monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

That Jenkins went back to demonstrating was not surprising after his strong reaction to recent changes in the league policy regarding behavior during the anthem.

“Quite frankly, guys in our league don’t like being told what to do, what they can and can’t do,” Jenkins told Philly.com. “We don’t have this type of policies for the other causes we support, whether it be our ‘Salute to Service,’ or breast cancer awareness, or anything else. It’s just when you start talking about black folks, quite frankly. It’s disheartening, but we’ll continue to be creative.”

With the moves that we are seeing to de-platform conservative voices and barr young conservatives from many colleges for ideological reasons, it becomes clear that the deep state, the corporate deep state, and elements of the left in American politics are attempting to create their own version of an iron curtain or Berlin wall and a Balkanization of information within the United States. If that **** is allowed to stand, it cannot end well. Conservatives and libertarians may well be able to create their own versions of things like YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their own versions of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford... But, again, that will leave tens of millions of people stranded in a Democrat/liberal plantation of information with no way for anybody else to even think about trying to reach them. That will most likely end up in some sort of a divorce or a civil war. Those people need to think about what they were doing a bit harder than they have done so far.

Omarosa Manigault Newman was offered a $15,000-a-month contract from President Trump’s campaign to stay silent after being fired from her job as a White House aide by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly last December, according to a forthcoming book by Manigault Newman and people familiar with the proposal.

But she refused, according to the incendiary new book, “Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House,” which also depicts Trump as unqualified, narcissistic and racist. Excerpts of the book were obtained by The Washington Post.

After she was fired, Manigault Newman wrote, she received a call from Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, offering her a job and the monthly contract in exchange for her silence.

The proposed nondisclosure agreement allegedly said Manigault Newman could not make any comments about President Trump or his family; Vice President Pence or his family; or any comments that could damage the president. It said she would do “diversity outreach,” among other things, for the campaign, according to her account.

“The NDA attached to the email was as harsh and restrictive as any I’d seen in all my years of television,” Manigault Newman writes in the book.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Omarosa Manigault Newman says she refused hush money, pens White House memoir calling Trump racist

The players who protested on Thursday may not be penalized. After the N.F.L. Players Association filed a grievance in July arguing that the new policy violated the N.F.L.’s collective bargaining agreement, the league agreed to freeze the enforcement of the policy while it tries to work out a potential solution with the union.

The media never valued her opinion on anything else before.

did she have that would have made any opinions of her's valuable?

HOW BAD ARE THINGS FOR THE GOP? A DEMOCRATIC HOUSE CANDIDATE GOT 30,000 WRITE-IN VOTES IN MICHIGAN

August 9 2018, 8:06 p.m.
IN APRIL, MICHIGAN officials who oversee elections kicked Democrat Matt Morgan off the congressional ballot, leaving the Republican incumbent, Rep. Jack Bergman, to run unopposed in the general election.

That was the plan, at least, until primary day on Tuesday, when more than 30,000 Democratic voters cast write-in ballots in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District. That’s nearly eight times as many votes as Morgan needed to be resurrected and placed on the November ballot.

Morgan, a progressive Marine veteran, pulled off the successful turnaround without help from the national party or progressive organizations set up to support vets. Instead, he had filmmaker Michael Moore and a team of hundreds of volunteers who made sure voters knew that, even though there was nobody on the ballot, they could still vote for Morgan.

In Marquette County, in fact, Morgan got nearly as many votes as Bergman did. The county credited him with 4,388 votes to Bergman’s 4,522, even after disqualifying a chunk of votes.

The candidate was booted from the ballot based on a technicality: His petitions listed a Post Office box rather than a physical address. His campaign turned the petitions in on March 6. An official got back to the campaign on April 29, explaining the address snafu, and saying that they had until the end of the day to withdraw or they were likely to be disqualified, said Joe Vanderbosch, Morgan’s spokesperson.

They refused to withdraw, so the Michigan Board of State Canvassers booted Morgan. The campaign took the decision to the Michigan Court of Appeals and lost in a 2-1 judgment. Instead of appealing further, the campaign turned to the write-in option instead. “We wouldn’t have ever chosen to do business this way, but when we look back on it, it has been a great opportunity,” Morgan told The Intercept. “It kicked our field program off, it incensed voters, it really turned people out.”

In order to make it onto the ballot, Morgan needed to win 5 percent of the total votes cast in the district for governor on the Democratic side, a figure that came to roughly 3,700 votes. His Marquette County total alone should qualify him for the ballot.

“It appears that Republican voter suppression in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District has failed in an historic way!” Moore wrote on Twitter. “Republicans on the election commission kicked the lone Democratic candidate off the ballot, so thousands of us mobilized.”

Making it through the November general election will be a more challenging task, though by no means impossible. Michigan’s 1st District has been on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s battle ground since 2017 (though Morgan said he has gotten little interest from the party so far). Bergman won comfortably in 2016 by 15 points in a district that the Cook Political Report says has a nine-point GOP advantage. Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by just over 10,000 votes.

While many veterans who run for Congress tout their military experience in justifying a more aggressive or expansive foreign policy, Morgan said that one of his top concerns is repealing the post-9/11 authorization of the use of military force. Presidents have been using the AUMF, as it is known, for a decade and a half to justify new military commitments around the globe unrelated to its original purpose of waging war against the group responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“One of the biggest issues veterans are concerned about today is that, when I first deployed to Iraq in 2003, I was newly married and had no children. Today I have a 13-year-old son, and the idea that we are still deploying our kids overseas on an AUMF that was passed four years before he was born, and we’re now four years before he’s eligible to serve, is the despicable reality of where we are today,” said Morgan, a retired lieutenant colonel. “I’m running against a guy that touts the fact that he’s the highest-ranking military official elected to Congress. He wears his military service on his sleeve, but he cannot step forward and say our Congress needs to be in front of this.”

Morgan added that his campaign has not yet found support among Democratic groups who aim to get veterans elected. “I am deeply frustrated that the organizations supporting veterans have not done more to support my candidacy, and my sense is they’re standing back because I’m running against another veteran,” he said. “But I think it’s really important: Jack Bergman and I are not the same.”

Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, has endorsed and funded a string of veterans across the country. He has had several conversation with Morgan, though he hasn’t yet endorsed him. (Moulton has endorsed a significant number of moderate to conservative candidates, but also some progressives; his spokesperson said Moulton has no ideological litmus test.)

Morgan said the number one issue he hears about on the campaign trail is health care. When he explains his own experience with single-payer health care in the military and argues that Medicare should be expanded to cover everyone, he said, he rarely finds any objections from voters. “The only people opposing that are the lobbyists in Washington. I do not see Americans in Michigan opposing the idea of Medicare coverage. They want it fixed and the price tag isn’t keeping them up at night,” he said.

Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by just over 10,000 votes.

Eye of the Hurricane

For all the talk of a blue wave sweeping Democrats back into the House majority this fall, their efforts could be thwarted in one of the nation’s bluest states.

I would say, formerly one of the nation’s bluest states. Minnesota is moving to the right.

Voters in the sprawling farm country south of Minneapolis and in the economically struggling Iron Range along the Canadian border give Republicans in those two congressional districts perhaps their best chance anywhere for flipping Democratic seats. Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in November to retake the House, but the odds grow long if they lose districts they currently hold.

That is exactly right. There are only four rural Congressional districts still held by Democrats, and three of them are in Minnesota. All three will flip to the GOP before long; in all likelihood, two will change hands in November.

Yes, it’s good to be a woman in a Democratic primary
According to our data, women have won 65 percent (90 of 138) of decided open Democratic primary races featuring at least one man and one woman. About 46 percent of all women who ran for office won the nomination — a stat we’ll call “win rate.” Men’s win rate has been just 23 percent (although part of their lower win rate is simply that more male candidates are competing against each other and, obviously, only one person can win each race). Women make up 48 percent (114 out of 2384) of the Democratic nominees in primaries that have been decided so far even though only 32 percent (263 of 811) of the candidates we analyzed were women. So, women are clearly having greater success than men.

In fact, all else being equal, being a woman has been worth an additional 10 percentage points over being a man in the open Democratic primaries we looked at.5 That’s one of the two biggest effects we found among all the variables we looked at. (The other variable with a similarly sized effect was having previously held elected office — more on this in a moment.)

Although women’s representation in Congress has almost doubled since 1992, the House and Senate combined have never been more than 20 percent women. But this year’s surge in the number of female candidates could change that, because studies have found that a major hurdle to women’s equal representation is that women are just less likely to run. But with women competing in 69 percent of open Democratic primaries this year, according to our data, that hurdle seems lower.

Women running in 2018 stand out from their male opponents in a few important ways. For instance, women this year are more likely than men to have previous experience as elected officials, especially if they’re running for higher-profile roles, like governor or senator. Fifty-six percent of the women who are running for governorships have previous experience as elected officials, compared with just 37 percent of men running for governor. In Senate races, the difference is even larger — 80 percent of women running for Senate have previously held elected office, compared with just 22 percent of men.

That squares with studies that find that women are less likely than men to see themselves as qualified for political office. Since previous experience as an elected official helps women to overcome the belief that they lack qualifications, it makes sense that the women running for a high-level office are more likely to have been elected before compared with men, who do not doubt their qualifications to the same degree. And because the women in our data set have more experience — which, as we mentioned, is an advantage in elections — that helps explain why they are more likely to win their races.

But women aren’t just winning because they have more experience. Even looking only at candidates with previous experience as elected officials, women are still outperforming men: 52 percent of previously elected women have won their primary races so far, compared with 40 percent of previously elected men.