Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Let there be snark.

No one could have predicted…

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

This fight is for everything.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

T R E 4 5 O N

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / On Hillary Clinton Asking People with Disabilities for Their Votes

On Hillary Clinton Asking People with Disabilities for Their Votes

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As Tip O’Neill famously said, Everybody likes being asked! And a cynic might say HRC knows what it’s like to live with a disability, because her lack of a penis has been treated as such by every misogynist & pundit for the last 40 years. Should we be happy that more people are finally getting the voice they deserve, or ashamed that it took this long?

ORLANDO — Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is pushing intensively to win over a group of voters who don’t typically get much attention during elections but who have become an increasingly potent political force: disabled people and their families…

Clinton is also targeting Hispanics, women, caretakers of the elderly and sick, and families of gun-violence victims, among other constituencies focused on specific issues. In the case of the disability community, which cuts across all partisan and demographic divides, Clinton may be trying to attract not only ­Democratic-leaning voters who are not excited by her candidacy, but also voters who may be leaning toward Trump — notably disabled veterans.

One very visible piece of the effort came Wednesday in a policy speech here devoted to initiatives to more fully integrate those with disabilities into the nation’s economy. It is an issue, Clinton said, that “really goes to the heart of who we are as Americans.”

Speaking in a packed community-center gym in this presidential battleground state, Clinton pledged to fully support “a group of Americans who are, too often, invisible, overlooked and undervalued, who have so much to offer but are given too few chances to prove it.”…

“A lot of families and people with disabilities are single-issue voters, where this is the primary issue in deciding who to vote for,” said Allison Wohl, executive director of the Association of People Supporting EmploymentFirst, a group that seeks employment and self-sufficiency for people with disabilities. “So the campaign sees an opportunity.”

Before Wednesday’s speech, Wohl participated in a conference call between campaign aides and disability advocates to preview what the candidate would say.

And behind the scenes, the campaign had already enlisted more than 200 advocates for disabled people, who have been vouching for Clinton on social media, developing policy positions and raising some $1.3 million for her campaign, according to a Clinton adviser…

Reader Interactions

119Comments

  8. 8.

    Adam L Silverman

    Just an FYI Srv and srv may not be the same person. Based on email and IP addresses it appears are troll has picked up a dedicated troll of his own.

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    @efgoldman

    Strictly personal, but don’t know a single white male who will (or ever would) vote for Trump.

    Extremely disappointing was riding the Long Island Railroad during the NY trip and hearing white women (30-ish, but am a lousy judge of age) loudly extolling the (so called) virtues of Trump and hating on Clinton. Overhead that several times, and each time from women.

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: Long Island should have been the tell. Lived there for a year. Its better than Staten Island, but that’s not saying much.

  22. 22.

    Mnemosyne

    While the primary was still going on, somebody posted a really moving essay from a disabled Bernie supporter who switched to Hillary and then was kind of blown away by how helpful and accommodating they were with her disability. The campaign staff in whatever city she was in went out of their way to make it easy for her to volunteer with them, and she was really impressed.

    So I think this has been bubbling under the surface for a while and is just being brought into wider view now.

  23. 23.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Adam L Silverman: I caught the S versus s as well*, and that I much prefer the parody troll to the regular troll.

    *a trick learned on young lawyer boards in the late ’90’s/early 2000’s

  25. 25.

    donnah

    I’m glad Hillary continues to reach out. Even if this campaign is all about Trump, it’s good to see Hillary and her team moving forward, inviting everyone into the tent, and making strides toward helping groups who have been ignored in politics.

    We’re all sick of Trump and the disaster he brings with him. Good on Hillary.

  30. 30.

    Lyrebird

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Hm. So is the new masculine equivalent of, what was it, a lady in the kitchen and a tiger in the bedroom is what… a chef in the kitchen and a monster in the bedroom?

    No idea if Joe Biden has any cooking skills, but a quick glance at Wonkette or here suggests some serious appreciation for some of the aforementioned white males. Non-exclusive appreciation – something the sh-tgibbon and his poisonous son do not understand… Like gee, respecting and caring about *my* ever-so-white dad makes it *easier* for me to respect and care about Pres. Obama, clearly another dedicated dad.

  35. 35.

    NotMax

    @Felonius Monk

    The was an old man named O’Doul
    Who stood, contemplating his tool
    “You took all my wealth
    And ruined my health
    And now you won’t pee, you damn fool!”

  37. 37.

    Frankensteinbeck

    is pushing intensively to win over a group of voters

    Or, you know, maybe she just believes strongly in these issues and has worked for them all her life.

    @redshirt:

    Literally the worst monsters in the world.

    Alas, no. We don’t even compete with Daesh, for example, very little of which is white, and quite a lot of women sign on to the horribleness. However, I will totally go with ‘the majority of white men in the US are such assholes that they’re trying to destroy the country just because they aren’t allowed to shit on anyone they feel like anymore.’

  40. 40.

    Davebo

    Disgusted with tonights football game I decided to look into good places to eat and drink in Tulsa as I’ll be there with my gal in Nov. for the Route 66 Marathon.

    Food blogs? Almost nothing and certainly nothing updated. I just wanted to find a decent bar to have a beer in for 26 miles or so worth or running! It’s been over 20 years since I’ve been to Tulsa and now I know why.

  41. 41.

    Matt McIrvin

    @efgoldman: A presidential election can’t be won with white men alone. It can, however, be won with white men plus just enough white women, and that’s the danger.

  43. 43.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: Daesh is more evil per capita, but in the grand scheme of things they have little power; much of the damage they do is leveraged via white-guy fears and overreactions.

  47. 47.

    SenyorDave

    A couple more stories on Yahoo news about the Trump charity by way of the Post reporter David Fahrenthold. This guy has done phenomenal work. Maybe the Times could hire him away, but they would probably make him report to the public editor Liz Spayd so he could do some stories about the Clinton Foundation because, you know, both sides.

  48. 48.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @redshirt:

    Men are the cause of most problems in the world.

    In the sense that we’re in charge to cause the problems. We’re used to the male-dominated kind, but female-dominated cultures were never any nicer. There certainly is a particularly ugly strain of toxic masculinity that bred in the 80s and is doing the popping-boil-spraying-yuck thing now.

    White men in specific can be charged as the worst of the worst.

    Hell, no. Among other things, there is a singular lack of actual, in-so-many-words, murdering all the males of minorities and selling the women as sex slaves in any current white society. Being evil is human, and not concentrated in any race or gender.

    For no other reason, just for example, then climate change.

    The environmental nightmare that is China would like to talk to you.

  51. 51.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    The environmental nightmare that is China would like to talk to you.

    What, the people we outsource our consumer-goods manufacturing to, so we won’t have the pollution in our own country?

  54. 54.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Matt McIrvin:

    so we won’t have the pollution in our own country?

    Of all the reasons we outsource anything, ‘so we won’t have the pollution’ isn’t one of them. The Chinese government has chosen, and indeed has chosen for the past hundred years long before they were a major American market, to treat the environment worse than America ever has – and I mean ‘worse than the Dust Bowl.’ It is only recently beginning to turn around. White men are definitely not stand-outs for destroying the environment.

  57. 57.

    Mnemosyne

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Plus you get into the interesting question of conscious evil vs evil results. Out here in California, the Spanish missionaries did not realize that converting the local Native American tribes and forcing them to live on the missions would end up killing them in droves because they didn’t have resistance to European diseases, but that was the result. The missions had good intentions, but deadly results.

  59. 59.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Mnemosyne:
    A bigoted concept of good revolving around their assumption that Christianity is the only truth, but yes, they did think they were being benevolent. And Christians certainly have NO monopoly on that kind of bigotry.

  60. 60.

    Steve in the ATL

    @efgoldman:

    Yes, European and American industry didn’t do the environment any favors before the middle of the 20th century, but it’s not just a white, male phenomenon.

    And in further defense of us poor, misunderstood white males, many of those people–the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, even the Irish–weren’t considered white at the time, so don’t blame all that shit on us!

  67. 67.

    hovercraft

    @NotMax:
    Long Island is not NYC, it is very much right RWNJ territory.
    There is a reason that Rep. Peter King is so comfortable advocating racial profiling of muslims.

    Less than one year ago, on Nov. 8, 2008, Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, was murdered in the town of Patchogue, N.Y. The killing, police say, was carried out by a gang of teenagers who called themselves the Caucasian Crew and targeted Latino residents as part of a sport they termed “beaner-hopping.” It highlighted a growing national problem — violent hatred directed at all suspected undocumented immigrants, Latinos in particular. Officials in Suffolk County, N.Y., where Patchogue is located, minimized the tragedy, with the county executive even suggesting that it would have been a mere “one-day story” if not for earlier publicity about his and other residents’ anti-immigrant activism over the prior decade.

    But the reality was that nativist intolerance and hate violence had been festering for years in Suffolk County, fostered by some of the very same officials who were now wishing the story away. The situation in Suffolk County, in fact, is a microcosm of a problem facing the entire United States, where FBI statistics suggest a 40% rise in anti-Latino hate crimes between 2003 and 2007, the latest numbers available. The number of hate groups in America has been rising, too, climbing more than 50% since 2000, mainly by exploiting the issue of undocumented non-white immigration.

    In the aftermath of the Lucero murder, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) sent a Spanish-speaking researcher to Suffolk County to interview Latino residents, both documented and undocumented, over a period of months. What SPLC found was frightening. The Lucero murder, while the worst of the violence so far, was hardly an isolated incident. Latino immigrants in Suffolk County are regularly harassed, taunted, and pelted with objects hurled from cars. They are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles, and many report being beaten with baseball bats and other objects. Others have been shot with BB guns or pepper-sprayed. Most will not walk alone after dark; parents often refuse to let their children play outside. A few have been the targets of arson attacks and worse. Adding to immigrants’ fears is the furious rhetoric of groups like the now-defunct Sachem Quality of Life, whose long-time spokesman regularly referred to immigrants as “terrorists.” The leader of another nativist group, this one based in California, was one of many adding their vitriol, describing a “frightening” visit to an area where Latinos are concentrated in Suffolk: “They urinate, they defecate, [they] make sexual overtures to women.”

    Suffolk County is also the home of the Grand Wizard of the KKK for this part of the country. When I lived there from 1998 till 2003, he lived in the next town over from me in Centereach. I was very happy to move away. One of my neighbors and I got in to it once after I shoveled my car out of a snow bank, went to the store, and came back (20 mins.) to find he had rammed his car out of a snow bank and moved it into my cleared spot. When I asked him to move his car he called me a nigger and told me to go back to where I came from and told me to get away before he shot me. I called the cops, who came over and told me that he didn’t mean it, so it wasn’t a threat, so there was nothing they could do. Good times.

  70. 70.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mnemosyne: I saw a sign on my visit to San Gabriel Mission on Monday that talked about smallpox wiping out most of the Gabrielinos(aka, Tongva) that lived at the mission in 1825.

  74. 74.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: All the way out. You have some exceedingly wealthy portions, both really old money and really new money, which range between conservative to reactionary. Then you have white ethnic enclaves, some having fled Staten Island or the outer boroughs, that run the gamut from liberal to reactionary. But overall, I’d say its conservative with large pockets of reactionary.

  76. 76.

    NoraLenderbee

    @Adam L Silverman: When I grew up on LI, there was a lot of white-ethnic racism and Jewish racism. It was weird coming from people who were only recently allowed to be white themselves. One reason I’d never move back.

  77. 77.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NoraLenderbee: Its the American dream: get into the US, get crapped on, after a couple of generation get accepted as American (and white if possible) and then crap on those that got here more recently.

  78. 78.

    hovercraft

    @efgoldman:
    Nassau is next to Queens and Suffolk is further out. Both counties are pretty republican but Suffolk is worse. When I worked in Huntington which is only about 30 miles from NYC, my co-workers thought I was crazy because I used to go into the city most weekends, the didn’t understand why I’d want to go there. One woman I worked with she was about 30 had only ever been to the City once in her life. For those people NYC was a dangerous exotic place that you’d only go to for special occasions. The one exception was sporting venues, which is possible, you can go to an Islanders or Knocks game without ever leving Penn Station, and the two baseball teams are in the boroughs so you don’t really need to taint yourself with Manhattan.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    The Huntington had a really good exhibit about Junipero Serra a few years ago. They did a great job of walking the line of presenting what the missionaries’ intentions were and what the actual results were. As the old saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

  81. 81.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman

    Fortunately, where Mom lives is (and has been since forever) exceedingly, pointedly liberal. It wasn’t that long ago that the progressive Lester Wolff was her representative, until redistricting cost him re-election.

  82. 82.

    Ian

    @Frankensteinbeck:
    I also don’t see how a Chinese government has chosen to treat the environment in any way for a hundred years when it was formed in 1949. 100 years ago China was in revolution, 5 years before that it was an Imperial Manchu dynasty.

  83. 83.

    hovercraft

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Nassau is where most of the money is until you get out to the Hamptons. Garden City, Syosset, Oyster Bay and many of the towns in Northern Nassau have serious old money, especially along Long Island Sound. As you get into the middle of the island, the money sticks to both the North and South shores with the hoi polloi in the middle. Long Island is a lot less diverse than NYC, Nassau is 73% white, and Suffolk is 84 % white.

  84. 84.

    redshirt

    I’m proud to vote Democrat straight party ticket all day, every election day.

    Anything to stop Republicans – an actual force of evil on this planet and a threat to us all.

  85. 85.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: Good. I lived in Bethpage for a year. I didn’t talk politics with anyone, but I also basically went to work, went to the gym, went to the dojo (in Manhattan), went home and did my thing.

  86. 86.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ian:

    Right, but Frankensteinbeck isn’t arguing that white people haven’t acted horribly, he’s only arguing that acting horribly is not exclusive to white people.

    ETA: Also, too, redshirt was obviously trolling with his initial remark, so don’t get too sucked into the argument. It wasn’t serious to begin with.

  88. 88.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ian: No one is denying that white people can be horrible. Read the whole thread and realize that one particular commenter said something that annoyed a few people. The majority of white men support Trump. They are dipshits.

    OTOH, having a commenter here say that all white men are monsters, when she(?) knows that many of the people she interacts with are white male allies is something else. Especially when that commenter often asks faux-provocative questions as a pretend naïf.

  91. 91.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mnemosyne: The Huntington does have some interesting exhibits, I did stop there on the way back from the San Gabriel Mission(just the Chinese and Japanese gardens and the European Art in the old mansion*).

    ETA: *The cross hall in the mansion reminds me of the cross hall in the White House.

  98. 98.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Miss Bianca: Thanks. Normally, white guys suck stuff rolls off my back because 60% of us do. Sometimes the 40% (and we are a lot, population-wise) feel feisty. redshirt triggered it with a number of people.

  101. 101.

    Emma

    @Adam L Silverman: Same here. Lived in North Merrick from 1990 to 2000. My landlord was wonderful. Other than that, I kept to myself. Work, weekends in the city (God, I miss New York!), and that was that. People were friendly, but I think that my landlord had put out the word.

  103. 103.

    J R in WV

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):

    I’m a monster. My name is Dave*, and I’m a white man, bald and paunchy, and a monster. Ask my wife!

    Can I still phone bank for Hills? and contribute?

    Hoping so!!! even if I’m a white male monster…

    *ETA: not really dave, still J R in WV, also still a monster!!!

  106. 106.

    J R in WV

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I think you outweigh me by, like 8 pounds, so you must be more evil that I am, assuming we’re both pretty much white bread white males.

    I’m also sorry. Can I still hope Hillary wins? Please?

    thanx!

  110. 110.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus: A vampire? Really? Schade – I’m more of a werewolf, myself – never understood the appeal of vampires. I always thought they’d be more like zombies – just ambulatory mindless malevolent bitey-bitey things – than like, I dunno, Maurice Chevalier.

  112. 112.

    Miss Bianca

    @Adam L Silverman: o/t, but speaking of Here Be Monsters…the green chile I made from the Hatch site recipe is simmering, and it is HOT!! Gonna make everyone break out in a sweat when they eat it!

  113. 113.

    J R in WV

    @efgoldman:

    I like NYC a whole lot too. We had planned to visit this fall, but Mrs J’s knee won’t stand for it, surgery is scheduled for next month. So maybe soon.

    @Adam,

    I like Marble Rye too, but I’m talking looks here, not culinary preferences.

  118. 118.

    Adam L Silverman

    @J R in WV: I look like I’m part Mongolian. Someone on Dad’s side of the family got to Russia by going East along the Silk Road and then North across the steppes.

  119. 119.

    ruemara

    I think watching white men whitemansplaining to each other is metaphysical inception that causes the destruction of the universe.

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