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Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will be cracking jokes tonight with the New York elite, something not witnessed since Donald Trump’s wedding. As if Tim Kaine’s year couldn’t get any better, Trump name checked his band, the Bad Hombres, last night. And despite all the Janet Jackson jokes, we still can’t shake the idea that a “Nasty Woman” is a disgusting hoagie sandwich only available in parts of Eastern Pennsylvania. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Thursday, October 20th, 2016:
TRUMP BASICALLY THREATENING TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY IF WE DON’T ELECT HIM - Trump/Pence: Don’t do anything stupid and no one gets hurt. Christina Wilkie: “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump opened a rally on Thursday by mocking widespread concerns that he may not accept the results of November’s presidential election. ‘Ladies and gentleman, I wanna make a major announcement today,’ Trump told a rowdy crowd in Delaware, Ohio. ‘I would like to promise and pledge, to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election’ he paused, ‘If I win.’ The crowd went wild. Trump made headlines Wednesday night, during the final presidential debate, by refusing to say whether or not he would accept the election results. In recent weeks he has stoked fears of voter fraud and claimed the election would be ‘rigged,’ despite a complete lack of evidence for either.” [HuffPost]
Oh, ffs: “Hillary Clinton received the questions for the third presidential debate ahead of time, Donald Trump appeared to claim Thursday ― without offering any evidence, of course. ‘Why didn’t Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions - she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary,’ [Trump tweeted]. Although the GOP nominee didn’t specify which debate he was referring to, the timing of the tweet suggested he was speaking about Wednesday’s debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The event was moderated by Fox News host Chris Wallace. The prospect of the conservative network ‘rigging’ the debate in Clinton’s favor is laughable. Wallace was widely praised for his fine job of focusing on the issues, and he pressed both candidates equally.” [HuffPost]
The Trump talking point that his skepticism about election results is no different than Al Gore’s actions in 2000 is total bunk, Nick Baumann explains.
ANOTHER WOMAN ACCUSES TRUMP OF ASSAULT - Just another instance of Donald Trump being the victim of a vast, globalist conspiracy making him violate other people’s bodies. Christina Wilkie: “A New York-based yoga instructor on Thursday said that Republican nominee Donald Trump groped her at a tennis tournament in 1998. Karena Virginia is the 13th woman in the past month to allege that Trump sexually mistreated her. Speaking at a press conference organized by attorney Gloria Allred, Virginia described waiting for a car to pick her up at the 1998 U.S. Open in Queens, New York, when she noticed Trump and a few other men looking at her. ‘Hey, look at this one, we haven’t seen her before,’ Trump allegedly said to his friends. ‘Look at those legs.’ Virginia said Trump then walked over to her and grabbed her right arm. ‘And then his hand touched the right inside of my breast,’ she recounted. She says she flinched, and Trump turned and said to her, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Right then, Virginia said, her car arrived, and she didn’t see Trump again for many years. The next time she saw him, he didn’t remember her.” [HuffPost]
WE’RE GUESSING TRUMP HASN’T READ ‘LEAN IN’ - Sam Levine: “Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, didn’t understand why the women on the first season of ‘The Apprentice’ didn’t do so well when they were paired with men. The two teams on the first season of the show started out separated by gender, but were mixed up after a few episodes after the women kept winning. Trump said he was shocked the women dominated the men at the beginning of the show. ‘What surprised me most was how easily the women dominated initially,’ Trump said at a 2004 press conference about the show, according to the Houston Chronicle. ‘Yet when the women were put with the men, they lost their dominance. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s a reflection of real life.’” [HuffPost]
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FLAKE URGES MOVEMENT ON GARLAND NOMINATION - Burgess Everett: “Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake has maintained for months that Republicans should take up Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination if it looks like the presidential contest is a lost cause for the GOP. It’s looking about that time, Flake said in an interview on Thursday. ‘I said if we were in a position like we were in in ‘96 and we pretty much knew the outcome that we ought to move forward. But I think we passed that awhile ago,’ Flake said. ‘If Hillary Clinton is president-elect then we should move forward with hearings in the lame duck. That’s what I’m encouraging my colleagues to do.’ The political calculus is straightforward: Better to deal with Garland now and avoid swallowing a more liberal nominee from Hillary Clinton. Flake, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, would not explicitly say that he expects Clinton will win. But he all but admitted that Donald Trump — whom Flake opposes — is toast.” [Politico]
GOP CONGRESSIONAL LEADERSHIP SILENT ON TRUMP’S ELECTION REMARKS - Michael McAuliff: “The failure of Republican leaders to denounce Donald Trump’s refusal to abide by a potential electoral loss is worsening the damage the GOP presidential nominee is already doing to America’s democratic system, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged Thursday.... Yet, the two top-ranking Republicans in the United States ― Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.) ― have been entirely quiet. Neither office had anything to say to HuffPost’s repeated queries on the subject, although Ryan’s spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, pointed to what she said on Saturday: ‘Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.’ … McConnell and Ryan have both criticized some of Trump’s statements in the past, but neither have withdrawn their endorsements of the ill-tempered mogul. Their reluctance may owe to Trump’s strong standing among Republicans. Indeed, a Bloomberg Politics survey released Thursday found 51 percent of Republicans think Trump’s views best match their vision for the Republican Party, compared to just 33 percent who feel that way about Ryan. “ [HuffPost]
VOTER FRAUD IS VERY HARD - This is in response to Rudy Giuliani’s claim that Democrats will commit fraud in Pennsylvania by bussing in voters to vote multiple times. Philip Bump: “Assuming 6 million people vote, that means that we’d expect the final vote tally in the state to be 2.8 million votes for Clinton and 2.4 million votes for Trump, with a margin of 372,000 votes. Meaning that we’d need to bus 372,000 people into Pennsylvania to vote, assuming the results are rigged.... The always-useful site SchoolBusInfo.com tells us that 72 people can fit on a regular school bus. That’s little kids, mind you. Only 48 high schoolers can fit on the same bus. But let’s assume we really pack these fraudsters in, have them standing in the aisles and so on. So: 72 each. We need to line up 5,167 buses to make our plan work… Oh, wait. No. We only need to line up 74,400 people, since each one will vote five times, according to Giuliani. Simple to round up 75,000 people in New York, and that decreases our necessary bus count to a more-manageable 1,033 buses. That’s a line of buses that would only stretch 9 miles. Barely noticeable.” [WaPo]
LOL, EVAN BAYH - Next thing you know, the students from the university job he never took will turn on him. Carl Hulse: “Until just a few months ago, Evan Bayh was working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Now the chamber is working as hard as it can against him. In a campaign twist with significance in the battle for the Senate, the nation’s leading business lobby is going all out to defeat Mr. Bayh, the former Democratic senator from Indiana trying to reclaim his old seat. The chamber is doing so despite the fact that Mr. Bayh, considered a business-friendly centrist, was on the chamber payroll as recently as June and made appearances on the organization’s behalf after leaving the Senate in 2011.... For Mr. Bayh, the chamber’s move is a disappointment that illustrates what is wrong with Washington. ‘I was disappointed to see the U.S. Chamber putting partisan politics over a longstanding relationship,’ Mr. Bayh said in a statement issued by his campaign. ‘I was pleased to work with the chamber for many years and have actually agreed with them on several important issues. Their decision reflects just how polarized and partisan Washington has become.’” [NYT]
WHEN YOU’VE LOST PAUL LEPAGE - Pretty amazing comments from a guy who was hyping up authoritarianism all but, oh, six seconds ago. Adam Hamze: “Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the outcome of the election in Wednesday night’s debate has unnerved one of his most vocal supporters. Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R), who has proudly defended the GOP nominee amid his many controversies, finally reached his breaking point Thursday, rebuking Trump for not vowing to follow democratic tradition and accept a likely election loss. ‘It’s a stupid comment. I mean, come on, get over yourself,’ LePage said during an interview with WGAN. ‘Donald, take your licks, and let’s move on four years.’ ... LePage has been an adamant supporter of Trump, even going far enough to say he would like the New York real estate mogul to ‘show some authoritarian power.’ Trump has awarded his admiration, saying he’d offer LePage a spot in his cabinet if he were to win the White House.” [HuffPost]
MERRICK GARLAND: STILL AROUND - “For now, Judge Merrick Garland is in limbo. That is, if heaven is serving on the Supreme Court and waiting in limbo involves a bunch of paperwork. Each morning, Garland does what he’s always done: he goes to work. That’s not so unusual. But these days, when he leaves his quiet Bethesda, Maryland, neighborhood, he’s riding in an SUV with federal agents.... [E]ver since President Barack Obama nominated him to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Garland hasn’t been wielding a gavel in the courtroom — Supreme Court nominees often don’t hear cases while they’re awaiting confirmation. For seven months now, Garland has focused on administrative duties such as overseeing the court’s budget and preparing for a Senate hearing on his nomination that may not happen.” [Roll Call]
BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR - Here’s a cat who is bad at fetch.
BAD LAWYER IS BAD - This could be an “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” plotline. Cristian Farias: “[S]omeone in the Kansas attorney general’s office apparently thought it was a good idea to cite to Dred Scott v. Sanford, the 1857 pro-slavery ruling, in a pending case where the state is defending an anti-abortion bill that was earlier ruled unconstitutional. Elizabeth Wydra, president of the legal think tank Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington, noted the citation on Tuesday, which led to outrage on social media and a barrage of breathless coverage in multiple outlets.… In an accompanying media statement, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt acknowledged the citation to Dred Scott ‘should not have been made.’ ‘Neither the State nor its attorneys believe or were arguing that Dred Scott was correctly decided,” Schmidt said. ‘Nonetheless, the reference to that case was obviously inappropriate, and as soon as I became aware of it today, I ordered the State’s brief withdrawn.’” [HuffPost]
COMFORT FOOD
- The origin of the internet’s favorite dumpster fire.
- Dog does an incredible TIE fighter impression.
- A look at how the 1990s treated computer hacking in films.
TWITTERAMA
@resnikoff: Everything Halperin says is intended to preserve off-the-record access to Steve Bannon so he can write HALF TIME or whatever it’ll be called
@MikeGrunwald:I always expected Obama to coopt the phrase “Obamacare” but coopting the phrase “Thanks Obama” is really next level.
@SimonMaloy: MORNING JOSEPH: ugh, these elites, they’re the danged worst; amirite Tom Brokaw, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Richard Haass, and Jon Meacham?
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