carolina.”
Something went very wrong for African-Americans' voting in North Carolina pic.twitter.com/ZpwjyEavmd
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) November 6, 2016
One meta-point is worth making here. We've heard a lot about both candidates being unlikeable, the election being ugly and so forth and how that means people are going to be turned off and a lot of people just won't vote at all. We don't know the total numbers yet. But all the indications from the early vote are that that is not going to be true. This should have been obvious. Everything we've seen over the last generation tells us that hard fought elections where a lot is on the line turn out a lot of people. That makes total sense. Why people stick to this other assumption is a mystery.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
