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Today we begin with some words from Hillary’s statement on Labor Day … in 2007.
On Labor Day, our nation celebrates the hardworking men and women who drive our economy and build the future of our nation. For more than a century, we have set this day aside to spend time with friends and family and to pay tribute to hardworking Americans and the labor movement which has stood up for them -- for fair wages, fair treatment, and fair benefits.
I believe that the foundation of a strong economy isn't the wealth at the very top -- but the investments we make in each other. I believe that economic growth comes from policies that promote prosperity -- and ensure we all share in it.
That starts with standing up for our unions because unions have helped build America's strong middle class. I'll end this Administration's practice of harassing and bureaucratizing our labor organizations. When I'm President, we're going to appoint people to the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board who are actually pro-labor.
And we're going to stand up for the right to organize again, because it's no coincidence that as union membership has declined to just 8% of private sector workers, wages have been stagnant -- and income inequality has increased.
You can watch video excerpts from her appearance in Hampton, IL on Labor Day last year at CNN. There is no advance statement released yet this year, as Hillary will be actively campaigning later today in Cleveland and then again in Hampton.
Nancy Altman at Huffington Post has a piece about how different Democrats and Republicans are on labor issues.
Fortunately, workers can help themselves this November 8. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have concrete plans to reverse these destructive policies, stop the upward redistribution of wealth, and make sure that workers receive their fair share. In sharp contrast, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have concrete plans to double down on the war on workers….
Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party advocate a substantial, long-overdue increase in the federal minimum wage, while Donald Trump and the Republican Party are fine with a starvation federal minimum wage. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party want to protect and strengthen workers’ ability to bargain with their employers, while Donald Trump and the Republican Party propose to intensify their war on collective bargaining. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party want to improve worker health and safety, while Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to further weaken these protections. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party favor paid family leave, paid sick days, and paid vacation. Donald Trump and the Republican Party apparently do not think these benefits, available to workers around the world, are worth even mentioning.
Rebecca Traister has given an interesting interview at Vox on how Hillary’s feminism is finding its voice during her run this year and other issues.
It’s not as much that she was being told to run as a man, as she was being told to run as a president. You can hear that in some of the critique of the time: She is running as if she has already been president (which, of course, has some complicated echoes because she is married to someone who has already been president), that she is running as if she is an incumbent, that there is no change here.
Presidential in our national imagination is coded male. The only American presidents we have ever known are men. The meaning of what a president is is a very masculinized notion. That is something I didn’t recognize when I wrote Big Girls Don’t Cry. This is a shift….
The funny thing about Hillary Clinton is that she gets this rap as a flip-flopper who changes with the wind. If you go on a position by position basis, you can tell that story — it is a true one.
But what’s also true is that she is one of the most wildly consistent human beings I have ever spent my life studying. Today she is the candidate who is going to get stuff done, and that is also who she was in 1969 when she gave her speech at Wellesley. That is Hillary Clinton — the "I am going to get things done" [person].
She is the ultimate pragmatic politician, absorbing things from the right, from the left, translating it with Congress, doing the gear-grinding work of compromise.
The campaign has a new Tumblr page with adorable letters to Hillary from children of all ages. Here is the text of one, but it is worth clicking over to see images of the actual letters.
Dear Hillary Clinton,
Hi! My name is Vivian, and I am writing to you because I believe that if you become president, you will become a role model for girls everywhere in the United States! girl power!!! girl power!!!
In my grade, girls are treated differently. The brave girls cheer on the boys in gym class, but the boys rarely cheer on us females. They care more about winning than they do about who helped them (& the rest of the team) win. If you are the leader of our country, you will show the boys that we deserve some credit, too. After all, without us, they wouldn’t even exist anymore!
Lastly, I would just like to say that if you win, you will show girls everywhere that they can do anything, as long as you set your heart to it. And make a lot of signs.
Thanks for your time—I HOPE YOU WIN!
Sincerely,
Vivian
Tim Kaine appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday and gave a great interview on the contrast of the two presidential campaigns as well as defending against various criticisms. Video Transcript
RADDATZ; Shouldn’t she be answering questions about this?
KAINE: I have been -- Martha, I just -- I just have to disagree with you. I have sat with her while she has answered questions, while she’s answered questions about what she did and why, and then she said, look, by using one device I made a mistake. I apologize for it, I’ve learned something, and I wouldn’t do it again. And I want all the facts to come out. I’ll talk to Congressional committees, we’ll provide the material. The FBI released these materials to the public.
But on the other hand, we’ve got a candidate in Donald Trump who won’t release his tax returns to the public after he promised to do so. And talk about national security -- he has openly encouraged Russia to engage in cyber hacking to try to find more e-mails or materials, and we know that this cyber attack on the DNC was likely done by Russia.
A president was impeached and had to resign over an attack on the DNC during a presidential election in 1972. This is serious business.
So contrast the Hillary situation, where the FBI said there’s no need for legal proceedings, with an attack that is being encouraged by Donald Trump on the DNC by Russia, similar to what led to resignation of a president 30 years ago.
Jimmy Carter has made a warm endorsement of Hillary, with comments about her tremendous service as his appointee during his Presidential term.
I’ve known Hillary for decades—and her record as a public servant is superb. In 1977, I appointed her to the board of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a nonprofit that provides legal assistance to Americans in need. She went on to become the first woman to chair the board.
Over her tenure, funding for the LSC tripled, allowing the organization to expand legal aid to every congressional district and handle 1.5 million cases for poor clients each year. As first lady, Hillary continued to advocate for legal services funding.
That’s a special thing about Hillary—when there’s a job worth doing, she doesn’t abandon it.
I saw that Wil Wheaton has made a very interesting comment on the media’s awful coverage of charitable foundations connected to the two Presidential candidates, with the media infatuated with concocted scandals on one side while actual impropriety on the other side barely gets any mention. Wil was not a strong ally of Hillary in 2008 or during the primary but makes sense here.
The story the media wants to write about the Clintons exists, but it looks more and more like it won’t be written, because it’s about Trump. I don’t think this is because the media is in the tank for either candidate, but is because there is a narrative: Trump’s a buffoon and dog bites man, while Clintons are just so damn suspicious and there’s a cloud over everything they do and whether it’s actually questionable or not, it sure has the appearance of being unethical.
This isn’t really a horserace election, because even though we have a flawed candidate in Hillary Clinton, we have an absolute psychopath in Donald Trump.
He gave further reaction at Reddit.
This has been driving me nuts all week, and I kept trying to put this into words, but I couldn't do it. It's not just about the press having a special set of rules for the Clintons, but also how this is just a complete and total failure by the entire media establishment to actually report a real story, while they're spending all this time chasing a story that isn't what they want it to be.
Other than a tiny handful of reporters (and bless them for the work they're doing) this major story is being completely ignored, and I don't understand how that is even possible. This goes to the heart of Trump's honesty and it exposes the corrupt nature of political contributions. Imagine the headlines and BREAKING NEWS coverage if it involved the Clinton Foundation. (Actually, you don't have to. I'm sure something that leads nowhere will come up in eventually, and we'll get to see it happen in HD).
This infuriates me because it isn't just "John Kerry sounds French" or "Al Gore is boring" or "Mitt Romney is weird" levels of pointless stupidity. This is genuine and real and seriously harmful journalistic malpractice.
Jordan Weissman had a short favorable comment on Hillary’s latest plans to combat unwarrented prescription drug price increases. He is a popular economic commentator for Slate.
Hillary Clinton already had a plan to lower prescription drug costs. In fact, it was one of the first pieces of her agenda that she rolled out. But following the furor over Mylan's decision to increase EpiPen prices by some 500 percent, her campaign has released a new proposal specifically aimed at stopping “unjustified” price spikes on pharmaceuticals. And it's surprisingly bold.
Victoria McGrane has an interesting piece at Boston Globe saying that Hillary has found her groove on the campaign trail now.
A while back, she told security not to eject two shirtless fanboys from a rally “as long as they don’t take anything else off,” then took a photo with them afterward.
Beyond the purely silly, analysts say, Clinton has grown more surefooted since winning the nomination.
“She’s evolving from a decent candidate to a very good candidate,” said Democratic strategist Steve McMahon, cofounder of the Virginia-based firm Purple Strategies. “You can see it in her performance every day.”
This new comfort of Clinton’s was evident just a few days after the pickle gag (which erupted into controversy over whether Kimmel had preloosened the jar) when she delivered a withering indictment of Trump as an unhinged bigot who traffics in conspiracy theories.
Finally, Paul Krugman’s OpEd this morning on how the media’s awful coverage of the Presidential race this year reminds him of the 2000 cycle’s media hostility to Gore and indulgent attitude towards Bush.
You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.
Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore’s mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.
And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it’s happening again.
Our candidates and their spouses have very busy schedules today! Hillary and Tim are scheduled to appear at a parade in Cleveland, OH, (see also ohio.com and cleveland.com) with Hillary also appearing later in Quad Cities of IL/IA (see also WQAD). Bill’s schedule shows events in Detroit, MI, and then in Cincinnati, OH. Meanwhile, Anne Holton will visit both Hampton and Newport News, VA.
Bonus Tweets:
Have a terrific Labor Day, everyone!
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.