CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was joined by panelists on Monday night at a Clinton campaign event in Philadelphia as the country prepares for Tuesday's election.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who has been joined in recent days by celebrities like Jay-Z, Jennifer Lopez, and Bruce Springsteen, held a concert to kick off the final hours leading into Election Day.
Meanwhile, Republican commentator Jeff Lord and Trump surrogate Kayleigh McEnany joined Cooper to talk about Jay-Z's language and Trump's p*ssy grabbing.
Lord started the conversation by suggesting that Clinton's crowd came out for the musical guests, rather than the candidate, whereas the people at Trump's rally showed up solely for their preferred nominee.
The conversation quickly escalated to a discussion about Jay-Z's lyrics and his mentions of "the p-word."
"One of the things that got [Michelle Obama] interested in this all of a sudden was that Access Hollywood tape, in which the 'p' word was mentioned. And yet there is Hillary Clinton with Jay-Z who has a song, specifically titled with the 'p' word" Lord pointed out.
As the discussion escalated, McEnany commented, "The difference is for Jay-Z to shout these expletives on a stage at a political rally while the Democrats are trying to stand on a moral high ground saying we're better than that and Hillary Clinton is putting out commercials with little girls looking in the mirror."
There is, however, a difference between grabbing women without consent — which is what Trump was bragging about — and using the word p*ssy.
Cooper called her out, though. "Ted Nugent grabbed his package at his concert, didn't he?"
Following a passionate rendition of "Thunder Road," at Hillary Clinton's Philadelphia rally, singer Bruce Springsteen launched into an attack on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Calling him "A man whose vision is limited to little beyond himself," Springsteen added, "He has a profound lack of decency that would allow him to prioritize his own interests and ego before American democracy itself."
Watch the video below including Thunder Road -- via YouTube:
Comedian Dave Chappelle has a message for the world: No, he is not supporting Donald Trump. Actually, to be extra clear, "Hell no," Chappelle said, according to TMZ.
TMZ referred to an article from the Observer that was published over the weekend in which the outlet claims Chappelle defended Trump at a gig in New York and "[slammed] the Democratic presidential nominee."
The TMZ reporter approached Chappelle in the street and said after his show over the weekend, "Everyone's surprised 'cause everyone's saying you're a Trump supporter."
Chappelle looked both stunned and irritated by the statement. "Jesus Christ, I'm not a Trump supporter," he responded. TMZ asked again, "You're not a Trump supporter?"
"Unequivocally no," he said. "Hell no. Just everybody vote, for whoever you want to vote for. But that's not what I'm doing."
Clarifying the situation just one more time, TMZ asked, "So everyone just took it weirdly?"
"It was from the Observer," Chappelle responded with a roll of the eyes. "Come and see my shows for yourself, and not listen to conservative paper reviews."
Laurel Mellin, Associate Clinical Professor of Family & Community Medicine and Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco As we move closer to Election Day, many of us are breathing a sigh of relief, but there is another mood percolating. Many of us feel anger, a deep, fire in the belly anger that it has come to…
An interview between Fox News host Sean Hannity and “In Trump We Trust” author Ann Coulter Monday devolved into a rant against the “corrupt media” as the pair re-litigated whether Republican nominee Donald Trump once mocked a disabled reporter with a congenital condition (he did).
“There’s a reckoning coming,” Hannity said on his radio show. “After this election, there is going to be war declared by me against every corrupt media figure that has been in bed with Hillary this entire campaign.”
“And just, the incessant lying,” Coulter said. “If you're listening and you're on the fence and you worry about some the things you've heard about Trump, first of all: It is all lies."
After railing against President Obama for “relying on the ignorance of his voters of Hillary's voters,” Coulter launched into a plug for her recent Breitbart article while insisting Ttump never mocked a reporter.
“[In the article,] I didn't even get to the lie about Trump mocking a disabled reporter … this is how Trump imitates a flustered person. He's done the exact same imitation, in fact in that speech the media knew they were lying, because later in that same speech he did an imitation of a general being flustered—does the exact same arms waving, mouth hanging open.
He’s done the same imitation of himself being flustered so you know, fine he’s not going to be a sketch actor on on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ but he was not mocking a disabled person.”
Coulter then argued that Serge Kovaleski, the New York Times reporter Trump imitated at a rally last November, “allowed himself to be lied about for the greater good of slandering Donald Trump,” adding the author was indeed flustered and therefore deserved Trump’s derision.
“Most importantly his disability isn't what Trump was doing,” Coulter insisted, purporting Trump’s hand gyrations were more like “somebody with epilepsy” than someone with Kovaleski’s congenital condition.
“If it’s horrible a thing to mock disabled person,” Coulter continued. “Isn’t it an equally horrible thing to falsely accuse someone of mocking a disable person?"
“The left does every election though," Hannity responded. “They falsely accused poor Mitt Romney of hating women being racist and and not caring about anybody but the rich.”
Listen to the audio below, via the Sean Hannity Show:
On one level, this is a curious move. Al Gore’s presidential bid was in 2000, when very few millennials (a generation born between 1982 and 2000) were even old enough to vote. In addition, relatively few young people say “the environment and climate change” is the most important issue to them this year. And climate change has received almost no attention in the debates, nor much media coverage in major outlets.
So why focus on climate change as part of the final push to mobilize millennials, many of whom are still recovering from the emotional roller coaster of Bernie Sanders’ rousing but ultimately unsuccessful campaign?
The data show that climate change is one of the very few issues that most millennials can get behind this election season, even though it doesn’t rank as the top concern. Whether enough millennials will turn out in large numbers or influence the result of the election still remains to be seen. But the data show that climate change in the future has the potential to be a unifying issue across party lines, and one that millennials can directly connect to their personal lives.
More popular than Bernie
Although Americans are increasingly more likely to accept climate change as fact and a serious threat, climate change has not been a top priority for the general electorate. Out of three presidential debates, the one mention of the environment that brought the most attention was the perfectly reasonable question about balancing clean energy and job security for many who work in fossil fuel energy industry, posed by the reluctantly famous internet meme Ken Bone.
As the director of Tisch College’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), which focuses on young people’s civic learning and engagement, I found that millennials have distinct views on climate change. In our survey, 26 percent named climate change as one of the key dangers our world is facing, in the middle of our list, after “foreign terrorism,” “corruption,” “too much power to select few” and “prejudice against people of different ethnicities.” By contrast, climate change ranked next to last in a Gallup poll that surveyed all Americans’ list of concerns.
Although climate change does not top the list, it is important to point out that most of the issues that do tend to be prioritized by a specific, and partisan group of millennials. For example, “violence against people of color” was named by 67 percent of black millennials, 27 percent of Latino millennials and just 16 percent of white millennials as a priority. By contrast, climate change is not a divisive issue – support for it crosses all political parties and racial groups.
Call themselves environmentalists?
The millennials who are part of the environmental movement are highly politically engaged, a rarity for a generation that prefers to address social issues through actions that have direct impacts, such as community service, over political involvement. Millennials are not lazy or apathetic – they just want to invest their energy into a cause that they can impact.
Because of millennials’ tendency toward direct impact, it is no surprise that most shy away from political engagement and find political discussion to be off-putting. Washington politics have not been exactly responsive or effective, at least based on the number of bills they have passed, and many young people do not feel their voices are heard or taken seriously.
Clinton called on former Vice President Al Gore, a high-profile advocate for action on climate change, to cohost a rally in October at Miami Dade Community College aimed at younger voters.
Alberto E. Tamargo/Sipa via AP Images
For those millennials who do consider themselves “part of” the environment movement – a relatively small 8 percent – their level of political engagement is extraordinary. These environmental activists may be catalysts for change who seek to educate and mobilize their less engaged, but supportive peers who are ready to turn their personal action into votes.
An additional 33 percent are not part of, but support, the movement, and they come from diverse racial, educational and ideological backgrounds, though they do lean Democratic. Support even comes from a seemingly unlikely group – 27 percent of Republicans (including “lean” Republicans) support the movement. Even among supporters of Donald Trump, the least supportive group, just 16 percent say that they would oppose the environmental movement.
This wide support is significant because millennials have found that their desire to make a positive impact on a personal level intersects with policy solutions and governmental actions, such as clean energy policies for consumers.
And if they vote in large numbers, millennials will express their support for the environment. According to a survey of millennials in battleground states by NextGen, 75 percent of millennials would be more likely to vote for a candidate who wants to “transition U.S. from dirty fossil fuels to clean energy like wind and solar.” Also, 73 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a politician who “wants to to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Faith in political process
It’s a bit too early to say that climate change is the unifying call for the millennial generation, but it may be in the near future. It’s striking that most (75 percent) millennial voters consider supporting transition to renewable fuel as a significant reason to vote for a specific politician.
To engage them on climate, politicians need to argue that we can mitigate the negative impact of climate change, and to link that sentiment to voting, making the case that one effective way to drive change is to to vote for candidates who will work to protect the environment.
However, our political leaders need to come up with ways to restore the trust in civic and political institutions among millennials who question the authenticity of the establishment and political system.
Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Director, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement in the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, Tufts University
Political correctness was one of Donald Trump’s earliest targets in his presidential campaign. From the onset, his massive crowds cheered whenever he would defiantly declare, “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap.” He often went on “straight talk” discourses spouting his beliefs about “real” America, Mexican immigrants, Muslim terrorists, inner-city crime and even the old war on Christmas.
On the campaign trail, Trump has often assured audiences, “I am the least racist person that you have ever met.” But to feed his need for uncensored talking points, Trump has drawn politically incorrect rhetoric from a bottomless online well of conspiracy theories and unfiltered intolerance. His “dog whistle” comments – their true meaning audible only to those already attuned to them – have given the radical right an amount of publicity, and legitimacy, never achieved in prior elections.
Yet what all this says (or doesn’t) about Trump himself is not as important as what it shows us of modern American bigotry. The more Trump’s words have been examined and associated with racist and xenophobic ideas, the more the public has come to identify similarly objectionable beliefs, comments and actions in society all around them. Trump has given extremists a high-profile stage, but in the process exposed them to the disinfecting sunlight.
As a researcher of online extremism, my investigations have focused on two general tiers of digital hate culture. The first is the well-traveled network of extremist websites that work hard to avoid appearing racist at first glance. Sites like Daily Stormer, American Renaissance and Occidental Observer have been skillfully designed to seem like faux-political blogs, social networks and news sites. And yet they contain fervently prejudiced discussions on issues like black violence, Jewish media, the prospect of deportation forces and the 2016 GOP candidate. Underlying this discourse is the recurring refrain that the white race is under siege.
The second layer of online extremism is that which has infiltrated, and in some cases, been quietly sewn into, some of the internet’s most popular blogs and news hubs. The right-wing Breitbart News website has a discussion tag bringing together visitors wishing to read about and comment on “Black Crime” in America. On Alex Jones’ InfoWars, followers are fed a regular diet of conspiracies about “illegal aliens” among us. And on The Drudge Report, readers can regularly find headlines collected from across the web about the shrinking white majority and the related rise in minority populations.
Digital demagoguery in the mainstream
It is clear that this next possible president draws from this world. One of Trump’s earliest – and most sustained – involvements with the digital fringe was the birther movement, attacking President Obama’s legitimacy to be president. It began with questions about the first black president’s nationality and faith spreading like ivy along the margins of cyberspace in 2008. Then it graduated onto increasingly mainstream blogs and into campaign politics. Trump sustained it in countless tweets and media appearances over many years.
As his campaign ramped up, Trump built on these connections. In November 2015, some of his supporters attacked a black protester at a rally in Alabama. The next day, Trump tweeted a racially charged meme highlighting the number of “Whites killed by Blacks.”
The statistics he cited were patently false, and the source nonexistent. But the fact that he had tweeted it meant the underlying idea became national news.
In January 2016, Trump drew fire for giving a megaphone to the web’s fanatical underbelly, by retweeting the sentiments of a white supremacist Twitter user. Deeper analysis found Trump often retweeting posts from people who used a “white genocide” hashtag.
By August 2016, Trump was rebooting his campaign for a third time, choosing as his campaign manager Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart News. That brought mainstream attention to the site, and some of its recent headlines, such as “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Bill Kristol: Republic Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” and “Hoist it High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.”
Through his connections to these digital demagogues, Trump has empowered narratives that would otherwise have no place in electoral politics.
Exposing the alt-right
But by bringing unprecedented attention to extremist views in 2016, Trump also forced America to see these threats in the light of day. That could be their undoing. Exposed, these guises of bigotry have been recognized, decoded and even classified – as the “alt-right” – by the press and public.
When last we saw the racist fringe in mainstream media, neo-Nazis and KKK members were regulars on “The Jerry Springer Show,” mocked rather than feared by audiences. Today’s vast online interconnected network of hate, with its Trump-aided inroads into mainstream culture, may yet suffer the same fate.
A KKK leader on ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’
Birtherism, for example, is no longer being debated on the right as a legitimate movement. By 2016’s first presidential debate, it was being cast as a clear pretense for racism, with questions from the moderator shifting to Trump’s role in perpetuating the charade.
More recently, civil rights groups quickly identified Trump’s talk of election rigging in the cities of Chicago and Philadelphia as coded racism for “voter fraud” among the black community. And an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll recently concluded nearly 70 percent of Americans “say they have concerns about Donald Trump’s comments and language on women, immigrants and Muslims.”
In Trump’s journey to abolish political correctness, he has led his supporters to an awkward impasse. No doubt, his backers continue to admire in Trump someone who has the courage to “tell it like it is.” But now they often find themselves saying, “He doesn’t really mean that.” These two sentiments cannot logically coexist.
As we enter the final hours of the 2016 US presidential campaign, an interesting trend is noticeable: three states in the US South, traditionally thought of as a conservative Republican bastion, seem to be in play. Here are four reasons why Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina in particular might just surprise us this year.
1: The South has never been predictable
Ever since the American Civil War, the states that founded the Confederacy have been known as the “Deep South”: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Along with the other states who seceded – Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee – they make up “Dixieland”, a region memorialised in song, steeped in tradition, and inseparable from the history of race in America.
From 1880-1948, Dixieland block-voted Democratic all but twice (1920 and 1928). But then in 1948, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina voted for third-party segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond. These southern Democrat states became known as Dixiecrats, opposed to racial integration and determined to protect the southern way of life. They developed a reputation for voting in favour of segregation even when it meant crossing party lines.
In reality the votes of these four states, though sometimes opposing the Democratic candidate, were more in opposition to “everyone else” than they were to their own party. They stood all but alone in support of the Democrats against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, in opposition to Democrat and civil rights supporter Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and in support of third-party segregationist George Wallace in 1968.
With the re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972, the entirety of Dixieland voted solidly with the Republican Party. Yet for six of the next ten elections, southern states diverged from the Republican candidate to support one of their own, such as Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, and to support a new face, such as Barack Obama. The 11 states of Dixieland have delivered a unified vote in only six of the 20 elections since World War II.
2: Not all southern states were Dixiecrats
We therefore must acknowledge that the bloc of southern states that supposedly vote as one changes from one election to the next.
Neither Florida nor Georgia nor North Carolina were part of the original Dixiecrat cohort. Florida voted differently to the majority of the South in nine of the last 17 elections, thereby earning its reputation as a swing state. Georgia did not support Thurmond in 1948, it supported Clinton in 1992, and stayed loyal to its native Jimmy Carter in 1980 along with only four other states in the entire country. North Carolina, meanwhile, voted for Johnson (1964), Carter (1976), and Obama (2008).
3: Race matters – but not like it used to
To complicate the picture further, these three states’ electorates are steadily becoming less and less white. This is thanks in part to internal migration toward hubs of innovation and intellect, among them the Georgia capital, Atlanta, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, which now boasts the headquarters of more than 170 companies.
A richer civic life and the creation of jobs in the international market are drawing in a more diverse and more educated electorate. Compared to traditional southern Republicans or Trump supporters, these people are less likely to feel voiceless or to see themselves as outsiders to the economic gains and cultural change that have come with globalisation. They are less likely to support Trump than they were to support 2008’s John McCain or 2012’s Mitt Romney.
Then there’s immigration from abroad. The percentage of the US population who are legal foreign-born residents has been on the rise since 1970; 44% of them are naturalised and therefore able to vote as of 2010. In Georgia and North Carolina, nearly 10% of the population is foreign-born; in Florida, the figure is nearly 20%. These changes mean there are pockets of the electorate unlikely to agree with Trump’s views on immigration.
4: Florida is different
Though one of the southern states who seceded from the union, Florida has never reliably voted with its neighbours. Not for the first time, the state looks like a true toss-up.
Florida’s former governor and failed 2016 candidate Jeb Bush is not voting for either Trump or Clinton. Florida hasn’t broken with the Bushes in a single election where they’ve run, and while there isn’t a Bush on the ballot this year, both his and the family’s feelings are abundantly clear. Both Bush presidents have declined to comment on the race, which many consider to be near-endorsements of Hillary Clinton by their silence alone; former first lady Barbara Bush has explicitly spoken out against voting for Trump.
Trump has also been disowned by a number of important Florida Republicans, including many in the Bush orbit. The list includes such luminaries as senior Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, former Jeb Bush aide and campaign manager Sally Bradshaw, and major Republican donor Mike Fernandez.
These leaders have substantial political and financial clout in the state; by withholding their resources, mobilising their networks and speaking out publicly, they have the potential to convince millions of Florida voters to support Clinton or stay home altogether.
It might seem novel or unexpected that so many southern states are in play right now – but looking back over their electoral history, their current leanings are less surprising than we think.
Former McCain campaign Chief strategist Steve Schmidt joined a MSNBC panel on Monday and discussed the importance of Michigan to the 2016 election. MSNBC host Chuck Todd asked panelists, "What took Trump so long to get to Michigan?"
Panelists discussed the difficulties for each party of reaching working class American voters.
Schmidt responded to Todd's prompt on Michigan and said, "They don't have a functioning campaign, so they weren't on top of it. They didn't see where the opportunities were."
Todd asks why it's taken so long for the Republican party to crack the code of "Northern tier states" in presidential years, reminding Schmidt how McCain's campaign had trouble in states like Michigan and Minnesota as well.
"I think this is the second of four really consequential global elections, the next will be the French and the German," Schmidt explained. He noted how there is a shift in the global political climate from one where people are split down the middle as right-leaning and left-leaning, to one based on who has benefited or not from globalization.
There are those who have benefited from globalization, and those who feel they have been left behind, according to Schmidt.
"I think that's going to be the new fault line in American politics," Schmidt said. "And the voters, the Bernie Sanders voter and the Trump voter — like fishnetting, the fish can swing through the netting from left to right very, very easily."
Later in the segment, Schmidt touched on Silicon Valley, otherwise known as a hub of tech start-ups and entrepreneurship. "Let's look at the Silicon Valley wing of the Democratic party and be clear about the partisan nature of all of these companies," Schmidt started.
"The number one job for not college educated white men in America is driving something somewhere. So when we talk about an era now of driverless trucks, driverless cars, where do those jobs go? Where's that displacement?" Schmidt continued.
He added, "We have these arguments about minimum wage — $12, $15. We're 18 months away in this country from a robot in the window at the McDonalds handing you your cheeseburger."
We're not having conversations about the "profound displacements that are going to come to what's left of the high paying blue-collar jobs in this country," Schmidt said.
They just want it to be over. That’s my sense of things after watching recent campaigning for the 2016 elections in the US’s ultimate battleground state: Florida.
I spent the last few days before the election in the gulf coast beach resort of St. Petersburg and the Central Florida college town of Gainesville. In St. Pete, as it’s known, I encountered the annual conference of the Southern Historical Association, a biker convention, and more stag and hen parties than you can shake an inflatable penis at. In Gainesville, home to the University of Florida, there’s an annual arts festival in full swing right now, but it’s also home to the Gatornationals, one of the nation’s premier drag-racing meets.
Driving between the two along Interstate 75, you can see down-at-heel trailer parks and upscale horse-breeding estates. It’s a land of contrasts. This diversity explains why Florida has been beset by so much frantic last-ditch campaigning, and why its people’s presidential choice is proving so difficult to predict.
Factor in the heavily Hispanic South Florida region around Miami, which also boasts enormous numbers of retirees from the north, and the so-called “Redneck Riviera” of the Panhandle, a largely conservative region that extends west towards Alabama, and the complexities of the state and the difficulties of organising a coherent state-wide campaign become even more evident.
Florida is now another part of Purple America – a place where red and blue loyalties mingle. Both camps have no choice but to try to win the state.
With 29 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency up for grabs, Florida is just too important to neglect. The weekend before the vote, Trump was in Tampa, trying to rally support among his base white supporters and making special, if probably futile, appeal to African American and Hispanic voters. The same day, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton’s most potent surrogate, was in Gainesville; on Sunday he moved on to Kissimmee. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine was also in the state, taking in Fort Myers and Sarasota before jamming awkwardly with Jon Bon Jovi in St. Petersburg on Saturday night.
Right to the bitter end, both sides are pumping enormous financial resources into the state. The Democrats had, as of November 5, spent US$77.2m in TV ads in Florida; Trump has spent less than half that, at US$38.2m*link*. The huge effort from the Democrats is especially telling: Florida has voted Republican many times before, and Clinton could win the White House without it, but it’s very difficult for Trump to get to the Oval Office without detouring through the Sunshine State. She is trying hard to head him off.
Sick and tired
A Democratic Party political organiser who has been parachuted into St. Pete to help with the final week’s efforts, explained the calculations to me. The Democrats are cautiously confident that Clinton will win the top of the ticket race – though as she admitted, nobody working on an election should ever be wholly confident again post-Brexit. The campaign team are at least resigned to the fact that there isn’t much more they can do to bolster Clinton’s personal support in Florida. Minds are largely made up. They do, however, feel they can still make a real difference in tight down-ballot races, especially for the Senate.
Ultimately, however, all this feverish activity and endless speculation seems to be taking its toll on the Florida electorate. The single most common reaction among those I spoke to was exhaustion with the whole protracted and often painful process. This campaign has stirred anger, incredulity and, latterly, simple fatigue. Across the political spectrum, there was enormous relief at the welcome distraction of a titanic baseball World Series final between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians, in which the former ended a 108-year losing streak. Early voting means that for millions of people, the election is already over: their votes are cast. They just want a result.
Of course, there are still plenty of people making calls, putting up (and sometimes tearing down) yard signs, trying to mobilise the vote for their preferred national and local candidates. There may even by a few people who actually still pay attention to the endless stream of relentlessly derogatory ads coming from both camps.
This jaw-droppingly sad exercise in lowest-common-denominator politics is now almost totally bereft of any discussion of policy except in the most abstract terms. The election is now all about surface and style, prejudices and posturing. “It’s a circus,” lamented a long-time Democratic Party activist in Gainesville, despairing at the absence of substantive debate and lack of civility in the campaign.
This isn’t about apathy. I spoke to a lot of people who think that this election will define the future of American democracy. If anything, it’s the Clinton supporters who have the most apocalyptic vision. How, they ask, can a man whose actions and rhetoric embody the worst kinds of ignorance, prejudice and arrogance find himself within striking distance of the White House? As they see it, something is rotten in the heart of the republic.
Pray for the day
While the bile I heard many Trump supporters direct towards Clinton sometimes smacked of little more than crude sexism, the unease about her integrity, financial dealings, and political judgement is real enough.
Some Florida Democrats share those reservations, but will turn up to vote for a woman who is arguably the best qualified candidate for the office in US history. They take a pragmatic view of her wheeling and dealing and lapses of judgement, arguing – not unreasonably – that there’s probably no politician who has reached her level of power without sailing close to the wind.
For Trump’s most vehement supporters, meanwhile, a Clinton victory would simply confirm that the system is, as their hero likes to proclaim, rigged. They believe a Clinton win means business as usual for a cabal of Washington insiders. But many Republicans who ultimately vote for Trump will do so with a heavy heart.
Trump has no real conservative credentials, sits well outside the embrace of the Christian Right, and has displayed levels of misogyny and bigotry that genuinely distress many Republicans. He has further divided an already fractious party to which he has, at best, a tenuous ideological and historic connection. One dispirited Republican told me he was reading his Bible daily for guidance on whether he should vote at all. He could not countenance Clinton; Trump was nearly as problematic.
So how will this all play out? Despite both parties’ money and best efforts, in Florida the race remains officially too close to call. A RealClearPolitics averaging of polls has Clinton by one point, at 47% to Trump’s 46%; the Tampa Bay Times announced that according to early voting data, Republicans had “a razor thin ballot advantage of 1,833 over Democrats”.
In yet another indication of the inscrutability of the outcome, the same paper has endorsed Clinton for president, Democratic candidates for the US and Florida Senates, and a purple slate of Republican and Democrats for the US House of Representatives and local Florida offices.
Florida voters are, as ever, up for grabs, and everyone is duly piling on. No surprise they’re getting tired of it.
Victims of foreclosure across the country are working on a lawsuit against the LNV Corporation, which is directly connected to the Trump campaign.
According to a new report from the Intercept, Donald Trump's economic advisor, billionaire and poker player Andy Beal, is at the center of the lawsuit. Beal is the board member of the LNV Corporation, and is the sole target of the legal battle.
Beal was named as Trump's economic advisor earlier this year and in a statement on the matter, a spokesman for Beal Service Corp wrote the following:
Andy Beal reaffirms his belief that Donald Trump will do much more to help America than Hillary Clinton could ever imagine doing. Mr. Beal has known Mr. Trump for many years and knows him to be a highly intelligent man who makes excellent reasoned decisions ...
Mr. Beal believes that current US government is the problem, and that more of the same simply perpetuates the problems.
One of the plaintiffs, Denise Subramaniam, is alleging that the corporation "forged evidence to prove it owned her loan, and that the summary judgment for foreclosure issued by the lower court violates constitutional protections regarding due process," David Dayen writes.
There are three lawsuits — including Subramaniam's — against LNV that are taking place before the 9th Circuit in Portland, Oregon, and various others across the country.
The plaintiffs from Oregon and elsewhere have formed an "informal network of homeowners" called the Victims Group. It is made up of 15 participants who help one another with their foreclosure cases via email and phone.
Subramaniam says, "Those of us who have survived this process have come together. It saves us time and makes us smarter."
However, LNV lawyers and spokespeople have suggested that the Victims Group is a sham. "The allegations raised by the borrowers are categorically false," senior vice president for corporate communications Jim Chambless wrote in a statement.
Chambless adds that the allegations "have been disproven and vetted by the appropriate authorities all over the country."
Dayen notes, however, that the cases around the country that focus specifically on Beal form a pattern. Specifically, that each plaintiff received a mortgage "with companies other than Beal's," and when the housing market collapsed in 2008, Beal, through LNV, acquired all those mortgages.
In a sharp segment on MSNBC Monday, reporter Katy Tur refused to let Trump supporter John Sununu blame her for focusing on “distractions,” reminding the former N.H. governor that he’s the one who made inappropriate comments about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s sex life.
At a N.H. rally Friday, Sununu joked about the Bill Clinton's sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, asking the audience if they "think Bill was referring to Hillary when he said, ‘I did not have sex with that woman?’”
Towards the end of her interview with the former N.H governor, Tur noted the “many low moments” of the 2016 presidential campaign before asking Sununu about his comments. As the conversation became more combative, Tur rebuffed his attempts to blame her for focusing on distractions:
Sununu: I’m not even gonna go there.
Tur: Do you regret getting into that on the stump for Trump?
Sununu: I do regret that I did not focus on this culture of corruption issue.
Tur: This whole campaign’s been marked by distractions, it seems—
Sununu: It shouldn’t be, why do you ask questions on distractions?
Tur: You said it, sir.
Sununu: Why don’t you ask me why I believe there’s a culture on corruption?
Tur: Why don't you focus on a culture of corruption instead of coming out suggesting something untoward about the marriage of the opponents?
Earlier in the interview, Sununu and Tur sparred over the investigation of Clinton’s email, with the former N.H. governor accusing Tur of pleading Clinton’s case for her.
Explaining why he said—without evidence—that FBI director James Comey was “pressured” into not pressing charges against Clinton, Sununu repeated the familiar Trump campaign talking point that the FBI couldn’t have reviewed 650,000 emails in one week. He also insisted the FBI did not close the case, they merely decided they are “not going to indict at this point.”
“‘At this point’ implies that they may indict further down the line,” Tur countered. “Why do you believe that there is an indictment coming where all of the evidence that’s been put out there so far suggests that they are not looking at an indictment; the FBI [director] has said repeatedly now he will not recommend any charges be brought against her.”
“You really try to plead her case very strongly don’t you?” Sununu asked.
Over the past several years, Hillary Clinton has transformed her signature pantsuit – a loose fitting jacket that runs to the mid-thigh paired with lightly tapered pants – into a rallying cry for female empowerment. In early October, a pantsuit-clad flash mob popped up in New York City’s Union Square, dancing to a Justin Timberlake song in a show of support for Clinton. And on the Friday before the election, Beyonce and her backup dancers took the stage donning pantsuits during a pro-Clinton concert.
The ensemble, however, has a controversial history, and Clinton’s clothing choice hasn’t been bereft of criticism. “Hideous,” “unflattering,” “unfeminine” – these are just some of the insults lobbed Clinton’s way since she started regularly wearing them about a decade ago.
As a historian of women and clothing, I see Clinton’s pantsuit – and those who criticize it – as the latest chapter in a long history of people telling women what they can and can’t wear.
How pants infiltrated women’s wardrobes
Why does the pantsuit rankle so many Americans?
Women’s appropriation of men’s clothing should be ho-hum in an age of unisex fashion trends and boyfriend jeans. But the line between “his” and “hers” took centuries to build and will take more than a female presidential candidate to dismantle.
People seem to hate the pantsuit because it includes, well, pants – which happen to be one of the most controversial garments in women’s clothing. Skirts (whether worn on their own or as part of a dress) obscure the female form, leaving one to wonder, “Hey, what’s underneath there?” But pants – traditionally a man’s garment – leave little to the imagination. On women, pants take away all of the subtlety that Western society has valued in female dress for hundreds of years. They play to society’s fears about what happens when women dress themselves and decide, on their own, what it means to be feminine.
A pantsuit-clad flash mob appears in Manhattan’s Union Square.
True, since the early 1900s, there have been female artists, models, hikers, farm hands and women’s rights advocates who wore pants for practical or political reasons. But the infiltration of pants into women’s wardrobes happened in the slow-yet-unrelenting way that cultural norms change. It was a wearer-driven movement that started with the young.
Women loved the pantsuit in all shapes and forms. In 1960, designer Norman Norell paired culottes (knee-length trousers) with a matching tunic top. Meanwhile, California-based designers – the same ones who introduced rayon shorts and gardening togs – touted wide-legged pants with a matching cropped jacket.
In 1966, couturier Yves Saint Laurent offered up Le Smoking, an ensemble that played upon a decades-long tradition of avant-garde women in tuxedo-inspired garments. Despite its endorsement from fashion’s heavy hitters, socialite Nan Kempner was thrown out of Manhattan’s Le Cote Basque for wearing it. Women in pants still had no place at formal dining establishments.
Turning criticisms into a calling card
Today, pantsuits are a formal garment worn to the office or social events. (You’d be hard-pressed to attend a wedding and not see a woman in a pantsuit.) As Clinton unabashedly admits, pantsuits are practical and comfortable – two things that women’s clothing, historically, hasn’t been.
And Clinton is all pantsuits, all the time. Sometimes her jackets have round collars or half collars or mid-sized lapels. Sometimes they are bright orange or teal or – as in the last debate – white. Often, they are the work of the late Oscar De La Renta or Nina McLemore.
In a pantsuit, Clinton always looks professional and put together. But that hasn’t stopped the comments about her being tired and overweight or her belly being too puffy or how she seems “grandmother-ish.”
Lena Dunham’s “Pantsuit Anthem” in support of Hillary Clinton.
She has turned critics’ scoffs into further proof that women’s appearances are always up for dissection – even at the top of the political pyramid. Rather than diversify her public wardrobe or whip out some of the dresses she wore as First Lady, Clinton clings to the pantsuit.
You don’t have to be a professor or a working mom or even a female to get behind the message of Clinton’s pantsuit. You just have to be sick of pretending that our society has moved beyond “liking” or “disliking” women by how they look or what they wear.
