GOP Candidate Defends ‘No More Mosques’ Comment

“So I just made a statement, I’m a Christian that believes we ought to propagate our Christian faith. So I see an article and I retweet, ‘no more mosques in America,’ you know, and like, and share. So I retweeted it. So yeah. So what? I believe in Christian — I believe in liberties, freedom, free speech, and Christian values is kind of my base. And so yeah, I posted it, so no big deal. I’m not that stressed out over it.”

— North Dakota U.S. Senate candidate Gary Emineth (R), defending in a radio interview his sharing an image on Twitter that said no more mosques should be built in the United States.

Polls Show Clinton Was Right about Trump’s Alt-Right ‘Basket of Deplorables’

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After shrugging off Donald Trump’s steady stream of lies and incendiary remarks about African-Americans, Latinos, women and Muslims for more than a year, the media is now in a full pearl-clutching froth over this “politically incorrect” statement by Hillary Clinton a fundraiser late last week:

You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic?—?you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites…He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

The fury with which Trump and surrogates have responded is evidence that Clinton struck a nerve. Predictably, their retaliation is based on lying. They insist that Clinton’s statement was a smear against all Republicans and conservatives when, in fact, she was specifically referring to the white supremacist alt-right base of Trump’s support.

Of course, as these things always go, the pundits are focused on whether Clinton’s statement was politically damaging while ignoring the fact that what she said is true.

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GOP Remains the Whitest of Parties

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Number of blacks among the 2,472 delegates at this week’s Republican National Convention, reports the Washington Post: “Although that handful includes some of Trump’s most vociferous backers, the overall lack of ethnic diversity at the convention illustrates one of his greatest challenges: how to court black voters after four decades of controversy over his racial views, including campaign-trail rhetoric that has alienated many minorities.”

King: Whites Have Contributed More to Civilization

This whole business does get a little tired… I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?

— Rep. Steve King (R-IA), challenging MSNBC panelists to name a “subgroup” that contributed more to civilization than white people.

The GOP Created the Monster that Is Trump

Republican elites are panicky about the durable dominance of Trump (and to a lesser extent Ben Carson) in the presidential race. They are right to worry, but I don’t feel much sympathy. Trump is a problem of their own creation. … Trump gets ever more base in his bigotry — and yet, with few and intermittent exceptions, rival candidates, party leaders and GOP lawmakers decline to call him out. So he continues to rise, benefiting from tacit acceptance of his intolerance. … For months — years, really — Republicans have averted their gaze from Trump’s attacks on women, Hispanics and immigrants. Now the racism becomes more overt — and still, he goes unchallenged.

— Dana Millbank, writing in the Washington Post.

PensitoWire

No Republicans to Attend Selma Commemoration

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Number of Republican legislators planning to attend the Selma, Ala., commemoration this weekend, Politico reports. “Scores of U.S. lawmakers are converging on tiny Selma, Alabama, for a large commemoration of a civil rights anniversary. But their ranks don’t include a single member of House Republican leadership — a point that isn’t lost on congressional black leaders.”