Islamophobia HOAX: NY Muslim Yasmin Seweid arrested for filing false report #GellerRightAgain https://t.co/hWFiNkKECB pic.twitter.com/7ZWiMxlbGg— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) December 14, 2016
Throwback because watching hair cutting videos today made me think how crazy it was I cut all this off. pic.twitter.com/rx7pw9wpzP— ɑղժí (@andi_ludewig) December 12, 2016
A month after the surprise election of Donald Trump in November (surprising to noone more than to Trump and Clinton), the losers are still working through the stages of anguish in ways that seem strange to many observers but of which they appear oddly proud.Keep reading.
Not only do they brag of the length and intensity of their bouts of sobbing —"crying as if someone died" was a common description — but, as New York magazine reported days later, professional women all over the country are making a brave stand to protest Trump's election by doing hideous things to their hair. Because "the election results felt like an attack on minorities, women, and marginalized people in general," a "vegan chef" cut her hair off to send Trump a "message." Others like her got buzz cuts, flat tops or tossed out their extensions, and went platinum, or black.
Unfortunately, there was not a chance in the world that this message would reach Trump, or that he would care if he got it, but somehow the logic of making themselves ugly in the interests of spiting a well-know connoisseur of feminine pulchritude just seemed the right thing to do...
The intellectual ghosts of the post-Cold War era will be haunting us for a while. https://t.co/JbWs90racv
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 13, 2016
Thanks to the principle of academic freedom, professors have unusual space in American society to challenge the powerful without fear of retribution. For this reason the right has always resented professors, and for decades it has targeted them as subversives. The election of Donald Trump and the rise to power of the extremist ideologues surrounding him, like Steve Bannon and Rudolph Giuliani, make this a frightening moment for those academics who see fighting for a more just world as part of their job.Still more.
In 2012, I found myself the target of a hate campaign after saying a few intemperate things about the National Rifle Association and American gun culture in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I was upset not only because of the horrors of the event itself—a shocking one for many Americans—but because in 1998 my high-school Spanish teacher in Springfield, Oregon, had been murdered by her son before shooting up his own high school. How many people had to die before anything was changed? Noting on Twitter that I would like to hold NRA leadership accountable for its promotion of high-powered firearms, I said that I wanted to see “Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.” This was obviously a metaphor, but thanks to a right-wing website called Campus Reform, which “monitors” leftists on college campuses, demagogues such as Michelle Malkin started a campaign to have me fired. Hundreds of phone calls and e-mails poured into the university. Luckily, I work on a unionized campus and nothing came of the campaign.
While people still joke about this incident with me, I barely gave it another thought until two weeks ago when a young conservative activist backed by the extremist right-wing organization Turning Points USA created the Professor Watchlist. Listing 195 professors believed to be hostile to the group’s agenda of unregulated capitalism, white-supremacist politics, and opposition to women’s reproductive freedom, it is a rough draft of a possible Trump-era blacklist. I was placed on the Watchlist because of my attacks on the NRA four years ago. Professors across the nation found themselves suddenly targeted by well-connected conservative activists in a nation where increasingly radical Republicans have suddenly captured each branch of government. No one knows what will come of it, but the shock has ricocheted through the halls of campuses all across the country.
So far, the reaction has mostly been an awesome display of solidarity from my students and my colleagues, both at my university and around the nation. Hundreds of professors have reported themselves to the Professor Watchlist, asking to be included, with faculty at the University of Notre Dame even writing a public letter to that effect. This is wonderful. But what happens after Inauguration Day? Will free speech be respected by the Trump administration? Will the right be emboldened to launch increasingly harsh attacks against professors? If there are sustained pressure campaigns against radical academics, will administrations be able to resist giving in?
Only a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton’s campaign was denouncing Donald Trump as un-American for saying the election might be “rigged.” We criticized Mr. Trump at the time. But now that Mrs. Clinton has lost, her campaign is claiming the election really was rigged, albeit for Mr. Trump by Russian meddling, and it wants the Electoral College to stage what amounts to a coup.It's despicable. Evil even.
That’s the only way to interpret the extraordinary statement Monday by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta endorsing a special intelligence briefing for electors a week before they cast their ballots for President on Dec. 19. He released the statement hours after 10 members of the Electoral College sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seeking information on foreign interference in the election to judge if Mr. Trump “is fit to serve.” One of those electors is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.
“The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed,” Mr. Podesta said. “We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”
What should really distress Americans is that the losers are trying to overturn the election results based on little more than anonymous leaks and innuendo. Whatever Russia’s hacking motives, there is no evidence that the emails it turned up were decisive to the election result. Mr. Podesta is citing a CIA judgment that Americans have never seen and whose findings are vaguely public only because one or more unidentified officials chose to relate them to a few reporters last week.
Much of the press is reporting these as the gospel truth, though it isn’t clear that the CIA’s judgment is even shared across the intelligence community. The FBI doesn’t share the CIA’s confidence about Russia’s hacking motive, and our sources say the evidence is thin for the CIA’s conclusion.
Yet Mr. Podesta’s demand is that those same unidentified leakers now give a secret briefing to the 538 electors, most of whom lack any experience in judging the nuances of intelligence. Those electors are then supposed to decide based on information Americans won’t have seen whether they should invalidate the results of an election in which more than 128 million voted. Even Vladimir Putin at his most devious couldn’t have imagined his cyber-spooks would provoke this much anti-democratic nonsense...
The final results of the 2016 presidential election look like this: Hillary Clinton got roughly the same number of votes that President Obama received four years ago en route to his reelection, but she nonetheless lost the presidency to Donald Trump, who came in at least 2.8 million votes behind her.Still more.
That’s a highly unusual outcome — the biggest gap between the popular vote and the electoral college in almost a century and a half. Only now, with almost all the nation’s ballots counted, have analysts begun to flesh out what led to that result and what implications it has for the nation’s deep political divisions.
Start with California, where Clinton beat Trump by almost 2 to 1, amassing a margin of more than 4.2 million votes. That’s a victory more impressive even than Obama’s in 2012, and it included a win in Orange County, which had sided with the Republican in every presidential election back to 1936.
But Clinton’s huge majority in the nation’s largest state was also part of her key weakness — a base of support too concentrated in the big, urban areas of the northeast and the West Coast.
A candidate gets all of a state’s electoral votes whether she wins by four or 4 million, so in the national picture, the huge size of Clinton’s majority in California, as well as a similarly lopsided margin in New York, did her no good. Clinton piled up similarly “wasted” votes in some big, Republican states — notably Georgia and Texas — in which she did significantly better than recent Democratic nominees, but not well enough to win any electoral votes.
By contrast, Trump’s vote “was incredibly efficient,” said Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, a Democratic data and strategy firm based in Washington. “Where he lost, he lost big. Where he won, he won by a little. There weren’t many wasted votes. He won almost all the close ones.”
Trump narrowly eked out the victories he needed in key states of nation’s industrial belt, taking Michigan by 10,704, according to final returns, Wisconsin by 22,717 and Pennsylvania by just under 45,000, according to a compilation of the latest data maintained by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.
The reasons that happened varied from state to state, Bonier and other analysts note. In Ohio and Wisconsin, for example, turnout fell, belying the image of an army of previously hidden Trump voters storming the polls.
In Pennsylvania, by contrast, that image may be more accurate — turnout rose significantly across the state. Similarly, in Florida, Clinton won heavily in nearly all the places that Democrats generally count on, but lost because of a huge election-day upsurge in heavily white, nonurban counties of the central part of the state, according to an analysis by Democratic strategist Steve Schale.
One big, consistent piece of the problem was that Clinton performed worse than Obama did in blue-collar, predominantly white communities outside of major cities; such as the counties that include Scranton and Erie, Pa.; Youngstown, Ohio; Green Bay, Wis.; and Daytona Beach in Florida. In many such counties, Clinton’s vote was 15 percentage points or more below what Obama received in his reelection.
“When I look at those blue-collar areas, I’m still kind of in awe” over how dramatic the change was, said Sean Trende, election analyst for the RealClearPolitics website.
Clinton actually did better than Obama in counties that have high levels of education — Orange County being a prime example — as well as suburban counties outside Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston and several other major cities.
Indeed, the share of the white population with a college degree or higher turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of which candidate would win a particular area this year.
Trump’s weakness in those suburban counties, which in the past have often sided with Republicans, provides “a big red, flashing sign for both parties,” said Trende.
The danger for Democrats is that “if Trump can bring those suburban Republicans back into the fold” without losing his core support among blue-collar, white voters, “he could win a pretty significant victory” in the next election, Trende said.
The danger for Republicans is that if Trump fails to improve his standing in the suburbs, “there are a bunch of GOP representatives from those districts” who could suddenly be at risk...
“Letters in The Times are the opinions of the writers, and editors strive to include a range of voices. But the goal is to present readers with civil, intelligent, fact-based opinions that enlarge their understanding of the world,” Maharaj said. “These letters did not meet that standard.”And get this, "The Travel section plans to print letters of response in the Dec. 18 edition."
John Glenn, 1921-2016 https://t.co/lE2UaH5PLl
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 9, 2016
Democrats search for a path back into rural America’s good graceshttps://t.co/mwsCnQuYMG
— slone (@slone) December 12, 2016
