Donald Trump: game-show host, birther king, shady businessman, and proud pu@sy-grabber is the next president of the United States. Congratulations, America. Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton, who mishandled some e-mails and wasn’t forthcoming about the fact that she had pneumonia. Whew. Dodged a bullet there.
Remember when Republicans said Obama couldn’t be president because he lacked experience? Well, Trump did guest star on “The Nanny” once, so there’s that. Â From “Yes, we can” to “Grab ’em by the pu@sy” in eight years.
The results will undoubtedly be dissected for days, weeks, and months to come, but this much is clear: that a man much of the county finds abhorrent could win election to the highest office in the land is the starkest example yet that we aren’t just on different wavelengths; we’re practically different species.
In local results, the Slaughter juggernaut is back. Long-serving Democratic Congress member Louise Slaughter easily defeated her Republican rival, Mark Assini, tonight. Unofficial results from the Monroe County Board of Elections put Slaughter up by more than 10 percentage points, with only 18 districts left to report in.
Slaughter barely defeated Assini, who is supervisor of the Town of Gates, in 2014.
Many people were watching this race because Assini seemed to come almost out of nowhere in 2014. While Slaughter was able to keep her seat, she won that year by about 800 votes – not a stellar performance for a longtime incumbent.
Slaughter had some advantages in this year’s election. She was completely prepared for Assini and she was well-funded. Slaughter had the money for ad buys and she clearly used it, often going pretty rough on Assini. It was also a presidential election year and from most accounts, turnout has been strong.
But Slaughter is also without question one of the area’s most beloved figures. She is a staunch liberal and tough as nails. She has a long history of bringing funding back to the Rochester area on everything from major infrastructure to research. More recently, she has championed Rochester’s photonics industry, which is still in its infancy.
While some voters like the idea of term limits, it takes only a few minutes with Slaughter to see the difference in depth that experience can make. For his part, Assini never seemed to catch on during this election. He was mild-mannered and respectful of Slaughter. He campaigned on repairing the region’s infrastructure and improving the local economy by containing government spending. It was not enough, however, to take him across the finish line.
Also in Monroe County, Adam Bello just did something rare: he won a countywide office as a Democrat. Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed Bello to the vacant county clerk seat earlier this year.
With the vast majority of polling sites reporting, Bello has a wide lead over Republican Cheryl Rozzi, the Greece town clerk and the former clerk of the County Legislature. Bello had roughly 57 percent of the vote to Rozzi’s 43 percent.
As clerk, Bello placed an early focus on vacant and abandoned properties. He highlighted the effort in his campaign and said that it showed how the clerk’s office could tackle broader issues. He campaigned on reopening a downtown Rochester DMV office and modernizing the clerk’s office to allow things such as legal document e-filing.
Bello also criticized Republican County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo, his predecessor in the office, over fees that were waived under her administration. Many of the waivers dealt with passport fees, and a Department of State representatives says the practice violated the law.
Bello and Dinolfo, of course, are potential political rivals. Some Democrats and Republicans have talked about Bello as a future county executive candidate, and his decisive victory tonight will only fuel that speculation.
At the state level, Democrat Harry Bronson will keep his 138th Assembly District seat, which covers parts of the City of Rochester as well as the towns of Henrietta and Chili. He pulled in around 63 percent of the votes, besting Republican Bob Zinck, who got about 36 percent.
Both Bronson and Zinck prevailed in primaries back in September; Bronson beat former television reporter and anchor Rachel Barnhart while Zinck beat conservative activist Peter Vazquez. Bronson stressed his support of and advocacy for marriage equality, minimum wage increases, and paid family leave throughout his primary and general election campaigns.
Republican Senator Joe Robach will also return to Albany after defeating his Democratic challenger, Ann Lewis. Robach is very popular in his district, which stretches from Brighton through part of the city and into the westside towns. Democrats have struggled to unseat him and as a candidate, Lewis isn’t well known.
In for the 133rd Assembly District, Republican Joe Errigo beat Democrat Barbara Baer, getting 52 percent of the vote to her 39 percent.
The race became tragically complicated when the incumbent, Republican Bill Nojay, killed himself the day he was supposed to turn himself in on fraud charges.  And it took another twist when Errigo made inflammatory comments about City of Rochester neighborhoods on WXXI’s Connections program recently. The remarks may have hurt him in the Rochester area, since Baer carried the few Monroe County towns in the district. But Errigo carried the Livingston County and Steuben County portions of the district.
Also at the state level, Â Republican State Senators Rich Funke and Robert Ortt won their uncontested races, as did Democratic Assembly Majority Leader Joe Morelle, Democratic Assembly member David Gantt, and Republican Assembly members Peter Lawrence and Stephen Hawley.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2016.
Trump’s Sound Bite (Button) Lesson
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Perhaps Trump is teaching us. The sound bite counts.
Maybe we need to start with a few words, REPEATED over and over.
Yes, we may be bothered by being BUGGED, but maybe with repetition, we will change our ever loving minds.
(I think Trump has a learning disability LD, and so he, himself (and the USA), needs to be BUGGED, again and again).
Trump kept repeating himself and he did not get bored, but maybe Clinton got bored with repetition.
The FBI statements were a repetition and that may have triggered the voters. ANGER all the more.
I have buttons, like the EASY button from Staples, and other buttons.
Cellphones have “buttons”. Trump pressed people’s buttons and won…
Harry,
Just as I responded when you sent me the message below via email — I don’t really know what the heck you’re talking about, but you are right about one thing — Trump definitely pushed a button. It’s called the button of WHITE-SUPREMACIST-BACKLASH — period.
Howard, amusing read as always. You know what’s funny though? Exit polls show Hillary performed WORST among minorities (and females) than Obama did in ’08 and ’12… It’s funny that you blame “racists” for Trump’s win. At the same time though, I’m confused. How did the half black guy win in ’08 and ’12? Not enough racists around then to beat him? Again, thanks for the lunch time laugh!
Why don’t you try to be a non-biased news source if you want to be taken seriously.
Lets be honest here anyhow. The reason Trump won is the former leader of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.. Bernie Sanders was trouncing Trump in national polls, but he wasn’t a beloved insider like Clinton, so what happens? Oh yeah, the DNC stacks the deck against him, and boom, we get the two most atrocious choices of, hopefully, our lifetimes.
Agreed, but doesn’t matter and Clintons misstepped by not having Bernie as her running mate, if she did that she wins. Doesn’t matter, people went out and voted for Trump and he won by a landslide.
@Eric Maloney
Spot on, and I mentioned this months ago – the DNC would rather have a possible Pres Trump than a guaranteed Pres Sanders. Well, it blew up in their faces, as it should have. Sometimes there is a little justice in the world.
I don’t have high hopes for a Trump presidency, but at least there’s a good chance we won’t be going to war with the Russian Federation over their refusal to lick our boots.
Another thought, having Hillary at the top of the ticket probably kept enough Dem leaning Centrists at home, Democratic party lost a lot of close races due to poor turnout.
@ City – ” mishandled some e-mails”? Mishandled??? Really? C’mon City, you can do better than that. I voted for her, so I share SOME of your dismay and astonishment, but any ordinary Joe who did what she did would be in handcuffs. She knew better, and you should know better too.
Trump DID not win by a landslide. In fact, HRC won the popular vote, and it was a virtual tie. It’s just that he won the electoral college. In reality, more people voted for Hillary. Unfortunately, we lost the house and the Senate, which doesn’t allow us to have much leverage in terms of a mandate. The midterms are going to be more important than ever.
I think that people finally realized that the leaders of both parties were aligned more with their large donors than their party’s platform. The DNC rigged the primaries against Bernie and the Republican Establishment tried to block Trump ,even after the primaries were over and Hillary was the alternative.
The election was won in what used to be the Industrial Heartland by voters who responded to Trumps promise to re-work trade deals and return manufacturing jobs.
@ Amy Bown
…Except there are still “red states” (four) still counting. He’s projected to win the popular vote as well.
By and far people vote for someone who are like them or who have qualities they like to have. the results just show that the worst of america won. The racism, misogyny, hate was all just sitting there in the deepest guts of the country until drumpf came over like an emetic and then it all came pouring out…
God bless America, again!
I, and many others I know are so very glad that Mr. Trump was elected President.
President-elect Trump has a very nice ring to it.
Get used to saying, hearing ‘President Trump’ for the next four years.
Hillary can now fade into the woodwork, and take her anger, and frustrations unjustly out on Bill.
It is great to be an American, again!
“the DNC would rather have a possible Pres Trump than a guaranteed Pres Sanders” — really? Pres Sanders would have been a guarantee? What solid evidence do you have that that would have been the case? No telling what the campaigns of Trump vs Sanders would have looked like, and how people would have voted.
I would like to see a woman president – but NOT Hillary Clinton. I’m thinking Condoleeza Rice. If the deeply flawed insider and rule flouter had been elected (then indicted and tried for criminally mishandling classified information) Hillary would have set back women’s progress for a generation. The Clintons have more than worn out their welcome and it’s past time for them do go.
What surprises me more than anything, is that Trump won in spite of the Liberal biased news media, selectively reporting and twisting the facts on both candidates.
The results of this election verified what I had already suspected; that the deceitful projection polls, used by the media, to influence and sway potential voters, were wrong and should never be relied upon.
This election should be a wake up call to the mainstream news media; in that many Americans are privy to the editorialized reporting of information;in that what the media spews is not purely factual but instead, political propaganda with a hidden agenda.
Don I agree..When I looked at the polls right before the election that showed Hillary up the most points I checked their methodology. Invariably they would be over represented by registered Democrats often by 10 points or more. The polling websites like Real Clear Politics or 538 would include them in their averages and it distorted them. I think that the media bias has become so blatant now that people are aware of it and discount much of what they read or hear.
“Democrat Hillary Clinton, who mishandled some e-mails …” Mishandled some emails? You mean tens of thousands of them, each count potentially a felony. She should go to jail. Anyone else would have. Then there is the Clinton Foundation used to funnel millions to Bill and Hill . I could go on and on.
Amy, a few replies to your comments. Not only did the Dems lose on the national level, but they also lost two more governorships (they are now down to about 16) and control of at least one additional state legislature. In 2018, the news gets worse for them. This year, of the 34 Senate seats, 24 were held by Republicans, and they turned two of,them. In 2018, of the 33 seats, 25 are currently held by Dems or Independents, so they have the most to lose. In addition, Dems do a very poor job of,turning out to vote in off year elections. Their own fault.
The Democratic Party has been exclusively focused on the presidency and has allowed its organization for governing to wither away. You may be able to,dad from time to time, but you cannot effectively govern.
This link shows which Senate seats are up in 2018. Not the ones in blue that went Republican this year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta…
Don’t boo, write!
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contact
Where is the news about the $30 million train station that Louise procured for Niagara Falls? Brand new and VACANT . Amtrak doesn’t even want it. Good use of taxpayers dollars(ha ha), but I’m sure it bought you some votes.
It’s surprising how many commenters on this thread seem to be immune to the actual facts about the kerfuffle over Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Hillary only set up a private server because George Bush’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell, recommended that she do so, and because it was legal at the time. For what it’s worth, Powell used his private AOL account and had a private server for official State Department business, just like Clinton did. The email correspondence between them is preserved and is available online should anyone care to read it.
The reason that Hillary set up her private server, and the reason that private email accounts were used to send official emails, is because the IT systems at the State Department were so antiquated as to be useless. Additionally, Clinton preferred to use an antiquated Blackberry PDA to communicate online, and she found it easier to have her staff print out email so she could read them (she didn’t know how to use a computer). The printers at the State Department were so bad that her staff found it easier to copy them to their private accounts and print them off at home!
If you’re reading this and your under 40, you’re probably laughing at how obsolete that all is!
The very few “classified” emails found on Hillary Clinton’s server were later found to have been misclassified. They should never have been secret at all.
Eight investigations by highly partisan Republican congressional investigative committees failed to find any wrongdoing by Clinton. The FBI, clearly no friend of Clinton’s, twice found that she committed no crime. FBI Director James Comey retracted all FBI allegations that Hillary Clinton’s emails were found on Anthony Weiner’s computer.
This despite approximately $10 million spent by Congress, and about $20 million spent on the investigation by the FBI! (Fiscal Times)
There never was a grand conspiracy on Clinton’s part. To quote a former UK Prime Minister “It was a muddle, not a fiddle.”
The real scandals concerning Hillary’s emails are that critical government IT systems are so obsolete as to be useless, that they’re highly vulnerable to hacking and other forms of cyberattack, that high level government officials are technologically illiterate, and that government agencies routinely “overclassify” data.
The final scandal here is how partisan media has triumphed in creating ignorant, angry partisan hacks rather than informed citizens. The whole email kerfuffle is the successful culmination of a 37 year propaganda campaign against Clinton, by what she was once mocked for calling a “vast right wing conspiracy.” But what else can you call decades of coordinated attacks by Fox News, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, and hundreds of other conservative and “alt right” media outlets? Clinton has her flaws, several serious, but she’s not the monster she was made out to be in the right wing media.
Peer-reviewed academic studies – i.e., the facts – have shown that Fox News viewers – both Democrat and Republican – are actually less well informed about current events than people who don’t watch the news at all!
Thomas Barnes, the one thing you left out. The fact is, no matter who ran the server, those emails, EVERY SINGLE ONE are property of the citizens’ of The United States of America. She had NO RIGHT to delete anything, especially after being subpoenaed. Hillary and Hillary alone is responsible for what happened.
Most concise summary of Hillary FBI email investigation I’ve read. The first section contains a quick summary of the report. I don’t know the FBI Directors feelings toward Hillary Clinton but Loretta Lynch is a highly partisan Attorney General ( as most are)
https://sharylattkisson.com/the-clearest-n…
Johnny,
All federal agencies are having trouble archiving their emails. Yes, as head of the State Department, Hillary owned the problem of her missing and lost emails, but she’s not alone.
For example, the Bush II administration lost or deleted over 22 million emails. Admittedly, that’s for the entire executive branch over 8 years, but it does give a sense of the scope of the problem. Doubtless, the Obama administration will lose some emails too when he leaves office.
The original intent of the requirement that government agencies preserve emails was for archival reasons. For much of the 19th and 20th century, we have great archives of all sorts of information ranging from the fascinating to the deathly dull. But, starting from about 1990, future historians are going to have only partial record of these sorts of records because it’s mostly migrated to electronic data, which is manifestly NOT archival quality. (Digital preservation is a huge issue for archivists, historians, and librarians.)
For example, we have absolutely no email records from the Vice President’s office from 2001-2008 because they were all destroyed when Dick Cheney left office, including all the memos about events after 911, the planning of the invasion of Afghanistan, or the events leading up to the Iraq War. Whether the deletion of all those records was intentional or not, their loss is a national tragedy.
What really comes out in the FBI report (https://vault.fbi.gov/hillary-r.-clinton) is a sense of blissful ignorance on Clinton’s part. Remember, she was a high level government official. At that level, she’s supervising people who supervise people who supervise people. She’s going to be at least 2 layers removed from anything involving IT.
More to the point, this is a woman who didn’t know how to use a desktop computer, so the idea of her doing anything technical with a Linux/Mac OS email server is laughable. Hillary didn’t pay any attention to her private email server except when it didn’t work. She probably didn’t even know where it was located!
The people in charge of setting up the server for Bill’s office at their house in Chappaqua (i.e., the fateful “private server”) were on her husband’s staff, hence Bill’s problem. The sysadmin was some poor schlub who will never work in the industry again named Bryan Pagliano. Mrs. Clinton probably didn’t even know his name since she was mostly in Washington or flying around the world doing diplomat things.
And remember, just because you delete an email from your account doesn’t mean it goes away. At least one copy remains on the server, and/or on backup files, until the sysadmin deletes it or the drive fails. Even then, forensic computer people can sometimes still read a bricked or wiped disk.
The reason why Hillary’s emails went missing is that Bill’s IT guy didn’t know that Hillary was using the server at her house for official email, so he was wiping old server backup images stored on external hard drives as storage space ran out. Additionally, when the IT guys transitioned to a new server they mistakenly blew away some old email files.
The FBI also mentions that a number of PDAs and computer drives were either wiped or destroyed, which sounds suspicious as hell until your realize that cell phones die fast, and most computers get obsolete after 2-3 years. At that point, GSA regulations require that old devices be destroyed or have their drives wiped for security purposes. Clinton smashed her broken Blackberrys (remember, really old phones, in constant use, carried all over the world, so of course they break) with a hammer, but actually she should have been even more thorough (https://www.wired.com/2016/09/actually-clinton-destroyed-phones-better/).
As to Clinton’s emails, they’re all available online from the State Department’s web site, for example: https://foia.state.gov/Search/Results.aspx?collection=Nov03_2016.
You can read them if you like, but you’ll find that most of them are really tedious, trivial stuff. The emails that Clinton wanted to keep private related to private stuff – personal info about her staff, conversations with Bill, details of her daily schedule, personal errands she wanted her personal aide to do, etc.
There’s absolutely NOTHING of interest there relating to Benghazi that wasn’t released previously. No shady dealings with foreign governments, no shifty financial deals, no secret assassinations. Nothing involving the Trilateral Commission, The Gnomes of Zurich, Fluoridation of Your Tap Water, Area 51, Lizard People, or whatever the hell the Republican congressional investigations were looking for.
Of course, every conspiracy theorist is their own special flower who knows better than the teams of specialists who worked with the raw data, interviewed witnesses, ran tests, and figured out what was going on the in the first place. Any gap in the record is a cover-up and random data points somehow get connected into a glowing mandala of crazy. Then it all gets vomited onto InfoWars or Worldnet Daily, and breathlessly Tweeted across the planet.
Thomas the FBI report I posted directly contradicts much of what you wrote. I noticed that in some earlier posts you reference VOX while criticizing right wing media.
The link below gives a perspective on VOX as well as many media outlets.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/vox/