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Good morning, good folks. Time for another Saturday HNV. Hope this finds you well.
Index
1. AP comes under heavy fire for blatantly false reporting on Clinton foundation
2. Teamsters union endorses Hillary
3. LA Times: Trump calling Hillary Clinton a bigot is the tactic of a 5-year-old
4. Jonathan Chait writes “Trump: Only Desperate Liars Call Their Opponent Racist. Also Hillary Is Racist.”
5. How Hillary Clinton Could Win the Debates
6. Donald Trump Fine With Supporter who called for Hillary Clinton’s execution
7. Mother Jones: It's the End of August and Hillary Clinton's Lead Remains Clear and Steady
8. WaPo: New Quinnipiac poll showing Hillary Clinton up 10 points gives insight into why Donald Trump’s campaign is faltering
9. The First Time Hillary Clinton Was President. At Wellesley.
10. Rolling Stone: Presidential candidates ignore Women of Color at their peril
11. Mother Jones: Hillary Clinton Hits Trump With New Ad on Race
1. AP comes under heavy fire for blatantly false reporting on Clinton foundation
There is near unanimous agreement in the press that the “Breaking” report from the AP about the Clinton foundation. The report was blatantly false, misleading, and botched.
CNNMoney:
Associated Press botches Hillary Clinton report and response
But finding the fire -- the lie, the misdeed, the unethical act -- is proving to be rather difficult, as evidenced this week by an inaccurate tweet and arguably misleading story from the Associated Press that were quickly rebutted by the Clinton campaign and dismissed by many media outlets.
Three days later, the Associated Press is still standing by its story and has yet to correct its tweet, despite near unanimous agreement among other journalists that the tweet, at least, was false.
"The AP's social-media take on the story was seriously flawed," David Boardman, the Dean of the School of Media and Communication at Temple University and former editor of the Seattle Times, told CNNMoney. "It's sloppy, click-grabbing shorthand that is a disservice to the reporting to which it refers."
This is the Tweet in question:
That was patently false, as Hillary met with over 7,000 dignitaries as SOS, whereas the AP made the claim about “more than half those who met Clinton...gave money to Clinton foundation” about a very limited subset of 154 meetings (more than half of those would be, logically, anything above 77 meetings).
Not true: As the article stated, what the AP found was that "more than half the people outside the government" who met with Clinton while she was secretary of state "gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation."
Clinton campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon accused the AP of cherrypicking "a limited subset" of data to give "a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation." On Twitter, he hit the AP for failing to correct its breaking news alert, which he called "100 percent factually inaccurate."
Brian Fallon’s tweet:
2. Teamsters union endorses Hillary
Teamsters.org press release:
Teamsters Endorse Hillary Clinton for President
Clinton Will Be a Strong Voice for Working Families
(WASHINGTON) – Today, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. The Teamsters General Executive Board unanimously voted to endorse the former senator and secretary of state.
“We are proud to endorse Hillary Clinton for President of the United States,” said Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa. “She is the right candidate for the middle class and working men and women across the country. She will stand strong for the workers of America by fighting to reject job-killing trade deals, enforcing labor laws and working to provide retirement security for millions of people who have sacrificed so much for the chance to retire with dignity.
“The Oval Office needs to be occupied by a serious candidate who understands what it means to govern responsibly,” Hoffa said. “Donald Trump supports national right-to-work laws that are proven to weaken the middle class and has a long track record of shipping jobs out of the country as a businessman. He is no friend to working Americans.”
This is a great endorsement from the 4th-largest union in the country. The Teamsters provide a lot of boots on the ground for the general election, both for GOTV efforts and for registration efforts, canvassing, etc. The Teamsters also run media advertising to support their choices. Glad to have you, Teamsters.
3. LA Times: Trump calling Hillary Clinton a bigot is the tactic of a 5-year-old
LATimes:
Trump calling Hillary Clinton a bigot is the tactic of a 5-year-old
Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times)
Donald Trump has said many crazy things, some quite entertaining, many wildly fantastical and incendiary. Now he may have outdone himself with his charge that Hillary Clinton is a bigot.
Even people who oppose Clinton and loathe her political views — maybe even those who believe that she is corrupt and think she should be “locked up” — would have a hard time agreeing that she is a bigot. Perhaps Trump does not know what the word actually means. Given his record and the company he keeps, he should.
In this case, an obvious bigot calling someone else a bigot to deflect from his own bigotry is a prime example of projecting.
His charge that Clinton is a bigot is yet another attempt to twist facts after being stung by allegations that he is empowering real bigots.
…
Trump could have responded in many ways to this onslaught, but he chose to take the approach of a 5-year-old who has been called a name and simply shouts the same name back — “I’m not a bigot, you’re a bigot!
….
But calling Hillary a bigot? That’s a tactic that assumes blacks and Latinos do not know what a real bigot is. Bad assumption, Mr. Trump. They know. They know too well.
Trump is the bigot, even most Republicans are well aware of the fact, and HIM calling Hillary a bigot has backfired because nobody takes these desperate rantings seriously.
4. Jonathan Chait writes “Trump: Only Desperate Liars Call Their Opponent Racist. Also Hillary Is Racist.”
Trump: Only Desperate Liars Call Their Opponent Racist. Also Hillary Is Racist.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech tying together Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from his early days excluding African-American tenants from his family’s housing in New York to what Paul Ryan called “textbook racist” comments that a Mexican-American was unfit to judge whether Trump had committed fraud. Trump fired off a peripatetic series of replies. He oddly lambasted Clinton’s speech as “short,” raising the tantalizing question of what further evidence of his racism he believes she should have included. (His racialized hysteria against the “Central Park Five”? His assertions that black people are inherently lazy?) He lambasted Clinton’s use of the racism charge, “the last refuge of the discredited politician,” a cheap trick to which only a scoundrel would resort. Then finally, that evening, forgetting his conviction that only a discredited politician would charge his opponent with racism, Trump appeared on CNN, where he called Clinton a “bigot.”
Trump couldn’t help himself. Hillary’s cutting and 100% correct speech got under his skin, so he lashed out, as only he would. The difference is that everybody knows that Trump is a racist and a bigot, while everybody knows that Hillary is not.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager, boasted in July (when he was still running the pro-Trump Breitbart), “We’re the platform for the alt-right.” Trump has not made the GOP a white-supremacist party, he has simply nudged it further along that spectrum.
Trump has forced conservatives to either accept this evolutionary step toward its white-identity constituency, or fight it.
The GOP is at a crossroads. Embrace racial hatred, bigotry and xenophobia as the main party tenet, or fight the racist movement and eradicate it from the party, thereby expanding your reach with minorities. This is a pivotal crossroads, given the major demographic shifts we are undergoing as a country.
5. How Hillary Clinton Could Win the Debates
The New York Times “Taking Note” page muses that Hillary’s cutting speech shows how Hillary can win the debates.
New York Times:
How Hillary Clinton Could Win the Debates
If you were wondering how Hillary Clinton would handle Donald Trump in a debate, you may have just gotten a preview.
In a speech on Thursday billed as a critique of the “alt-right,” she calmly enumerated the many comments and actions that should disqualify Mr. Trump from the presidency.
…
Mrs. Clinton is not generally known as a stirring speaker, but the moment showcased one of her strengths: the ability to deflate opponents’ arguments with the force of her disdain. We saw it in her face at the 11-hour Benghazi hearings. We saw it in her response to Lincoln Chafee’s strange attempt, in an early debate, to link the Iraq War with her email server (asked if she’d like to respond, she said simply, “no”).
And we saw it repeatedly on Thursday, as Mrs. Clinton showed the American people how ludicrous and deplorable Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is.
Hillary’s exasperation with those on the right, and Trump, and the Benghazi committee and morons is real. It is responsible for some of her best lines and speeches.
The article concludes that if Donald Trump continues in the vein he has, Hillary has a winner of a strategy at her disposal for the debates.
6. Donald Trump Fine With Supporter who called for Hillary Clinton’s execution
The Huffington Post reports:
Donald Trump Fine With Supporter Who Called For Hillary Clinton’s Execution
In July, Al Baldasaro, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire, said Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton“should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”
And now Donald Trump says he is unfamiliar with the remarks.
Yeah, right. Trump is glued to Twitter 24/7. He gets all his news from the web.
“I didn’t know that but I will tell you he’s a very fine person,” Trump told a New Hampshire TV station on Thursday. “He is a person that loves the military and loves the veterans.”
Baldasaro is an advisor to the Trump campaign who has spoken at Trump events, and he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. His widely-reported call for Clinton’s execution prompted an investigation by the Secret Service, not to mention lots of condemnation.
And Trump didn’t know that? The reporter asked again if Trump condoned Baldasaro’s call for Clinton’s execution.
“I don’t know what he said,” Trump insisted. “You’d have to show me what he said.”
Of course. Trump doesn’t know what was said. Does anybody believe that? This guy has taken playing the ignoramus role “with pride” to new heights never before seen.
7. Mother Jones: It's the End of August and Hillary Clinton's Lead Remains Clear and Steady
It's the End of August and Hillary Clinton's Lead Remains Clear and Steady
Is the presidential race tightening up? Let's take a look. Here's Pollster:
No tightening evident here. Here's Sam Wang:
No tightening here either. If anything, Clinton has improved her position. Here's Real Clear Politics:
Some slight tightening here since early August, when the convention bumps settled down. Maybe a point or so. Here's Nate Cohn:
Compelling graphs. The race has been very stable since the beginning of August. No movement at all, really.
8. WaPo: New Quinnipiac poll showing Hillary Clinton up 10 points gives insight into why Donald Trump’s campaign is faltering
A new poll showing Hillary Clinton up 10 points gives insight into why Donald Trump’s campaign is faltering
A new survey from Quinnipiac University shows Hillary Clinton with a 10-point lead over Donald Trump, with more than half of respondents preferring her candidacy. "We are starting to hear the faint rumblings of a Hillary Clinton landslide," the assistant director of the poll wrote in his summary, which of course is the sort of thing that is currently being passed around Clinton's headquarters in Brooklyn to semi-constrained giddiness.
This from Quinnipiac, a pollster that had pretty much shown the worst numbers for Hillary in the primaries and early in the general election. It was so bad that Quinnipiac had become a running joke around here. “Q to the rescue” was the response when among 6, 7, 8 polls, all showing Hillary ahead by close to double digits, a Quinnipiac poll, national or state, would pop up and show a much tighter affair, giving fresh hope to the Hillary opponent. Anyway, THAT Quinnipiac has just released a devastating (for Trump) national poll.
What we can learn from the Quinnipiac poll is what's changed since their last survey, conducted at the end of June. In that poll Clinton led 42 to 40. Now, she leads 51 to 41.
As a result, plotting the margins of support for Clinton over Trump by demographic, most of them have shifted to the left — meaning that the margin by which Clinton leads has grown or the margin by which Trump leads has shrunk.
- In June, 6 percent of Republicans said they'd back Clinton; that jumped to 12 percent. The percent saying they'd back Trump didn't move.
- Overall, Trump leads with whites by 11 points (down from 13 in June) and trails among nonwhites by 62 points.
- Overall, Clinton's lead with women increased by seven points, and Trump's lead with men shrank by the same amount.
- The oldest and youngest voters were the ones who moved the most toward Clinton, by 12 and 10 points respectively.
But why did Trump's support slip? Well, at the same time that Clinton's margin in the polls grew by eight points, Clinton's net favorability (those who view her favorably minus those who view her unfavorably) grew by eight points as Trump's fell by five. More than half of voters now say they have a strongly unfavorable view of the businessman — not the direction he'd want to go.
A net 13 improvement for Hillary on the fav/unfav front. Her numbers improved strongly, Trump’s worsened.
.
Devastatingly for Trump, overall 54% of Americans believe that the way Trump talks appeals to bigotry:
The groups who blame Trump the most for churning bigotry with his talk are non-whites, Millennials and Women.
Also, the candidates are viewed quite differently in terms of their qualifications, level headedness, and having “the right experience”.
While Hillary wins high marks on all these measures Trump is seen by majorities of Americans to be unqualified for the presidency, not to have the right experience and not as being “level headed”. Only on “honesty” does Hillary have a deficit, but that’s a function of the media’s constant obsessing about Hillary on that aspect. As we know, Hillary, along with Obama, is actually among the most honest politicians around:
Now, pivoting to a more historic Hillary retrospective:
9. The First Time Hillary Clinton Was President. At Wellesley.
From Politico:
The First Time Hillary Clinton Was President
The idea of “President Hillary” in 2016 is thrilling for some and scary to others. But for one small group—students at Wellesley in 1968 and ‘69—it is a phenomenon they have already lived through. And while the student presidency has only so much in common with the job she’s bidding for now—welcoming new students is not exactly a state of the union address—what she did in elected office as a junior and senior in college turned out to be remarkably predictive of the kind of politician she has become.
During a period of immense social upheaval, she was the most prominent intermediary between her increasingly radicalized fellow students and a change-resistant faculty and administration. “Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro told me.
"Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro said. Above, Hillary Rodham participates in a panel. | Wellesley College Archives
.
“Rather than using her position to make us more upset … I think she was searching along with all of us,” Nancy Wanderer told me, “and she became our leader in that search, as opposed to being a very revolutionary type of person who stands up and says, ‘Let’s tear this place down because the world’s a mess.’”
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Hillary getting her face painted. | Courtesy of Laura Grosch
A song praising Hillary written by Davis Hall dorm freshmen. | Wellesley College News
This long article is a fascinating read. I recommend clicking on the link to read it.
10. Rolling Stone: Presidential candidates ignore Women of Color at their peril
Presidential Nominees Ignore Women of Color at Their Peril
Though the fight for fair access to the polls was long and hard, and continues today – we still see voter-suppression efforts targeting minorities – women are now a voting bloc to be reckoned with. In every presidential election since 1980, women have voted at higher rates than men, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
"Women come out in higher numbers, and there are more of them," says Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the center. "When a group is the largest and more reliably comes to the polls, they are a key part of the election outcome."
Women are 54% of the electorate in a general election. Whoever wins the woman vote has a leg up on the competition. Trump is in trouble with women (his unfavorable number with women is 70% or higher) and that is mostly driven by the subset of Women of color.
"The most reliable Democratic voters have been black women," says Dittmar. "Black women are a key piece of the Democratic coalition that could help elect Clinton."
11. Mother Jones: Hillary Clinton Hits Trump With New Ad on Race
Hillary Clinton Hits Trump With New Ad on Race
The ad is called “Everything.”
In recent days, Donald Trump, who has faced charges (even from Republicans) that he has made racist remarks during this presidential race, has mounted what his campaign considers an outreach effort toward African American voters, with Trump (while speaking to predominantly white audiences) insisting that he will do more for inner-city black Americans than Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. But the Clinton campaign has seized on this Trump move as an opportunity to make the case that Trump in the past and in the present has insulted African Americans—and to remind all voters of Trump's controversial record on race. On Friday, the Clinton team released a new TV ad contrasting Trump's new effort with his past history of discrimination against African Americans.
As always, I end this week’s HNV with a roundup of the inspiring, cutting or informative tweets Hillary and her team have published over the last 24 hours.
Have a great weekend, everybody. Onward and forward.