Hillary News & Views kicks off today with Clinton joining the protest line outside Trump Hotel and taunting the GOP presidential frontrunner.
Huffington Post reports:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took aim at Donald Trump Monday evening, making a surprise appearance at a labor protest right outside his Trump International Hotel.
"You have to say...'no' to efforts to prevent you from organizing, to prevent you from having the kind of working conditions you deserve, the kind of wages that are going to give you a living wage," Clinton said at the rally. "And that means saying no to Donald Trump."
"Some people think Mr. Trump is entertaining. But I don't think it's entertaining when somebody insults immigrants, insults women. That is just unacceptable behavior," she added. "When we're here together in solidarity to organize, we also want to send a message to Mr. Trump: That if you're going to run for president, then you should represent all the people of the United States, and that includes hard-working people."
The Culinary Workers Union Local 226 organized Monday's protest to demand that Trump allow workers at his hotel to unionize.
Clinton's appearance indeed surprised the crowd, which had been speculating whom the special guest would be.
"It has to be Bernie," said one woman, referring to Clinton's rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Union members marched down the street with signs reading, "No Contract! No Peace!" and chanting slogans like, "Vegas is a union town!"
Proving that if you want to get fresh answers, it helps to ask fresh questions, podcast Another Round got Clinton to go on the record about sexism on Capitol Hill.
BuzzFeed reports:
Last year, when Kirsten Gillibrand was promoting her memoir — a book detailing a number of sexist encounters with unpleasant male colleagues — the senator said of one occasion, “I wasn’t in a place where I could tell him to go fuck himself.”
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been in that place.
“Yes, I have,” she said in an interview with Another Round, a BuzzFeed podcast, declining to elaborate. Typically, however, Clinton said she refrains from cursing. “I say, ‘Did you hear what you just said?’ I’ve had some luck with that over the years.”
“But I’ve encountered those kinds of situations over the years,” she said, describing men who find it difficult to work respectfully with women.
“Sometimes you just have to ignore what’s happening because there’s a larger issue you’re trying to deal with, and sometimes you have to confront it, and it’s almost a snap decision.”
She recounted one moment in particular. It was 1976, and Clinton had taken a leave from Arkansas to go work for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in Indiana. As she writes in her memoir, Living History, Clinton had dinner one night with the men running Carter’s get-out-the-vote efforts. She was the only woman at the table:
“They wouldn’t give me any specifics, and I kept pressing for details about how many phone calls, cars, and door hangers they planned to put out on Election Day. All of a sudden, one of the men reached across the table and grabbed me by my turtleneck. ‘Just shut up, will you. We said we’d do it, we will, and we don’t have to tell you how!’ I was scared. I knew he had been drinking, and I also knew that all eyes were on me. My heart was beating fast as I looked him in the eye, removed his hands from my neck and said, ‘First don’t ever touch me again. Second, if you were as fast with the answers to my questions as you are with your hands, I’d have the information I need to do my job. Then I could leave you alone — which is what I’m going to do now.’ My knees were shaking, but I got up and walked out.”
“So, I’ve been around a lot longer, and I’ve had a lot of challenges, but what I’ve found is that the vast majority of them can be dealt with by, ‘Come on, really?’ — basically saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Did you just hear what you said?’ — and not, you know, not accelerating it, making it an even bigger confrontation.”
“But then sometimes, you have to do what you have to do.”
“Sometimes nothing helps,” Clinton said. “You’re just up against somebody who has got his own problems that he’s trying to act out.”
Asked whether sexist encounters with men are common on Capitol Hill, Clinton said, “That does happen. I mean, when I got there it was clear that there were some people that were just troubling. And they just, you just wanted to avoid them.”
In the same podcast, Clinton talked about the double standards that exist for women in politic, as revealed when she teared up on the campaign trail in 2008.
CNN reports:
"When it was over I just felt drained. I didn't feel anything other than that. I didn't realize it was going to be such a big deal to be honest," Clinton said in an interview with Buzzfeed's "Another Round" podcast published late Sunday night.
"It was a combination for me of feeling like somebody's asked me a really personal question and it's very hard out there and this is something that just demands your mental, emotional, physical stamina all the time and I just felt like, you know, how do I get up everyday and do this?" Clinton said.
And while some critics have since suggested that the Clinton's choking up was a scripted political moment, Clinton called the moment an "emotional, personal reaction" that occurs "when something real pierces the sort of political screen" that seems to engulf the day-to-day grind of campaigning.
"As a woman you're really held to a totally different standard and you're expected to be both strong and vulnerable at the same time. That's not easy to do. And so you just have to be who you are to the best of your ability but it is somewhat frustrating," Clinton said. "We all feel like if you do it you're criticized, if you don't do it you're criticized. It's just so hard to get people to realize that you know we're all different. We may all be women. We have our strengths, we have our weaknesses. Eventually people they get you or they don't."
Clinton said she's "gotten kind of used" to the sort of criticism that has marred not just her presidential runs but her first run for office in 2000 to become New York's senator.
"I've gotten kind of used to it but it does sort of still pose this conundrum: How is a woman supposed to behave? Well how about the way she is and then people should figure out her instead of her having to figure out everybody else," she said.
She also reflected on the activists fueling the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and addressed the nineties crime laws she's now pushing to reform.
BuzzFeed transcribes:
ANOTHER ROUND: I feel like what [Black Lives Matter activists] were looking for, and what a lot of black people are looking for, is for you and/or your husband to shoulder some responsibility in the crisis that we’re facing now. So, my question to you is do you ever look at the state of black America today — we can focus on the prison system for now — and regardless of what the intents were, and I know the ‘90s were a different time — times change, legislation changes, needs change — but regardless of your intent, do you ever look at the state of black America and think, “Wow, we really fucked this up for black people”?
HILLARY CLINTON: I’ll tell you what I think, and my husband has spoken to this, he spoke about this at the NAACP just last summer — you always have to learn from what you do.
I was interviewed by Al Sharpton the other day, and I’ve known him a long time, because I represented New York, and he said, and I think it’s good to be reminded of this, that in the ‘90s, and particularly when my husband became president, there was a great demand, not just from America at large, but from the black community, to get tougher on crime.
And Al Sharpton said this, he said, I was one of the people who was asking that we get tougher on crime and that we clean up our neighborhoods and we stop gangs from killing each other.
And he said, I was going around boarding up crack houses, and so we can’t go back and say we didn’t ask that a lot of this be done, because we did. I think what’s important is you take stock of what was done and you figure out what needs to change and what we have seen over the course of now a number of years is that too many low-level offenders, too many nonviolent offenders ended up in prison, and that became a terrible strain and drain on the African-American community, because too many, again, predominantly, not exclusively, men, were ending up incarcerated.
So I think what my husband said when he spoke to the NAACP was: Look, we’ve learned a lot, and took responsibility for whatever the impact of the legislation, but also being reminded that there were reasons that that legislation was passed and very strongly supported across communities of color and everybody else.
In a democracy, you’re supposed to keep being a learning political system, and now we have to say to ourselves, as people are, hey, maybe there were some good intentions, but those intentions had unintended consequences, and we’ve got to deal with those consequences.
But it’s not enough, in my opinion, as some on the Republican side are saying, let’s just change the sentencing and all that — I’m for all that, but let’s also provide more supports in the community. Let’s also make sure that people who are diverted from the criminal justice system have a real chance to get the services and support they need to build their lives.
So, this has now I think got to be a broader conversation than just, you know, change the sentencing and move low-level offenders out of the prisons, because that has to be done, but that’s not enough.
ANOTHER ROUND: Do you think that that answer is a good enough answer for the people of color who are right now in jail because of a very, very broken system?
CLINTON: Look, most of the people who are in jail are there are under state law, not federal law. The federal prisons are a very small part of the equation here. So you have to change the federal prisons, which are going to — that’s why President Obama went to visit a federal prison, because the president really only has direct authority over the federal prisons.
We have to change what are the vast majority of decisions being made in local jails and state prisons in order to move this agenda forward. And the federal government can provide some incentives, like put more money into drug courts, put more money into services for people, so that you can then move states in the right direction, but states control their prison system.
So again, that’s one of those distinctions that needs to be made. We’ve got to change the policies at the federal level to serve as an example hopefully to provide some incentives and disincentives so states also change their policies.
ANOTHER ROUND: So we want to transition a little bit to talk about Black Lives Matter. We’ve talked a lot on our show about the recent barrage of stories about black people being killed by the police. I want to quote specifically from the encounter you had with Black Lives Matter activists a few week ago. You were saying, “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts, I believe you change laws. You change allocations of resources. You change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart. You’re not.”
I don’t want to speak for them, but I don’t know if anyone was suggesting that policy doesn’t matter. I’m more curious generally to hear how you see racial change happening in America, especially as a white person who was radicalized by Martin Luther King. You talk a lot about hearing him speak, and how his assassination was very deeply meaningful to your young life.
CLINTON: I had what I thought was a very honest, very open conversation with the activists that I met with. I’m going to be meeting with some more. My staff is in constant contact with them, because I so admire their passion and their intensity in reacting to what is a terrible, continuing, systemic problem of race and justice in America.
And there’s no doubt in my mind that they have helped to galvanize opinion across the country and that they have given real energy to try and get some changes quickly made, as the president’s policing commission has recommended and others.
But I was sounding a note of caution because, again, having done this for a long time, I don’t want anybody who has that level of intelligence and energy and commitment to get discouraged, to walk away from the hard work it takes in politics to make changes, because we need them.
We need their voices, we need their activism, and I’ve seen myself a lot of change that has happened, and it matters.
The Civil Rights Act mattered, the Voting Rights Act mattered. But what I think what people have learned is that there is no way that progress continues if there’s not constant pressure.
ANOTHER ROUND: Oh, absolutely. I guess I’m curious more generally, what do you think it would take for other white people to see the problems that we see?
CLINTON: Oh, I think a lot do.
ANOTHER ROUND: Some, let’s say some. I think the frustration of that interaction was not that the policy wasn’t right. We can talk about policy, but that on a basic level, people feel like they’re not being heard. Black Lives Matter is a pretty simple plea.
CLINTON: Right, it is. It is. But if it’s going to be a movement, and not just a plea, then it has to build on making changes that people either have to accept or they have to embrace.
And in many ways, getting people to accept, the changes that are necessary, will require consistent pressure and leadership at all levels — in the community, all the way to the White House.
And then you have to keep making the case, as I have tried to make, going back a long time, but in this campaign going back to the first speech I gave at Columbia University in New York, you’ve got to be willing to constantly say there are gross inequities, and you can’t act like they don’t exist.
And one of the biggest is the way that African-American — particularly men, but also women, but let’s focus on men for a minute — are arrested more, charged more, tried more, convicted more, incarcerated more, than white men who do the very same things.
Now that’s just a fact, and that’s a fact that you have to say over and over again, as I have done to a lot of audiences that are predominantly white, and say, “Put yourself in the position of either one of those young men, or the mother or the father of one of those young men. How would you feel?”
And it’s not a question that is easily answered by a lot of white people because they don’t have that experience. And you have to force folks to kind of say to themselves, “Hey, if this is really happening, and I guess there is evidence to show it’s happening, then maybe I’d better change my thinking about all of this.”
It’s a very slow process, but we made progress, now I think in some areas we’re stalled, so we have got to put some energy behind pushing forward and getting more people to do what they should be doing anyway.
The future meeting that Clinton referred to in the podcast occurred this past Friday.
Huffington Post reports:
Clinton met with a number of activists, including DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie and Samuel Sinyangwe, all of whom are on the Campaign Zero planning team and are affiliated with the group We the Protesters. Those present from the Clinton camp were national political director Amanda Renteria, senior policy adviser Maya Harris and African-American outreach director LaDavia Drane, attendees said.
“In the end, I felt heard,” Mckesson said. “It was a tough conversation, and we didn’t agree about every approach or everything. But she was willing to be pushed, and it was a candid conversation, and that’s important.”
Clinton spoke directly about the continuing effects of racism and slavery, which attendees said she called America’s “original sin.” Elzie said she is curious to see if Clinton will begin speaking more frankly about racism in public. Clinton “would listen and acknowledge that her experience was totally different than any of the black people at this table,” Elzie said.
“It took her awhile to get there, but she got there. So I’m hopeful that she will continue to have this educational conversation with herself to acknowledge her privilege,” Elzie said.
he activists said they pressed Clinton on providing economic support to racially marginalized communities, establishing national use of force standards and changing the role the federal government plays in law enforcement reform.
At one point, Cherno Biko, a transgender activist, spoke about trans women of color who have been killed this year. Biko discussed approaching the killers of those women with love, rather than locking up more people and contributing to a system of mass incarceration.
In a moment captured on video, Clinton told Biko, "You're a better person than me wanting to love folks who kill somebody." She added, "Listen, I will forgive them, but I'm not going to love them."
Clinton reiterated the "Original Sin" comment on Twitter:
Also on Twitter, she sent out her support to the family of Tamir Rice:
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For more on Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency, check out…
The Hillary 2016 Platform Series
Part 1: Criminal Justice Reform
Part 2: Immigration Reform
Part 3: Voting Rights
Unfiltered Hillary: The Transcripts
September 4, 2015: MSNBC Interview with Andrea Mitchell
August 14, 2015: Iowa Wing Ding Dinner
July 31, 2015: National Urban League
July 20, 2015: Facebook Q&A
July 17, 2015: Iowa State Democratic Party Hall of Fame Dinner
April 23, 2015: Women in the World Summit
Crossposted at Hillary HQ.com, an independent, progressive blog committed to electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.