(07-01-2016, 02:26 AM)Armonica_Templar Wrote: ...The problem is the sister apparently did not talk with the mother

The mother is not mentioned here, guess why..

She blames Hillary

(07-01-2016, 02:51 AM)Minstrel Wrote:

(07-01-2016, 02:26 AM)Armonica_Templar Wrote: ...The problem is the sister apparently did not talk with the mother

The mother is not mentioned here, guess why..

She blames Hillary

So - propaganda, in this instance, could be described as selective reporting.
I seem to recall other official narratives that do the same thing...

On the one hand - I agree with the sister about using someone's misfortune to make political points.
But - that's the game.  And - her brother chose to play.

Interesting that this "Republican" report is coming out when so many "Republicans" are trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump (and his supporters)...meaning...they are aligning with the Inside The Beltway Establishment (Hillary Clinton).

Quote:[*]John Amato [/url]Founder and publisher, CrooksandLiars.com

[*]





As a friend said, NBC should just pay Williams his money and make him narrateDateline or something. He has been terrible at being a breaking news anchor.

And someone over there also needs to tell Brian Williams that remaining mute while a former NYC mayor goes off on racist tangents about blacks to defend the police is not a good thing either.

Rudy Giuliani joined MSNBC Live, hosted by Brian Williams earlier today, and the former Republican presidential candidate was simply despicable throughout, blaming the Black Lives Matter movement for helping murder five people in Dallas as well as making other blacks hate the police so much that they will turn to violence against he men in blue.

Giuliani said this, “When you talk about Black Lives Matter, well you know, the black young boy who is killed by another black young boy is just as dead as a black young boy who was killed by the police officers.”

WTF is he talking about? He’s using the excuse of black-on-black crime to justify his complaints against BLM.

Crime is one thing, Rudy. That’s what the police force is there to protect us from, not up the body count. When that happens, and the police are culpable, law enforcement needs to be held accountable too.

Just like everybody else in this country and it’s not a crime to voice that opinion.

But when countless conservative politicians and pundits like Rudy apologize for all police violence, it creates the environment for protest actions to be born.

Then Giuliani firmly blamed Black Lives Matters for the heinous mass murder in Dallas last night.

“I think the reason there’s a target on police officers backs is because of groups like Black Lives Matter. They make it seem like all police are against blacks.”

No, Rudy, you cretinous jackass.

Americans have the right to voice their opinions and form protest groups. Especially when they feel an injustice has taken place, repeatedly.

In this case, African Americans have a right to show their frustration about police brutality, especially when there’s video evidence that civilians are gunned down by police officers for doing nothing at all.

Digby wrote a very thoughtful piece for Salon:

Quote:
Yesterday afternoon the nation was once more reeling from news of police officers shooting black men, one in deep south big city Louisiana and one in the upper midwest suburban Minnesota. These two cases are a little bit different from the ones we’ve dealt with in the recent past in that both men were legally armed but from what we could tell were not threatening the police. Louisiana, where Alton Sterling was shot point blank while on the ground in police custody, is an open carry state meaning that anyone is allowed to have a gun on their person in public with no questions asked. Minnesota, is a concealed carry state and the other victim, Philando Castile, was shot after telling the officer that he was licensed and armed.

[*]

Williams for his part, sat like a stone statue throughout the segment and let this babbling fool blame blacks for being murdered by law enforcement and then criticized the groups that are outraged by that violence.

The only time Williams uttered a word in this segment I cut was when he mentioned that Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton said he didn’t believe Philando Castile would have been killed if he was white.

This riled Rudy up to the point where he became indignant of Gov. Dayton and said, “That’s a heck of an assumption, though and not appropriate by the governor.”

No it isn’t you pompous fool.

What’s not appropriate is MSNBC giving you an uninterrupted platform to voice your thoughtless, hateful and racist ideas.
But he didn’t stop there.

Rudy continued, “white people get killed also by police officers in the United States.”

Wow, they certainly do, Rudy. What a poignant opinion to have.

He then listed a litany of terrible white groups like the mafia and Russia crime syndicates that get shot by the police. Clearly, if anybody is supposed to get shot, it’s hardened criminals, not innocent civilians, you moron.

Brian, are you awake? Hello, anybody home!

Rudy continued on by making bogus analogies that aren’t pertinent to the recent tragedies and said, “a confrontation with the police is an inherently dangerous situation, whether you’re white or black. If you resist, a police officer is immediately going to become concerned for his own life.”

Absolutely, Rudy, but where did Alton Sterling and Philando Castile resist?

“When a police officer tells you something, do what he says. it doesn’t matter if you’re white or black.”

When a police officer has his gun drawn and pointing at you, that’s great advice, but Giuliani is stumping for a fascist police state, where citizens are supposed to subjugate their will to a uniform, in every situation. That’s not what America’s democracy stands for.

Rudy says he does want to prosecute all those officers, “beyond a reasonable doubt” that are guilty, but have you ever seen him come on TV to discuss a case like that on?

And he believes we must teach our black children that the police are the ones actually saving their lives! Kudos!!!
Then he goes to a place where no man should go.

Giuliani said, “because the real danger to you is that black kid is going to shoot you on the street cause that happens many, many more times than police officers.

Again, the police are supposed to protect people, not execute them.

This isn’t a math quiz, Rudy.

My God. That’s your reasoning? My cops don’t kill as many blacks as criminals do so it’s all good.

Isn’t one too damn many?

What an embarrassing moment for Rudy, MSNBC and our national discourse.
Follow John Amato on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnAmato

Quote:"Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating unnecessary panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draftduring World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.


The paraphrasing does not generally include (but does usually imply) the word "falsely", i.e., "falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater", which was the original wording used in Holmes's opinion and highlights that speech which is dangerous and false is not protected, as opposed to speech which is dangerous but also true.

Contents
  [hide] 

• 1The Schenck case
  
• 2Literal examples
  
• 3Criticism
  
• 4See also
  
• 5References
  
• 6Further reading
  

The Schenck case[edit]
Main article: Schenck v. United States
Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended with the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:

Quote:The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

The First Amendment holding in Schenck was later overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot). The test in Brandenburg is the current High Court jurisprudence on the ability of government to proscribe speech after that fact. Despite Schenck being limited, the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has since come to be known as synonymous with an action that the speaker believes goes beyond the rights guaranteed by free speech, reckless or malicious speech, or an action whose outcomes are obvious.

Literal examples[edit]
People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, in Harlem in 1884,[1] and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead. In the Shiloh Baptist Church disaster of 1902, over 100 people died when "fight" was misheard as "fire" in a crowded church causing a panic and stampede.
Criticism[edit]

A version of Chafee's article

Finan writes that Justice Holmes began to doubt his decision due to criticism received from Free Speech activists. He also met the legal scholar[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zechariah_Chafee]Zechariah Chafee and discussed his work "Freedom of Speech in War Times".[2][3] According to Finan, Holmes' change of heart influenced his decision to join the minority and dissent in the Abrams v. United States case. Abrams was deported for issuing flyers saying the US should not intervene in the Russian Revolution. Holmes and Brandeis said that 'a silly leaflet by an unknown man' should not be considered illegal.[2][4]Chafee argued in Free Speech in the United States that a better analogy in Schenk might be a man who stands in a theatre and warns the audience that there are not enough fire exits.[5][6]

In his introductory remarks to a 2006 debate in defense of free speech, writer Christopher Hitchens parodied the Holmes judgement by opening "FIRE! Fire, fire... fire. Now you've heard it," before condemning the famous analogy as "the fatuous verdict of the greatly over-praised Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes." Hitchens argued that the imprisoned socialists "were the ones shouting fire when there really was a fire in a very crowded theatre indeed... [W]ho’s going to decide?"[7][8]
See also[edit]

• Bomb threat
  
• False alarm
  
• Hate speech
  
• Shiloh Baptist Church disaster, 1902
  
• Italian Hall disaster, 1913
  
• The Boy Who Cried Wolf
  

Quote:Prominent Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson is calling for peace after at least three police officers were shot and killed in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday. 

“The movement began as a call to end violence,” Mckesson told The New York Times. “That call remains.” 
Mckesson was arrested earlier this month in Baton Rouge while protesting the death of Alton Sterling, who was killed by police on July 5. 
The East Baton Rouge Parish district attorney dropped the charges on Friday against Mckesson and about 100 other protesters who were arrested.  

Quote:Last Updated Jul 17, 2016 7:36 PM EDT

After days of violence and heightened racial tensions in the U.S., the White House responded this week to an online petition asking the federal government to formally label the Black Lives Matter movement as a "terror group."

"Terrorism is defined as 'the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims,'" read the "We The People" petition, created July 6 on the White House website. "This definition is the same definition used to declare ISIS and other groups, as terrorist organizations."

Black Lives Matter, the petition said, "earned this title due to its actions in Ferguson, Baltimore, and even at a Bernie Sanders rally, as well as all over the United States and Canada." It asked the Pentagon to recognize the group as such "on the grounds of principle, integrity, morality, and safety."

Because the online document received at least 100,000 signatures -- at the time of this reporting, it had garnered over 141,000 names -- the White House was automatically prompted to respond.

The "We the People" team noted that "The White House plays no role in designating domestic terror organizations," nor does the U.S. government "generate a list of domestic terror organizations."

Play VIDEO
[/url]
Mayor Rawlings: Dallas police died for Black Lives Matter movement
[url=http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/mayor-rawlings-dallas-police-died-for-black-lives-matter-movement]
"[T]herefore," the response read, "we are not able to address the formal request of your petition."
The White House then went further: Acknowledging that it was a "difficult time" for the country -- and that the debate remains a "charged" one -- the statement additionally prompted petition signers to consider President Obama's words calling for compassion towards the movement.

"I think it's important for us to also understand that the phrase 'black lives matter' simply refers to the notion that there's a specific vulnerability for African Americans that needs to be addressed," the president said last week, talking to a Washington, D.C. gathering of enforcement officials, civil rights leaders, elected officials and other activists on the issue of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. "We shouldn't get too caught up in this notion that somehow people who are asking for fair treatment are somehow, automatically, anti-police, are trying to only look out for black lives as opposed to others. I think we have to be careful about playing that game."

The petition came on the heels of deadly officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and after days of Black Lives Matter protests for more police accountability.

On July 7, one day after the petition published online, seven law enforcement officers policing a BLM demonstration in Dallas, Texas were shot and killed in a shower of sniper-like fire. And on Sunday, three more policemen were shot and killed in Baton Rouge.

Black Lives Matter protesters condemned the massacre in Dallas, and prominent members did the same after Sunday's Baton Rouge shooting of police officers.

One public voice of the movement, DeRay McKesson, urged peace after news of the Louisiana deaths broke.
"I'm waiting for more information like everybody else," McKesson told the New York Times. "I have more questions than answers."

"The movement began as a call to end violence," he said. "That call remains."
Errol Barnett contributed to this report.

Quote:By Janell Ross July 18 at 9:29 PM 

Sheriff David Clarke, Jr., of Milwaukee County, Wis., salutes the crowd at the National Rifle Association convention in Nashville on April 10, 2015. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
There are two broad schools of thought on political critics, or rather two that can be described here using largely polite terms.

The first comes by way of the American founding father Benjamin Franklin: "Critics are our friends, they show us our faults." The second is exemplified by the thoughts of Plutarch, the Greek historian and essayist: "It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome." And it's into one of these two boxes that the words of David Clarke Jr., Sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wis., will fall for many Republican National Convention viewers tonight.

Technically a Democrat, Clarke took the stage during prime time hours. Why? Well, it probably has about as much to do with who Clarke is as it does what Clarke will say.

The son of a former Army Ranger and Korean War vet, Clarke began his own law enforcement career in the late 1970s, according to a 2003 profile written about Clarke in Milwaukee magazine. He was just 21 years old.
Described by his father as a boy always disciplined and well-behaved, police work was a good fit. Clark, his father said, always seemed respect authority in any setting. He rose through the Milwaukee Police Department ranks, becoming a detective, a homicide investigator and then a police captain inside of 25 years.

Clarke was making plans -- literally-- to take the helm of the department when the county's sheriff announced plans to leave office before the end of his term. Wisconsin's Republican governor, at the time Scott McCallum, decided to appoint Clarke to the job. And soon, Clarke became a kind of Milwaukee attraction, one of those elected officials able to draw large crowds, appeal to people across party lines and say things that no white politician, certainly no white Republican would without some kind of blowback in the very politically blue, nearly 1/3 black Milwaukee area. Plus, McCallum was 6'4" tall and equipped with "GQ good looks," according to that 2003 profile.

Donald Trump souvenir buttons are seen on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. Thousands of delegates descended on a tightly secured Cleveland arena Monday for the opening of the Republican National Convention, with Donald Trump's wife playing character witness as the tough-talking mogul locks up his party's presidential nomination. (DOMINICK REUTER/AFP/Getty Images)
So Clarke was relatively young, attractive and also an experienced law enforcement official, with the kind of resume and personal assets that rarely do a male politician harm. He was a prominent public figure in a community struggling with poverty, unemployment and crime for a good portion of the last 20 years and, some might argue, a collection of entrenched power brokers unwilling to surrender their fiefdoms and public funding in the interest of trying new things. In Clarke, conservatives not only found a voice saying exactly what they think or want to advance for political purposes coming out of a politically unexpected body, said Juliet Hooker, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Austin and the author of the 2009 book, Race and the Politics of Solidarity.

Here's what Hooker told the Fix about Clarke's rise to the Republican Convention stage via a brief email exchange. Hooker was traveling Monday and unable to engage in an extended interview.

Quote:

The appeal of a black conservative like Clarke is that their views disrupt what I call racialized solidarity...(i.e. that blacks and whites tend to have different views of the same events, as has been largely true of Black Lives Matter even with all the videos showing police escalation, culpability, etc.).

This  allows the critique of BLM [Black Lives Matter ] to become an issue that Republicans can say is about  ideology, not racism. Clarke himself does this when he talks about liberals not being willing to call them a hate group, etc.

This narrative also fits in with the Republican base's feeling that racism against whites is a problem that is not being acknowledged and that is stronger than anti-black racism.

5-Minute Fix newsletter
Keeping up with politics is easy now.
Sign up
In the United States race continues to shape almost every aspect of daily life. That includes but is not limited to where they live, where they work, how much they earn, what they have in the bank, the quality of their children's schools and the health care they receive, the proximity of parks, pools, libraries, public transportation and other life-enriching public services and conveniences as well as how often they encounter police and what happens when they do. So, much to the chagrin of many a conservative commentator who bemoans the continued existence of identity politics, there are real reasons why identity also continues to shape most Americans' sense of their primary political needs.

Some individuals reject that. And that's a role that Clarke has embraced. He's made a series of public statements that really -- in their content and tone -- amount to cover fire making it easier for conservatives to challenge the very decency of challenging or questioning the police, no matter the death toll of some police tactics or how disproportionately they affect black and Latino families. On Monday Clark doubled down on that work beginning his speech with a declaration that blue lives matter and going on to describe any critique of police as utterly wrong at any time.
David Clarke proclaims 'Blue lives matter' at RNC
 
Play Video1:03


Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke offered his support for police officers around the country to a standing ovation. Clarke spoke on the opening day of the Republican National Convention July 18. (The Washington Post)
In recent weeks leading up to the convention, Clarke has placed blame for attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., squarely on organized and semi-organized efforts to protest racial disparities in policing and deaths while in contact with police. Clarke has called Black Lives Matter  "domestic hate group," group which spouts "hate-filled messages," and encourages or even produces violence wherever it goes. He's also challenged the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that studies and tracks hate groups, to label Black Lives Matter according to Clarke's description or lose all credibility, Clarke says.

There's no evidence to support what Clarke has said. More than one Black Lives Matter activist has publicly condemned the police murders in Dallas and Baton Rouge. But that is what Clarke has said, nonetheless. In doing so, he's taken on two of the biggest baddest modern conservative political bogymen in one fell swoop, and expressed a set of ideas that in the context of this particular convention will allow Trump and the party set to make Trump its presidential nominee to lay claim to a law and order position, strongly imply that the opposition does not agree and then, in a particularly shrewd act of modern politicking, attempt to dismiss claims that these fact-free claims reflect some kind of bigotry because they come from a black man who is also a law enforcement official.

Quote:The Democratic Party is holding its convention in Philadelphia this week.

Every day, ABC News will be fact-checking speakers at the Democratic National Convention.

DAY TWO: Tuesday, July 26

Fact Check: Clinton Voted for Some FTAs, Against Others
Claim: Hillary Clinton voted for some trade deals, against others

Rating: True. Clinton voted for some and against others. But she also pushed for trade deals as secretary of state, in at least one case after opposing it as a senator and a candidate.
Bill Clinton said, of Hillary Clinton’s time in the Senate, “She voted for and against some proposed trade deals.”

Background: Trade has become a major point of contention in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and while this claim is true, Clinton has also touted support for trade agreements in the past.

Notably, Clinton voted against the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, also known as DR-CAFTA, on June 30, 2005. While running for president as a senator, she voiced opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia, which had sparked major opposition from unions over the murder of labor organizers on that country.

Clinton voted for other trade deals before those, and later backed a deal with Peru in 2007. In explaining her vote against CAFTA, Clinton noted she had voted for all other trade deals to come before the Senate until then.

As secretary of state, however, Clinton pushed for the Colombia deal she had opposed years earlier. Appearing with Colombia’s foreign minister in 2011, Clinton said the deal would “open new markets and create jobs and opportunities for both of our peoples.” Also as secretary of state, she pushed for Congress to pass free-trade deals with Panama and South Korea.

Fact Check: Clinton Launched a State Department Program to Counter Terrorists Online
Claim: Hillary Clinton launched a State Department program to counter terrorists online

Rating: True, but an independent review of the program reportedly found “scant evidence” it had diminished terrorism recruiting, and Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration have acknowledged the effort’s shortcomings

Bill Clinton said: “She launched a team -- this is really important today -- she launched a team to fight back against terrorists online and built a new global counterterrorism effort. We've got to win this battle in the mind field.”

Background: As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton created a program to discredit violent jihadist messages online and offer a counter-narrative aimed at dissuading would-be terrorist recruits.

But an independent review conducted last year by a panel comprising Google and Twitter veterans, as well as marketing experts and data scientists, reportedly found “scant evidence” the program had succeeded in its mission.

Another core finding was that counter-messaging originating from the United States lacked credibility, which Josh Earnest acknowledged in a White House press briefing in December. That recognition has led the Obama Administration to shift the focus away from U.S. government-produced content, toward partnering with allied governments who may be viewed as more credible messengers.

It’s perhaps not surprising the State Department has been outmatched by the likes of ISIS, whose followers produce an estimated 90,000 messages on social media per day. Hillary Clinton herself acknowledged as much on the campaign trail in December, saying: “Those efforts have not kept pace with the threat.”

Fact Check: U.S. Approval Rating 20 Points Higher When Clinton Left
Claim: Global favorability ratings of the U.S. rose 20 points during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State

Rating: Unclear. Global opinions of the United States bottomed out during the Bush years and rose after Obama’s election—not necessarily on Clinton’s diplomacy. Numbers were presented differently in ’08 and ‘13, so an even comparison is difficult, but on a case-by-case basis, in many countries the U.S. rating rose by far less than 20 points.

Bill Clinton said: “[T]he approval of the United states was 20 points higher when she left the secretary of State's office than when she took it.”Background: The authorities on global opinions of the U.S. are the Pew Research Center, which publishes data on how the U.S. is viewed around the world, and Gallup.

In 2013, the year Hillary Clinton left the State Department, the global favorability rating of the U.S. was recorded at 63 percent.

In 2008, the last year before Clinton became secretary of State, Pew did not appear to render a global favorability rating, instead breaking out ratings by countries, so an apples-to-apples comparison does not appear to be possible.

Examining countries on a case-by-case basis, U.S. favorability changes from 2008 to 2013 present a mixed bag.

In Britain, it remained relatively constant, 53 percent in 2008 and 58 percent in 2013. In France, it rose from 2 percent to 64 percent. In Germany, it rose from 31 percent to 53 percent. In Russia, it rose from 46 percent to 51 percent. In South Korea, it rose from 70 percent to 78 percent. In Egypt, it fell from 22 percent to 18 percent.

Gallup similarly presents its data on a country-by-country basis, making it difficult to say how the overall U.S. approval rating changed.

Fact Check: Trump Received $150,000 in September 11 Recovery Funding
Claim: Trump received $150,000 in funding intended for small businesses recovering from the September 11 attacks.

Rating: True. A firm owned by Trump called “40 Wall Street, LLC” received $150,000 in aid money from a September 11 aid package, according to reports.

Background: Rep. Joseph Crowley said of Trump: “He cashed in. Collecting $150,000 in federal funds intended to help small businesses recover — even though days after the attack Trump said his properties were not affected.”

In 2006, the New York Daily News reported that one of Trump’s holdings, 40 Wall Street, LLC., received $150,000 in funding intended to help small businesses that were impacted by the September 11 attacks.

Politicians and reports debate various points about whether Trump’s holding qualified for the funding on the basis of differing definitions of a “small business.” The New York Times reported a back-and-forth between Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Donald Trump. Nadler had written an open letter, writing that Trump’s firm did not deserve the funds, which he said had $26.8 million in annual revenues: “Despite the federal definition of a small business as having less than $6 million in revenue, you accepted a $150,000 payout.”

Trump responded, according to the Times, “The company received this small amount of money after qualifying, given the limited number of employees working at the property.”

Despite debates on whether or not Trump’s company should have taken the money, it is true that his holding received money from these recovery funds.

Fact Check: Clinton Helped Win Health Care for Eight Million Children
Claim: Hillary Clinton helped win health coverage for 8 million American children

Rating: True. Hillary Clinton did help win passage of the Children’s Health Insurance Program
Bill Clinton commended Hillary Clinton for “helping win healthcare for 8 million children as First Lady of the United States”

Background: Politifact has rated as “mostly true” the notion that Clinton won health care for 8 million kids under the Children’s Health Insurance Program, enacted in 1997, noting that it’s not entirely accurate to say Clinton “won” it on her own.

But Clinton did play a key role in passing CHIP, and both Sen. Ted Kennedy and a top healthcare adviser to the senator said Clinton was critical to pushing the law through Congress.

Fact Check: Trump Wants to Punish Women for Having Abortions
Claim: Trump wants to punish women for having abortions

Rating: Mostly false. Donald Trump quickly reversed himself after saying women be punished for abortions, and appears to have abandoned that position.
Cecile Richards, CEO of Planned Parenthood, said: “Donald Trump has called women ‘fat pigs’ and ‘dogs.’ He wants to punish women for having abortions. And he says pregnancy is an ‘inconvenience’ for a woman’s employer.”

Background: Cecile Richards is apparently referring to Donald Trump’s March 30 town hall with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, during which the following exchange took place:

MATTHEWS: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no as a principle?

TRUMP: The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.

MATTHEWS: For the woman.

TRUMP: Yeah, there has to be some form.

By that evening, as ABC News’ Meghan Keneally reported, Trump had walked back his statement that women who undergo abortions, if there were a ban on the procedure, should be punished. Trump’s new statement read:

"If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.

The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed -- like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions."
Trump statement that women should be punished for abortion was the first of five different positionson abortion Trump would take in three days—and one he appears to have quickly abandoned.

Fact Check: Donald Trump Wants to Defund Planned Parenthood
Claim: Donald Trump wants to defund Planned Parenthood

Rating: True. Donald Trump wants to defund Planned Parenthood as long as it performs abortions, even though he’s praised the group’s work on women’s health.

Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, said: “Hillary has always been in Planned Parenthood’s corner, because she knows women deserve someone in theirs. Women like Dayna Farris Fisher, a mom in Dallas who was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago. Today, Dayna is cancer-free. She says she couldn’t have done it without Vivian, the Planned Parenthood clinician who stuck with her all the way through treatment. When Donald Trump and Mike Pence say they’ll defund Planned Parenthood, they’re talking about cutting women like Dayna off from lifesaving care.”

Background: Last fall, when Donald Trump was asked if he’d shut down the federal government to cutoff taxpayer funds to Planned Parenthood, he replied “I would.” Since then, he’s clarified his position, saying, “The abortion aspect of Planned Parenthood should absolutely not be funded.” Over the course of his campaign, he’s repeatedly said he’d push for Congress to stop funding Planned Parenthood as long as they provide abortions.

Trump’s running mate, Gov. Mike Pence, is also on record firmly opposing the use of federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Yet at the same time, Trump has distinguished himself among some Republicans for praising the group. Acknowledging his was “not a perfect conservative view,” Trump has lauded Planned Parenthood’s broader mission to provide women’s health, citing thousands of letters he’s received from women helped by the group, and saying “millions and millions of women -- cervical cancer, breast cancer -- are helped by Planned Parenthood.”

Federal funding reaches Planned Parenthood through two sources that both primarily serve lower-income Americans: a federal family planning program known as Title X and Medicaid, with the latter accounting for 75 percent of the federal funding, according to a Planned Parenthood spokesman quoted by NPR.

Under federal law, Title X funds may not be used to pay for abortions. Medicaid, however, does permit the funding of abortions in certain cases. The Hyde Amendment of 1977 allowed for Medicaid money to fund abortions in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother.

Yet 17 states have expanded their exceptions to include "medically necessary" procedures, causing some to question whether groups like Planned Parenthood are performing taxpayer-funded abortions in violation of the law.

Regardless of the merits of such claims, it stands to reason that cutting off federal funds would impede Planned Parenthood’s ability to render services other than abortion (abortion services account for 3% of its overall medical services, according to its most recent annual report). The $528 million in government funding that Planned Parenthood received comprised more than 40 percent of its $1.3 billion annual revenue, the report states.

Fact Check: DOJ Cut Federal Prison Population and Crime Rate Together for First Time in 40 Years
Eric Holder made two claims: “…we cut the federal prison population and the crime rate together for the first time in more than 40 years. Now, that's right. That's right. Despite the fiction and the fear mongering you have heard from the other party's nominee, violent crime has gone down since President Obama took office.”

Claim 1: The Justice Department cut the federal prison population and the crime rate together for the first time in more than 40 years.

Rating: True. During Holder’s tenure at the Justice Department, the federal prison population and crime rate were both cut for the first time in decades. The federal prison population, however, did drop between 1976 and 1980. But the violent crime rate did not drop in this time period. Thus, it is true that the federal prison population and crime rate were cut together for the first time in 40 years.

Background: According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the first time that the federal prison population dropped since 1980 was between 2013 and 2014, when the population dropped from 219,298 to 214,149. Every other year, the federal prison population has grown.

This is not the case for the period between 1976 and 1980, however. According to the Department of Justice, the federal prison population dropped between 1976 and 1980. In 1976, the federal prison population was 26,980. In 1980, the federal prison population was 24,640. During this same period, however, the violent crime rate increased every year, according to the FBI.

Thus, between that and the fact that the violent crime rate was cut during the Obama administration (see claim below), Holder’s claim is accurate that it was the first time that violent crime and the federal population rate were cut together in 40 years.

Claim 2: Violent crime has gone down since President Obama took office.

Rating: True, as ABC previously reported. Violent crime rates have gone down during the Obama administration.

Background: The national violent crime rate on a national scale has gone down since President Obama took office, according to the FBI’s latest data.
The latest comparable annual data the FBI has made available is from 2014. In 2014, the FBI reported that there was a violent crime offense rate of 365.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2013, the violent crime rate was 367.9 per 100,000. In 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, there was a violent crime offense rate of 431.9 per 100,000.

The FBI did release preliminary semiannual crime statistics for the first six months of 2015, showing a 1.7-percent increase in violent crime when compared to the number of violent crime offenses committed in the first six months of 2014. However, annual numbers for 2015 have not yet been released by the FBI, leaving us with 2014 as the latest comparable dataset of crime committed on an annual basis.

Fact Check: One in Three African-American Men Will Go to Prison
Claim: One in three African-American men will be incarcerated at some point in their lives

Rating: Questionable. The statistic is reliably sourced, but it comes from 2003. There do not appear to be more recent data to validate or contradict, but the African-American prison population has declined since 2000.

Former attorney general Eric Holder said: “When one in three black men will be incarcerated in their lifetimes, and when black defendants in the federal system receive sentences 20% longer than their white peers, we need a president who will end this policy of overincarceration.”

Background: While Holder is an authority on criminal-justice matters, this statistic is based on data from 2001.
It popped up in a Huffington Post headline after The Sentencing Project included it in a 2013 report to the UN Human Rights Commission. That report, however, sourced the statistic to a 2011 study, which in turn sourced a 2003 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

That 2003 study, the original source, stated unequivocally that “one in three black men will be incarcerated in their lifetimes.”

It was based, however, on prisoner surveys between 1974 and 2001, examining how many had been imprisoned for the first time.

The Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, has cast doubt on this claim, calling it “stale” and awarding it two Pinocchios. Elsewhere, the Post has noted that African-American incarceration rates have declined since 2000—from 3,457 inmates per 100,000 people in 2000 to 2,724 in 2014—suggesting it’s possible the trend from 2001 no longer holds.

Fact Check: Prison Sentences Twenty Percent Longer for African Americans
Claim: African-American defendants receive prison sentences 20 percent longer than whites

Rating: True. The statistic (actually 19.5 percent) comes from a U.S. Sentencing Commission study of sentences of black and white men from 2007 to 2011. Earlier time periods showed less disparity.

Former attorney general Eric Holder said: “When one in three black men will be incarcerated in their lifetimes, and when black defendants in the federal system receive sentences 20% longer than their white peers, we need a president who will end this policy of overincarceration.”

Background: This statistic comes from a multivariate regression analysis of sentences from 2007 to 2011. A similar analysis of 2003-2004 data showed a much smaller disparity.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission wrote, in a 2012 report:
"Sentences of similarly situated Black male offenders were 19.5 percent longer than those of similarly situated White male offenders during the Gall period."
[/url]View gallery

[url=https://gma.yahoo.com/photos/democratic-national-convention-2016-fact-checking-speakers-photo-030605763--abc-news-topstories.html]Democratic National Convention 2016: Fact-Checking the Speakers (ABC News)
That time period, the most recent studied, yielded the largest disparity of three timeframes examined. An earlier period, 2003-2004, showed black male offenders received sentences that were 5.5 percent longer than white defendants.

DAY TWO: Tuesday, July 26

Fact Check: Donald Trump Wants to Deport 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants
Claim: Trump wants to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Rating: True. Trump has promised to deport undocumented immigrants, although he later said he would not describe his deportation policy as including “mass deportations.”

Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois described Trump as “someone who promises to round up and deport families, millions of families, and then put up a wall between them and us.”

Background: This claim is difficult to evaluate, since Trump has offered statements that seem to conflict.

On multiple occasions, Trump has made it clear that he intends to deport undocumented immigrants.

“We’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go,” he told “Meet the Press” in August 2015. “You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely,” Trump told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in November. “They’re going to be [deported], and they’re going to come back, and they’re going to come back legally,” Trump said at a televised forum in April.

Trump later said in an interview with Bloomberg, “No, I would not call it mass deportations.”

While it does not matter what Trump calls his policy, it is worth pointing out that after promising to deport undocumented immigrants, Trump later said explicitly that his immigration policy does not include “mass deportations.”

Fact Check: Trump Wants to Eliminate Federal Minimum Wage
Claim: Trump wants to eliminate the federal minimum wage.

Rating: Mostly true. Asked about raising the minimum wage, Trump said the federal government should not set a wage floor. But he has also said the federal minimum wage should stay the same.

Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania said Trump “wants to get rid of the federal minimum wage.”

Background: Trump has said minimum wages are a state issue, not a federal one. Before that, he made contradictory statements.
In May, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Trump about calls to raise the minimum wage from its current $7.25 per hour. Trump said he was “actually looking at that.” He had said during a primary debate that the federal government should “leave it the way it is.”

Four days after the CNN interview, when NBC’s Chuck Todd asked why Trump was suddenly open to raising the minimum wage, Trump said, “I would like to see an increase of some magnitude. But I’d rather leave it to the states. You let the states decide.”

When asked, “Should the federal government set a floor?” Trump responded, “No, I’d rather have the states go out and do what they have to do.”
It’s not correct to say that Trump wants no minimum wage at all, PolitiFact notes. He has indeed indicated that the federal government should not set a wage floor, but since Trump was being asked about raising the minimum wage and since he previously said that the federal minimum wage should be left as is, it’s not entirely clear that Trump wants to do away with the federal minimum as it stands.

Fact Check: Trump Opposes Equal Pay for Women
Claim: Trump opposes equal pay for women.

Rating: Questionable. Trump has said he believes women deserve equal pay for equal work.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said, “Donald Trump thinks that women should just work harder because — and I’m quoting — ‘You’re gonna make the same if you do as good of a job.’ Every woman in America knows that’s not true. Hillary [Clinton] believes that women deserve equal pay for equal work.”

Background: Asked on “Morning Joe” in August 2015 if he supports equal pay for women, Trump gave a discursive answer, calling it a “tricky question” because of the difficulty in determining when work is truly equal, then made a passing reference to global competitiveness. Yet he also said, “If they do the same job, they should get the same pay.” He concluded his response by saying equal pay is “one of the things that we have to look at very strongly.”

From this response, it seems fair to conclude Trump has expressed support for equal pay, with some reservations. This stance appears to be consistent with the quote Gillibrand cites from Trump’s remarks at the October 2015 No Labels Problem Solver Convention.

As the exchange below between Trump and an audience member shows, Trump does not suggest that women need to work harder to earn equal pay, contrary to Gillibrand’s claim:

Audience member: I want to get paid the same as a man, and I think you understand that. So if you become president, will a woman make the same as a man? And do I get to choose what I do with my body?Trump: You’re going to make the same if you do as good a job. And I happen to be pro-life. OK? I’m pro-life.

Ivanka Trump last week told the Republican National Convention that her father has “made it a practice at his company throughout his entire career” to pay women an equal wage and that “he will fight for equal pay for equal work.”

So there’s reason to believe Donald Trump supports equal pay — at least in theory.

An analysis of payroll data by The Boston Globe, however, revealed that men working for Trump’s presidential campaign in April made, on average, about 35 percent more than women working on the campaign. (In fairness, data show that Hillary Clinton’s Senate office paid women less and that the Clinton Foundation paid high-ranking female employees less than their male counterparts.) It should also be noted the Republican Party platform makes no mention of wage equality.

Fact Check: Origin of Trump Products
Claim: Trump-branded dress shirts are made in Bangladesh, furniture is made in Turkey, picture frames are made in India, wine glasses are made in Slovenia and neckties are made in China.

Rating: Mostly true. Various reports have confirmed that the provenance of most of these products with a Trump label as listed by Casey are true.

Background: Casey said, “Where are his, quote, tremendous Trump products made? Dress shirts, Bangladesh; furniture, Turkey; picture frames, India; wine glasses, Slovenia; neckties, China. China.”

According to several reports, Casey accurately stated the provenance of these products:

Dress shirts: The Washington Post reported that Trump shirts were made in Bangladesh, China and Honduras. Furniture: The New York Times reported that Trump furniture is made in Turkey. Picture frames: ABC News cannot confirm the origin of Trump picture frames. Wine glasses: In an interviewwith The New York Times, Trump confirmed that his glassware collection is made in Slovenia. Neckties: CNN reported that Trump neckties are made in China.

Fact Check: Trump Tax Cuts Would Come at Cost of Middle Class
Claim: Trump’s tax plan would hurt the middle class.

Rating: Questionable. Analysis of Trump’s tax plan shows he would cut taxes for everyone but the rich would see a larger cut.
Casey said Trump “would cut taxes for the richest Americans at the expense of the middle class.”

Background: Trump has proposed broad tax cuts, touting a “huge reduction in rates,” paid for by closing “loopholes” for corporations and “the very rich.” Its highest marginal rate is 25 percent for single people earning $150,000 or more. Workers making $50,000 to $149,999 would pay 20 percent.

Analysis by the Tax Policy Center, affiliated with the Brookings Institution, shows that Trump’s plan would mean tax cuts for everyone, just with larger cuts for the rich.

The analysis read, “The proposal would cut taxes at every income level, but high-income taxpayers would receive the biggest cuts, both in dollar terms and as a percentage of income. Overall, the plan would cut taxes by an average of about $5,100, or about 7 percent of after-tax income. However, the highest-income 0.1 percent of taxpayers (those with incomes over $3.7 million in 2015 dollars) would experience an average tax cut of more than $1.3 million in 2017, nearly 19 percent of after-tax income. Middle-income households would receive an average tax cut of $2,700, or 4.9 percent of after-tax income.”

Critics have questioned how Trump would pay for federal programs with such a tax plan, and Moody’s has concluded that Trump’s policies would add to the national debt and hurt the economy.

Casey’s assertion that the tax plan would come at the middle class’s expense appears to be a rhetorical point about the wealthy seeing greater benefits and an assumption that the purported economic effects of Trump’s plan would hurt the middle class more.

Fact Check: When Obama Took Office, 800,000 Jobs Were Being Lost
Claim: When President Barack Obama entered office, 800,000 people were losing their jobs every month.

Rating: True. In January 2009, nonfarm employment declined by 791,000. In March of that year, it declined by 823,000.
Bernie Sanders said, “Some 800,000 people a month were losing their jobs … That’s where we were when President Obama came into office.”

Background: Revised employment numbers show 823,000 jobs were lost in March 2009, two months after Obama became president. In January, the month he took office, 791,000 jobs were lost.

Click here for a Bureau of Labor Statistics chart covering the peak years of the financial crisis, expressing one-month changes in nonfarm payroll employment, in thousands.

Fact Check: Top One-Tenth of 1 Percent of Americans Have As Much Wealth as Bottom 90 Percent
Claim: The top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent of Americans.

Rating: Mostly true. The comparison comes from a study conducted by economists in 2012, according to PolitiFact.

Background: Sanders said, “It is not acceptable and it is not sustainable that the top one-tenth of 1 percent now own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.”

PolitiFact studied this claim, which Sanders made in campaign speeches. According to PolitiFact, the number comes from a 2012 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Here’s how PolitiFact explained the study:

“The top 0.1 percent was composed of 160,000 families with average wealth of $72.8 million. All told, they owned 22 percent of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent — 144 million families with average wealth of $84,000 — owned only 22.8 percent of the wealth.”

That study, however, omits Social Security income, PolitiFact noted in two checks of Sanders’ claim.

Fact Check: 1 in 5 Cannot Afford Medicine
Claim: One in five Americans can’t afford their medicine.

Rating: Mostly false. Even more have some difficulty paying, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that only 5.6 percent of Americans go without medicine because of costs.

Sanders said, “One out of five Americans are unable to afford the medicine they need.”

Background: Studies in the last several years have found that 1 in 5 Americans has trouble paying medical expenses, but 2015 data from the CDC suggest that Sanders’ claim overstates how many Americans can’t afford medicine.

When it comes to affording health care in general, the CDC found in 2013 that 1 in 5 Americans had trouble paying their medical expenses in the first six months of 2012. A Gallup poll in 2013 found that more than 3 in 10 said they put off medical treatment because of cost.

And an August 2015 Kaiser survey supports Sanders’ claim, with 24 percent of respondents saying they have trouble paying for drugs — more than the figure he cited.

But in 2013 the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found that in 2011, 12.6 percent of Americans surveyed said they did not take medicine as prescribed because of cost. The NCHS’ most recent study, published in April 2016, suggests the figure is actually closer to 1 in 20:
“In 2014, 8.2 percent of persons reported delaying or not receiving needed medical care due to cost, 5.6 percent reported not receiving needed prescription drugs due to cost, and 10.0 percent reported not receiving needed dental care due to cost in the past 12 months (Table 63).

Among adults aged 18–64, the percentage who reported delaying or not receiving needed medical care, not receiving needed prescription drugs and not receiving needed dental care due to cost in the past 12 months increased 22 percent–31 percent during 2004–2010, and then declined 24 percent–32 percent during 2010–2014 (Table 63).”

Those data include only people 18 to 64, but in other studies, a lower percentage of older Americans expressed difficulty paying than the 18-to-64 group.
Sanders is right that 1 in 5 — even more, according to Kaiser — has difficulty paying for medications, but that’s not the same as not being able to afford them at all.

Fact Check: Trump Will Cut Medicaid for Lower-Income Americans
Claim: Trump will cut Medicaid for lower-income Americans.

Rating: Unclear. His statements on health care in general and Medicaid in particular have been inconsistent.
Sanders said, “And what is Donald Trump’s position on health care? No surprise there. Same old, same old Republican contempt for working families. He wants to abolish the Affordable Care Act, throw 20 million people off of the health insurance they currently have and cut Medicaid for lower-income Americans.”

Background: According to some Republican experts, Trump’s positions on health care are a mishmash. He has said he wants to replace the Affordable Care Act but also said, without spelling out how, that “everybody’s going to be taken care of” and “the government’s going to pay for it.”

His approach to Medicaid is also unclear. In its media section Trump’s campaign website refers to an interview he gave to The Daily Signal in May 2015 — before he announced his presidential run — in which he says he would not cut Medicaid as president.

The site discusses Medicaid in the positions section, saying Trump would distribute federal Medicaid funding to state governments through block grants. While it does not specify whether he would maintain federal funding at current levels, a reference to eliminating fraud, waste and abuse from Medicaid suggests he would seek cuts to the program.

He has repeatedly promised he would make sure no one slips through the cracks because of unaffordable insurance costs. But given his inconsistency and lack of policy details, it’s unclear whether his health care plan would cut Medicaid for lower-income Americans.

Fact Check: Job Creation From Clinton’s Infrastructure Plan
Claim: Clinton’s infrastructure plan would create millions of jobs.

Rating: Possibly true. It depends on how projects are set up and how workers are hired. Studies indicate that her $275 billion five-year spending plan would support fewer than 1 million jobs per year, but the total created could reach into the millions

Sanders said, “And she is determined to create millions of new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure — our roads, bridges, water systems and wastewater plants.”

Background: Although studies suggest that fewer than 1 million jobs per year would be supported by Clinton’s infrastructure spending plan, it could create millions of jobs, depending on how and how long workers are hired for projects.

Clinton has proposed spending $275 billion on infrastructure over five years. A study from Duke University found that a “six-year transportation bill of at least $100 billion annually would support upwards of 2.18 million American jobs.”

Other sources use different numbers. Every $1 billion in highway and transit spending under the 2009 stimulus bill would support 13,000 jobs per year, the White House Council of Economic Advisers found. Clinton’s average of $55 billion per year would mean 715,000 jobs annually, by that measure. The University of Massachusetts found $1 billion in spending would mean 18,000 jobs per year.

Sanders’ claim is not accurate if we interpret it to mean that Clinton’s infrastructure plan would mean U.S. employment figures would be higher by millions of employed workers, sustained over the life of the five-year spending plan. For labor statistics purposes, Clinton’s plan would likely mean fewer than 1 million additional workers on payrolls in a given year.

Given the nature of infrastructure jobs, however, Clinton’s plan could very well create millions of jobs; it depends on how those jobs are set up.
For instance, if Clinton’s plan funded only five-year programs that employed the same workers over the life of the projects, it would create fewer than a million jobs.

That seems unlikely, however. Infrastructure projects begin in different areas and last for varying amounts of time over the life of a federal infrastructure spending plan, as we saw under the 2009 stimulus bill. To the extent that projects last fewer than five years and are replaced with new ones and to the extent that different workers are hired for different projects and across projects funded by the program, the number of individual employed as a result of Clinton’s plan could very well reach into the millions.

Quote:Republican Donald Trump took a six-point national lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton in at least two polls, from CNN andThe Los Angeles Times, immediately following his nomination at his party's convention in Cleveland last week. But that polling bump has since evaporated, as a new Reuters survey finds Clinton is now six points ahead after her own convention.

Meanwhile, a Real Clear Politics average of multiple recent polls puts Trump and Clinton in a dead heat — each claiming 44.3 percent national support — as of Friday. It likewise records the disappearance of Trump's brief lead, which marked only the second time he has ever pulled into first place throughout the whole election cycle per that calculation. See the history of their matchup below. Bonnie Kristian
[img=600x0]http://api.theweek.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/rcp.png?itok=faFJK2V1[/img](Real Clear Politics)

Quote:When J.D. Vance was a boy, his beloved grandmother “Mamaw” told her boozer husband that if he ever came home drunk again, she’d kill him. When he did, and passed out on the couch, she got a gasoline can, poured fuel all over him and dropped a lit match on his chest. He survived with mild burns, and later quit drinking.


One time when J.D.’s mom took exception to something the boy said in the car, she hit the accelerator and sped up to 100 miles per hour, screaming that she was going to kill them both. When he jumped in the backseat hoping to protect himself from the impact, he recalls, she instead pulled the car over “to beat the s- -t out of me.” The evening concluded with Mom being hauled away in a police car.

One of J.D.’s stepdads, Bob, though kindhearted, had a bad case of “Mountain Dew mouth.” Half his teeth had fallen out, the other half were black, brown and misshapen.
[/url]Modal Trigger[img=231x0]https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/book-cover1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=231&strip=all[/img]
J.D. and his people are called rednecks, white trash, hillbillies. But Vance made it out of the holler, way out. The Marines led him to Ohio State, then Yale Law School and finally a job as a principal at a Silicon Valley investment firm. Looking back on his youth, and all he fled, yields a frank, unsentimental, harrowing memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” It’s a superb book given an extra layer of importance by its political reverberations: When Vance returns home these days, he sees yard after yard festooned with Trump signs.

Nancy Pelosi says blue-collar white men vote “against their own economic interests” because of guns, gays and God, “God being the woman’s right to choose.” The Washington Post noted that this group does care about gun rights more than the average voter but it’s a myth that their views on gays and God differ much from everyone else’s, and Pelosi’s regal dismissal of the bitter clingers is not only too reductive, it’s an attitude that drives voters away from the Democratic Party.

Though “Hillbilly Elegy” is about people, not politics, it is an eye-opening field guide to an unruly and hard-to-understand group, many of them born and bred Democrats, who could cost Hillary Clinton what looked like an easy election win. White voters without a college degree have favored Republicans for some time — they voted for Mitt Romney by 18 points in 2012 — but they love Donald Trump. In an average of six polls this month, he is beating Clinton by a margin of 58 to 30 among these voters. The massive swing of white working-class voters, who made up 44 percent of the electorate in 2012, could more than cancel out her strengths among minorities and the college-educated.

Vance paints a picture of a world exactly like the one Trump described in his acceptance speech 10 days ago. He grew up in Jackson, Ky., and nearby Middletown, Ohio, a once-prosperous industrial town where everyone seemed to work for the steel company Armco. Back in the 1960s, the company would actively recruit new workers from the hills of eastern Kentucky, taking care to preserve families by encouraging relatives to move in also. “For my grandparents,” Vance writes, “Armco was an economic savior — the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky to America’s middle class.” Vance’s Papaw would proudly stop by car dealerships to explain to J.D. that this or that car was built with Armco steel. He retired with a generous pension.

Quote:It is an eye-opening field guide to an unruly and hard-to-understand group, many of them born and bred Democrats.

After a 1989 merger with Kawasaki, the company became AK Steel. It still exists, but many factory jobs in Middletown disappeared. Real-estate prices collapsed. Those who could afford to cut their losses left town; others were trapped in houses they couldn’t sell because they were worth less than what was owed on the mortgages. Downtown, prosperous shops turned into empty storefronts and poverty-exploiting businesses like cash-for-gold shops and payday lenders. Two local malls that were bustling as recently as the early 1990s are now dead, one of them turned into a parking lot. Crime and dread began to infect the night. “A street that was once the pride of Middletown today serves as a meeting spot for druggies and dealers,” Vance says.

Vance shuttled between the care of Mamaw and his mother, who burned through men and drugs. Once she was fired from her nursing job for rollerskating through the hospital, high on prescription meds she had stolen from the pharmacy. In a moment of panic, she once asked her son for a urine sample so she could pass a surprise whiz quiz as a condition of her job. He complied, feeling shamed and dirtied.
Modal Trigger[img=300x0]https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/160614-trump-birthday-today-feature.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=300&strip=all[/img]Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Dallas.Photo: Getty Images

There are decaying post-industrial Middletowns all over the map. In 1970, Vance notes, 25 percent of white children lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates above 10 percent. By 2000 the figure had risen to 40 percent, and Vance believes it is higher today. The life expectancy for Vance’s people is declining.

Trump’s promises to stand up to the Chinese are resonating, as is his message that “the system is rigged” against a proud group of Americans, Americans who built the postwar glory but now feel they’re being ignored or outright mocked. White trash is the one ethnic group it is still OK to make fun of.

“Humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us,” Vance recently told The American Conservative. “And if you’re an elite white professional, working-class whites are an easy target: You don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.”

Mapping the politics of Vance’s clannish, resentful neighbors is challenging, even exasperating. Hillbillies pride themselves on distinguishing the deserving poor from the lazy moochers, but Vance points out that it’s a fuzzy line. His grandmother would lash out at the government for doing too much, then for doing too little. She’d ask why society could afford aircraft carriers but not enough drug-rehab centers. She’d complain that the rich weren’t paying their fair share. But she and J.D. would be just as angry at people who paid for T-bone steaks with food stamps and hated the idea of the government using Section 8 housing vouchers so that poor people could move in next door — poor people “like us,” Vance says. She’d say people wouldn’t have so many problems if they were forced to work for their benefit checks.
Modal Trigger[img=664x0]https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/afp_dp5ve_130876742.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=664&h=441&crop=1&strip=all[/img]Supporters of Republican President candidate Donald Trump cheer during an address to supporters.Photo: Getty Images

“I initially assumed that Mamaw was an unreformed simpleton,” says Vance, “and that as soon as she opened her mouth about policy or politics, I might as well close my own ears. Yet I quickly realized that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom.”

Calling it wisdom seems like a stretch, but there does seem to be some continuity to the howl of desperation that echoes so chillingly through Vance’s book.

Manufacturing shed 5 million jobs after 2000, giving way to welfare, drugs and despondency. The number of Americans receiving welfare of one kind or another exploded from 42 million (or 18.8 percent of Americans) in 1983 to 109 million (or 35 percent) in 2012. As America added 83 million citizens, then, it added 67 million welfare recipients — during a period of massive wealth creation. (Per-capita income rose from about $30,000 in 1983 to over $52,000 in 2012.)

Quote:

Hillbillies pride themselves on distinguishing the deserving poor from the lazy moochers, but Vance points out that it’s a fuzzy line.

The factory closings on the one hand and the welfare checks on the other created lots of idle people. And what do they do with all that spare time? Drugs. Government checks are easily laundered (In Appalachia a favorite trick is to buy cases of soda with food stamps and re-sell them for cash).

Some Americans may unreservedly cheer the explosion in government largesse — aren’t we helping people more than ever before, and also doesn’t it create lots of solid middle-class jobs for administrators in the federal bureaucracy?

But Appalachians evidently have mixed feelings about it, sensing their growing dependency. They do want to turn back the clock, but not because they’re racist or afraid of modernity. They want to go back to having good-paying jobs. They want to go back to being proud of themselves and the things they produced. For years, they’ve essentially been told to sign up for welfare and shut up.
Vance said he noticed as a child that his peers seemed to fall into two groups: “My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

[url=https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/j-d-vance.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&strip=all]Modal Trigger[img=231x0]https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/j-d-vance.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=231&strip=all[/img]Author J.D. Vance

What might the government do differently? Vance notes that hillbillies love to complain, a la Trump, that the system is holding them back. “Never be like those f—ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” Mamaw used to tell her grandson.

And yet hillbillies create so many varieties of misery for themselves. Vance recalls that in high school a neighbor ran a bath, took some painkillers and passed out. When she awoke the bath had overflowed and ruined the top floor of her house. “This is the reality of our community,” Vance writes, “It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.”

The anger in hillbilly country is understandable. Vance grew up thinking it was perfectly normal for couples to have screaming matches that frequently turned violent. Neighbors would slide open the window to listen when the folks next door started going at it.
Trump’s attacks on the media and political correctness make Vance’s people stand up and cheer. From the Democrats, they draw the same sense of condescension that struck Vance when, at Yale, another student said she couldn’t believe he was in the Marines because he was a nice guy.

In hillbilly country, a code of honor runs so deep that if you casually call a man a son of a bitch, he’ll beat you senseless for the implied insult to his mother. But then you wouldn’t call the police because you figured you deserved to get a licking. Trump’s me-against-everybody combativeness, his refusal to back down, his vows to disrupt Washington deal-making are giving the hillbilly class a feeling they haven’t had in decades: that they’ve got a friend at the top.

Quote:ASHLAND, Ohio (AP) — The Commission on Presidential Debates rejected Republican Donald Trump's claim that Democrats rigged the debate schedule so that two of the three debates would occur during football games.


In a statement released Sunday, the commission said it started working more than 18 months ago to identify all religious and federal holidays as well as baseball and football games and other major events. The commission said it was "impossible" to avoid all sporting events.

"As a point of reference, in a four-year period, there are four general election debates (three presidential and one vice presidential), and approximately 1,000 NFL games," the commission wrote.

On Sept. 26, the night of the first debate, ESPN will carry the Monday night game featuring the Falcons vs. the Saints. On Oct. 9, the second debate will air opposite the Sunday night game featuring the Giants vs. the Packers on NBC.

Hillary Clinton vowed to attend all the match-ups, telling reporters in Ohio on Sunday: "I'm going to be there, that's all I have to say."
Her campaign, meanwhile, dismissed Trump's claims, with vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine saying he's "mystified" by what he calls Trump's "bizarre" allegations.

"Is Donald Trump complaining that the framers of the constitution put the election in the NFL season?" he asked during a campaign stop at a dairy barn in Ohio.

The Democratic ticket is in the midst of a post-convention swing through the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
On Friday, Trump accused Clinton of "trying to rig" the schedule. "Unacceptable!" he wrote. In an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Trump said he got a letter from the NFL calling the conflict "ridiculous."

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy tweeted on Saturday: "While we'd obviously wish the Debate Commission could find another night, we did not send a letter to Mr Trump."

A Trump aide said Saturday that the Republican candidate "was made aware of the conflicting dates by a source close to the league." The aide was not authorized to speak by name and requested anonymity.

The nonpartisan, independent presidential debate commission said it never consulted with either political party in setting the dates, announced last September. The group serves as event sponsor and sets the participation criteria, dates, sites and formats.

The Democratic Party was criticized during the primary race for scheduling debates between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday nights and holiday weekends, times when viewership is low. The Sanders campaign suggested that was an effort to limit the size of the audience.

Trump told ABC that Clinton wants to debate "like she did with Bernie Sanders, where they were on Saturday nights when nobody's home."
___
Daniel reported from Washington. AP Pro Football Writer Barry Wilner in Springfield, New Jersey, and AP writer Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.
___
This version corrects that 18 months ago was when the Commission on Presidential Debates began looking at the dates of other major national events, not when it decided which night a debate would be held.

Quote:Grant Stern[/url] [url=http://twitter.com/grantstern]Grant Stern is a professional mortgage broker, radio broadcaster and columnist based in Miami, Florida.
This post is hosted on the Huffington Post’s Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and post freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
FBI Director James Comey ‘Crossed the Rubicon’ this week when he cast his dice with the Republican party by releasing a partisan memo with election implications.

He’s facing an internal revolt over the affair at the FBI, for undoing decades of non-partisan law enforcement practices.

Two serious criminal complaints have already been levied against the FBI Director by the Democratic Coalition Against Trump for using the FBI to engage in partisan activity and now by former White House Ethics Counsel Richard Painter too.

Quote:Chief ethics lawyer in GW Bush White House has filed official complaint to Office of Special Counsel 4 inquiry of Comey 4 violating law.
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 30, 2016

Sources inside the FBI told Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald that they were furious with Director Comey’s rare public revelations from the Clinton investigation from the start this summer.

They’re not the only ones upset.

High ranking Department of Justice officials strongly discouraged Comey from going public just 11 days before a general election, without holding a smoking gun or really any strong evidence of anyone’s wrongdoing in hand.

The FBI Director broke policy to inform Congress about details of an investigation without any actual details, which is already being used for partisan purposes.

Director Comey followed up his first memo to Congress with a “cover your ass” memoto his fellow FBI officers which appeared in The Washington Post. 

The impact within the FBI has been swift after the first memo.

Newsweek is reporting that the Republican FBI Director’s inappropriate letter to Congress put him in a very danger of a “mutiny at the FBI,” whose proper role is protecting America from domestic terror threats and investigating serious crimes.

Not influencing elections.

In the FBI Director’s second letter, he admitted that his agency doesn’t“ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations,” and that he doesn’t know anything about, “the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails.”

He also claimed that, “I don’t want to create a misleading impression,” and Comey then made a final admission that, “in the middle of an election season, there is a signficant risk of being misunderstood.”

Well, it’s too late now.

Here’s a copy of the letter:

Quote:FBI Dir. Comey sent a second letter today - to FBI employees. He seems to have some doubts about what he did (via WashPost)pic.twitter.com/IagFJRZYyU
— West Wing Reports (@WestWingReport) October 29, 2016

Newsweek’s report about this latest non-scandal points out firmly that the FBI Director’s letter literally points out emails that have nothing to do with the Democratic nominee:

Quote:The disclosure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation late on Friday, October 28 that it had discovered potential new evidence in its inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s handling of her personal email when she was Secretary of State has virtually nothing to do with any actions taken by the Democratic nominee, according to government records and an official with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity. The revelation that the FBI has discovered additional emails convulsed the political world, and led to widespread (and erroneous) claims and speculation.

Quote:Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the media that this development had prompted the FBI to “reopen” of the case, it did not;

Quote:What we know: FBI found some emails on a new device. They dont know whats in them or if they’re copies or if they’re classified. That’s it.
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016

Comey’s decision to leak news about a politically driven investigation is threatening his professional standing and ability to function inside the Bureau.

Newsweek’s top investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald told the story in a tweetstorm:

Quote:Word from inside @FBI. FURIOUS at Comey, think he’s mishandled public revelations from get go. “Outrageous incompetence” one agent told me.
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016

Quote:If Comey doesn’t get ahead of this, going to have a mutiny at @FBI. “This is why u say ‘We dont talk about investigations’” one told me....
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016

Quote:...his original decision to lay out info on clinton case, then opine on what it meant outside of criminal findings, infuriated these folks..
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016

Quote:...to begin with, because it was inappropriate precedent set. Then it set him up for what he did today, and because he knew how angry...
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016

Quote:...people inside were with him, he was trying to play to two audiences — updating his testimony while not revealing too much. But that....
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016

Quote:....just made everything worse.
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016

The FBI has a difficult job to perform in the best of times, and when it comes to political investigations agents must walk a tightrope between performing their duties properly, and unduly influencing public opinion with the results of their investigations.

For an entire year, they managed to quietly, but diligently investigate the sensitive matters surrounding Hillary Clinton’s emails which they ultimately concluded, “were not a cliff-hanger” because there was literally no there, there.

These events show precisely why the FBI does not ordinarily publicly release the results or targets of their investigations until charges are filed.

These memos have set off a chain off events sure to end with the termination of Comey’s tenure as head of the agency.

Quote:
[/url]

PHOTOPIN.COM

Dr. GS Potter [url=http://twitter.com/SIIPCampaigns]Educator, Advocate and founder of the Strategic Institute of Intersectional Policy
This post is hosted on the Huffington Post’s Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and post freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
This past winter, an armed right-wing militia group took up arms against the federal government and seized Malhauer National Wildlife Refuge in the state of Oregon. The militant rebels, known as the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, held it by force for 41 days and carried with them over 30 guns and close to 20,000 round of ammunition.

This takeover was led by the sons of Cliven Bundy – Ammon and Ryan. Cliven was recently incarcerated for his own armed encounter with federal authorities in 2014 over similar local-federal disputes. He was arrested on his way to support his sons in their rebellion. Ammon and Ryan still face charges relating to this incident.

What stands out about both armed acts of militant defiance is not only that they happened, but that local law and federal law enforcement didn’t seem very eager to stop them.

The CCF was allowed to come and go as they pleased for weeks. They were met with no force for the entire standoff. They were allowed to peacefully negotiate, and those that were arrested were arrested without incident. Even though they were fully armed, took over federal property and had threatened to kill law enforcement – on Thursday, a federal court acquitted 7 of these neo-Confederate soldiers, including the Bundy Brothers, of federal conspiracy and firearms possession charges related to the militia’s armed action against the federal government.

This treatment by law enforcement starkly contrasts the violence unleashed upon the peaceful protestors at Standing Rock.
The unarmed and peaceful Dakota Access Pipeline protestors who are defending the sovereignty, sacred sites, land and water of their people were met with a violent intergovernmental response. As reported by Camp of the Sacred Stones,

“Over 300 police officers in riot gear, 8 ATVs, 5 armored vehicles, 2 helicopters, and numerous military-grade humvees showed up north of the newly formed frontline camp just east of Highway 1806. The 1851 Treaty Camp was set up this past Sunday directly in the path of the pipeline, on land recently purchased by DAPL. Today this camp, a reclamation of unceded Dakota territory affirmed as part of the Standing Rock Reservation in the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1851, was violently cleared. Both blockades established this past weekend to enable that occupation were also cleared.

In addition to pepper spray and concussion grenades, shotguns were fired into the crowd with less lethal ammunition and a sound cannon was used (see images below). At least one person was tased and the barbed hook lodged in his face, just outside his eye. Another was hit in the face by a rubber bullet.”

As many community groups, advocates and national media outlets have reported – the racial inequality reflected in this week’s side by side treatment of protesters cannot be understated.

The soft treatment of white militant protestors also contrasts sharply with the violent backlash unleashed on black protest groups such as Black Lives Matter. In Ferguson, for example, the National Guard was brought in to control those protesting the killing of Michael Brown. Their response included armored vehicles, tear gas and M4 rifles. Subsequent protests such as those in Charlotte and Milwaukee have been met with similarly swift and violent counter-responses by local, state and federal law enforcement organizations.

In the Confederacy, only White Power Matters.

It is predictable that white people would be treated differently than indigenous and black people by law enforcement and by the criminal justice system, though. This is one of the core inequities that community advocacy groups are organized against.

What is less predictable, though, is that an armed terrorist takeover of federal property would be met with little response and zero federal consequences.

Two important takeaways from this turn of events. First, white power is still strong in the United States. Second, the neo-Confederate movement has infiltrated the highest levels of the government. Not only do they threaten to take over the White House through Donald Trump, but they have already quietly overthrown some of the most important systems in the national government.

The acquittal of white, armed, anti-federal militants in Oregon sheds light on the levels of authority at which the neo-Confederate movement has infiltrated. The list of Trump supporters, though, gives us a clear list of which states, localities, organizations, media channels, pundits and politicians have also been taken over by the Confederacy.

The lists of governors and Congress members that endorse Trump tell us how many states have joined the efforts to Redeem the Confederacy and dismantle the Union. The lists of mayors and local politicians that support the Trump agenda tells us how many cities and municipalities have already fallen to Confederate authority. Court rulings, such as that in Oregon, teach us how deep into the criminal justice system the alt-right has seeped. The endorsement of the National Fraternal Order of Police tells us that law enforcement and local police are playing just as strong a role in preserving the Confederacy as they did before, during and after the Civil War.

And while the military battle to structure the government of the United States ended with the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, the Southern efforts to “Redeem” the nation continue on today. Those seeking to weaken the federal government, strengthen states’ rights, maintain racial exploitation and expand it are organized, active, armed and extremely successful.
The neo-Confederacy has learned from its history.

Directly following the Civil War, the Confederate states responded to the newly established federal authority by engaging in localized efforts designed to undermine it. And while the political war between the Confederates and the Union escalated, nationwide military violence transitioned into localized militia-style attacks.

The Klu Klux Klan and other white paramilitary organizations such as the White League and the Red Shirts, with the protection of law enforcement, for example, waged localized campaigns of violence and intimidation against black citizens and their political representatives. In 1868 there were over 1000 politically motivated of black citizens alone. It has also been reported that “At least 10 percent of the black legislators elected during the 1867-1868 constitutional conventions became victims of violence during Reconstruction, including seven who were killed.”

By 1870, the South retook control of state and local governments and successfully passed a slew of policies geared at undermining federal authority and stopping black citizens from exercising their rights and freedoms. Black Codes and Jim Crow lawslittered the political landscape. Prohibitions on reading and writing, literacy tests, and poll taxes were violently enforced to keep black citizens from voting. Efforts were taken to reinstitute slavery under different names. Vagrancy laws, for example, allowed poor black citizens to be arrested, fined and sent to labor camps as methods of repaying these fines – effectively reinstituting slavery under the guise of criminal justice.

These efforts were successful. By the time of the 1876 presidential election, only 3 states were considered unredeemed, and the south was poised to take control of the white house – without force.

This presidential election resulted in the Confederate candidate Samuel J. Tilden winning the popular vote. The Union candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, was able to secure the electoral college. The final outcome of the election was dictated by the1877 Compromise.

With this informal compromise, the Confederates agreed to allow the Union to maintain control of the White House so long as one overriding condition was met – all federal troops must be pulled out of the Confederate States. This is how after only little more than a decade, Reconstruction came to a halt and federal efforts to protect newly freed slaves from the violent inequalities of those seeking to re-enslave them ended.

The struggle for equality has waged on since.

Jim Crow laws still stand on the books. Target communities are still deprived of rights, opportunities and social mobility. Non-dominant groups such as people of color, people with disabilities and the poor are marginalized in the education system, the housing system, the labor market, the criminal justice system and by law enforcement at the hands of their white and otherwise privileged counterparts.

The Confederate flag still flies on many buildings and is printed on the license plates of a number of states. And a conservative white nationalist that threatens to dismantle the federal government and take up arms against those that oppose him is only a few percentage points from occupying the highest position of authority in the nation.

The Confederacy is strong. And it threatens, once again, to overtake the White House.

Confederate values lie at the heart of the Donald Trump campaign and the people, politicians and organizations that support it. These values, reflected in the Confederate Constitution and Trump’s Deal with America, remain the same. Increase state and individual rights. Weaken federal protections and authority. White power. Militant resistance.

Donald Trump has promised to dismantle, gut or repurpose all federal departments including the EPA, the Department of Education, the Federal Regulations Committee and even the Food and Drug Association should he assume the presidency. He has pledged to make changes in legislation to ensure that civil rights are state’s rights issue, and that federal protections are removed. He has launched assaults on the black community, Muslims, immigrants, Mexican Americans, the LGBTQIA community, the disabled and women. He has called for the incarceration of his opponent and his mouthpiece Sheriff David A. Clarke has openly stated that it’s “pitchfork and torches time in America.”

The efforts to Make America Great Again include a neo-Confederate takeover of the political system, while his neo-Confederate soldiers prepare to take up arms if the political assault fails.

And without a doubt, the Confederacy is militarized.

According to a recent report,

“…130 million guns are owned by 3% of American adults, who each own 17 guns on average….Among this group, an estimated 7.7 million Americans make up the country’s “gun super-owners,” who own between eight and 140 guns…. On the whole, gun owners tended to be white, male, conservative and reside in rural areas, the survey found.”

The Confederacy has risen. They are militarized. They occupy every level of government, criminal justice and law enforcement. And the neo-Confederate movement is just percentage points away from overthrowing the capital. Should they fail at the polls in just over a week, they have four more years to organize for the next election – if they don’t violently resist the outcome of this one.

The question is – is anyone going to stop them?

Quote:Mitt Romney called Donald Trump a “con man,” and so did Marco Rubio and Michael Bloomberg.
For the news media, the fact that Trump is widely seen as a con man, even by many in his own party, has created thorny problems regarding how to cover him. The mainstream news media (aside from Fox News) generally endeavors to be fair and balanced in covering elections – but what does “fair and balanced” mean when covering a con man?

In aspiring for balance, does that mean news organizations should do as many pieces criticizing a con man candidate as criticizing his or her opponent? But wouldn’t the news media then be delinquent ― and unfair to the non-con candidate ― if they do just as many negative articles about a con man candidate like Trump as negative articles about a more conventional candidate, like Hillary Clinton, who also has problems with the truth.

Many news organizations have concluded that the fair and balanced way to cover Trump and Clinton is to be equally aggressive toward them when that is warranted. In other words, be critical and aggressive toward Trump or Clinton whenever they are found to tell falsehoods, cheat, cut corners or otherwise do wrong.

Quote:Trump’s most dangerous con of all: he is undermining our precious democracy by asserting that the election is rigged, and that he might not accept the election results.

Trump is in a league of his own in terms of telling falsehoods and lies, and that’s one reason the news media have often been tougher on him. Fact checkers have found Trump to be the most dishonest major party candidate they’ve ever encountered.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has given a Four Pinocchio rating to an astonishing 63 percent of the 91 Trump statements it has examined – a Four Pinocchio rating means a statements was totally false. In contrast, 14 percent of Clinton’s statements received Four Pinocchios – a typical candidate gets Four Pinocchios 10 to 20 percent of the time. (I have no patience for Rush Limbaugh and others who repeatedly attack fact checkers as biased and not to be trusted. Limbaugh and his ilk attack fair-minded fact-checking referees for a simple, strategic reason: to delegitimize them in order to make it easier for the candidates they support to continue spewing their falsehoods.)

Mitt Romney and many others agree that Trump is the greatest con man ever nominated by a major party. Indeed, Trump has been compared to some of the great demagogues of history, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who spectacularly and falsely stated that a horde of Communists worked in the federal government, and Governor Huey Long, who charmed voters with pie-in-the-sky, share-the-wealth promises that he’d deliver impossible-to-deliver levels of prosperity.

So why do Romney and others call Trump a con man? Trump has boasted that he knows more about ISIS than the generals. He promised that he’d release his tax returns if he ran for president, but he still hasn’t released them. He has repeatedly insisted he can’t release his returns because they’re under audit, but audits in no way preclude him or anyone else from releasing their returns. Trump demonizes trade with China and Mexico, but, whoops, his Trump-brand suits, shirts and ties are made overseas. Trump openly mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability, then denied ever doing so. He asserted that thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks on rooftops in New Jersey, but he has failed to provide a scintilla of evidence to buttress that false claim.

Trump has repeatedly said that America’s murder rate is the highest ever and that America’s taxes are the highest in the world, even though fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked those claims. Trump says that no one respects women more than he does, even though he has savagely mocked women for their looks, has acknowledged barging into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty contestants and has boasted of grabbing women by the pussy. Trump denounces illegal immigrants, yet he hired undocumented workers to do demolition work for Trump Tower. Trump initially proposed nearly $10 trillion in tax cuts over a decade along as well as a vast increase in military spending – all while absurdly promising he would balance the federal budget.

Long after Barack Obama produced his birth certificate, Trump continued to maintain that Obama was an alien born overseas. Trump asserts that Mexico will pay for his “beautiful wall” between the two countries—something that proud, Yanqui-resenting Mexico wouldn’t agree to in a million years. This past Friday Trump said the economy is “an absolute disaster” even though the jobless rate has dropped to 4.9 percent, the nation has added 15 million jobs since 2010 and the 5.2 percent jump in median household income last year was the highest on record. And then there’s Trump’s most dangerous con of all—he is undermining our precious democracy by asserting that the election is rigged, and that he might not accept the election results.

The list of Trump’s falsehoods and cons goes on and on – there was that snake-oil operation known as Trump University or Trump, by one count, has flip-flopped 138 times on the issues. We journalists pay a lot of attention to whether a candidate lies a little or a lot because that says something fundamental about a candidate’s character. Journalists, like other Americans, much prefer when candidates tell the truth – it shows whether a candidate is leveling with, or seeking to fool, the American people.

Quote:You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.Abraham Lincoln

To be sure, Clinton, like most other politicians, has made mistakes and lied. It was politically unwise and all too cozy for her to speak to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech. She originally hailed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as “the gold standard,” before flip-flopping and opposing it in the face of a tough challenge from Bernie Sanders. And it was very wrong of her to use a private server for her emails, but let’s not forget that many other officials have used private email addresses for government business, including many governors, senators and representatives as well as Colin Powell and Karl Rove and many other officials in the Bush/Cheney White House, even on some military matters. (So, why the many calls to jail Clinton over this, but not the many other officials who have done the same thing?)

To me, a journalist who has written for the past 20 years about American workers, the biggest mystery in this election (as I wrote for Huffington Post last week) is why are millions of normally tough-minded working-class voters rallying behind Trump, even though he is so widely seen as a con man. To be sure, many people are tired of the Clintons and are angry with the status quo. Wages have, until recently, stagnated for years, Corporate America has moved millions of jobs overseas, and the cost of college has skyrocketed. People want these problems fixed, and now comes Mr. Trump, a brash, charismatic, tough-talking showman and change agent who promises to make yu-u-ge changes. He often even pledges to do the impossible: to wipe out ISIS in a jiffy and to bring back jobs from overseas, from China, Mexico and elsewhere, that are never coming back. Millions of Americans have been charmed by the tune of this pied piper ― even though Romney and other Republicans have warned voters about him.

The greatest Republican of them all, Abraham Lincoln, cautioned us about con men, saying, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Whether Trump wins or loses on Tuesday, I am sure that for years to come, political scientists are going to study and debate how did it come to pass that in the year 2016, tens of millions of Americans voted for someone who Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg and so many others warned is an obvious con man.

Also on HuffPost
Help! My Relatives Support Trump  11

Quote:Ok,  so that just happened. Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated, low-information white people. As Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the election. (Whether that trend held up remains to be seen.) In contrast, in the 2012 election, college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Last night we saw something historic: the dance of the dunces. Never have educated voters so uniformly rejected a candidate. But never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate. Trump supporters might retort: “That’s because Trump supports the little guy and Clinton helps the already privileged college grads.” But that’s false: Trump supporters in the primaries had an average income of about $72,000 per year. They aren’t rich, but make more than the national average and more than Clinton supporters.


Trump owes his victory to the uninformed. But it’s not just Trump. Political scientists have been studying what voters know and how they think for well over 65 years. The results are frightening. Voters generally know who the president is but not much else. They don’t know which party controls Congress, what Congress has done recently, whether the economy is getting better or worse (or by how much). In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, most voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than George W. Bush, but significantly less than half knew that Gore was more supportive of abortion rights, more supportive of welfare-state programs, favored a higher degree of aid to blacks, or was more supportive of environmental regulation.

Just why voters know so little is well-understood. It’s not that people are stupid. Rather, it’s that democracy creates bad incentives.

Consider: If you go to buy a car, you do your research. After all, if you make a smart choice, you reap the rewards; if you make a bad choice, you suffer the consequences. Over time, most people learn to become better consumers.

Not so with politics. How all of us vote, collectively, matters a great deal. But how any one of us votes does not. Imagine a college professor told her class of 210 million students, “Three months from now, we’ll have a final exam. You won’t get your own personal grade. Instead, I’ll average all of your grades together, and everyone will receive the same grade.” No one would bother to study, and the average grade would be an F.

That, in a nutshell, is how democracy works. 

Quote:Most voters are ignorant or misinformed because the costs to them of acquiring political information greatly exceed the potential benefits.

Most voters are ignorant or misinformed because the costs to them of acquiring political information greatly exceed the potential benefits. They can afford to indulge silly, false, delusional beliefs — precisely because such beliefs cost them nothing. After all, the chances that any individual vote will decide the election is vanishingly small. As a result, individual voters tend to vote expressively, to show their commitment to their worldview and team. Voting is more like doing the wave at a sports game than it is like choosing policy.

The great political scientist Philip Converse once said: “The two simplest truths I know about the distribution of political information in moderate electorates are that the mean is low and variance is high.” In other words, most people know nothing, some know less than nothing (that is, they are systematically mistaken rather than just ignorant), and some know a great deal.

In general, college-educated people are better-informed than those with a high school diploma, who are in turn better informed than those who did not finish high school. 

When people hear such depressing statistics, they are quick to wag their fingers at America’s broken education system. “This just shows we need better teachers!” they cry. It’s a plausible argument, but wrong.

In fact, average Americans have completed more schooling now than 60 years ago, but they’ve remained equally ignorant about politics even as their education levels rose. More fundamentally, to blame the schools is to misunderstand why citizens know so little. The schools teach them most of what they need to know to vote well. But they forget it because the information is not useful. And the reason it is not useful is because their individual votes make no difference.

Others say the problem could be fixed by encouraging citizens to deliberate together. They believe getting random groups of Americans together to talk about politics will cause them to resolve their differences, become informed, and reach agreement. However, political scientists have been conducting large number of experiments testing how deliberation works. Even though the researchers in question almost always want deliberation to “fix” democracy, in general, they tend to find that it makes things worse, not better.

None of this would matter if political information had no effect on how citizens vote. But, in fact, it does. Every other year, the American National Election Studies survey 1) what voters know, 2) what policies they support, and 3) who they are (e.g., white or black, poor or rich, employed or not). With these three sets of data, it is then possible to determine how information, by itself, changes what voters want, because we can control for whatever effect race, gender, and income have.

Trump supporters might be upset to learn that this method reveals that high-information voters (regardless of their income, race, employment status, gender, or where they live) tend to favor free trade and are pro-immigration.It’s not just that Trump’s anti-trade and anti-immigrant agenda flies against the consensus of economists on the left, right, and center, but it’s precisely the platform informed voters reject — regardless of their backgrounds.

Quote:That’s not to say that high-information voters tend to favor the Democrats’ politics.

That’s not to say that high-information voters tend to favor the Democrats’ politics. In fact, high-information voters tend to have policy preferences that cut across party lines. For instance, high-information voters are pro-free trade, pro-immigration, in favor of criminal justice reform, wish to raise taxes to offset the deficit, anti-war, pro-gay rights, and skeptical that the welfare state can solve all our problems.

The real worry, though, is that when we look at the policy platforms of the two major parties, we see that both the Republicans and Democrats push agendas that tend to appeal to the uniformed and disinterested. We can’t quite blame them for that. After all, politicians need to win elections, and to do so, they have to appeal to voters. In a modern democracy, the uninformed will always greatly outnumber the informed. The quality of our candidates reflects the quality of our electorate. But democracy encourages our electorate to be bad quality.

There is no real solution to the problem of political ignorance, unless we are willing to break with democratic politics. Some economists, such as Robin Hanson, favor using specialized betting markets to choose policies. Law professor Ilya Somin favors radically decentralized federal systems that encourage citizens to vote with their feet. In my recent book Against Democracy, I discuss how we might experiment with epistocracy — where political power is widespread, as in a democracy, but votes are in some way weighted according to basic political knowledge. Most of these proposals set off alarm bells (usually among people who have not bothered to think carefully about how these systems work). But each proposal at least takes seriously that universal suffrage and voter ignorance go hand in hand.

Trump’s victory is the victory of the uninformed. But, to be fair, Clinton’s victory would also have been. Democracy is the rule of the people, but the people are in many ways unfit to rule.

Quote:Donald Trump’s presidential win took many — including members of his own campaign — by surprise Tuesday night.


But for members of the alt-right, the amorphous, nationalist fringe movement that gained mainstream recognition during the 2016 campaign, the brash businessman’s ascension through the Republican primary ranks and ultimately to the presidency was a victory many years in the making.

“It was like I was in a bit of a dream last night,” Richard Spencer told Yahoo News on Wednesday. “It was like a pinch-me moment.”

Quote:For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback. #Trump
— Richard ???? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) November 9, 2016

Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute, a Virginia-based white nationalist think tank, is widely recognized as the founder of the alt-right. For Spencer and other members of the movement, Trump’s election was more than just a victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

“This is a very, very significant victory against virtually the entire American political and media class,” said Jared Taylor, another prominent alt-right figure and the founder of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance.

Trump, Taylor noted, received only two major newspaper endorsements compared to Clinton’s 57.

“And yet he beat the establishment candidate,” he said. “Shows how completely out of touch American elites are with the people of their country.”
Specifically, the people Taylor is referring to are white Americans.

“We take it for granted that blacks will vote for candidates who promise good things for blacks. The same for Hispanics as well,” he said. Taylor is a self-described “race realist,” or proponent of the widely-denounced theory that certain races are biologically superior to others, and has advocated on behalf of eugenics.

“You could argue that, for the first time, whites are clearly beginning to vote the way people of other races do — that is to say, in their own interests,” he said.

More a loose web of far right ideologues than a cohesive political movement, the alt-right is connected by a shared interest in promoting a white national identity, fueled by the belief that white American culture is under attack.

Even now, alt-right leaders like Taylor are the first to admit that Trump is “not one of us.” But they are also quick to recognize Trump’s campaign as a vehicle for their interests. Among other things, Trump has said he wants to build a massive wall along the U.S.’s southern border, deport everyone living illegally in the U.S., and bar all Muslims from entering the country. Even Trump’s campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again” — was interpreted by some as a nod to a time when American culture was less pluralistic.

“Building a wall to keep out illegals, sending home all illegals, taking a very hard look at Muslims, ending sanctuary cities, putting an end to birthright citizenship,” Taylor said, rattling off Trump campaign proposals that resonate with the alt-right.

Though the average Trump supporter does not identify as a part of the alt-right, a movement that many have never heard of, Spencer and others argue that it was these same antiestablishment viewpoints that ultimately earned Trump such widespread support among white voters.

“White middle Americans, wherever they live, had been ignored by politicians of both parties,” said Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and the founder of Stormfront.org, one of the oldest and most popular “white nationalist” forums on the Internet. “Immigration simply wasn’t part of the debate because both parties wanted some form of amnesty for illegals. Nor was free trade and globalism. Then Trump threw a monkey wrench into the system.”
Black said he couldn’t help but take some pleasure in the “shock and awe” over Trump’s victory Wednesday morning.

Taylor compared Trump’s presidential win to the similarly unexpected success of this summer’s Brexit referendum to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union. Not only were both “considered nearly impossible by pollsters,” Taylor argued, but like Brexit, Trump’s win is also “part of a worldwide reawakening of nationalist sentiment.”
View photos

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, surrounded by a group of supporters, was a vocal supporter of Trump’s bid for the White House. (Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)

More

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit that monitors extremist groups in the U.S., said the number of hate groups in the country has shot up dramatically in recent years. The SPLC attributes the proliferation of these groups to a variety of factors, including the election of the country’s first black president and the subsequent projection from the U.S. Census Bureau that, by 2050, whites will be a minority in the United States.

“That drove a lot of fear into the hearts of people who were ‘racially conscious,’ or racist,” Ryan Lenz, editor of the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog, told Yahoo News. “Donald Trump tapped into that fear and stoked that fear.”

Lenz said it’s not quite clear whether Trump’s rhetoric riled that fear into “racial rage” or if “this underlying hatred, fear of the other” existed before Trump entered the presidential race and propelled his campaign forward.

“What is clear is that three days after the election, there is palpable and real evidence that racism is alive and well in this country,” Lenz said, referring to the growing list of people who have reported incidents of racially charged violence, harassment and intimidation in the 48 hours after Trump was elected president.  

As of Friday evening, the SPLC had counted more than 201 cases of election-related hate speech and intimidation since Trump’s win Tuesday, based on news articles, social media posts, and reports submitted through the center’s website.

“The irony is that … after Obama’s election, many people were saying that we were living in a post-racial America,” Lenz said. “Eight years later, it’s very clear that we are not.”
View photos

Trump delivers his acceptance speech after winning the presidency. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

More

While Trump often eagerly embraced his alt-right fans on Twitter, the support of known white nationalists like Taylor and former KKK leader David Duke attracted unwanted scrutiny to his campaign — forcing Trump to distance himself from some of his more recognizable radical supporters.

But the cold shoulder did little to deter Trump’s admirers on the alt-right, whose views have long been relegated to the furthest corners of fringe.

“I didn’t see a lot of enthusiasm in those disavowals that he gave,” Spencer said. But he didn’t blame Trump for giving them, either. “I’ve been alienated from the Republican Party, been alienated from most of politics for most of my career.”

Reluctant as the president-elect may have been to take the relationship public, Spencer said, “we have this deep connection with Trump that we haven’t had with any other candidate, and I don’t think he can really deny that.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a president other than Trump strongly considering Steve Bannon as his chief of staff, as reports suggest he is. Bannon, the former chairman of the alt-right Breitbart News, helped lead Trump’s campaign in its final stages.

“Let’s be honest,” Lenz said. “The possibility that Donald Trump will bring extremist figures from the alt-right into his administration is real.”

Quote:This article first appeared on the Dorf on Law site.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of this year's election. The consequences for America and the world are profound, and we are only beginning to come to grips with what might come next. As we do so, it is important to learn and remember the key lessons from this terrible election campaign.

Unfortunately, liberals and media types are already engaging in the worst kind of post-election recriminations. Suddenly, we are being treated to 20/20 hindsight about Hillary Clinton's supposedly "flawed candidacy," even though the swing of only a few thousand votes in a couple of key states would have resulted in her winning the presidency.

Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week

Had she won the electoral vote, of course, there would surely have been no stories about how brilliantly Clinton navigated the treacherous political terrain of 2016, but rather more snark about how she should have done better.

Even the best commentators, like Jim Newell at Slate, immediately defaulted into claims about the awfulness of everyone involved on Clinton's side, writing that "the Democratic establishment has beclowned itself and is finished." To be fair, Newell published his piece at 3:25 a.m. on the 9th, only hours after the awful outcome had become a reality. His piece was more like an extended primal scream than anything else.

But the scariest part of this post-election conversation is how badly it misses the big picture. Republicans (with a big assist from the Supreme Court) have spent the last several decades figuring out how to prevent Democratic-leaning Americans from voting. Maybe that made a difference in, say, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Maybe?

More importantly, as I will discuss at length below, the supposedly liberal press relentlessly repeated the narrative that Clinton was unlikable, untrustworthy and so on. That onslaught of negativity poisoned the campaign in a way that no one could have imagined.

To blame Clinton for losing in such an environment, or to fault her "messaging" and other matters dear to political insiders, is quite frankly insane. It would be like watching a school bully tie a kid's shoelaces together and push her down the stairs, and then criticizing the kid for being clumsy.

I have been planning for quite some time to write at length about the disastrous state of the American political media. Had Clinton won this election, my message would have been that she did so in spite of the irresponsible coverage from the mainstream press. That she lost only makes this topic more urgent.

Prior to this year, I had never really thought of myself as a critic of the media. That is not to say that I have been pleased with the quality of press coverage, because at least on the issues in which I have professional expertise, I have found that reporters are almost willfully ignorant and are all too ready to write uninformed nonsense.

On the other hand, it is true that the four policy areas that have been the focus of my writing as a legal scholar and an economist—government borrowing, Social Security, tax policy and the debt ceiling—are all highly technical and often involve numbers. Writing about such issues is a challenge for anyone, and doing so in a way that lay readers can understand is truly difficult.

Still, the persistent problem that I have noticed over the years is that the press —and here I am very definitely including the most prestigious media organizations in the country—buys into the conventional wisdom almost every time. Supposedly skeptical reporters mindlessly take it as an established fact that Social Security is going bankrupt, or that tax cuts always increase economic growth, or that the president would have no choice but to cut spending during a debt ceiling crisis.

None of those things are true. The problem, however, is not that reporters would include such claims in their articles. After all, there are many politicians who say these uninformed things, and a reporter would be negligent to exclude such statements from their stories.

The true problem is that reporters do not even bother to engage in he-said-she-said journalism. They simply accept the conventional wisdom, perhaps supplemented by a quote one or two from people with alternative views (although such views are presented as being off the wall in some way).

Ezra Klein, then of The Washington Post, noted one aspect of this problem in 2013: "For reasons I've never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don't apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions."

During dozens of interviews with different reporters (print, radio, and television) over the years, I certainly have found this to be true, not only regarding deficits but on nearly all economic topics.

If the problem with economics-related stories is that they are too technical, however, then political coverage should be different. Political reporting does not require knowledge of multivariate calculus (not that economics coverage really does, either, but stay with me here). It should not be too much to expect writers and editors to resist falling into easy, lazy established narratives.

By the end of this year's campaign, however, I discovered to my surprise that a large number of my columns have been devoted to chastising the media for being nothing less than sloppy. This is not at all the same as Donald Trump's claim that "the media is corrupt" because they report unflattering facts about him. It is reporters and editors reinforcing tired storylines, especially about Hillary Clinton, that were based on little more than a smug belief that what "we all know" about Clinton must be true.

Before I get into some examples, I should acknowledge that there are trained media critics who have been taking the press to task for years, certainly before Trump's hate-filled circus came to town. For example, NYU Professor Jay Rosen has been writing incisive commentary on the media for quite a long time.

In an excellent piece from 2011, Rosen argues that the mainstream press is not biased in the standard sense of that term. Instead, the reporters are part of the "cult of savviness," where "savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political." This means that "the savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you. They say: I am closer to reality than you."

But the supposed reality that the savvy claim to have divined is a manufactured reality of inside jokes and accepted memes. As I wrote in a column after the second presidential debate last month, the with-it political writers for The New York Times clearly live in a world in which they talk to each other all the time, read each other’s work, and try hard to prove to each other that they are part of the group and are always in the know.

Again, however, a further crucial distinction is in order. Part of the immediate post-election narrative has involved faulting the media for living in a bubble and failing to see that Trump would win. Even the still-new public editor for The Times has weighed in, chiding reporters for not talking to "the half of America the paper too seldom covers."

This is silly, and it actually amounts to little more than anti-scientific bias. After all, the reason that the election was a surprise was not that a bunch of reporters had sat around in coffee shops on the the Upper West Side of Manhattan and talked to people who look like themselves, or that they only wrote down sound bites from Trump voters without truly trying to understand their lives.

Poll-based statistical models—where the pollsters had surveyed Real People—had proved to be highly accurate in the past, and it made sense to focus on them rather than on reporters' gut feelings or to lurch from one poll to another without context.

The modelers that I am aware of were quite clear that nothing was certain. Now, however, because the outcome of the election was a surprise, the claim is that the press was blinded by its own privilege.

What the electoral prediction models had been saying, however, was that Trump had about the same chance of winning as the Chicago Cubs did of coming back to win the World Series when they were down three games to one. Guess what happened there? That is not a matter of isolated or narrow reporters, but simply the reality of a still-young and imprecise statistical method.

So the problem that I am focusing on here is not that reporters should try to figure out how to talk to people from places like Ohio (where I grew up). They actually do that a lot. Calls to "contextualize" their reporting sound suspiciously like an effort to get journalists to rely even more on anecdotes and then hope that they get the big picture right. Excuse my skepticism, but it is more than a bit difficult to imagine that this will improve political reporting.

The fundamental problem is, instead, how the boys (and girls) on the bus engage in "pack journalism," where they not only cover the same stories by talking to the same sources, but they replicate each other’s framing of questions and issues. The hive mind quickly determines what is savvy, and heaven help the chump who does not go along.
[img=757x0]http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2016/11/11/1111crookedhillary01.jpg[/img]

Hillary Clinton addresses her staff and supporters about the election defeat, in New York City on November 9. Neil Buchanan writes that even though Clinton's supposed scandals never amounted to anything, we were inundated with comments about "clouds of suspicion" and "doubts" and "voters' unease with her."CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

Which brings us back to the press's coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There has been some very good commentary on this question already. In Newsweek, for example, the former news reporter Allan Chernoff recently offered some excellent insightsabout TV news coverage of the election, and Isaac Chotiner in Slate just published a particularly insightful analysis of the good and bad ways that the press covered Trump.

But the pack mentality was absolutely brutal to Clinton. For example, it turned the James Comey story in late October from a needless distraction into an embarrassment for the press (and arguably a game-changer for the election).

If reporters and editors had simply reported the facts of Comey's leaked letter to Congress, after all, they would have said that there is nothing new or interesting happening. Yet the story became a feeding frenzy based (as far as I can tell) on the idea that anything related to Clinton and emails was Big News, even when it was no such thing.

Although TV news deserves much criticism, my focus here is on the print media, especially The New York Times , because throughout the campaign these supposedly left-leaning journalists so clearly bought into a negative Clinton narrative largely of their own construction.

One problem, which I criticized again and again as it was happening, was the story that "both candidates are unpopular." This was the worst kind of lazy false equivalence, and it infected nearly every aspect of the coverage. It also helped to make people feel morally superior by saying, "I'm not voting for either one of them because they're both terrible people."

The bigger problem was that no one actually seemed to have watched Hillary Clinton during this campaign—that is, almost no one watched her without putting everything she said through the "Hillary is a scandal-ridden and unlikable policy wonk" filter.

For example, Clinton's comments during the second and third debates regarding sexual assault and women's rights were downright moving. But even if a journalist were to disagree with my subjective assessment, at the very least the objective truth is that Clinton spoke with intensity and emotion. Yet we were soon back to seeing supposedly objective news articles that lazily relied on anti-Clinton memes such as her supposed need for "the safety of her teleprompter." Unrelatability again.

Even though Clinton's supposed scandals have never amounted to anything, we were inundated with comments about "clouds of suspicion" and "doubts" and "voters' unease with her." The coverage of the Clinton Foundation was especially galling, because it added up to nothing but was infused with comments about "intimations of pay-to-play" and similarly slanted language that fed into the overarching narrative.

The day before the election, when it still appeared that Clinton would win, two media critics for The Times discussed what lessons the press should learn from the campaign. They were, of course, worried about how easily the press had been played by Trump, but they could not resist going right back to the well of false equivalence.

One reporter pointed out that Trump lied all the time, but he then made sure to tell us that Clinton "fibbed less ( but did aplenty )." The story to which he linked was a PolitiFact piece from late October titled "Hillary Clinton's Top 10 Most Misleading Claims." As usual, this was an astonishing article in which Clinton was subjected to a clear presumption of guilt.

For example, PolitiFact rated as a "Pants on Fire" lie a claim from Clinton that "Comey said my answers were truthful." Why was this false? "Comey said that there is 'no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI' about her email practices. But Comey has specifically declined to comment on whether Clinton’s public remarks have been truthful."

So he said that she did not lie, but he did not specifically say that she was telling the truth. There is a difference there, but people refer to "not guilty" verdicts as "innocent" all the time. Yet the conclusion is that Clinton's pants are on fire?

Even more bizarrely, PolitiFact's list includes a greatest hit from 2008 about her landing under sniper fire in Bosnia, a claim that all of her grandparents were immigrants and a claim that "Donald Trump doesn't make a thing in America." (Of the latter claim, PolitiFact writes: "Many of Trump’s products are made overseas, but not all of them." Bombshell!)

This is all incredibly petty, but it then becomes a citation for a Times reporter to say that Clinton "fibbed aplenty." As I wrote over the summer, the lists of Clinton's supposed scandals is similarly full of hot air, including the nine-times-investigated-and-debunked Benghazi non-scandal.

The problem is that a reporter who adopts this kind of insider wink-wink narrative never runs a risk of losing professional stature, because that is what they are all saying, even though it is not based on facts or logic. It is impossible to imagine anyone other than Clinton being called a big fat liar for saying, for example, that "I am the only candidate on either side who has laid out a specific plan about what I would do to defeat ISIS." That counts as "false"? Not an argument with which one might disagree, but a falsehood?

When the prestige press gets into this kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop, of course, everyone else piles on. Saying "Clinton is dishonest" becomes as safe as saying that the budget should be balanced. (Both statements are false).

This then affects other commentators. For example, Trevor Noah's first year on "The Daily Show" has been marked by an unquestioning acceptance of the Clinton-is-dishonest conventional wisdom.

After the first debate, for example, Noah showed a clip of Clinton saying something about crime rates that was absolutely true. Even so, he then scolded her: "You don't need to defend it by lying. These are the small lies that allow false equivalency to exist."

Again, she had not lied. But Noah, safe in the embrace of the narrative that the top-tier media pushed relentlessly, acted as if it was obvious that she had done something wrong, and he seemed to believe sincerely that he was only trying to help.

After all of that, it should surprise no one that even commentators who want to praise Clinton go out of their way to offer up gems like this one from Nicholas Kristof: "Clinton has made thousands of compromises and innumerable mistakes, her pursuit of wealth has been unseemly and politically foolish, and it’s fair to question her judgment on everything from emails to Iraq." With friends like these...

And of course, we end up with the Clinton emails saga. This story dominated the mainstream media narrative like no other, yet there was virtually nothing to it. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones did what journalists are supposed to do, that is, he actually read the FBI's report from beginning to end. He concluded that it was "an almost complete exoneration of Hillary Clinton" and that "if the FBI is to be believed, it's all pretty small beer."

Seriously, read the article. It is astonishing how much distance there is between the FBI's findings and what made its way into the discussion in the press. No matter the reality, it was a "scandal" that framed everything about the media's coverage of Clinton, and it seemed to support the "Crooked Hillary" label from Trump.

This, then, brings us back to the people, especially young people, who decided that they did not need to vote for Clinton over Trump because "everyone sucks," or "I just don't know about her," or whatever.

Clinton only needed support from a few thousand of those non-voters in swing states to turn her popular vote victory into an electoral college victory. Yet they stayed home (or voted for third-party candidates), some in disgust and others due to a sense of entitled (and imaginary) purity, convinced by the relentless anti-Clinton narrative.
Related Stories

• White Voters Helped Unravel Clinton's Blue Wall
  
• Third Party Votes May Have Helped Trump Win
  
• Hillary Clinton Beats Trump in Popular Vote
  
• Neil Buchanan: Why Is the Press Ganging Up on Clinton?
  

To return to my image of the bully and his victim in high school, it was bad enough that Clinton had to deal with Trump's provocations. He was the one tying her shoelaces together and pushing her, but the supposedly liberal press was throwing things at her and telling her to catch them or dodge them as she tried not to fall down the stairs.

She still managed to come out of it all with her dignity intact, never falling even as the last banana peels were thrown in her path.
Yet now some people want to blame her for being flawed. She lost a winnable election, they say, but she did so because she could not overcome voter suppression or a relentlessly harsh media narrative. She—and the country—deserved better. Now, we will all pay the price.

Neil H. Buchanan is an economist and legal scholar, a professor of law at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Taxation Law and Policy Research Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches tax law, tax policy, contracts, and law and economics. His research addresses the long-term tax and spending patterns of the federal government, focusing on budget deficits, the national debt, health care costs and Social Security.
REQUEST REPRINT OR SUBMIT CORRECTION[url=http://www.newsweek.com/neil-buchanan-cruel-crooked-caricature-doomed-clinton-520125#][/url]