November 10, 2016
News and Views
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/muslim-women-wearing-hijabs-assaulted-just-hours-after-trump-win-n681936
Muslim Women Wearing Hijabs Assaulted Just Hours After Trump Win
by AMANDA SAKUMA
POLITICS NOV 10 2016, 3:12 PM ET
Video -- Trump Win Leaves Questions, Anxiety for Many Minorities in U.S. 1:43
Play Video -- 'Not my president': Anti-Donald Trump protests erupt across the country after election 2:12
Play -- Has Brexit Sparked a Wave of Racist Hate Crimes? 1:04
WNBC: 'Rash' of Hate Crimes Reported Day After Trump's Election
Image: A woman wearing a Muslim headscarf walks past people holding Donald Trump signs before the annual Muslim Day Parade in the Manhattan on Sept. 25. Stephanie Keith / Reuters
Related: Donald Trump's Immigration Ban Ensnares One-Third of World
Related: Here's How Donald Trump Might Govern
Related: A Full List of Trump's Rapidly Changing Policy Positions
The first police reports started trickling in within 10 hours of Donald Trump's victory speech.
A Muslim student from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette reported being attacked by two men on Wednesday morning. The victim told investigators that one wore a white "TRUMP" hat while they hit her with a metal object and shouted obscenities as she fell to the ground. University police say the suspects fled with the woman's wallet and hijab.
The center of the campus was also defaced with incendiary pro-Trump language.
Another Muslim woman said she was attacked from behind in a parking garage at San Jose State University. A man ran up and pulled at her hijab, choking her, university police said.
At San Diego State University, another Muslim student reported being followed by two men who made comments about Trump and the Muslims, according to the police report. University police say the suspects confronted the woman, stole her purse and car keys before fleeing the scene. They came back for her car while she was off searching for help.
It was the first full day of America under a President-elect Trump. And it reinforced fears that the Republican's upset victory would inspire a new wave of Islamophobia nationwide.
One of Trump's most popular proposals within his base has been to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States. He has expressed an openness to secretly surveying mosques and Muslim leaders. He's even suggested that American Muslims are actively harboring foreign terrorists.
Trump's sweeping proposals has raised concerns of widespread discrimination that targets an entire religious group.
Corey Saylor, who tracks instances of Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino coupled with the incendiary rhetoric against Muslims playing out during the White House campaign had created a perfect storm of Islamophobia in America. He predicted attacks against Muslims will become even more frequent now that Trump will be president.
"Unfortunately the election of Trump will embolden people who don't like minorities — and not just Muslims but minorities across the board," Saylor said.
Intensifying those fears is the fact that the string of attacks reported on Wednesday were aimed at Muslim women specifically.
Many Muslim women chose to wear a hijab, a veil traditionally wrapped around their head. But it also clearly marks an easily identifiable symbol of Islam.
Muslim women voiced their anxiety early Wednesday morning as the final election results slowly cemented Trump's victory.
Some issued warnings to women that in wearing a hijab, their faith would compromise their personal safety. Others remained defiant.
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jannatinã…¤ @harryonmen
My mom literally just texted me "don't wear the Hijab please" and she's the most religious person in our family....
2:17 AM - 9 Nov 2016
73,401 73,401 Retweets 93,410 93,410 likes
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Narjis Naqvi @narjisfn
If you don't feel safe to wear hijab in your area, please reach out to a friend/have a call-buddy/don't walk alone whenever you're out.
12:14 AM - 9 Nov 2016
44 44 Retweets 66 66 likes
Reports of Islamophobic incidents have been on the rise. Overall hate crimes were down across the board in 2014, except for one category — crimes against Muslims, according to the FBI's annual Hate Crime Statistics report.
They recorded 154 reported anti-Muslim incidents that year — an average of almost three per week. That was a rise of 14 percent from 2013.
Saylor said CAIR recorded 34 anti-Muslim incidents during November and December last year — or about one every second day.
"It was the worst period of anti-Muslim activity since 9/11," Saylor added.
A report released by Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding also found an uptick in hate crimes against Muslims following terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.
There has also been a dramatic surge in Islamophobic attacks in the U.K., where reported hate crimes increased by 60 percent following the divisive Brexit referendum in June.
With Trump's victory comes fears that his supporters will feel emboldened to stretch his most xenophobic views to the limit.
Trump's candidacy was warmly embraced by the alt-right and Ku Klux Klan leaders. And instances of overt racism are already bubbling to the surface.
On Wednesday racist graffiti, including swastikas and Nazi slogan "sieg heil," were spotted plastered around South Philly, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Following Wednesday's attack at San Diego State University, President Elliot Hirshman issued a statement to help ease student groups and staff who expressed fears out of the divisive election outcome.
"Hate crimes are destructive to the spirit of our campus and we urge all members of our community to stand together in rejecting hate, " he said.
I’ve always thought that this country is too restrictive, not so much in our government as in our social structure. We aren’t open enough to any kind of variance whatsoever, but especially human differences. There is not a large enough segment of our population who are educated much beyond the high school level so that they will find it easy to educate themselves further when they get home from work. There aren’t nearly as many of us as I would like who even have any high degree of curiosity – a necessary factor – and as a result we tend to be unfamiliar with people outside our own group, and thus have a high degree of suspicion toward them.
There is also a strong strain of downright aggressiveness and even viciousness in us. Those things aren’t really necessary to our having a HEALTHY LEVEL of competitiveness as some people seem to believe, and in addition, our society is dangerously TOLERANT of such characteristics. That’s why schoolyard bullies aren’t punished, expelled or even given compulsive psychiatric therapy. Abusiveness just isn’t considered a real “problem,” except among our most sensitive kids who tend to end up as the victims. It is our society’s view that they just “need to toughen up!”
Finally, we have a feeling in this country that memorizing Bible verses will make us gentle, but really it takes specific personal interaction training while kids are young to really produce gentleness. They have to learn to care about others. We don’t do enough of that kind of teaching in the US. If we allow our people to be aggressive and uncaring, then race war and pogroms will come naturally. We also don’t seem to understand that it is necessary to have a cooperative spirit in our nature to really succeed, also.
The Donald Trump style of rousing the crowd into a fever pitch of anger and hatred is paying off in the most predictable way here, and we “good Christians” will suffer from it, along with the Mexicans and “A-rabs” if we become that kind of country. When there’s a war, people on both sides are killed. Why can’t the people in this country realize the beauty of what we had – America the Beautiful.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-trump
Sanders Statement on Trump
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
BURLINGTON, Vt., Nov. 9 – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement Wednesday after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States:
“Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids - all while the very rich become much richer.
“To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.”
https://mg.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=dourn45q3k33t#5283601954
Stand with women of color against Donald Trump
Charles Chamberlain, Democracy for America
Lucy -- After the most divisive presidential election in the nation's history, the divide in this country will be between those who attempt to accommodate Donald Trump's fringe-right, bigoted agenda and those who will fight him every step of the way.
So, let's be absolutely clear: Democracy for America will do everything in our power to obstruct, delay, and halt the attacks on people of color, women, and working families that will emerge from a Trump administration. [NOTE: DFA was founded by Howard Dean in 2004.]
After watching Donald Trump's speech, we are more convinced than ever that our country needs a massive, multi-racial, multi-generational progressive political revolution led by women and people of color that is not beholden to the broken political establishment that brought us to this moment. And that's precisely what we'll work with our members and our allies to build in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
We invite you to read the following open letter to our nation from 100 women of color leaders, including DFA's Mari Schimmer -- and take the pledge to stand with women of color who will lead the fight against Donald Trump and everything he stands for. Thank you. -- Charles Chamberlain, Executive Director, Democracy for America
Read the open letter from 100 women of color leaders:
This morning, we come together to declare our resolve. Many of us are holding our babies, families, and loved ones close. We know that there is tremendous suffering and anger in this country, yet we stand here today, determined. After an election, rife with the politics of division and hate, today we open a new chapter in our country's long, difficult journey towards the promise of liberty and justice for all.
Join us, over the next 100 hours, at community events across the country as we come together to affirm our unity, and together recommit to continue our work towards this promise.
Our work did not start, and has not ended, with this election. Women built upon longstanding community and family networks to lead community-based voter programs. We've known that women of color represent 74 percent of the growth in eligible women voters since 2000. In more than 100 cities, across all 50 states, women came together to mobilize and inspire turnout, creating an unprecedented gender and racial gap at the polls.
Women did this work, not to get one woman a new job, but because we understood the stakes in this election. Black lives, women's lives, immigrant's lives, the lives of LGBTQ folks, of people with disabilities; of working people of every race, region and ethnicity, including those at Standing Rock and others protecting our land. We know that the future and well-being of this country depends on the health and well-being of all women.
Today, we feel how far we are from the promise of a nation that ensures liberty and justice for all. But our work, built on the hopes of our grandmothers, mothers, sisters and daughters, is testament to the power of our shared belief in that promise. It is we who must build the path forward on our journey.
As we look at our polarized country standing at this crossroads, we are filled with love for the many peoples of this nation. Despite disappointment and heartbreak, our resolve grounds us in hope for our future. Too often in the shadows, women's hands have always been the strongest grip bending the arc of history towards justice.
Today, we recommit to take hold of that arc of history. As women, we stand united in our pledge to continue to take action to bring forward solutions. We know the politics of hate will not get us to the solutions we need.
As women of color, as leaders, we will build and lead us on a path forward. We must work together to hold civic, administrative and corporate decision makers accountable. To reach our full potential as people, and as a nation, this democracy must be owned by all of us, for all of us. We pledge our unity and determination to be ready, determined and united behind a vision and plan of action to become a nation where we can all live with dignity, care for our loved ones and the land, and thrive in freedom from all forms of inequality.
We can only get there, together. We invite you to journey with us.
Take the pledge:
My work will not end at the ballot box. In the #First100Hours and #First100days, I will stand with women of color leadership. I will stand with women who are leading solutions that support a vision for Black lives, an end to violence against women and girls, power to make decisions about our bodies, health and reproduction, common sense immigration reform and an end to Islamophobia. I pledge to take action to pursue a democracy and economy where we all have an equal say, and an equal chance.
EMAIL NOVEMBER 9, 2016
https://www.laprogressive.com/trump-victory-survey/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+Newsletter&utm_campaign=425665c519-LAP_News_19_July_2011_Live7_18_2011&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9f184a8aad-425665c519-286822829
Ohhh! Emmm! Geee! What Just Happened?
BY DICK AND SHARON
You’ve seen the news. Hillary Clinton suffered a stunning defeat. She may yet win the popular vote nationwide, but Donald Trump will be our 45th President. His tweet-length policy statements will drive the public debate. His soft porn star wife will replace Michelle Obama as First Lady. Republicans will control both houses of Congress. They will name Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court — and then probably a couple more justices — swinging the Court far to the right for a generation.
Take this survey to tell us what you think went wrong. Check your top three, then comment below.
The top 3 reasons Donald Trump will be in the White House - (select 3)
FBI Director James Comey’s outrageous last-minute intervention threw the election to Trump.
The Republicans’ voter suppression campaign to disenfranchise black voters gave Trump the margin of victory.
Mainstream media gave Trump a free ride, treating him like a normal candidate, not a racist demagogue.
Right-wing money increased GOP turnout in battleground states.
The Democrats ran the wrong candidate: Hillary's campaign didn't catch fire, Bernie would have won.
The Democrats addressed global issues like climate change; Trump drilled down on jobs.
Trump played the race card to great effect.
Trump effectively roused hatred of immigrants.
ANSWERS:
Take this survey to tell us what you think went wrong. Check your top three, then comment below.
The top 3 reasons Donald Trump will be in the White House - (select 3)
The Democrats ran the wrong candidate: Hillary's campaign didn't catch fire, Bernie would have won. (69%, 72 Votes)
Mainstream media gave Trump a free ride, treating him like a normal candidate, not a racist demagogue. (57%, 60 Votes)
Trump effectively roused hatred of immigrants. (34%, 36 Votes)
Trump played the race card to great effect. (30%, 31 Votes)
FBI Director James Comey’s outrageous last-minute intervention threw the election to Trump. (29%, 30 Votes)
The Republicans’ voter suppression campaign to disenfranchise black voters gave Trump the margin of victory. (22%, 23 Votes)
The Democrats addressed global issues like climate change; Trump drilled down on jobs. (22%, 23 Votes)
Right-wing money increased GOP turnout in battleground states. (11%, 12 Votes)
Total Voters: 105
TAKE THIS SURVEY
POSTED ON NOVEMBER 9, 2016
About Dick and Sharon
As a husband and wife team, Sharon Kyle and Dick Price publish several print and online newsletters on political and social justice issues. Sharon serves as Publisher for Dick & Sharon's LA Progressive and Dick serves as Editor.
READER COMMENTS
Larry Wines says
November 9, 2016 at 3:42 pm
Reading the comments to this “what happened” poll is a much better use of time than listening to all the hand-wringing, back-peddling, overhyped, overpaid celebrity commentators and pundits trying to explain their way out of things on this “day after” on mainstream corporate media.
First, I agree with comments here that the LA Progressive’s offering of choices for “what went wrong, why did this happen” just misses the mark, and I’ll not repeat what others have identified as the reasons why.
Second, I’ll add that, as traumatic as this loss seems to so many partisan Democrats? The blame-game being played today by so many of them is all the evidence needed to show that situational ethics has bred rampant and self-destructive hypocrisy. Neoliberalism that turns a blind eye to unacceptable behavior by their anointed candidate — one who was nominated as a result of clear and documented cheating, thumb-on-the-scale irregularities, and worse — and gets the vapors over statements by the opposition candidate, stretches credibility beyond the breaking point.
The best answers to why Trump won is that people are disgusted with insiders covering for each other, getting breaks and deals for each other, and excluding the rest of us. Whether it’s TTP, TTIP, horribly destructive mining for precious minerals on US public lands, foreign tar sands pipelines on Indian reservations, the abandonment of our once proud space program, eight more years of disintegration of our critical infrastructure while China built a high-speed rail line to Poland, the ghost town of Detroit being joined by poisonous drinking water in Flint, and on and on. Yes, it is ironic that an out-of-touch billionaire was enthusiastically supported by so many who feel dispossessed, who see no realistic paths to prosperity for themselves.
But it has been the Democrats who had eight years to at least propose a New Deal with a WPA, a CCC, a Youth Employment Program, and paid-for college in return for national service (not just military service).
People are tired of hearing, “But Republicans filibuster everything! They block and obstruct everything!” It all becomes a feckless “Whaa-whaaa!” A Democratic administration never passionately and persistently tried, just as it never jailed the banksters and never stood up to the militarists and constant expansion of the drone wars.
Add the uncontainable allegations of HRC’s shenanigans to promises of keeping the status quo — from rising Obamacare premiums to America’s wealth used to make rubble of Mid East cities, and a big media that strains credulity selling it, and you honestly expect anybody to vote you into office? Asking questions is, indeed, the right place to start if there is any hope for surviving an apocalypse. But the questions here aren’t gonna do it. At best, they’ll pacify and lull into a false sense of “we’re addressing that” for lightweight feel-good intramurals. The Dems need a fundamental reevaluation, a realization that interventionist neoliberalism is the antithesis of progressive values, as are trade policies that exploit poor nation’s labor while making former workers unemployed and poor in America.
The Dems need a no-nonsense paradigm, one without the constant parsing and equivocating that any sensible person weighs as inauthenticity, phoniness, and words that prove someone wants to get elected just to have power. Get past the media characterizations of Donald Trump, and people heard him as unequivocal, no-nonsense, comfortable with being decisive, and they were more than ready for that.
Bottom line? This is a teachable moment, or the first step in a funeral procession. the Dems need to clean house now to stand a chance in the 2018 midterms, or the party will be irrelevant by 2020.
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Ryder says
November 9, 2016 at 4:42 pm
Word.
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Catherine O'Connor says
November 9, 2016 at 2:57 pm
Hi.
I would really appreciate it if you would add this comment to your survey. I believe you were terribly remiss in not offering the following possibility as one of the three reasons to choose in your survey:
–Bernie supporters and other progressives were too self righteous in their refusal to be pragmatic and vote for Hillary, thus cutting off their noses to spite EVERYONE ‘S faces.
I am very serious. I say this as a Bernie supporter. You list “Democrats running the wrong candidate” as a possible reason, but not the above. Please don’t be as one-sided as Trump and company. This was obviously a factor in the election results.
Were there many greater and worse reasons, such as the ones you list? Yes of course. But we must recognize the above as well. Thank you for your time,
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Molly Franks says
November 9, 2016 at 5:17 pm
So because people didn’t fall in line like robots, to help Bernie elect Hillary, we are self-righteous? This is the kind of language coming from the Democratic party that reinforces my desire to separate from it. This kind of language has been heaped on any person to the left that did not go the way of the marching orders, lock step.
Remember, if we are ever to have a democracy, every person is free to vote according to their own desire, not as others dictate and NO ONE should be shamed for the manner in which they chose to cast (or not cast) their vote.
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Bill Quam says
November 9, 2016 at 2:53 pm
In addition to many of the reasons already stated a silent issue is the fact that Prez Obama continued too many of the Bush NeoLiberal foreign and defense policies. 65 million refugees that dramatically increased in the last 8 years and weapons sales that were higher than during the Bush 8 years, to women and children oppressive regimes. The DNC and Clinton Dynasty stole the election from Bernie and because of their dishonesty they actually elected Trump for us.
If progressives and Bernie supporters wanted a real progressive woman in the White House then they should have voted their conscience instead of their fears and voted for Jill Stein. Because of the corruption of Clinton and the DNC I left the Democratic Party, a decision I am more glad I made each day.
Al Lowenstein is turning over in his grave with how NeoLiberal the Democratic Party has become. [NOTE: SEE ALLARD K LOWENSTEIN, BELOW.]
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Bruce M. Roberts says
November 9, 2016 at 2:34 pm
You’re missing the point. Your reasons for why Trump won are biased. Michael Moore said it all in Trumpland.. That is what really happened. Although I voted for Bernie it was reluctantly. I wanted Elizabeth Warren.
However, I did vote for Hillary also reluctantly. .
I was listening to a discussion about the election on The Young Turks Stated that Trump actually got 35% of the Hispanic vote. So that throws out that Hispanics did not want to vote for Trump. When I was returning to my apartment complex which was a polling place I met a Hispanic male who told me that he voted for Trump. “I came here legally. Why don’t they?”
Tricia is right on point.
Now we’ll see what Trump will or can do. You can’t wing it by being President.
Also he said that he would win. And he did.
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Dee says
November 9, 2016 at 3:38 pm
The law is clearIllegal entry is a crime punishable by return to native country. Reagan provided amnesty in the 1980’s but it was not to be repeated. Many came illegally assuming another amnesty would be done.
Today there are forged papers revealed when young people fill out paperwork for SSAN for their first job. Quality educations often in Spanish are provided by children brought here illegally or born to those here illegally. Oddly many who come legally can not get their children educated in their foreign language, but those here illegally can.
These are some of the issues that anger those who supported Trump. They need jobs, better educations for themselves and their children, training for skills that provide income from decent jobs, decent jobs that meet their basic needs and respect. But their needs are ignored. They feel they are not respected. They feel ignored. These issues must be addressed. Trump acknowledged them, now he must provide solutions.
Instead of time using Facebook and playing computer games get these books to read: HILLBILLY. ELLIGY. and OUR KIDS: The American Dream in Crisis. Watching TRUMPLAND may be a good idea also.
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Chuck Comisky says
November 9, 2016 at 2:27 pm
Thanks Sharon and Dick for keeping the embers of progressivism fanned. They may yet break into a blaze.
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Cynthia says
November 9, 2016 at 1:09 pm
The DNC stole the primary from Senator Sanders. Hillary Clinton should have never been the Democratic nominee. The media colluding with Hillary’s campaign, annnouncing that HRC won before Californians actually voted was just utterly corrupt! In my opinion, that is the main reason why Trump won.
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Chuck Comisky says
November 9, 2016 at 2:16 pm
Hilary should have been more agressive and taken a stronger stance on progressive issues, not just brief lip service. Trump used the proposition that the system is broken and rigged and he was part of that but now wants to fix it. Of course that would mean dealing with Wall Street and that she couldn’t do. Asking a true progressive to balance out her ticket may also have helped… But not to be…
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tricia anderson-becker says
November 9, 2016 at 1:01 pm
I am a progressive who supported Sanders and then refused to support either Trump or Clinton (and believe that Sanders could have won big against trump). I ended up voting for Stein. This survey is so disappointing to say the least.
Try this reason for Trump’s win: The ECONOMIC policies of redistribution upward that both Republicans AND YES Democrats have embraced that have impoverished and alienated and angered so many people in the midwest and elsewhere. As Michael Moore so perfectly said, their vote was a big F**ck You to them, and to the media that has failed to work in the public’s interest.
Sure,the media gave free advertising to Trump, not by hiding his demagoguery but by increasing their profits and ratings with it. It failed to really focus on the real issues affecting, harming many in the country, in the world today. From the primary on it seemed to act as an arm of the Clinton campaign, feeding the mistrust many feel for the MSM.
Yes, racism is involved. But whenever there is great and growing inequality, the elite know that one of their best tools, proven throughout history, is to divide the lower classes,turn them against the “other,” pit lower class whites against people of color, immigrants, even people that have it just a little better than they do (ie public employees). This effectively draws attention from their own ill-got gains, their excess wealth, their policies of self-enrichment. If the Democratic establishment had really worked for economic equality, health care for all (not profit for insurance companies), had gone after the criminal bankers, had spent what has been spent on wars and arms to secure oil in the middle east and elsewhere on the people here at home, had felt more secure in their own country, then they’d have voted democrat.
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Chuck Comisky says
November 9, 2016 at 2:20 pm
Excellent analysis.
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Ryder says
November 9, 2016 at 4:57 pm
Actually, racism is involved, but not in the way you think. Before and especially after the election, disappointed democrat voters have gone full Clinton… who slandered the fine American public as deplorables… but as is so very common, average leftists smear their countrymen with charges of racism on a whim.
The people that use the term (including on this very page), sadly, don’t even know what racism is anymore. They think they do… but the fact is, they don’t care enough to understand the concept, and simply use charges of racism as a blunt object to attack their countrymen.
The democrats, both in leadership, and the common voter alike, have made casual sport of slandering the good people of the USA, almost none of whom have a racist bone in their body.
These people finally got tired of it. And why shouldn’t they? To be accused of something that the accuser doesn’t even understand is simply intolerable.
And they have spoken.
The abuse that everyday Americans have had to endure at the hands of all democrats everywhere is unconscionable, and it’s disgraceful.
I have personally asked hundreds of people who have used the term to describe another human being, and in not a single case as the accuser even known the definition of racism. Not one.
(and chances are, not a single person reading this knows either).
Do the world a favor. Find the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, or some other reputable dictionary, and look up, for the first time, this word you are so casual to use against your neighbor.
And as the left takes to the streets once again burning, destroying, protesting… notice how the “racist” right never did this when Romney lost, or when McCain lost… or ever.
You’ve become generally unpleasant people… abusive of your neighbor. And they’ve found someone to speak for them. You are very much a part of the reason Trump is in office.
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karen anderson says
November 9, 2016 at 12:35 pm
Regarding the Supreme Court vacancy, I am hopeful that President Obama will make a recess appointment of Judge Garland this winter and that the Houses will not remain in session just long enough to run out the clock on the President’s window to make the appointment. Hopefully, when the time comes for the Houses to affirm the appointment when back in regular session, a strong public push will force the Houses to let Judge Garland remain on the Court.
It is also my feeling that now is the time for the majority “minority” to coalesce and use every lawful option to fight back against any proposed legislation that is harmful to them. Now is not the time for apathy and despair. There cannot be any “poor me, all is lost” attitude. It is time for engagement, involvement and action. And, most importantly, belief in the power of the people.
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Jonathan Adler says
November 9, 2016 at 1:19 pm
Karen Anderson: I wish the Pres. could make that recess appointment. But alas SCOTUS said No by 9-0 in NLRB v. Noel Canning (2014) __ U.S. __ (summarized at http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/06/court-strikes-down-recess-appointments-in-plain-english/; Court’s opinions and other commentaries linked at http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/national-labor-relations-board-v-noel-canning/.) All that the GOP-controlled Senate need do to stop a recess appointment is to go into a very very brief “pro forma” session at least every 3 days.
(**** NOTE TERMINOLOGY OF THE SENATE SESSION TYPES:
*** Every two years the Senate convenes a new “congress,” a two-year period of legislative business. Typically, a congress is divided into two annual sessions of the Senate, convened in early January and adjourned in December. On any given day, however, the Senate may meet in a variety of designated sessions to fulfill its legislative, executive, and constitutional duties.
*** Daily Session: The Senate’s routine day.
*** Special Session: When the Senate convenes an extra session, following sine die adjournment, it is known as a special session.
*** Extraordinary Session: An extraordinary session occurs when the president exercises his constitutional authority to call Congress back into session during a recess or after a sine die adjournment.
*** Joint Session: When the Senate and the House meet together to conduct formal business, to hear an address by the president, or to count electoral ballots, it is known as a joint session. On some occasions, the two houses of Congress meet unofficially to hear foreign dignitaries speak or for other purposes. This is known as a joint meeting.
*** Pro Forma Session: From the Latin, meaning “as a matter of form,” a pro forma session is a brief meeting of the Senate, often only a few minutes in duration.
*** Lame Duck Session: A lame duck session occurs when Congress (or either chamber) reconvenes following the November general elections. Among the lawmakers who return for this session are those who were defeated for reelection or chose not to run again. They are informally called "lame duck" members participating in a "lame duck" session.
*** Closed Session: Closed sessions of the Senate, sometimes referred to as secret sessions, are used to debate confidential information, such as classified material dealing with national security, and for deliberations during impeachment trials. From 1789 to 1795 the Senate always met in closed sessions. After the Senate agreed to open its doors to the public in 1795, it continued to conduct all executive business—that dealing with treaties or presidential nominations—in closed session. In 1929 the Senate decided to open all routine business to the public, including much of its executive business deliberations.
*** Executive Session: In the Senate, a portion of most days is given to executive business with the Senate meeting in executive session to consider treaties or presidential nominations. Although such sessions were closed for many years, the modern Senate does most of its executive business in open session.)
COMMENTS CONTINUED:
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Molly Franks says
November 9, 2016 at 12:31 pm
Oh, so many reasons why Hillary lost, but not the cop out reasons her supporters like to list (3rd party voting, wasted voting, white privilege, narcissism, lack of moral compass, protest voting, temper tantrum). The DNC had a lot of power, as did Hillary. They could control the outcome and the message of the Democratic campaign, but in the final analysis she could not control voting Americans. In a way, it is a relief to know that Americans can still affect an outcome somewhat, even if the outcome doesn’t look so hot. I’m tired of hearing everyone mourning the setback to our progress. We haven’t had real progress for a very long time and the mourning could have commenced decades (centuries?) ago, as well as activism to right the wrongs. I see this as the swan song for both parties. We are on our way to implosion.
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Les Marsden says
November 9, 2016 at 12:25 pm
By far, the critical determining factor was the huge mistake, the strategic miscalculation: of running HRC. Bernie created SO much optimism, drew SO many younger, first-time and third-party followers to the party and most important of all: was the OUTSIDE candidate the American electorate was clearly clamoring for. Trump – besides all else: tapped into that distrust of the status quo and suspicion of the Washington insider. And HRC was the perfect model OF all they disliked. And beyond that, she has no charm, no charisma – and of course, as we all know: dislike ratings above the 50% mark.
We lost the General Election not yesterday, but in the Primary. With the selection (aided and abetted by the reprehensible superdelegate system) of HRC, we were doomed to lose. And the fact that we lost to a xenophobic vulgarian buffoon with NO experience in elected governance, with ALL the negative, jaw-dropping factors Trump possesses: only shows how incredibly wrong HRC was as a candidate. If SHE couldn’t win against THAT, she might have lost (even) to a corpse. I can only say I hope the Clintons – ALL the Clintons: will now get the clue and disappear from public life. I – personally: have had more than enough of their anti-populist neoliberalism – as well as the sense of entitlement to office which seemed to ooze from their every pore.
Reply
Molly Franks says
November 9, 2016 at 12:34 pm
Yes.
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Cyndie says
November 9, 2016 at 1:13 pm
You are perfectly correct Mr. Marsden!
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Dee says
November 9, 2016 at 3:17 pm
I agree. This election was lost at the time of the Primary.
The DNC had its candidate in waiting for 8 years and blocked a real emergence of a candidate we would support with excitement. In time the hacking of DNC provided evidence of our suspicions, but it was too late. It also increased confusion and anger of all citizens. Clinton had many negatives before the campaign started. She was not my favorite candidate either. There were the emails, poor explanations about emails, decisions in the Middle East, first woman president goal, and Clinton Foundation but little clear strategy for solutions needed for all citizens. The process was blocked before it began.
The process is too long, too controlled, too expensive. Good candidates are discouraged by the process. Maybe it is time to reconfigure the process. We also have citizens who love the voice in democracy, but not the work to learn about our government, documents, history, and process of governance. It is more more important to play computer games, watch movies, and have fun. Democracy as designed by our Constitution requires all citizens to be serious about their citizenship responsibility. The ultimate puzzle for all should be understanding issues and developing detailed viable solutions. It will take all to solve our issues fairly for all.
We need to address that there are multiple Americas in the USA: African Americans, Asians, Spanish with multiple orientations, whites ranging from poor to rich, and other sub-groups that need to be addressed. Roger Moore should be listened to more often. There has been focus on African Americans, but little support for poor whites who have not had a break in decades. Their lives are getting worse. It was his group that lost their jobs with all the trade agreements. These agreements may have provided an illusion of “quality at a cheaper price” with people freed from “a minimal wage boring job”. I disagree on the quality. Everyone also needs a job, There are some in our country who love these repetitive jobs. We deny them the opportunity to work in steel factories, automotive equipment, food preparation and tech because of our elitist positions. The bank crisis 8 years ago that started during GOP control i.e. Bush administration, took their homes, jobs, hopes, and possible employment. Obama tried to help but was blocked. Now their medical care will be gone in less than 100 days. Maybe the correct party will get credit this time. Anyone listening to the Trump rallies saw this happening. Trump stated the issues and heard the people. This group finally felt like they were heard and voted for him. Meeting their needs will maybe force even Ryan to be progressive.
The FBI statement did not help the support for Hillary. But some reports last night indicated the vote was decided in September. The FBI director may have provided a sense of confirmation of their decision, but did not cause it. We already knew the issue and tried to brush away our concerns. The reaction to Trump last summer was the clue Hillary missed. Yes, many others rejected what was happening.
Trump and the GOP have a major job to do: quell the anger; find a way to keep the promises made; not break the budget; keep us out of war and stop Putin; deal with the Trump family legal issues; respect the rights of all citizens including women’s reproductive rights; and find a way to provide medical care to the large portion of our population who will be facing more expensive medical care.
In four years we start again, but in two years we have another chance to hire legislators who will work to solve the needs of ALL Americans. We have a chance to make our country better. But each needs to take the responsibility for themselves to actively make this country better for ALL citizens.
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Michael (Mickey) Weinberg says
November 9, 2016 at 12:18 pm
4. Democratic elite leadership allowed unions to weaken and shrink. At the same time, they ignored and disrespected working class whites, both male AND female. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s disinterest. Even as they manipulated working class whites, Republicans DID pay attention to them.
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Jay Holladay says
November 9, 2016 at 12:04 pm
It was more like “All of the Above”. You missed the jump in costs of Obama Care, which was ill-timed to say the least.
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AtchaJohn says
November 9, 2016 at 12:00 pm
It’s just outrageous to be gazing across the pond to see this! And our UK PM invokes the special relationship in congratulations too, towards Trump!! Outrageous also!!
Now it’s time to reach to each other of our ilks and hold ground and create answers to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allard_K._Lowenstein
Allard K. Lowenstein
Wikipedia
Allard Kenneth Lowenstein (January 16, 1929 – March 14, 1980)[1][2] was an American Democratic politician, including a U.S. Representative of the 5th Congressional District in Nassau County, New York for one term in 1969 to 1971. His work in the Civil Rights Movement and the antiwar movement has been cited as an inspiration by public figures including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry; former U.S. Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Donald W. Riegle, Jr.; former U.S. Representative Barney Frank,[3] California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, columnist William F. Buckley, Jr.,[4] actor Warren Beatty,[5] former White House Counsel Gregory Craig,[6] former New York City Public Advocate Mark Green, and musician-songwriters Peter Yarrow and Harry Chapin.[7]
CAN’T TRUST ANYONE, CAN WE??
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history
ENVIRONMENTALISM’S RACIST HISTORY
By Jedediah Purdy
AUGUST 13, 2015
Madison Grant (Yale College 1887, Columbia Law School) liked to be photographed with a fedora, or just his dauntingly long head, tilted about thirty degrees to the right. He belonged, like his political ally Teddy Roosevelt, to a Manhattan aristocracy defined by bloodline and money. But Grant, like many young men of his vintage, felt duty-bound to do more than enjoy his privilege. He made himself a credible wildlife zoologist, was instrumental in creating the Bronx Zoo, and founded the first organizations dedicated to preserving American bison and the California redwoods.
Grant spent his career at the center of the same energetic conservationist circle as Roosevelt. This band of reformers did much to create the country’s national parks, forests, game refuges, and other public lands—the system of environmental stewardship and public access that has been called “America’s best idea.” They developed the conviction that a country’s treatment of its land and wildlife is a measure of its character. Now that natural selection had given way to humanity’s “complete mastery of the globe,” as Grant wrote in 1909, his generation had “the responsibility of saying what forms of life shall be preserved.”
Grant has been pushed to the margins of environmentalism’s history, however. He is often remembered for another reason: his 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,” a pseudo-scientific work of white supremacism that warns of the decline of the “Nordic” peoples. In Grant’s racial theory, Nordics were a natural aristocracy, marked by noble, generous instincts and a gift for political self-governance, who were being overtaken by the “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” populations. His work influenced the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and Africa and banned migrants from the Middle East and Asia. Adolf Hitler wrote Grant an admiring letter, calling the book “my Bible,” which has given it permanent status on the ultra-right. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who killed sixty-nine young Labour Party members, in 2011, drew on Grant’s racial theory in his own manifesto.
Grant’s fellow conservationists supported his racist activism. Roosevelt wrote Grant a letter praising “The Passing of the Great Race,” which appeared as a blurb on later editions, calling it “a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, who headed the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History (and, as a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, named the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor), wrote a foreword to the book. Osborn argued that “conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country.”
For Grant, Roosevelt, and other architects of the country’s parks and game refuges, wild nature was worth saving for its aristocratic qualities; where these were lacking, they were indifferent. Grant, as his Times obituary noted, “was uninterested in the smaller forms of animal or bird life.” He wrote about the moose, the mountain goat, and the redwood tree, whose nobility and need for protection in a venal world so resembled the plight of Grant’s “Nordics” that his biographer, Jonathan Spiro, concludes that he saw them as two faces of a single threatened, declining aristocracy. Similarly, Roosevelt, in his accounts of hunting, could not say enough about the “lordly” and “noble” elk and buffalo that he and Grant helped to preserve, and loved to kill. Their preservation work aimed to keep alive this kind of encounter between would-be aristocratic men and halfway wild nature.
For these conservationists, who prized the expert governance of resources, it was an unsettlingly short step from managing forests to managing the human gene pool. In a 1909 report to Roosevelt’s National Conservation Commission, Yale professor Irving Fisher broke off from a discussion of public health to recommend preventing “paupers” and physically unhealthy people from reproducing, and warned against the “race suicide” that would follow if the country did not replenish itself with Northern European stock. Fisher took the term “race suicide” from Roosevelt, who, in a 1905 speech, had pinned it on women who dodged childbearing. Gifford Pinchot, the country’s foremost theorizer and popularizer of conservation, was a delegate to the first and second International Eugenics Congress, in 1912 and 1921, and a member of the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society, from 1925 to 1935.
Roosevelt put Pinchot in charge of the National Conservation Commission, and made him head of the new Forest Service, but he also cultivated the Romantic naturalist John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892. In the Sierra Club’s early leaders, the environmental movement has some less troubling ancestors. Following Muir, whose bearded face and St. Francis-like persona were as much its icons as Yosemite Valley, the club adopted the gentle literary romanticism of Thoreau, Emerson, and Wordsworth. The point of preserving wild places, for these men—and, unlike in Roosevelt’s circles, some women—was to escape the utilitarian grind of lowland life and, as Muir wrote, to see the face of God in the high country.
But Muir, who felt fraternity with four-legged “animal people” and even plants, was at best ambivalent about human brotherhood. Describing a thousand-mile walk from the Upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, he reported the laziness of “Sambos.” Later he lamented the “dirty and irregular life” of Indians in the Merced River valley, near Yosemite. In “Our National Parks,” a 1901 essay collection written to promote parks tourism, he assured readers that, “As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.” This might have been incisive irony, but in the same paragraph Muir was more concerned with human perfidy toward bears (“Poor fellows, they have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother man”) than with how Native Americans had been killed and driven from their homes.
It is tempting to excuse such views as the “ordinary” or “casual” racism of the time, and it does feel more like a symptom of the dominant culture than Grant’s racism and Pinchot’s eugenics, which touched the nerves of their organizing commitments. But Muir and his followers are remembered because their respect for non-human life and wild places expanded the boundaries of moral concern. What does it mean that they cared more about “animal people” than about some human beings? The time they lived in is part of an explanation, but not an excuse. For each of these environmentalist icons, the meaning of nature and wilderness was constrained, even produced, by an idea of civilization. Muir’s nature was a pristine refuge from the city. Madison Grant’s nature was the last redoubt of nobility in a levelling and hybridizing democracy. They went to the woods to escape aspects of humanity. They created and preserved versions of the wild that promised to exclude the human qualities they despised.
Their literary icon, Thoreau, had said in his 1854 speech “Slavery in Massachusetts” that even his beloved ponds did not give him pleasure when he thought of human injustice: “What signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? . . . The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.” But Thoreau also shared Muir’s problem; in some ways, he created it. When he wrote about American nature, Thoreau was arguing about American culture, which, even for most abolitionists, meant the culture of a white nation. In his essay “Walking,” which gave environmentalists the slogan “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau proposed that American greatness arose as “the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.” For both Muir and Thoreau, working, consuming, occupying, and admiring American nature was a way for a certain kind of white person to become symbolically native to the continent.
The nineteen-seventies saw a raft of new environmental laws and the growth of the Sierra Club’s membership from tens to hundreds of thousands. But the decades of advocacy behind this wave of environmental concern shared much with the older, exclusionary politics of nature. In 1948, more than a decade before Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (most of which was first published in this magazine), a pair of best-selling works of popular ecology sounded many of Carson’s themes, from the dangers of pesticides to the need to respect nature’s harmonies. William Vogt’s “Road to Survival” embraced eugenics as a response to overpopulation, urging governments to offer cash to the poor for sterilization, which would have “a favorable selective influence” on the species. In “Our Plundered Planet,” Fairfield Osborn, the son of Madison Grant’s friend and ally Henry Fairfield Osborn, forecast that postwar humanitarianism, which allowed more people to survive into adulthood, would prove incompatible with natural limits. While neither man evinced Madison Grant’s racial obsessions, they shared his eagerness to champion an admirable “nature” against a debased humanity that had flourished beyond its proper limits.
This strain of misanthropy seemed to appear again in biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 runaway best-seller “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich illustrated overpopulation with a scene of a Delhi slum seen through a taxi window: a “mob” with a “hellish aspect,” full of “people eating, people washing, people sleeping. . . . People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating . . . People, people, people, people.” He confessed to being afraid that he and his wife would never reach their hotel, and reported that on that night he came to understand overpopulation “emotionally.” By the evidence, what he had encountered was poverty. Ehrlich was announcing that his environmentalist imperatives were powered by fear and repugnance at slum dwellers leading their lives in public view. At the very least, he assumed that his readers would find those feelings resonant.
Even as environmentalism took on big new problems in the seventies, it also seemed to promise an escape hatch from continuing crises of inequality, social conflict, and, sometimes, certain kinds of people. Time described the environmental crisis as a problem that Americans “might actually solve, unlike the immensely more elusive problems of race prejudice or the war in Vietnam.” In his 1970 State of the Union address, in which he expended less than a hundred words on Vietnam, made no explicit reference to race, and yet launched a new racialized politics with calls for a “war” on crime and attacks on the welfare system, Richard Nixon spent almost a thousand words on the environment, which he called “a cause beyond party and beyond factions.” That meant, of course, that he thought it could be a cause for the white majority.
Environmentalism largely was that. When the Sierra Club polled its members, in 1972, on whether the club should “concern itself with the conservation problems of such special groups as the urban poor and ethnic minorities,” forty per cent of respondents were strongly opposed, and only fifteen per cent were supportive. (The phrasing of the question made the club’s bias clear enough.) Admitting to its race problem took the movement nearly two decades. In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published an influential report that found that hazardous waste facilities were disproportionately located in minority communities, and called this unequal vulnerability “a form of racism.” The environmental movement, the report observed, “has historically been white middle and upper-class.” Three years later, activists sent a letter to the heads of major environmental organizations, claiming that non-whites were less than two per cent of the combined seven hundred and forty-five employees of the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council (N.R.D.C.), and Friends of the Earth. Fred Krupp, then executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, replied with a mea culpa: “Environmental groups have done a miserable job of reaching out to minorities.”
Since then, “environmental racism” and “environmental justice” have entered the vocabulary of the movement. There are many environmentalisms now, with their own constituencies and commitments. In the Appalachian coalfields, locals fight the mountaintop-removal strip mining that has shattered peaks and buried more than a thousand miles of headwater streams. Activists from working-class Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles have opposed parts of California’s landmark climate-change legislation, which the large environmental groups support, arguing that it gives poor communities too little protection from concentrated pollution. Despite some such conflicts, large, well-resourced national groups such the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council seek out these groups as partners in everything from environmental monitoring to lawsuits. Mitch Bernard, director of litigation at N.R.D.C., says, “It’s no longer a national group swooping down on a locale and saying this is what we think you should do. Much more of the impetus for action, and the strategies for action, come from the affected community.” (I worked under Bernard at the N.R.D.C., in the summer of 2000.)
Still, the major environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, were written with no attention to the unequal vulnerability of poor and minority groups. The priorities of the old environmental movement limit the effective legal strategies for activists today. And activists acknowledge that persistent mistrust goes beyond immediate conflicts, such as the split over California’s climate-change law, but can make them more difficult to resolve. Bernard attributes some of the misgivings to environmentalism’s history as an élite, white movement. A 2014 study found that whites occupied eighty-nine per cent of leadership positions in environmental organizations.
Some of the awkwardness of environmental politics since the seventies, now even more acute in the age of climate change, is that it lays claim to worldwide problems, but brings to them some of the cultural habits of a much more parochial, and sometimes nastier, movement. Ironically enough, Madison Grant, writing about extinction, was right: the natural world that future generations live in will be the one we create for them. It can only help to acknowledge just how many environmentalist priorities and patterns of thought came from an argument among white people, some of them bigots and racial engineers, about the character and future of a country that they were sure was theirs and expected to keep.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT EMAIL:
TO THOSE OF YOU WHO THINK I’M AGAINST ALL RELIGION, THAT ISN’T THE CASE – JUST DOGMATIC, FEAR INDUCING RELIGION AND GROUPS WHO WANT TO TAKE OVER THE US GOVERNMENT – DOMINIONISM, ETC.
https://mg.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=5n0bh4hj8qcu4#4959026244
Freedom From Religion Foundation info@ffrf.org
The Freedom From Religion Foundation's digital marquee today at Freethought Hall reads: "When the night is darkest, light shines brightest."
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is not a partisan office or group. But we are realists. Those who care about the separation between religion and government, as well as religion's continuing grip on social policy in the United States, must be cognizant that Nov. 8 was a game-changer — and not a positive one for our essential work to buttress the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
That's because President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to repeal the Johnson Amendment that governs church politicking. That law properly prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofits from abusing their privilege by electioneering in tax-free institutions with tax-deductible donations.
What looked like a phony election-year promise now has now changed into a bona fide threat. If "stained glass money" turns into "dark money," political churches could function as unaccountable political money laundering machines and religious denominations would become PACs. Our secular republic would be imperiled.
Even more distressing is losing the chance — seemingly just within grasp — to swing the Supreme Court back to the secular side. It's not just that the next president will choose Scalia's replacement and break the 4-4 tie, but potentially will be given the opportunity to replace sympathetic justices, including the Divine RBG, age 83, Stephen Breyer, 78, and the reputed "swinger," Anthony Kennedy, age 80.
One bright piece of election news comes out of Oklahoma, where voters soundly rejected a referendum to rewrite the state constitution to allow direct government subsidy of religion.
Our second rotating marquee message today promises: "We're going to fight like hell for your rights." Our work has never been more important.
Freedom depends on freethinkers.
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The Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wis., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational charity, is the nation's largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics), and has been working since 1978 to keep religion and government separate.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/hate-trumps-history-reality-tv-star-wins-white-house-broken-america
Hate Trumps History: A Reality TV Star Wins the White House in a Broken America
There's no telling what comes next.
DAVID CORN
NOV. 9, 2016 2:35 AM
Photograph -- Chris Pizzello/AP
America is broken. Into two irreconcilable halves. In a historic and baffling election—after a brutally ugly campaign—Donald Trump, an erratic candidate who campaigned as a bully and a bigot, who demonstrated a weak understanding of crucial policy matters, who set a record for false statements, who encouraged violence, who was caught bragging about committing sexual assault, who hid key information about his life from the public, and who was called by members of his own party a con artist, a racist, and a danger to the nation, won the votes (if not the hearts and minds) of tens of millions of Americans and the keys to the White House. Pocketing a huge majority of non-college-educated white voters, Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming the country's first woman president. Hate did trump. The Republicans' animus-driven effort yielded a decisive victory for the reality television celebrity and left the nation bitterly and fundamentally divided.
Pushing a message of inclusion and declaring that "love trumps hate," Clinton pulled together a diverse coalition of voters reflecting the demographic changes underway in America, much like the majorities assembled by Barack Obama. Trump mounted a demagogic effort fueled by anger, resentment, fear, and lies that appealed mostly to older white guys without much education. The 2016 election, because of Trump's thuggish conduct and racist and misogynistic statements and actions, marked a severe decline in US political discourse.
This was a campaign of profoundly conflicting attitudes and opposing perspectives. Trump depicted the United States as a down-and-out hellhole, overrun by undocumented Latino immigrants and criminals (including ISIS infiltrators) and sold out by craven political and media elites in league with international bankers (shades of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). He was the candidate of disruption and chaos, claiming he would be the do-whatever-it-takes, tough-guy champion of Americans who felt screwed over by the powers that be. He was the strongman who could slay the treasonous enemies of American greatness within and single-handedly restore the lives and dreams of hardworking folks and bring about the return of some mythical (whiter?) America. Trump wielded powerful themes: revenge, destruction, and revival. He made big promises; he didn't sweat the pesky specifics.
Clinton pitched an utterly different view: The United States, a wonderful mixing bowl, was already great and on the mend after the Bush-Cheney recession, but the nation needed to strive in a communal fashion to help those still struggling and become even greater. She was the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work policy wonk, with oodles of experience to do the job. Her message was more cerebral, not as visceral. Never known as an effective firebrand, Clinton campaigned as if this were a job interview, not a holy crusade. Her motto, "Stronger Together," was vague but a counter to Trump's politics of hate and accusation. The opposites were well defined: bare-knuckled instincts versus deliberative smarts, hot passion versus cool competence, instability versus experience, R versus D, and, yes, macho man versus pioneering woman.
The Clinton-Trump face-off was the most policy-free election of recent decades. As soon as Clinton secured the Democratic nomination and turned toward Trump, her likely opponent, she focused less on the policy differences—of which there were many that cut along traditional D/R and progressive/conservative lines—and aimed at what she figured was his greatest weakness: Trump himself. She made his temperament the key topic. With polls showing he was not a popular or trusted person, this was an obvious strategy, especially since Clinton, too, scored poorly in such polls. She zeroed in on his egotism, his arrogance, his lack of self-control, his divisive and vengeful nature. Could he be trusted with nuclear weapons? With the economy? Top experts on national security and economics said no. Surely, all these people couldn't be wrong.
Trump even obliged by acting throughout much of the campaign in an egotistical, arrogant, undisciplined, and mean-spirited manner. He lashed out. He engaged in juvenile name-calling. He was obsessed with personal slights—and with himself, constantly praising himself in the third person and citing polls (when they were good) to declare he was the best thing ever. He insulted the parents of an Army captain who lost his life in Iraq. In the wee hours, he tweet-feuded with a former Miss Universe. He was cheered by white supremacists and mainstreamed the alt-right. He allied himself with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has claimed 9/11 was an inside job (orchestrated or allowed to happen by Republicans!) and who insisted the Sandy Hook shooting massacre was a hoax. Trump's odd behavior yielded one of the best put-downs of the campaign, courtesy of President Barack Obama: "Over the weekend, his campaign took away his Twitter account. Now, if your closest advisers don't trust you to tweet, then how can we trust him with the nuclear codes?" Millions of American voters disagreed. (They also told Obama they didn't give a damn about his legacy. They would elect a racist to replace the first black president.)
Trump's obvious deficits—his bad temper, his crackpot birtherism, his refusal to release his taxes, his crude and boorish ways, his history of stiffing contractors, his past ties to the mob, his bankruptcies, his ill-informed policy statements, his multiple flip-flops, his climate change denialism, his love affair with Vladimir Putin, his boasts of grabbing women "by the pussy"—were of little concern to a majority of voters (or at least a majority of those in the key swing states). They were either too damn mad or could not stand Clinton. Maybe because she was a woman, maybe because of…whatever. Trump told many more lies than she did, but she was judged untrustworthy.
Policy details—Clinton's strength—didn't matter. This was a battle of personalities and abilities. Trump devoted little time to backing up his "Make America Great Again" vow with substance. The only policy he truly seemed to care about was the wall that he vowed he would build on the US-Mexico border with you-know-who paying for it. It was a cure-all for the problems of illegal immigration, ISIS terrorists infiltrating America, and the opioid epidemic in New Hampshire. The old saying is that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As one former Trump adviser told me, in the early days of his campaign, his lieutenants made sure that he was always prepared to discuss the wall. That way, if any subject came up that was tough to talk about, he could always pivot to the wall. Former aides noted the obvious: This was a man with attention issues. That itself should have been another disqualification, but it was not.
With Clinton also distrusted by a majority of voters, Trump didn't need much policy chops. He pummeled her as the embodiment of all that his followers hated and feared about the nation: She was a corrupt, treasonous member of an elite in league with globalists trying to suck the lifeblood out of America. Trump exploited the Clinton and Obama hatred on the right. At rallies and at the GOP convention, his devotees wore "Hillary for Prison 2016" T-shirts and shouted "lock her up." These were festivals focused on hatred. Trump encouraged this, as if the United States were a phony democracy where politicians attempt to imprison foes. He pledged to send her to jail if he won. (At the end of the final presidential debate, top Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani snarled at me, "She should already be in jail." For what? He didn't say.)
Clinton's email imbroglio handed Trump ammunition for his over-the-top assault. She had screwed up and taken too long to explain and apologize for this misjudgment. Her failure to separate herself from the Clinton Foundation and its funders posed another problem. These controversies were not concocted by the right, but they were certainly not nearly as bad as Trump's alleged sexual assaults, his lack of transparency, his Trump University fraud case, his former ties to the mob, and his modeling firm's use of models without work visas. Still, these episodes, often with mainstream media assistance, were hyped beyond reason and allowed Republicans and conservatives to peg their hatred to real-world events. Trump made her the focus of all the wrath he had inspired, and he kept pushing this button: She was a liar, she was crooked, she was a criminal, she was a mobster. He also contended that she was a weak woman who did not look presidential. (Sorting out how sexism affected the 2016 contest—from media coverage to voter attitudes—will be an honorable task in the weeks, months, and years to come.) Trump normalized demonization, tossing aside the standard courtesies of political debate. He made the race a test of trash-talking.
All of this was mirrored in the candidates' events. Trump rallies were infused with pessimism and rocked with loathing. These were people pissed off at having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish; some felt economically insecure, some felt culturally threatened by the changing complexion of the United States. Clinton events were models of earnestness and, dare one say it, hope. Hers looked like America. His were uni-tonal. Politics is often a cultural clash. This race more so than ever. Mars and Venus collided. It was tribal warfare between Trump's us-against-them nation and Clinton's we're-all-in-this-together coalition. The fight was not really over trade policy. It was about which America was ascendant, and the vision of the angry and the lesser educated triumphed. The alt-right, the Ku Klux Klan, the anti-Semites, and, by the way, Vladimir Putin won. (The Russian hack of US democracy worked—an important story that will require deeper exploration in the weeks and months ahead.)
This horrid election settled the primary issue at hand: who will move into the White House. But it did not resolve the fundamental conflicts that animated the most cracked and awful presidential campaign in modern times. The forces of animus have taken control of this country. And there is no telling what comes next.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/electoral-college-lesson-more-voters-chose-hillary-clinton-trump-will-n681701
Electoral College Lesson: More Voters Chose Clinton, but Trump Will Be President
by ZACHARY ROTH
NOV 10 2016, 7:28 AM ET
Photograph -- Chuck Todd: 'There is a Bug' in Our Electoral College System 1:32
Play -- How does Trump bridge the national divide? 4:58
Related: Trump Protesters Take to Streets Across U.S.
Play -- Trump Win Leaves Questions, Anxiety for Many Minorities in U.S. 1:43
Play -- Excitement, Shock Abounds Among Voters After Trump Victory 1:46
Related: Obama Pledges to Help Trump Transition Into White House
Play -- Trump's Campaign Promises: Are They Realistic? 1:52
Play -- 'Not my president': Anti-Donald Trump protests erupt across the country after election 2:12
There are still more votes to be counted, but it looks almost certain that despite losing the presidency, Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote.
And likely by a million or more votes — a much larger margin than Al Gore enjoyed in 2000, when he too was denied by the Electoral College even though he had more votes.
Put more starkly: It appears Americans chose Clinton, but got Trump.
Trump's popular vote loss likely won't constrain his effective power as president, especially with unified GOP control of Congress — just as it didn't seem to hem in George W. Bush.
But if the candidate who got fewer votes wins the White House for the second time in five elections, it could put a new spotlight on the peculiar way that America picks its presidents — one not shared by any other democracy.
"It certainly is going to bring this back into the forefront of public discussion," John Koza, the founder of the National Popular Vote campaign, which aims to effectively get rid of the Electoral College, said Tuesday night as the results rolled in.
To Koza and many good-government advocates, sidelining the Electoral College is common sense.
"We think every vote should be equal throughout the United States," he said. "We think the candidate who gets the most votes should become president."
Even on election night in 2012, when early results seemed to indicate that Mitt Romney would get more votes than President Obama but lose the electoral college (that didn't happen, Obama won both) Trump went on a tweet storm, calling "the electoral college ... a disaster for a democracy."
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Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!
11:33 PM - 6 Nov 2012
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Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
11:45 PM - 6 Nov 2012
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Five times in our history — in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and, it appears, this year — the Electoral College has handed victory to the loser of the popular vote.
That's nearly 10 percent of the time — though systematic black voter suppression and other differences in how the elections worked make it hard to determine the true popular choice in the first three cases.
The impact isn't random, either. Since every state gets at least three electoral votes, there's a bias toward small states. Consider that California has 69 times as many people as Wyoming, but only about 18 times as many electoral votes.
One result is to give the votes of rural whites more weight than those of urban minorities—a harmful imbalance that already exists via U.S. Senate. That's why it's no coincidence that the Electoral College has twice in this century benefited the party favored by the former group over the one preferred by the latter.
Sanford Levinson, the respected Harvard Law School constitutional scholar, has called the current system "indefensible."
Only a constitutional amendment could formally abolish the Electoral College. Koza's National Popular Vote (NPV) campaign, which launched in the wake of the 2000 election, takes a different approach.
It lobbies states to pass legislation pledging that they'll award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote — something the Constitution allows. The legislation would only go into effect once states representing a majority of electoral votes — 270 — sign on. At that point, it would achieve its goal of ensuring that the candidate who gets more votes wins the presidency.
To date, 10 states plus the District of Columbia, representing 165 electoral votes, are on board. But none are "red" states.
"When we first started, Republicans bristled at the idea of discussing this," since it seemed to imply that George W. Bush's presidency was illegitimate, Koza said. As memories of 2000 faded, that attitude has softened a bit lately, with GOP-controlled chambers in Arizona and Oklahoma passing NPV. But Koza said Tuesday night's results could once again stiffen GOP opposition to the idea,
Some conservatives see no need for reform. "Our system for electing a president has worked pretty well," Brad Smith, a Republican former Federal Election Commissioner wrote in a 2008 paper opposing the NPV campaign. "There is no real case being made that it will work better if changed — only that it will look nicer if one subscribes to one particular vision of how democracies should work."
Others go further. Tara Ross, a conservative activist and the author of the 2004 book "Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College," thinks that the system ensures candidates seek votes not just from the most populous areas but from across the country as a whole. Without it, Ross has said, "we could see the end of presidential candidates who care about the needs and concerns of people in smaller states or outside of big cities."
Of course, the current system is worse in that regard, since it limits campaigning to a handful of swing states. But Ross argues that the Electoral College has another benefit: thwarting majority rule. "The Founders had no intention of creating a pure majority-rule democracy," Ross has said. "In a pure democracy, bare majorities can easily tyrannize the rest of the country."
It's not clear how letting the president sometimes be the candidate who got fewer votes protects political minorities. And that's not at all why the Founders created the Electoral College. Still, the idea did emerge out of a similar distrust of majoritarian democracy.
The Founders didn't think ordinary people — even the white male property owners who were the only ones allowed to vote — were informed or responsible enough to choose the president. (Letting them do so, said Virginia's George Mason, would be like referring "a trial of colors to a blind man.")
So they created a double buffer. State legislators would choose presidential electors, who would be "most enlightened and respectable citizens," as John Jay put it. Then, these elites would come together at an Electoral College and use their superior wisdom and intellect to decide on a president.
But electors soon began to run on party slates, pledging to rubber-stamp their party's nominee rather than use their own independent judgment. And almost all states soon let voters rather than lawmakers choose the electors. In this way, the system became something close to democratic.
But because states don't award their electoral votes proportionately to the popular vote, it still left us with the problem that arose again Tuesday — that the candidate who gets fewer votes to be elected.
In other words, the Electoral College has often fulfilled the Founders' goal of acting as a check on the popular will — but not at all in the way they intended.
ZACHARY ROTH
TOPICS 2016 ELECTION, ELECTIONS
FIRST PUBLISHED NOV 9 2016, 9:35 PM ET
The subject of the Electoral College has always been important to me since I began to study politics and history. What is the point of living in an avowed democracy with so few choices, as in the case of the DNC’s “superdelegates,” i.e., the most wealthy and prestigious people? More class conscious bilgewater, in my view. I want to choose the candidate by my vote as well as elect him/her on election day. If we want to protect against the "tyranny" of pure democracy, we can simply make a larger margin necessary to win, not a "simple majority".
https://www.laprogressive.com/working-class-democrats/
No More Condescension: What We Can Do Now
BY PETER LAARMAN
November 10, 2016
Shortly before Election Day, I saw a clip of Hillary Clinton telling a crowd that she understands that many people are angry. She then added quickly: “but let’s face it, anger is not a program.”
Wrong. Anger actually is a kind of program. Anger at the implicit condescension in Secretary Clinton’s comment, for example. People can sometimes be angry enough to burn down their own houses. That’s no kind of “program” by conventional measures, but it is nevertheless programmatic in regard to its real-world consequence.
Enough people voted with a vengeance to give Donald Trump the presidency.
On this dark day of reckoning, we can of course choose to to [sic] continue to condescend to the people who supported Trump, dismissing them as ignorant racists and misogynists–in short, as “deplorables.”
Simultaneously apologizing for and defending the pollsters, Nate Cohn tells us that analysts probably underestimated the number of white working-class voters over age 45 by ten million. Think about that for a moment: ten million members of a traditional Democratic constituency who apparently became invisible or even nonexistent to the chattering classes.
What I’m going to say about this may be taken ill by many readers, but it is fully consistent with what I have written previously. For more than thirty years, a Democratic Party financed by wealthy globalists focused its energies on issues related to culture liberalism (feminism, multiculturalism, LGBTQ advancement, etc.) while ignoring the devastating wage stagnation facing most American working people, even younger working people with college degrees.
I am a gay man who strongly supports the multicultural agenda. But I also worked professionally for many years in the labor movement (e.g., I was communications director for the United Auto Workers during the early intra-party skirmishing over “free” trade). I have always feared how the accelerating Democratic abandonment of the white working class would end. It turns out that 1980’s “Reagan Democrat” phenomenon in places like Macomb County was just the first ripple in the tidal wave that now sweeps over us.
On this dark day of reckoning, we can of course choose to continue to condescend to the people who supported Trump, dismissing them as ignorant racists and misogynists–in short, as “deplorables.” But choosing a course of still more condescension will only dig us in deeper. Religiously, those embittered folks out in the heartland are also God’s children. Politically, as Bernie Sanders understood, they were repeatedly and blatantly betrayed by their own party.
peter-laarman--175x227 It ought to be possible to forge a Workers Party that is fully progressive on social issues as well. There are precedents elsewhere. If we can’t or won’t do that, we will deserve what we get.
Peter Laarman
Religion Dispatches
About a week or two ago I got an Email about the great Michael Moore's new documentary/comic stage show called "Trump World." Go to YouTube and watch it. It's a little over an hour long, and it's wonderful. It is proving painfully and uncannily prophetic. Now he's a man who is "in touch" with the public pulse of our working class.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/when-all-the-rules-are-broken-maybe-its-time-new-ones?cid=eml_mra_20161109
The MaddowBlog
When all the rules are broken, maybe it’s time for new ones
11/09/16 10:04 AM—UPDATED 11/09/16 10:52 AM
By Steve Benen
Photograph -- Donald Trump holds a press conference and then speaks at a lunch for the Staten Island GOP, April 17, 2016. Mark Peterson/Redux for MSNBC
In August 2015, the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato, a prominent political scientist, co-authored a piece on Donald Trump’s electoral prospects. “If Trump is nominated,” the analysis said, “then everything we think we know about presidential nominations is wrong. History has shown that presidential nominations tend to follow a certain set of ‘rules.’”
Of course, we now know that Trump, nine months later, won the Republican nomination, and come January, he’ll be president of the United States. But with Sabato’s year-old piece in mind, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the utility of what many, including me, considered the old “rules.”
Because as of today, it’s probably time to give Campaign Management 101 a new course syllabus.
After an election, it’s not uncommon to evaluate campaign teams the way some might look at sports teams: those who win, practically by definition, did a good job. But just as the better team sometimes comes up short, a successful candidate sometimes wins despite comic ineptitude.
And in 2016, Donald J. Trump was a pretty horrible presidential candidate. That Americans voted for him anyway doesn’t make this any less true.
Successful candidates build impressive teams, but Trump found it necessary to overhaul his entire campaign team three times since the spring, and the result was a leader-less operation featuring “a band of squabbling and unfireable advisers, with confusing roles and an inability to sign off on basic tasks.”
Successful candidates cultivate a broad national network, but Trump didn’t much bother with a “ground game.”
Successful candidates win debates. Successful candidates lead effective nominating conventions. Successful candidates release their tax returns and maintain some level of transparency. Successful candidates have helpful surrogates. Successful candidates run on compelling platforms with meaningful solutions. Trump lost the debates, ran a ridiculous convention, embraced unprecedented secrecy, alienated his own party’s leaders, and didn’t see the point of offering voters any policy ideas.
And in the end, none of this mattered. Voters in most states just didn’t care.
My point is not to mock a successful candidacy. It’s a bit like pointing out all the mistakes made by the team that won the Super Bowl – the players and coaches still get the trophy, the rings, and the parade, whether they played a great game or not.
Rather, I mention all of this because I’d like to see the political world start thinking anew about old assumptions. On paper, the very idea that Americans would choose a racist, misogynistic, widely unpopular reality-show host to be president of the United States, despite running an incompetent and divisive campaign, is hopelessly insane. And yet, we now know a woefully unqualified clown will nevertheless take the oath of office on January 20.
The “rules” are being rewritten before our eyes.
I think the common people in this country do like Trump partly because he doesn’t “talk down” to them. See the laprogressive.com article above on Clinton’s unfortunate condescension to voters who used to be the meat and bread of the Democratic Party. It is just like the trouble that Romney got into in his last election by saying that he doesn’t try to please the poor voters because they “won’t vote for me anyway.” Sometimes respect is to be given out of common decency and not based on a social value points system. We don’t speak to people because they are going to give us something in return, but because when we meet them, a greeting is really BASIC in human relations. So is allowing people to talk in a group and listening politely to them, even if we think we are much smarter and finer than they are. To live in a democracy, we should do such things with no reward.
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