The newspaper USA Today, as bland and mainstream a newspaper as you can get, let loose with an editorial on Monday that was shocking because it told the truth about Donald Trump in unvarnished terms. The editorial was prompted by Trump issuing a tweet against senator Kirstin Gillibrand who had called on him to resign because of the many credible sexual abuse allegations against him.
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It is always dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions from one data point, so the stunning victory in Alabama by Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore in one of the reddest of red states should not be taken as a sign that the era of Republican extremism, so well represented by Moore, is over. The result continues my streak of making wrong predictions, since I had thought that Moore would win and that the only doubt was whether he would win narrowly or easily. My repeated wrongness has made me think of referring to myself as ‘the anti-pundit’. But there are some implications that are easy to predict.
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In what has to be considered a huge upset, Democrat Doug Jones has just been projected to be the winner in the Alabama senate race, defeating sex abuser and molester of teens Roy Moore by a margin of 49.5 to 48.7% with 91% of precincts reporting, in one of the Republican party’s strongest of strongholds.
I am off to bed feeling great and will discuss what this might mean tomorrow.
It is telling that lawyers who are defending three men accused of a hate crime against Somali immigrants are demanding that the jury include people who are more likely to be supporters of Donald Trump.
Three men accused of plotting to bomb a mosque and apartment complex housing Somali refugees asked a federal judge Friday to include prospective jurors from rural western Kansas because they are twice as likely to have voted for President Donald Trump.
A defense motion argues that plans to only summon citizens in the more urban counties closest to the federal courthouse in Wichita is a discriminatory practice that excludes rural and conservative jurors. The trial begins March 19.
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Yesterday Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for senator in Alabama who had been off the campaign trail and hiding for the past week, emerged to hold a final rally before the vote today. Olivia Nuzzi was there and says that it was fittingly weird, and in attendance were well-known Republican loonies: Steve Bannon, Representative Louie Gohmert, and Sheriff David Clarke.
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One of the most aggravating aspects of the recent deluge of sexual abuse and harassment allegations has been that the country’s abuser-in-chief Donald Trump seems to be getting away with it simply by denying, denying, denying, and having his loyal army of surrogates back him up. So I was glad to see that three of his accusers, Jessica Leeds, Samantha Holvey, and Rachel Crooks, are upping the ante and coming forward and today demanded a full congressional inquiry into their allegations.
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Given the veneration that Americans seem to have for the military, it is not surprising that some people try to appropriate some of that by lying about having served in the military or even having received military honors. This practice had become so common that Congress even passed the Stolen Valor Act of 2013 that makes it a crime “for a person to fraudulently claim having received a valor award specified in the Act, with the intention of obtaining money, property, or other tangible benefit by convincing another that he or she received the award.”
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In a welcome move, by a unanimous vote, the party’s Unity Reform Commission, made up of 21 members selected by Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and DNC Chair Tom Perez, reduced the number of so-called super-delegates to the party’s presidential nominating convention from 715 to 315 and also required them to vote according to the wishes of their respective states.
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When people talk of making American great again, the obvious question to ask them would be when they thought it was great in the past, but few reporters do. One audience member at a rally did ask this to Alabama pervert Republican candidate for senate Roy Moore at a rally back in September. Moore spoke about his longing for a return to the days when slavery still existed.
At Moore’s Florence rally, the former judge outlined all the wrongs he sees in Washington and “spiritual wickedness in high places.” He warned of “the awful calamity of abortion and sodomy and perverse behavior and murders and shootings and road rage” as “a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins.”
In response to a question from one of the only African Americans in the audience — who asked when Moore thought America was last “great” — Moore acknowledged the nation’s history of racial divisions, but said: “I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another…. Our families were strong, our country had a direction.