Good morning. This is a little heavy on election stuff, but here’s what you missed over the weekend.
1. Hillary Clinton rallied at St. Augustine’s in Raleigh yesterday.
The Democratic nominee held a rally on St. Augustine’s quad on Sunday afternoon with the Mothers of the Movement, women whose sons and daughters have been killed by police or gun violence over the past several years.
Clinton, who is essentially taking a victory lap, talked about her policy goals, including her college tuition plan, gun control, and renewable energy, spoke for a little over twenty minutes and spent a good amount of time promoting both Roy Cooper and Deborah Ross. She also went after Donald Trump, joking that standing next to him for four-and-a-half hours over three debates proved she “had the stamina to be president.”
You can watch the full speech here:
After leaving Raleigh, Clinton had another campaign stop at a second N.C. college, UNC Charlotte.
Meanwhile, Trump gave his own Gettysburg Address:
accused by another woman
Jessica Drake is at least the 11th woman to accuse Trump of unwanted sexual advances since the surfacing of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump brags about being able to grope and kiss women.
I wonder why Clinton is statistically tied with Trump in Texas right now.
2. Triangle early voting numbers strong through the first couple of days, but some counties whose hours were cut see dropoffs.
Wake County saw 32,308 votes in the first three days of early voting, and a lot of those were Democrats:
Orange County saw a big spike during the first two days, as well:
But because of the cut in early voting hours in many North Carolina counties, many counties are seeing lower turnout. Via NBC News:
Seventeen North Carolina counties reduced the number of early voting locations from 2012. Of those, fifteen saw lower in-person turnout in the first two days of early voting in the state, Thursday and Friday, according to an analysis by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor and a leading authority on voting rates.
Several of those counties, including Mecklenburg County, the state’s largest, saw only modest drop-offs. But in at least six, the in-person voting rate declined by around 50 percent, McDonald found. And Guilford County, home to the predominantly African-American city of Greensboro, cut early voting locations from 16 to just one. It saw in-person voting decline from 21,560 votes in the first two days of the 2012 voting period to just 3,295 this year—a drop off of roughly 85 percent.
Guess this all doesn’t county as rigging.
3. A DNS hack on Friday took out a large chunk of the internet.
Via Gizmodo:
This morning a ton of websites and services, including Spotify and Twitter, were unreachable because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a major DNS provider. Details of how the attack happened remain vague, but one thing seems certain. Our internet is frightfully fragile in the face of increasingly sophisticated hacks.
Some think the attack was a political conspiracy, like an attempt to take down the internet so that people wouldn’t be able to read the leaked Clinton emails on Wikileaks. Others think it’s the usual Russian assault. No matter who did it, we should expect incidents like this to get worse in the future. While DDoS attacks used to be a pretty weak threat, we’re entering a new era.
But don’t worry, Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn is on the case. Also via Gizmodo:
Wolf, you don’t know who is behind this, you don’t know if it’s foreign or domestic. What I do know is over the years we have tried to pass data security legislation. There’s been bipartisan agreement in the House. It has not moved forward into the Senate. We also know that a few years ago we tried to do a bill called SOPA in the House which required the ISPs to some governance on these networks and to block some of the bad actors.
Sounds good, but the Stop Online Privacy Act has nothing to do with DDoS attacks, as Inverse explains:
Except, there’s really no logical correlation between Friday’s DDoS attack and the kind of piracy that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced in 2011 to combat. The law, which ultimately died in Congress in 2012, would have banned advertising networks and payment businesses from working with sites in violation of copyright law and imposed a maximum penalty of five years in prison for violators. But opponents, which included Google and Wikipedia, said that the law would stymie freedom of speech and stall innovation on the web.
It’s great that someone who has no idea about how anything related to the internet works is the vice chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee.
4. Another North Carolina GOP meltdown over being called racist.
North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse’s long national nightmare — which includes people of color having more than one hour to vote, frequent sightings of William Barber, and Twitter feuds with his brother — continued over the weekend, when a liberal PAC called N.C. Families First released an accurate ad about the racial gerrymandering of the congressional distrcits against conservative N.C. Supreme Court Justice Bob Edmunds.
Here was Woodhouse’s response:
This was all Woodhouse talked about on Friday, and he spent damn near all of Saturday trying in vain to get African-American Democratic politicians — including Congresswoman Alma Adams and both Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, Larry Hall and Dan Blue — to condemn this largely accurate ad.
NCGOP chair Robin Hayes jumped in and called it a “racially charged and explosive ad,” and Congressman G.K. Butterfield gave the response that the NCGOP’s incessant whining deserves:
“Dallas Woodhouse and the Republicans are flat-out wrong and misleading in their characterizations,” Butterfield said. “The United States District Court – in two separate cases – effectively ruled that Justice Edmunds incorrectly applied the law by finding that gerrymandered districts were constitutional when in fact they were clearly unconstitutional. … Justice Edmunds’ opinion aided the Republicans in their efforts to further disenfranchise African-American voters.”
Meanwhile, as we noted above, early voting in Greensboro has been devastated because of Republican policies aimed at disenfranchising African-Americans. Whether it’s because they don’t want a Democratic bloc to vote or straight-up racism is irrelevant; the end result is to try to limit the number of black people at the polls. And for people like Woodhouse and Hayes, being called a racist will always, always, always be more offensive to them than the systemic racism that they serve as a mouthpiece for every single day.
Related: please go vote.
5. N.C. State got its ass kicked by Louisville on Saturday.
God damn:
There were no close calls or struggles on Saturday at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium. Lamar Jackson threw for three touchdowns and ran for another as No. 7 Louisville blitzed the Wolfpack 54-13.
N.C. State (4-3, 1-2 ACC) gave No. 4 Clemson all it wanted last Saturday. It had a chance to win in regulation on a 33-yard field goal but lost 24-17 in overtime.
Louisville (6-1, 4-1) labored against Duke last Friday before surviving a tough game with a 24-14 win.
The Cardinals didn’t waste any time on Saturday, jumping out to a 17-0 lead in the first quarter and 44-0 margin at the half.
In other football news, UNC beat UVA 35-14, improving to 6-2. Both Duke and the Carolina Panthers were off this week.
That’s it, have a good one.
