Trump's World is finally caving in on him

Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said.

“No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not.”

At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment.

More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.

About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.

According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.

“He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere.”

She fled to the back of the plane. “It was an assault,” she said.

Ms. Leeds has told the story to at least four people close to her, who also spoke with The New York Times.

Mr. Trump’s claim that his crude words had never turned into actions was similarly infuriating to a woman watching on Sunday night in Ohio: Rachel Crooks.

Ms. Crooks was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan, when she encountered Mr. Trump outside an elevator in the building one morning in 2005.

Aware that her company did business with Mr. Trump, she turned and introduced herself. They shook hands, but Mr. Trump would not let go, she said. Instead, he began kissing her cheeks. Then, she said, he “kissed me directly on the mouth.”

It didn’t feel like an accident, she said. It felt like a violation.

“It was so inappropriate,” Ms. Crooks recalled in an interview. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”
Shaken, Ms. Crooks returned to her desk and immediately called her sister, Brianne Webb, in the small town in Ohio where they grew up, and told her what had happened.

“She was very worked up about it,” said Ms. Webb, who recalled pressing her sister for details. “Being from a town of 1,600 people, being naïve, I was like ‘Are you sure he didn’t just miss trying to kiss you on the cheek?’ She said, ‘No, he kissed me on the mouth.’ I was like, ‘That is not normal.’”

In the days since Mr. Trump’s campaign was jolted by a 2005 recording that caught him bragging about pushing himself on women, he has insisted, as have his aides, that it was simply macho bluster. “It’s just words,” he has said repeatedly.

And his hope for salvaging his candidacy rests heavily on whether voters believe that claim.

They should not, say Ms. Leeds and Ms. Crooks, whose stories have never been made public before. And their accounts echo those of other women who have previously come forward, like Temple Taggart, a former Miss Utah, who said that Mr. Trump kissed her on the mouth more than once when she was a 21-year-old pageant contestant.

In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims.

“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at the Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.

“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.

Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk.”

But for the women who shared their stories with The Times, the recording was more than that: As upsetting as it was, it offered them a kind of affirmation, they said.

That was the case for Ms. Taggart. Mr. Trump’s description of how he kisses beautiful women without invitation described precisely what he did to her, she said.

“I just start kissing them,” Mr. Trump said on the tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”
Ms. Crooks and Ms. Leeds never reported their accounts to the authorities, but they both shared what happened to them with friends and family. Ms. Crooks did so immediately afterward; Ms. Leeds described the events to those close to her more recently, as Mr. Trump became more visible politically and ran for president.

Ms. Leeds was 38 at the time and living in Connecticut. She had been seated in coach. But a flight attendant invited her to take an empty seat in first class, she said. That seat was beside Mr. Trump, who did not yet own a fleet of private aircraft, records show. He introduced himself and shook her hand. They exchanged pleasantries, and Mr. Trump asked her if she was married. She was divorced, and told him so.

Later, after their dinner trays were cleared, she said, Mr. Trump raised the armrest, moved toward her and began to grope her. Ms. Leeds said she recoiled. She quickly left the first-class cabin and returned to coach, she said.

“I was angry and shook up,” she recalled, as she sat on a couch in her New York City apartment on Tuesday.

She did not complain to the airline staff at the time, Ms. Leeds said, because such unwanted advances from men occurred throughout her time in business in the 1970s and early 1980s. “We accepted it for years,” she said of the conduct. “We were taught it was our fault.”

She recalled bumping into Mr. Trump at a charity event in New York about two years later, and said he seemed to recall her, insulting her with a crude remark.

She had largely put the encounter on the plane out of her mind until last year, when Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign became more serious. Since then, she has told a widening circle of people, including her son, a nephew and two friends, all of whom were contacted by The Times.

They said they were sickened by what they heard. “It made me shake,” said Linda Ross, a neighbor and friend who spoke with Ms. Leeds about the interaction about six months ago. Like several of Ms. Leeds’s friends, Ms. Ross encouraged her to tell her story to the news media. Ms. Leeds had resisted until Sunday’s debate, which she watched with Ms. Ross.

When Mr. Trump denied having ever sexually assaulted women, in response to a question from Anderson Cooper of CNN, Ms. Ross said she immediately looked at Ms. Leeds in disbelief. “Now we know he lied straight up,” Ms. Ross recalled saying.

In the days after the debate, Ms. Leeds recounted her experience in an email to The Times and a series of interviews.

“His behavior is deep seated in his character,” Ms. Leeds wrote in the message.

“To those who would vote for him,” she added, “I would wish for them to reflect on this.”
For Ms. Crooks, the encounter with Mr. Trump was further complicated by the fact that she worked in his building and risked running into him again.

A few hours after Mr. Trump kissed her, Ms. Crooks returned to her apartment in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn and broke down to her boyfriend at the time, Clint Hackenburg.

“I asked, ‘How was your day?’” Mr. Hackenburg recalled. “She paused for a second, and then started hysterically crying.”

After Ms. Crooks described her experience with Mr. Trump, she and Mr. Hackenburg discussed what to do.

“I think that what was more upsetting than him kissing her was that she felt like she couldn’t do anything to him because of his position,” he said. “She was 22. She was a secretary. It was her first job out of college. I remember her saying, ‘I can’t do anything to this guy, because he’s Donald Trump.’”

Days later, Ms. Crooks said, Mr. Trump, who had recently married Melania, came into the Bayrock office and requested her phone number. When she asked why he needed it, Mr. Trump told her he intended to pass it along to his modeling agency. Ms. Crooks was skeptical, but relented because of Mr. Trump’s influence over her company. She never heard from the modeling agency.

During the rest of her year working at Bayrock, she made a point of ducking out of sight every time Mr. Trump came into view. When Bayrock employees were invited to the Trump Organization Christmas party, she declined, wanting to avoid any other encounters with him.

But the episode stuck with her even after she returned to Ohio, where she now works for a university. When she read a Times article in May about the Republican nominee’s treatment of women, she was struck by Ms. Taggart’s recollection of being kissed on the mouth by Mr. Trump.

“I was upset that it had happened to other people, but also took some comfort in knowing I wasn’t the only one he had done it to,” said Ms. Crooks, who reached out to The Times to share her story.

Both Ms. Leeds and Ms. Crooks say they support Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, and Ms. Crooks has made contributions of less than $200 to President Obama and Mrs. Clinton.

Ms. Crooks was initially reluctant to go public with her story, but felt compelled to talk about her experience.

“People should know,” she said of Mr. Trump, “this behavior is pervasive and it is real.”

Donald Trump threatens to sue New York Times over sexual harassment report

Lawyers for Donald Trump are "drafting" lawsuits against The New York Times and The Palm Beach Post, hours after those newspapers published separate reports in which women claimed Trump had touched them inappropriately.

Two high-ranking Trump campaign sources confirmed to CNNMoney that a lawsuit against the Times was in the works, but has not been filed. One source said the campaign was also drafting a lawsuit against the Post.

"NYT editors, reporters, politically motivated accusers better lawyer up," one of the sources said on condition of anonymity.

The Times story features two women, Jessica Leeds and Rachel Crooks, who say that Trump made inappropriate physical advances. The Post story features a woman named Mindy McGillivray who says she was groped by Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 23. CNN has not been able to independently confirm their accounts.

If the Trump campaign does proceed with lawsuits, it will give both the Times and the Post the opportunity to pursue discovery and request information on Trump's entire sexual history, because Trump would have the burden of proving falsity and actual malice.

When Times reporter Megan Twohey interviewed Trump by phone on Tuesday night, "he threatened to sue us if we published these allegations," Twohey told CNNMoney. She quoted Trump as saying that "none of this ever took place" and calling her "a disgusting human being."

Twohey also received a legal letter from a Trump attorney on Wednesday afternoon.

The Times published the story online shortly before 7 p.m. Eastern.

"I think it is pretty evident this story falls clearly in the realm of public service journalism, and discussing issues that arose from the tape and his comments since it surfaced," Times executive editor Dean Baquet told CNNMoney.

A lawyer for Trump similarly threatened to sue The Times when it published several pages of his 1995 tax return earlier this month.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond when asked if Trump actually intended to file a lawsuit against the Times. But in a statement, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the "entire article is fiction."

"For the New York Times to launch a completely false, coordinated character assassination against Mr. Trump on a topic like this is dangerous," Miller said in the statement. "To reach back decades in an attempt to smear Mr. Trump trivializes sexual assault, and it sets a new low for where the media is willing to go in its efforts to determine this election."

"It is absurd to think that one of the most recognizable business leaders on the planet with a strong record of empowering women in his companies would do the things alleged in this story, and for this to only become public decades later in the final month of a campaign for president should say it all," his statement continued.

Twohey said Crooks, one of the two women, reached out to the newspaper after it published a story in May titled "Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private."

But Crooks was initially reluctant to speak publicly.

The other woman, Leeds, contacted the Times after Sunday's debate, when Trump was asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper if he had ever done the things he described in that video.

"No, I have not," Trump said.

Michael Barbaro, who co-bylined the story with Twohey, tweeted on Wednesday night, "This story might not have happened unless @andersoncooper had asked the pointed questions he did at debate."

In the Times story, Leeds alleges that Trump, whom she says she had never met before, grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt while the two were on an airplane more than three decades ago. Crooks, who worked in Trump Tower at a company that Trump did not own, says Trump kissed her outside an elevator after she introduced herself.

The Times report comes in the wake of the release of a 2005 recording in which Trump boasted about being able to kiss women and grope them in ways that would amount to sexual assault.

CNNMoney (Los Angeles)

First published October 12, 2016: 7:59 PM ET

Trump and His Foolish Birther Movement and How the Media has been unfair

The most graceful and dignified indictment of the U.S. media you’ll see in 2016

By Peter Daou |
SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

With some notable exceptions (David Fahrenthold comes to mind) the national political media have failed America in 2016. There is overwhelming, objective evidence that they are tipping the scales in favor of Donald Trump, offering cursory coverage of his myriad transgressions while obsessing over Hillary Clinton's every word. As a result, trust in the mass media is at an all time low.

On a day when Donald Trump has again invoked the assassination of Hillary Clinton, this response, from Kierna Mayo, is stunning in its simplicity and power:


Time is winding down and most of the 2016 race is in the rear view mirror. The view is ugly.
Hillary Clinton’s emails have been covered by major media outlets for 451 consecutive days (and 558 out of the past 562 days). Her every mistake is magnified and turned into a massive controversy. Even her cough is analyzed by pundits. She is scowled at while recovering from pneumonia and treated with dripping disdain at a Commander-in-Chief forum.
Meanwhile, Trump coasts along, leaving a trail of filth behind him. He mocks the press, toys with them, teases them. And they ask for more. Studies come out that confirm he gets better coverage. And they give him more.
Clinton is saddled with the Romney-esque 47% label for speaking the truth (inelegantly) about some of Trump’s supporters, while Trump is given a free pass for actually adding 3 points to Romney and calling 50% of the country lazy freeloaders.
Brian Beutler of the New Republic sums it up:
Whether you have a short or long view, you’ve seen enough to say authoritatively that Trump is different from all major party nominees in living memory. It is not normal in modern times for a major party nominee to be an erratic, racist demagogue; and it is almost definitionally abnormal for a major party nominee to be described as such by leading members of his own party.
These are the cardinal facts of this election. They should be the dominant upshot of any significant increment of news coverage and analysis—the thing that reaches and sticks with casual news consumers, in the same way that even musical dilettantes can hum the leitmotif of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.
For several weeks now—including since Labor Day, when most Americans truly began paying attention to the campaigns—these truths, which we all took for granted six months ago, have not been communicated to glancing news consumers. They’ve receded from most article leads, headlines, front pages, and A-block TV segments.
That development is the product of many collective choices and thousands of individual ones. It is an institutional failure, and as such, a major and abrupt course correction seems highly unlikely. But that doesn’t absolve reporters, editors, producers or anyone else who is part of the system.
There will be a reckoning when this race is over, a moment of truth for the mass media. And it is unclear whether they can ever recover from the damage they’ve done to their own credibility.








LEMON: Yes. Is that something to be proud of to make the president produce his birth certificate and then be wrong about him not, you know, being born somewhere else?

BASH: I mean, I don't expect him to say anything different. If he's going to make this conclusion that the president was born in the United States, he's Donald Trump, of course he's going to go through the record of how it happened, that the president did go to great lengths to release his long birth certificate. We all remember that happening. Now, he didn't...

(CROSSTALK)

LEMON: If we could find that sound bite it would be great of the president saying, you know, we don't have time for this when he produced his birth certificate, I would like to play that moment.

(CROSSTALK)

BASH: Yes, but he didn't put...

LEMON: And also -- there's also -- there's also a moment where he's saying you wouldn't believe what -- it was an interview, I forget who -- don't know if it was Katy. I forget who is he is with. No, it was Meredith Vieira, Meredith Vieira, where he says you won't believe I had my investigators, you know, over in Africa and then Hawaii and you won't believe what I'm finding out.

So, -- and then he goes on to say, "Mr. Trump did a great service to the president and to the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised." They brought the Hillary Clinton thing up again. "Inarguably, Donald Trump is a closer, having successfully obtained President Obama's birth certificate when others could not. Mr. Trump believes the president -- that President Obama was born in the United States."

I have to give it to Jason Miller. I mean, it was, this is a pretty interesting read.

PRESTON: Here's thing that you have to ask yourself too about the whole issue for the Republican Party. And let me defend the Republican Party in this. Almost every republican official in Washington, I think just about every one of them, believes that Barack Obama was born in the United States.

LEMON: Republican officials, but not most republicans, I believe, especially Donald Trump supporters.

PRESTON: Look, I think it's like 20 percent of people who were at national polls...

LEMON: Born outside of the United States and he's Muslim.

PRESTON: Think he was born -- you know, by the way, they all don't have to be republicans. Some of those could be very conservative democrats, they could be independents.

LEMON: Or just people who are divorced from reality.

PRESTON: Correct. I mean, they don't even need a political affiliation. But the fact is that this issue should have been put to bed a long time ago. Hillary Clinton's e-mail issue should have never happened, these medical records that we got in the last 24 hours should have been put together...

LEMON: Donald Trump shouldn't release his tax...

PRESTON: The tax issue should have been released a long time ago. I mean, this is another line of transparency that we're not seeing from either candidates.

LEMON: Yes. Dana, "Mr. Trump is now totally focused on bringing jobs back to American, defeating radical Islamic terrorism, taking care of our veterans, introducing choice of school, opportunities, and rebuilding and making our inner cities safe again." End of story. It's done. This issue is over.

BASH: Well, that's what he hopes. When I was talking to the senior aide who I talked to in the commercial break who gave us the breaking news that we reported that this statement was coming, that was my first question, why now? And the answer was, so he can focus on other things, the things in that statement.

Before when we were trying to figure out why he wasn't just saying, OK, fine, the president was born in the United States, you, Don, were saying well, maybe he's waiting for the debate.

Our colleague, David Chalian just e-mailed me something that's of course smart, which is all David Chalian says are smart things, and this is it's because he wants off the table before the debate, because this is not something that...

PRESTON: Of course.

BASH: ... he wants to be even a nanosecond of a focus during the debate. And you know just from the way Hillary Clinton jumped on it tonight, the fact that Washington Post interview went online with Trump, you know, sort of declining to say that the president was born in the United States.

I think it was maybe five minutes between then. And when Hillary Clinton added to that her prepared remarks in her speech this evening. So, they knew that this was going to be a potential issue. And again, remember, take a step back, this at this point, it is about Donald Trump being really close in a lot of these battleground states and to get over the line to the -- to the v-column, he has to expand his supporters, expand his base.

LEMON: Yes.

BASH: He's got those people. He needs to appeal to others.

LEMON: Phillip, we're going to talk and I know you want to get in and I promise you we'll get into it. The interesting thing is is that you have to give them -- him credit for at least now he's admitted it, I mean somewhat. You give him some credit for that. Though, I see other people in the studio saying no it took him way too long to do it. But, the interesting thing is is that why does it take so long for the campaign to admit? Why are they so tone deaf sometimes to admit that there are issues especially when we were all sitting here, when the night that he gave his speech in Milwaukee and we said why is he giving the speech to a mostly white crowd and the night before the campaign manager just was completely floored by, what are you talking about. So I think on this one issue, they were tone deaf, now they're trying to make up for it. 

Beware of the Arch-Deceivers: GOP's Issues With Race

Too bad The GOP created the environment in which Donald Trump is now tearing the Republicans apart by being the least productive Congress ever only because they wanted to spite President Obama. 

So sad is it that the Republican party (GOP) is in such disarray that they cannot seem to pull themselves together. There seems to be nothing but false talking points, smokescreens, lies and distractions in the form of attacks on Hillary Clinton and President Obama. 
Why are the Republicans in their current state of political disorientation? First, they have this tendency to judge and condemn harshly certain groups like liberals, those who are pro-choice, immigrants. As well, they tend to alienate women and African-Americans. 
It is no secret that the GOP base consist mostly of uneducated bigots and racist that Republican politician pander to during elections. They call it firing up the base. They use certain phrases and terminology that generally contain racist overtones and/or are well within the realm of bigotry. "Let's take back our country" is one of their battle cries. 
To prove my point let us take a trip down memory lane. To understand where we are now we should know a little about the Republican Party (GOP) and it's history concern African-Americans/Blacks.
In 1968, Richard Nixon realized he could not become president unless he made a deeply cynical move: convincing southern racists to vote Republican.

The trouble was, they hadn't done that since the Republican Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. But Nixon calculated that the Democratic "Solid South" could now be broken open: after the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and '64, and the Voting Rights Act of '65, racists, feeling betrayed and furious, were looking for a new home.

So, in what became known as the Southern Strategy, Nixon invited racists into the GOP. Ever since, the racists have been essential to the party's "winning coalition," the collection of targeted groups that can add up to electoral victory.

Not all Republicans are racists, of course. But without racists, I don't think the GOP can win elections.

Not the kind of thing you want to talk about openly, though. So Republican politicians have become fluent in a kind of code, which they use to communicate with the ugly part of their base without offending polite society. In 1981, GOP consultant Lee Atwater offered a guide in an interview: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

More recent examples: "taking back our country," voter ID, border security and birtherism.

But now, along comes a cartoon racist like Donald Trump, who ignores the code and drops the veil from the GOP's structural racism. In response, Republican politicians pronounce themselves shocked to see such blatant bigotry, naked and unashamed.

It's a tough sell. The GOP has been doing a racist strip tease for decades now, and Trump is just skipping the tease. Only a few years ago, Senator Lindsey Graham could safely flirt with anti-immigrant racism on Fox News. Now, he's forced to go on CNN and publicly disown Trump's very similar comments, calling him a "wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community."

So embarrassing.

But it may point to a possible upside. Thanks to gauche clowns like Trump -- not to mention Cliven Bundy, Steve King and others -- the GOP, like the Democratic Party of the 60s, might be forced to reform itself, if only to end the pain.


Because the party is finally experiencing the agony of racism in a form it can't ignore: bad PR. ~from The Huff Post article by Spencer Critchley "Trump Has Exposed GOP Racism" Posted: 07/13/2015 4:03 pm EDT Updated: 07/13/2015 4:59 pm EDT~

 To further drive my point home is another article from the The Huffington Post By Jackson Connor entitled "MSNBC's Chris Matthews Accuses GOP Of Keeping Jim Crow Alive In 21st Century"

 The thought of Chris Matthews railing against Republicans isn't anything new. But during the final segment of "Hardball" Thursday night, the MSNBC host seemed particularly riled up, accusing the GOP of ushering in a new era of Jim Crow with their treatment of the country's first black president.

Matthews said he believes Americans will see Barack Obama's time in the White House in "sharper contrast” in years to come, taking into account the antics he's had to endure from his conservative foes since taking office. According to Matthews, the GOP's primary goal has been to make sure the president "accomplishes nothing" and "gets booted from office as quickly as possible.”

The host pointed to numerous examples of Republican temper tantrums, listing Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-Ark.) recent letter to Iran, subverting Obama's ongoing nuclear negotiations, and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouting “You lie,” during the president's 2009 health care speech, among the most egregious.

“They will read all this and wonder, 'What was it that made this Republican opposition so all out contemptuous of an American president?'” Matthews said. “'What made it treat him as below respect, below the dignity historically accorded his office?'”

The answer, Matthews suggested (and it's been suggested before), stems from President Obama's race.

"They will then look at a picture of this president, a picture of this man," Matthews said, "and perhaps get the idea that the age of Jim Crow managed to find a new habitat in the early 21st century Republican Party.”

H/T Mediaite

  As a reply to people calling the Republicans out for their racism they say that it is the Democrats who are the real racist. Some of the facts concerning this are laid out in the following article: "Democrats are the real racists!: Inside the GOP’s pathetic & insulting response to charges of bigotry" If you're a Republican, how exactly do you explain away Donald Trump's hideous comments about Mexicans? by HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

  If there is a more fatuous right wing trope than “Martin Luther King was a Republican” it has to be the utterly nonsensical line that Democrats are the true racists because they were the southern party during Jim Crow. Inevitably, in any discussion of race, some smart-aleck troll smugly interjects the irrelevant fact that the departed Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK and some very clever boy or girl shares the astonishingly obvious fact that Republican Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Case closed, Democrats are the racists and the Republicans are the African Americans’ true allies.

I’m not going to go over the same tired ground that hundreds of others have covered to refute this foolishness. Even the trolls know that many millions of people who used to vote for Democrats switched parties after the various civil rights acts were passed in the ’60s under a Democratic majority. While they deny there was ever such a thing as the “Southern Strategy,” and pretend that racist appeals for votes never happened, that’s also a documented fact and they know that too.

But just because conservatives are clearly playing games, it doesn’t lessen the insult to African Americans when they make these inane claims. After all, if Democrats are the “real racists,” then 95 percent are African Americans must be very dumb indeed.

Here’s one of conservatives’ more “entertaining” strategies for proving their specious argument, from a chain email I received some time back, a painfully awkward attempt at satirizing the voice of a supposedly Democratic racist:

REWARD!

CAPTURE and RETURN  RUNAWAYS from the Democratic Party’s LIBERAL PLANTATION.

Any Person of Color claiming to be Republican, Conservative or a member of the Tea Party is suspect and should be berated, insulted, abused and returned.

BE ON THE LOOK-OUT

Runaways often speaking in an uppity manner about right the individual, personal responsibility an greatness of America and other such nonsense.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

THE PARTY OF JIM CROW

THE PARTY OF BULL CONNOR

in the not so distant past would lynch People of Color for voting Republican.

Then we learned it’s far better to just buy their votes using taxpayer money and for over forty years that’s what we have done!

WE OWN THEM.

*Amount of cash reward pending results of our fund-raising efforts. You didn’t expect us to use our own money, did you?

Those are words on a widely trafficked chain email, based upon real runaway slave posters. And it is disgusting, not only for the revolting imagery, but for making a mockery of the horror of slavery itself. After all, what this is is saying is that the vast majority of African Americans are “owned” by the Democratic Party, not because they’ve been bought but because they’ve been “bought-off,” and by implication have no sense of personal responsibility or belief in the “greatness of America.”

Again, this is a truly specious line of argument. They are saying that Black people vote Democratic because they’ve been “bought off” with all that generous welfare and food stamp money. The only “good” Black people, therefore, are the “runaways” who vote Republican. (Could they be any more contemptuous of the people they are supposed to be defending?) This “liberal plantation” concept, while not always as crudely expressed as in the aforementioned email, is pervasive among right wingers. And truthfully, this argument is often deployed by African American conservatives who obviously have a claim to use the imagery even though their message is insulting to the vast number of fellow African Americans who vote Democratic.

The question of why Black Americans vote for Democrats is not a mystery and it has nothing to do with being “bought (off).” As everyone surely knows, when they were allowed to do it at all, black Americans traditionally voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln for many years. This was for obvious reasons — he was the man who freed the slaves. But as this article in the Washington Post points out, African Americans started voting for Democrats long before they allegedly started chasing all that free government money:

[The] Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies pulled data from independent research, Gallup polling, exit polls, professional polling firms and their own surveys to put together a look at the partisan makeup of black voters since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. That the data start in 1936 and not, say, with the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War — thanks largely to a Republican president — is because the ability of black Americans to vote was regularly restricted and uneven. 
  In the decade before 1948, black Americans identified as Democrats about as often as they did Republicans. In 1948, as Real Clear Politics’ Jay Cost wrote a few years ago, Democrat Harry Truman made an explicit appeal for new civil rights measures from Congress, including voter protections, a federal ban on lynching and bolstering existing civil rights laws. That year, the number of blacks identifying as Democrats increased.

The second big jump is the one that you likely thought of first: The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its passage in July of that year was the culmination of a long political struggle that played out on Capitol Hill. When he signed the bill, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said that Democrats would, as a result, lose the South for a generation. It’s been longer than that.[…]

It’s worth [looking at the] Democratic vote in the heart of the South, including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. The average support for the Democratic candidate each year has slipped downward, but plummeted in 1948 and 1964. In the latter year, those states backed Barry Goldwater. In the former, they largely backed the States Rights party candidate, Strom Thurmond.

Black Americans have many reason to vote Democratic. But it was two Democratic presidents proposing civil rights legislation that made them leave the Republican Party in large numbers. Likewise, it was that same movement for civil rights that made many of those white Southern Democrats switch to the GOP.

And the Republican party is still having a problem dealing with the fallout. As Brian Beutler points out in this piece at The New Republic:

[S]ince the 2012 election Republicans have been engaged in a quiet and unresolved debate amongst themselves over which of the following three strategic reforms to pursue:

1) Making genuine, substantive concessions to minority voters.

2) Making symbolic and rhetorical concessions to minority voters, without making significant changes to the GOP’s substantive agenda.

3) Making no concessions to minority voters whatsoever, while working to increase the GOP’s already impressive margins among white voters.

Two developments in the past month—the mass killing of black worshippers by a white supremacist at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, and the launch of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—have thrown into stark relief how badly option one lost out to options two and three. The ongoing Republican presidential primary has become a contest to determine which of the latter two models the party will adopt in the 2016 election.

The hesitancy of the GOP presidential candidates to step up in the wake of the Charleston massacre says everything about their “outreach” to African Americans. The popularity of Donald Trump’s crude nativism among the base likewise illuminates their difficulty in attracting Latinos in sufficient numbers to win a national election. They are stuck.

But what can they expect? When you have people constantly spewing vacuous nonsense about the Democrats being the party of racism even as you are insulting African Americans to their faces, it’s hard to make a case for minorities voting for your party. Calling immigrants a bunch of rapists and criminals and rising dramatically in the GOP primary polls isn’t exactly a friendly gesture of inclusion.

Whether they like it or not, it is a historical fact that many people who were once members of the Democratic Party switched their affiliation to the GOP when the Democrats voted for civil rights legislation and Democratic presidents signed it. This is not a debatable point. That so many Republicans choose to pretend this isn’t so is either a sign that they are arguing in bad faith or they are living in denial. Either way, it won’t solve their problem: they just have no idea what to do about all the resentful white voters they’ve been opportunistically coaxing into their coalition for the last few decades. They can try to prevent people from voting and they can pretend that “illegal immigrants” are stealing elections. But it won’t change the fundamental reality that they are on the wrong side of history and have been for a very long time.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

 Bernie Sanders Rips Donald Trump While Calling Out The Bigoted Billionaire’s Racism

By: Jason Easley

Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ripped Donald Trump at a Latino roundtable in Iowa. Sanders stood up to the 

Republican bully by calling out Trump’s racism.

According to the Sanders campaign:


In a statement, Sanders said: “This country has experienced racism for hundreds of years. I would have hoped that by the year 2015 leading candidates for president like Mr. Trump would campaign on their ideas as to how they can address our serious problems, and not by trying to divide the country with racist and demagogic appeals. Clearly Trump is scapegoating the Hispanic community. Immigrants are not responsible,” Sanders stressed, “for the disappearing American middle class, the Wall Street collapse brought on by huge financial institutions’ greed and illegal behavior, the war in Iraq, income inequality or climate change.”
At the roundtable discussion, Sanders called Trump’s comments “mean” and “denigrating” to an entire group of people and accused him of using Latinos as “whipping boys” to distract attention from real problems confronting the country. He called it “absurd, racist and wrong” to blame immigrants for the nation’s problems.

“That is absolutely unacceptable,” the senator added during the roundtable discussion at the Muscatine County Boxing Club. “That kind of discourse should be removed from our politics.”

Sen. Sanders was correct. Donald Trump is scapegoating the Hispanic community, but Trump is merely building on the precedent that has been set by his party. The Republican Party has been trying to distract the country from their unpopular policies by playing up their imaginary immigration menace for nearly a decade.

Trump has brought the thinly veiled racial dog whistles that Republicans have been using out the open by being extremely blunt and direct about his bigotry.

Bernie Sanders has integrity and courage, which is why he directly confronted Trump and ripped him for his racist tactics. The “campaign strategy” is that Donald Trump is using should have been roundly condemned by the Republican Party. Instead of doing the decent thing, Republican presidential candidates have scrambled to follow Trump’s lead and cater to the bigots among their voters.


Since Republicans are too afraid to stand up to the bully, Bernie Sanders has risen to knock Trump down.

The GOP isn’t in trouble because of their racist base, they’re in trouble because they’re assholes

Conservatives — whose week went bad when retailers stopped selling southern treason flags before turning unbearable when the Supreme Court re-shoved affordable health care down America’s throat today  — are in a bit of a slump. After being smacked across the snout with a rolled-up copy of Modern Etiquette and told it was considered déclassé to wave a Confederate flag while killing black churchgoers, they are doing a little soul searching and discovering that their soul looks like a raisin that fell under the refrigerator over a year ago.

According to Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast, Republicans need to take a hard look at this whole dogwhistlin’, red-meat tossin’, hunkerin’ down in the dust with southern yahoos and talking about them thar obstreperous and uppity colored folk.

The injection of Southerners into the Republican coalition—a coalition they ultimately came to dominate—couldn’t help but change the image of the GOP. There were racial, cultural, political, and even religious implications. Republicans captured the South, yes, but the South also captured the GOP. There were no doubt many salutary benefits to this arrangement—most obviously, an electoral boon that lasted for decades. But it also guaranteed we would eventually see a day of reckoning.
Lewis then goes on to soft-peddle the “Southern Strategy,” writing “Whether or not you accept that this was an intentional strategy…”

It almost as if he is blissfully unaware of the late campaign wizard Lee Atwater bluntly describing it no uncertain terms as the way to the promised land.

Here is Atwater to explain it for the dim at heart:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gger, n*gger.”
I can see how someone might find that unclear when their thesis is dependent upon pretending it doesn’t exist — but let’s move on.

Lewis is concerned that, having allowed  their Confederate flag-waving crazy cousins into a Republican big tent that is whiter than a Wes Anderson movie, the Republicans can’t get their message heard over all of the yee-hawing, drunken political fistfights, and guns a’shootin’ into the air.

So here’s what the GOP has to figure it out: How do they continue to get the Bubba vote while shedding appeals to the cultural symbolism of the past? How do they sell their conservative ideas about free markets, strong national defense, and conservative family values to 21st-century Americans?
Here is the problem with that.

That is what Romney ran on in 2012 and the electorate was all, “Nah, we’ll pass” and Romney at least had the virtue of seeming like a decent –albeit out of touch — guy with sincerely held beliefs that were equally out of touch with anyone not still living in the 50’s.

This election go-around the party bus is top-heavy with smarmy assholes like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker, insincere assholes like Rand Paul and Jeb Bush, dumb assholes like Rick Perry, and executive assholes like Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina. To his credit, Marco Rubio to this point only seems like a sweaty overachiever, but the debates may push him into belching forth something equally assholish.

The problem for the GOP is both the medium and the message.  And even if they can somehow tamp down the party’s inherent racism –which is a feature and not a bug — in an election that most likely won’t feature a person of the dusky hue, they’re still going to have to explain that giving more tax cuts to the rich, starting up a few new wars, stripping millions of people of healthcare benefits, while trashing women, minorities, seniors, the poor, unions, gays, and science is what America is yearning for.


Good luck with that, guys. See you on the other side.


The GOP isn’t in trouble because of their racist base, they’re in trouble because they’re assholes