Open Thread for Friday, September 23, 2016
PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–McClatchy/Marist–Clinton 48, Trump 41
NATIONAL–AP-Gfk–Clinton 50, Trump 44
NORTH CAROLINA–NYT/Siena–Clinton 41, Trump 41
VIRGINIA–Roanoke–Clinton 51, Trump 40
VIRGINIA–Quinnipiac–Clinton 50, Trump 43
ARKANSAS–Talk Business/Hendrix College–Trump 55, Clinton 34
IOWA–Quinnipiac–Trump 50, Clinton 44
COLORADO–Quinnipiac–Clinton 44, Trump 42
COLORADO–Rocky Mountain PBS–Clinton 44, Trump 35
COLORADO–Quinnipiac–Clinton 44, Trump 42
GEORGIA–Quinnipiac–Trump 50, Clinton 44
FLORIDA–Suffolk–Trump 45, Clinton 44
WISCONSIN–Emerson–Clinton 45, Trump 38
ILLINOIS–Emerson–Clinton 45, Trump 39
LOUISIANA–SMOR–Trump 49, Clinton 33
MARYLAND–Goucher College–Clinton 58, Trump 25
CALIFORNIA–PPIC–Clinton 47, Trump 31
U.S. SENATE
NORTH CAROLINA–NYT/Siena–Ross 46, Burr 42
WISCONSIN–Emerson–Feingold 52, Trump 42
COLORADO–Rocky Mountain PBS–Bennet 45, Glenn 32
ILLINOIS–Emerson–Duckworth 41, Kirk 39
MARYLAND–Goucher College–Van Hollen 54, Szeliga 24
CALIFORNIA–PPIC–Harris 32, Sanchez 25
GOVERNOR
NORTH CAROLINA–NYT/Siena–Cooper 50, McCrory 42
Mark Cuban, who has savaged Donald Trump by suggesting the GOP nominee is not really a billionaire, was given a front row seat in next week’s first presidential debate by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, CNN reports.
“Cuban has tried to publicly shame Trump throughout the 2016 campaign, regularly slamming the Republican nominee for not releasing his taxes. The attacks have been particularly effective, given Cuban’s status as a fellow billionaire and his public persona as a similarly brash businessman.”
#BBCElectionTrain team is in Montana where they meet a white supremacist eager about Trump https://t.co/9aWbA4oBOL https://t.co/MrROLcU5JH
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) September 22, 2016
“They hate white people, because white people are successful and they’re not.” — Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC), in an interview with BBC News, commenting on the protests in North Carolina after police killed a black man.
Pittenger added, “We’ve put people in bondage so that they can’t be all that they’re capable of being.”
That last statement puts the racist cherry on top.
Vanity Fair has a must-read interview with President Obama conducted by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin:
OBAMA: I found during the course of my political career on the national scene…there’s a point where the vanity burns away and you’ve had your fill of your name in the papers, or big adoring crowds, or the exercise of power. And for me that happened fairly quickly. And then you are really focused on: What am I going to get done with this strange privilege that’s been granted to me? How do I make myself worthy of it?And if you don’t go through that, then you start getting into trouble, because then you’re just [gesturing, as if climbing a ladder] clinging to prerogatives and the power and the attention. There’s an expression that my daughters use: You get thirsty.
GOODWIN: And the thirst is unquenchable.
OBAMA: And the thirst is unquenchable. And that’s what you see, I think, sometimes with somebody like a Nixon—a brilliant person who, early on, had ambitions that probably were not that different from an F.D.R., certainly not that different from an L.B.J. But that thirst overwhelms everything, and you start making decisions based solely on that.
Mother Jones has a huge list of questions that should be asked by the moderators of Trump and Clinton during the debates.
Frank Rich says Americans are gaining a better perspective on terrorism, something I said in this space on Monday:
Cable news covers terrorist brush fires, as he calls them, the same way it covers the weather, crime, shootings, and just about everything else: Every potential cataclysm is a 9/11, a Katrina, a Sandy Hook until proven otherwise. It is, of course, serious news that lone wolves with seemingly jihadist aspirations savaged victims in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota over the weekend. But it is not necessarily the apocalypse, or certain evidence that America is under terrorist attack. In these latest instances, we may be dealing instead with unhinged assailants looking for ideological rationales for their violent sprees. If only all terrorists were as stupid as Rahami, who left so many clues to his identity that he could be rounded-up with remarkable dispatch.
Where I part with Shafer is in his conviction that Americans are unable to put Rahami’s small-time infliction of violence into a proper perspective. Maybe more and more Americans are gaining that perspective. The news of the bombing did not cause widespread panic in New York, and the story faded fairly fast from center stage nationwide. Part of this was that no one was killed, good news for humanity but bad news for cable news, which doesn’t know how to keep exploiting a crime scene when there are no lost lives to be milked for sentimental effect, no surviving relatives to be interviewed on camera. The quick fade may also be because the public is simply inured to most violence at this point. Nothing short of an Orlando or San Bernardino can grab the attention of a citizenry numbed by the daily overload of shootings in a nation where there are more guns than people.
Another reason for the story’s short half-life was the predictable responses of both presidential candidates. Donald Trump says that the Rahamis at loose in America can be stopped if we overcome political correctness, legalize ethnic profiling, and stamp out ISIS through magical means yet to be specified. Clinton talks about gathering the facts before lashing out indiscriminately at Muslims. We’ve heard it all before from both of them, and we are as numb to their pat responses to terrorist brush fires as we are to the latest bulletin of a mad gunman at the mall.
One candidate is 1,000 times more generous than the other. Guess which one that is. https://t.co/OiFzP5kQFs
— Susan Gardner (@SusanGDailyKos) September 22, 2016
Thomas Patterson: “My analysis of media coverage in the four weeks surrounding both parties’ national conventions found that her use of a private email server while secretary of State and other alleged scandal references accounted for 11% of Clinton’s news coverage in the top five television networks and six major newspapers… Excluding neutral reports, 91% of the email-related news reports were negative in tone. Then, there were the references to her character and personal life, which accounted for 4% of the coverage; that was 92% negative.”
“While Trump declared open warfare on the mainstream media — and of late they have cautiously responded in kind — it has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.”
“How about her foreign, defense, social or economic policies? Don’t bother looking. Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1% of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4% of it. But she might be thankful for that: News reports about her stances were 71% negative to 29% positive in tone. Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was. Trump’s claim that Clinton ‘created ISIS,’ for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State.”
HRC's policy stuff first overshadowed by Bernie's movement, then marginalized by Trump's wild dramatics. https://t.co/UTsLO2emI2
— Ed Kilgore (@ed_kilgore) September 22, 2016
Zack Beaucamp at Vox interviews conservative Samuel Goldman about the failure of the conservative movement:
Samuel Goldman is one of America’s most thoughtful conservatives. A professor of political theory at George Washington University and the executive director of its Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom, he spends his days pondering the ideas that define American politics.
Recently, Goldman has come to an uncomfortable conclusion: The conservative movement has failed. Its traditional package of ideas — free market economics, social conservatism, and an interventionist foreign policy — has long dominated the Republican Party but has clearly failed to win over enough actual voters to secure the White House.
“The great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives,” Goldman told me during a sit-down near his office. “Since conservative politicians and policies have stopped delivering peace and prosperity, I think it’s more or less inevitable that voters have become dissatisfied.”
Moreover, he argued, the GOP and conservative movement has embraced a vision of America — Sarah Palin’s “Real America,” more or less — that can’t appeal to anybody but white Christians. A (somewhat controversial) census projection suggests that the US will be a majority minority country in the next 30 years — an unfriendly environment, to say the least, for the GOP.
“If you project yourself as a white Christian provincial party, you’re not going to get very many votes among people who are none of those things,” Goldman says. “That’s what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years.”
The obvious question then becomes — what next? If movement conservatism is doomed, then is the kind of white identity politics that Trump has pioneered the Republican future? Goldman and I talked at length about how the dividing line between liberals and conservatives today appears to be less about economics and more about identity.
Go read it.
A considered, coherent, and horrifying program of white supremacy is emerging from the Trump campaign. https://t.co/ethKzTdS59 pic.twitter.com/uE56SgzSBo
— New Republic (@NewRepublic) September 23, 2016
Josh Marshall says Trump has gone back to Birtherism after a brief 5 day break:
When asked why he President Obama was born in the United States he said this.
“Well, I just wanted to get on with, you know, we want to get on with the campaign. And a lot of people were asking me questions. And you know, we want to talk about jobs, we want to talk about the military. We want to talk about ISIS and how to get rid of ISIS. We want to really talk about bringing jobs back to this area because you’ve been decimated. So we really want to get just back onto the subject of jobs, military, taking care of our vets, et cetera.”
In other words, I said it because I had to if I wanted to win the campaign.
Not only is Trump refusing to say he has anything to apologize for. He is essentially saying that he hasn’t actually changed his position or his mind. He just said it to get people off his back. […]
Earlier this month I picked up chatter that the Trump campaign was readying Trump to issue a true apology for being a birther – not just changing his position, but a true recantation and admission he’d been wrong. I’ve even heard that something like this was in the works before the interview with The Washington Post forced the campaign up the timeline and combine that terse, teeth-gritted 30 second statement with his DC hotel informercial.
My sense though is that the campaign, which is to say Steven Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, had essentially convinced themselves that Trump would do or had agreed to do something he simply never would: admit he was wrong and apologize. Thus what I said above: even the more disciplined, sharper campaign Bannon ushered in must still contend with, and at the end of the day, fail to overcome Trump’s most profound psychological and moral defects.
Go back and watch the video of Trump ‘renouncing’ birtherism. It’s teeth-gritted and angry, something he was clearly forced to do and could only bear to do by packaging it with more self-assertive nonsense. ‘Hillary wanted to be a birther but she failed. Only I could succeed.’ And now five days on, he’s back to it, back to being a birther, or perhaps a Hidden Birther, whose occultation will end only once he accedes to the presidency.
How Hillary Clinton is preparing to debate Donald Trump. @anniekarni @GlennThrush reporting https://t.co/Sb1T4ezmzH pic.twitter.com/k50AUlYuyc
— Kristin Roberts (@KristinPolitico) September 23, 2016
Brian Beutler of the New Republic says Liberals have failed to teach millennials about the horror of George W. Bush:
Anti-Trump forces aren’t wrong to see millennials as the key to this election. Their error is in short-handing their critique to suggest millennials are somehow more responsible for Trump than older, more conservative cohorts. But if you stop dividing cohorts by age, and do it instead by ideological leaning, the problem becomes clear. The younger and younger that left-of-center voters get, the less and less propensity they have to vote at all, and the greater propensity to vote (if they vote) for a third party…
But here’s a different theory, under which the very liberals who are laying the groundwork to blame millennials also share in the blame themselves. If 18-to 29-year-olds vote for third-party candidates in sufficient numbers to tip the election to Trump, it will be the consequence of a liberal failure to build an oral tradition around the Bush administration, from Ralph Nader’s vote haul in Florida through the injustice of the recount and the ensuing plutocratic fiscal policy; the 9/11 intelligence failure; the war of choice in Iraq sold with false intelligence and launched without an occupation plan; the malpractice that killed hundreds in New Orleans; the scandalousness that makes the fainting couch routine over Clinton’s emails seem Oscar-worthy; and finally to the laissez-faire regulatory regime and ensuing financial crisis that continues to shape the economic lives of young voters to this day.
I like the Mark Cuban move. Clinton’s team should be getting into Trump’s face over the weekend what a shitty business man he is.
When the officer in Tulsa gets exonerated/acquitted because she was afraid for her life, and it’s perfect legal because pretty much any reason is codified into law, perhaps then we can revisit the discussion about lynching. The mob works to terrorize in many ways.
Until then I’ll work on my book treatment. It’ll be similar to Michelle Alexander’s about the new Jim Crow being the mass incarceration. Working title, “The New Lynch Mob.” (Maybe one of you can write a nice essay about how what Alexander describes it’s technically Jim Crow?)
For now if you want to argue arcane semantics why don’t we go back to whether the Riverfront is gentrification or not. Your precise definitions are incredibly helpful.
And your imprecise bullshit is not.
The differences have been explained to you. Stupidity is excusable. Ignorance is not.
I get that there’s a correct definition for words. I get that words sometimes expand beyond their definition due to the times we live in, and sometimes holding onto the exact meaning is important and historical. I get that I see both sides of this ongoing discussion.
But what I really get is how these debates over definitions tend to derail the actual discussion. I know, for instance, that any discussion of BLMs or rape will be bogged down with pedantic comments and arguments over definitions. This rarely happens on comment threads about the economy or politics (both of which have plenty of words used that could be nit-picked for accuracy).
I’m not saying that words don’t matter. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use precise language. I’m just saying that no matter what word we use black men are being killed by police who end up not being held accountable for their actions.
I called it a lynching and anonymous got mad… I think he’s still mad.
The “explanation” was an opinion and I reject it. I wear your insult with honor. I could insult you in turn, but I’ve turned over a new leaf.
Expansion of terms can corrupt the debate until you are no longer talking about the original issue. Examples of expansion:
All Mexicans are rapists.
All Trump supporters are deplorable.
All sexual harassment is rape.
All unprovoked attacks on black people are lynchings.
If we didn’t care about the language used to discuss issues we wouldn’t be here.
That’s it, I’m renouncing my white race
The legislatively codified execution of unarmed blacks by our security forces without due process isn’t simply an “unprovoked attack.” Hence I reject your analogy.
How come we can’t post pictures in here? I got some amazing sunset shots of the Breakwater lighthouse last night
*Winner, NAACP Image Awards (Outstanding Non-fiction, 2011)
*Winner of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s Prevention for a Safer Society (PASS) Award
*Winner of the Constitution Project’s 2010 Constitutional Commentary Award
*2010 IPPY Award: Silver Medal in Current Events II (Social Issues/Public Affairs/Ecological/Humanitarian) category
*Winner of the 2010 Association of Humanist Sociology Book Award
*Finalist, Silver Gavel Award
*Finalist, Phi Beta Kappa Emerson Award
*Finalist, Letitia Woods Brown Book Award
Here’s a list of awards Michelle Alexander won for “expanding” the definition of Jim Crow to include mass incarceration. That seems to have been pretty effective.
“The legislatively codified execution of unarmed blacks by our security forces without due process isn’t simply an “unprovoked attack.” Hence I reject your analogy.”
I reject it as well. And no one has ever claimed that all sexual harassment is rape. Where are you getting this stuff from?
Mouse, you have to upload the pictures to an image hosting service like Flickr and then link to with an embed html code. Or you can simply email me the pictures at delawaredem@delawareliberal.net.
If you want, I can post them as a Daily Delawhere next week.
I have to echo Liberalgeek here. I’m stuck in a fucking cubicle with not even a sightline to a window and Mouse is going to start posting lovely beach photos? I must object! 🙂
Cool thanks, I just sent it. LOL
puck is right. sloppy inflammatory language in the service of a political point is no better when the left does it than when the right does it.
I’ll let Michelle Alexander know.
dorian, please do. she could use a little help.
“I’m just saying that no matter what word we use black men are being killed by police who end up not being held accountable for their actions.”
Yes, they are. And calling it lynching obscures that, which is why I object to this language. It is polarizing and it does nothing to either identify or rectify the situation.
I think he’s trying to challenge white people, which is well and good. Unfortunately, challenging them that way misidentifies the problem and is likely to lead to rejection of the premise rather than attempts to find the solutions.
And if your contention is that the only way to end this is to end racism, then you’re Jim Baker — you’re saying that there’s no way to end it, because you will never end racism. And I reject that “solution.”
PS: I’m not “mad” at DG. My answer was not an “opinion.” Try reading it with an open mind this time. Words have meanings.
The reason Ms. Alexander’s Jim Crow analogy works is simple: It fits the original use of the term.
Jim Crow laws were intended to segregate blacks from the rest of us. So is prison. Hence, an apt analogy.
Your analogy is flawed. I’m not “mad” about it.
What I’m attempting to do is answer the question that comes up after each one of these incidents. Why does this keep happening? Well, it keeps happening because the system is set-up this way. It’s by design. Codified into law. Stand your ground. Police bill of rights. Etc… Who design it and to what end?
The lynching construct actually gets immediately to the core of the matter actually. Whether it’s polarizing or not I couldn’t care less. I’m not a politician. I don’t need to equivocate.
As far as a solution, I’m not proposing anything. I’m terribly pessimistic on this score. I actually don’t believe it will end, at least not in the next decade or two. I’ve resigned myself to the idea that the majority of people don’t want to confront this at all. So on that item we agree.
Here’s why identifying the problem properly is key to finding the proper solution. To complete the circle, I’ll make this about “the new Jim Crow.”
The current cycle of imprisoning blacks can be traced back to the ’90s. If you go back and look, you’ll find that many black leaders wanted more law enforcement in their communities to curb the violence. Because they failed to understand the reasons for the violence, they sought the wrong solution. Now they have communities that are still crime-ridden, along with an adult male population riddled with people who, when not imprisoned, has second-class-citizen status because of felony records.
They thought drugs were the reason for the violence, instead of what they are, a symptom of people who have no place in the above-ground economy (otherwise known as jobs). So the “solution” made things worse.
Extrajudicial executions tacitly supported by the state to keep blacks in line. Lynching. It’s not complicated. If you think there isn’t a mob behind it, let’s see how the trial goes, if it even gets that far.
And if you think it doesn’t inspire terror in the black community, ask a black person.
We also agree that it’s systemic. But we must realize that the police priority isn’t to kill blacks. It’s to protect their own safety above all. I might be wrong on this, but I don’t think that’s a value that’s been put in place by their superiors. It’s been put in place by their unions.
I’m serious about this: Police are not working for us, they’re just being paid by us. Go online and look at some of the forums for police officers. It’s paranoia 24/7/365 — every person you stop could be trying to kill you. Unions bring in “trainers” who heighten this paranoia.
As I noted, one-third of fatal police shootings are committed by minority officers. I don’t think racism alone is at work here. And since we can’t fix the racism of individuals, we have to work on the trigger-happiness.
Of course it inspires terror — of the police.
You keep ignoring what I maintain is the major difference: Lynchings were highly public. Police work hard to keep their extrajudicial killings secret.
I agree with you on both the parameters and the particulars of the problem. I just think your terminology hurts more than it helps.
I am trying to answer the same question you are. But when I research it, I find it’s more complex than a simple label will allow. I have attempted to point out one of the reasons I’ve found — police who fear for their lives while they do their job.
It’s not racism pulling those triggers, it’s fear.
It’s plenty public. I’d venture to say that maybe 100,000,000 people watch these videos. Significantly more that a few hundred in a town square in Georgia or Mississippi. And legally justifying the killings isn’t the same as keeping them secret.
Also, I don’t think the label discounts the complexity of the problem.
No, that’s the number of views perhaps, but it’s not something white America was forced to see until the past few years. And the more they see of it, the less they support it.
But OK, let’s call it a lynching. Now what?
I can agree that it’s not all racism pulling the triggers, but racism plays a big part. It’s the reason why white, armed, law breaking people are taken alive and black people (armed, unarmed, etc.) are being killed. It’s the racist stereotype that leads to this – listen to the conversation of police in the helicopter. From the air they had stereotyped this guy. That’s racism.
Guns also figure into this, and that’s where the fear comes in. Assuming everyone is armed (and I get why that is part of this) escalates the fear and the situation. Being extra afraid of a black man is where the racism comes into it.
@pandora: Yes, I agree. But you can’t fix the racism, so you have to work with the rest of it.
Much of the racism is systemic and subconscious. Psychologists have tested this with a computer simulation — various people have various things in their hands when they turn to face the player/cop. People of all races are more apt to shoot black “people” without guns than white “people” with them.
We must understand that we all have this baked in, even those of us who know it and guard against it. Racism is a default setting in this country. It will not be eradicated in our lifetimes.
But racism isn’t all of it, so I think the most promising route to improvement lies with attacking the other sources of the problem.
Tribal resentments by people who lack the moral and intellectual development to self reflect on their own visceral biases
“And calling it lynching obscures that, which is why I object to this language. It is polarizing and it does nothing to either identify or rectify the situation.”
“I am trying to answer the same question you are. But when I research it, I find it’s more complex than a simple label will allow.”
Hear, Hear
Omnis enim, quae [a] ratione[7] suscipitur de aliqua re institutio, debet a definitione proficisci, ut intellegatur, quid sit id, de quo disputetur
For every systematic development of any subject ought to begin with a definition, so that everyone may understand what the discussion is about.
Marcus Tulius Cicero. De Officiis, Book 1, Moral Goodness
@a “But you can’t fix the racism, so you have to work with the rest of it.”
But that’s really the only way. Just treating the symptoms of the problem will not make the problem go away.
The first start is to better train police. Maybe some built-in automatic penalty for using lethal force might be effective (failure to defuse situation). If every lethal bullet comes with a $500 pay deduction, I wonder how many situational deaths there would be??
“Being extra afraid of a black man is where the racism comes into it.”
Absolutely. However, I don’t think that fear has been given sufficient weight in the discussion. Fear of those “not like me” is a human condition. It knows no nationality or ethnicity.
Cops want to go home after their shift. When they have an encounter, that mammalian characteristic, fight or flight, kicks in. Cops are not immune to this because they wear a uniform. The difference is that they can’t flee because their job does not allow them to do so. Consequently, they are left with a single choice. I think this is especially true of first responders because there is certain degree of machismo to the position. Now add in a level of resistance to authority and the fear of the “other” is escalated.
I’m not discounting other factors, including simple racism, beliefs that black people are up to no good, or they are black so they must have a gun, but when you inject significant fear into the equation, the likelihood of an incident increases significantly.
And it works both ways. If I am the other, I certainly would be fearful in an encounter with someone of authority who I believe thinks that I am a threat.
“But that’s really the only way. Just treating the symptoms of the problem will not make the problem go away.”
Police shooting black suspects more often than whites is more than just a facet of racism, which is a problem that manifests in thousands of ways.
I am concerned about this particular manifestation, because I think it’s a particularly pernicious form of racism that differs from the death penalty (another law enforcement punishment that disproportionately affects blacks) only in the speed of judgment and execution.
Look at it this way: Lynchings (traditional def.) were a symptom of racism, too. We eliminated lynchings without eliminating racism. We can do the same with police gun violence.
I, too, would like to see racism eliminated. But as Dave points out, that’s a problem so intractable that we see only small points of progress along Dr. King’s moral arc. So I focus on one point, police violence.
you can’t change (not very much, and only with time) how people feel. you can change, through laws and training, how they behave. police behavior needs to be changed.
I agree. Here’s a line from a story on HuffPo about the Tulsa shooter:
“Shelby’s attorney said she opened fire because she feared Crutcher might have been reaching for a weapon.”
This is a frequent reason/excuse, and right there is a problem — “might have been reaching for a weapon” is way too soon in the process to be using lethal force.
As I noted above about the training exercise: Cops of all races and ethnicities err on the side of shooting when the person in the simulation is black, and err on the side of not shooting when the person is white.
My solution: Make clear that simple possession of a gun is not illegal, and shooting a person because you THINK he MIGHT be REACHING for one involves the loss of the job. We have the cameras to back this up — it’s why Ms. Shelby has been charged with manslaughter.
“And it works both ways. If I am the other, I certainly would be fearful in an encounter with someone of authority who I believe thinks that I am a threat.”
Ah, but there is the problem. If a cop kills you, they get a paid vacation. If you kill THEM, you get life (in most states.. otherwise, it’s however quickly they can revenge-kill you)
More on Theatre N at Nemours, from WDEL:
Theatre N is being equipped with a brand new state-of-the-art digital projection and sound system,” said Weir, who will serve as technical director. “One of the features of this new system is that we will now have access to films from every independent studio, not just a limited subset.”
http://www.wdel.com/story/77325-theatre-n-set-to-relaunch-under-new-management-made-up-of-familiar-faces
Nice big clear warm waves coming in. Going to get scary tomorrow. Dewey Beach A way of life!