No Clintons for her
Hip-hop icon Sister Souljah, who was upbraided by candidate Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign when she suggested a week to kill white people, hasn't found a Clinton she likes yet.
While promoting her sixth book, she was asked how she felt about 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. Before answering, she took out an envelope and slid it across the table, according to Time.
"I want to control what I say so that I can be quoted properly," she said. "I have this past history of being misquoted or misunderstood."
The card read, "She reminds me too much of the slave plantation white wife of the white 'Master.' She talks down to people, is condescending and pandering. She even talked down to the commander in chief, President Barack Obama, while she was under his command!"
Well, perhaps Chelsea in 2028 might be her cup of tea.
Her Brian Williams moment?
If Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is to be believed, she once tried to join the Marines. Late last week, her campaign was in defense mode over a story she reportedly first told in the 1990s and repeated recently. The unlikely scenario had the then-Yale graduate and anti-war activist considering joining the Marines in 1975 while living in Arkansas.
A Clinton staffer said of the candidate, who had a 51 percent unfavorable rating in the most recent ABC/Washington Post poll, that "her interest was sincere."
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave the story about Clinton, who would have been 28 years old that year, "Two Pinocchios."
"At first glance, " he said, "this story doesn't really add up But as we noted, The Post did locate friends who recalled she had tried to join the Marines, though the circumstances are fuzzy. There are enough holes here that Clinton has an obligation to address the circumstances under which she approached the Marines, now that she had once again raised it in a campaign context."
Quirky Claire
U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who was headed to the ash can of history after one term until her Republican opponent self-destructed in 2012, made an advertisement for CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert recently, one that was to reveal the senator's quirky side. However, according to American Spectator, what she made was less "poignant and hilarious criticism" and more "prickly and outdated feminist overture from the embattled senator from a Midwestern state."
In the video, she says, as just one of 20 women serving in the Senate, it's her job to encourage more men to, "sometimes, just shut the hell up." She says it's not that women don't value men's thoughts but just that they don't value all of them.
Those verboten topics, Sen. McCaskill says, include what women do with their bodies, who the next James Bond should be, "Star Wars," pantsuits, selfies, Shonda Rhimes, curtains, carbs, millennials, body-hair removal, religion, gluten, Harry Potter, nut allergies, "Star Wars" again, all art in general, whether to brine the Thanksgiving turkey and ethics in gaming journalism.
"Please take a moment to jot these down," she says. And she ends with this: If men can refrain from talking about all of the above, "we'll let you weigh in on marijuana legalization."
Why mention "Star Wars" twice? The American Spectator opines that men "might say that there doesn't need to be a statistically equal number of female, minority and questionably gendered characters on screen at any given time, as though statistical equality within the scope of a fantasy movie about a fake space-faring civilization set thousands of years ago has a more dramatic impact on society's impression of gender equality than baseless accusations of sexism from unemployed Gender Studies majors."
The stripper vote
State Rep. John Bel Edwards, D-Amite, a Louisiana Democratic gubernatorial runoff candidate, evidently knows where to look for Democratic voters.
Last week, the candidate skipped a forum at Southern University where he was invited and where his opponent, Sen. David Vitter, R-La., appeared and blew off the Family Forum's social issues gathering at Jefferson Baptist Church in New Orleans the following night.
Where Edwards did appear, though, was a rally at Lyve New Orleans, a nightclub that advertises on Instagram with scantily clad women. A party bus, fliers for the gathering trumpeted, would be available to take attendees to early voting locations.
When questions began to be raised about the appropriateness of the event, the nightclub took down the invitations from its Instagram account.
Sabato's Crystal Ball, a service run by Dr. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, recently rated the election a toss-up.