HIT & RUN BLOG

Loren Elliott/ZUMA Press/NewscomTwo women have put forth claims that Donald Trump groped and kissed them without their permission.

We'll never know if they're telling the truth, because there are no witnesses who can corroborate their claims—except, of course, for Trump himself, who was caught on tape boasting about doing exactly what they said he did.

Recall what Trump told Billy Bush in 2005:

"You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them," Trump told Access Hollywood's Billy Bush, according to an audio tape leaked to The Washington Post on Friday. "It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that two women now say Trump did to them the exact things he described in the statement above. Jessica Leeds, now 74, claims Trump groped her during an airline flight: he grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.

And in 2005, then-22-year-old Rachel Crooks was forcibly mouth-kissed by Trump, she told The Times.

Trump supporters will describe these allegations as he-said/she-said. But that's not quite right, because, again, Trump already admitted on camera to committing these exact crimes.

Reason readers know that I am often critical of the idea—hypocritically promoted by none other than Hillary Clinton—that we should automatically believe alleged victims of sexual assault. (Clinton supporters have happily ignored inconvenient allegations against Bill.) The believe-all-victims mantra is frequently cited in the context of campus rape disputes, where anti-rape activists give the impression that they believe accused parties should be deemed guilty without any shred of due process. These accusations are often more complicated than either side would like to believe: they run the full gamut, from undeniable sexual assault to possibly genuine misunderstanding to deliberate fabrication.

The allegations against Trump are categorically different, and that's because Trump himself has not only admitted to such behavior—he's bragged about it, for decades. He was proud of his ability—afforded by wealth and status—to take advantage of women.

Trump's own words confirm his deplorable behavior. And then there are the women's statements in The Times. Plus Trump's ex-wife's testimony. And (underage) pageant contestants who say he barged in on them in the dressing rooms. This too. Oh, and this.

Automatically believing all victims is the wrong approach: the right approach is to soberly assess the facts. And the facts undeniably suggest that Trump is the monster he himself claims to be.

In this case, I believe Trump (circa 2005) and the victims, since their accounts are philosophically in agreement. (The Trump of 2016 denies the allegations, and also thinks Ted Cruz's father was involved in the Kennedy assassination.)

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh had this to say:

I read this and halfway through it dawned on me w/horror that Limbaugh was talking about the primacy of consent as if *it was a problem*. pic.twitter.com/k6CVvKvmqA

— Jeff B/DDHQ (@EsotericCD) October 12, 2016

But... "consent" is the magic key! Yes, you can do whatever you want to another person, sexually speaking, as long as you have their consent. The campus left, unfortunately, has put forth the unworkable claim that consent must be verbalized before each and every new sex act—that men and women aren't capable of reading the mood and mutually deciding to escalate things without aggressing against each other. It's a terrible shame that the far right—to the extent Rush Limabaugh represents it—is now putting forth an equally ludicrous claim: that consent is a bad thing.

It's as if, as Cathy Young claims in her latest article for Reason, Trump and his ilk are trying to prove leftist feminists right about rape culture.

Frustratingly difficult to argue U.S. is not a rape culture when one candidate is a sexual predator and the other is married to Bill Clinton

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) October 13, 2016

David Frum, former Bush speechwriter, credited with inventing the phrase "axis of evil," lays forth with admirably frightening precision what I'm afraid will be many GOP thought leader and activist's reaction to a big Trump loss in November: that while he may indeed have been an offensive jerk with a scarily volatile personality, Republicans must remember that when it comes to the issues the Party should run on moving forward, Trump was actually totally right.

This is all in an article actually called "How to Rebuild the Republican Party" at The Atlantic.

Donaldjtrump.com

Even as various GOP solons lately find strange new disrespect for Trump in the face of further exposure of his horrible personal expression and behavior, I fear Frum will prove prescient in setting forth the Official Line moving forward after a Trump loss, should that happen: that he was a terrible guy, sure, but a brilliant policy entrepreneur whose very popularity shows where Republican politics need to go from here.

That is, to almost zero interest in small government at all, except lip service to tax cuts while talking up enormous spending increases, and a very unspecified dislike of regulation, ideas that are not very encouraging in a guy whose economic policy advisers have a very tenuous grasp on any of the economic thought behind free markets.

Otherwise, as Trump exemplifies and Frum cheers:

a majority of Republican voters also want a message that secures health coverage, raises middle-class incomes, and enforces borders and national identity....

Trump saw...that the social-insurance state has arrived to stay. He saw that Americans regard healthcare as a right, not a privilege. He saw that Republican voters had lost their optimism about their personal futures—and the future of their country. He saw that millions of ordinary people who do not deserve to be dismissed as bigots were sick of the happy talk and reality-denial that goes by the too generous label of "political correctness." He saw that the immigration polices that might have worked for the mass-production economy of the 1910s don't make sense in the 2010s. He saw that rank-and-file Republicans had become nearly as disgusted with the power of money in politics as rank-and-file Democrats long have been. He saw that Republican presidents are elected, when they are elected, by employees as well as entrepreneurs. He saw these things, and he was right to see them.

The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump's insights—separate them from Trump's volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right.

Frum does give lip service to the notion that all that big government and culture war stuff from Trumpland can somehow be wedded meaningfully to: "individual initiative, a free enterprise economy, limited government, lower taxes...."

But once government is handmaiden to the complaints and supposed needs of Trump's constituency for free things, infrastructure spending explosions, economy-freezing protectionism, and making sure their version of undesirables can't get to America or work here, it's hard to see what limited government would mean or how lower taxes could be maintained. (I should note that at least the official version of Trump's health care thought doesn't match Frum's insistence that Trump agrees that "health care is a right," but it is what Frum obviously thinks the GOP needs to believe.)

I linked to Frum's essay yesterday in the context of the curious dog that didn't bark in it: despite Trump's non-interventionist fan club, superinterventionist Frum seems not concerned in the slightest that Trump might not conduct American foreign policy in a way that would please Frum.

For other recent takes on what a Trump loss can or will mean for the Republicans, see this from W. James Antle at Washington Examiner.

Antle's main point is backed up by my own impression of the average Trump fan I encounter online: what the Republicans who waited until pussygate to try to jump ship will gain from Trump's voters—and there will be plenty of them, even if he doesn't win—is a lot of heated and angry contempt. How the angry Trumpkins will see the situation is: various bigwigs in the GOP establishment have proven they would rather kowtow to feminazis and a liberal media than make America great again, that, as Antle notes, the GOP are afraid to really fight for the interests of those who hate liberals more than they love liberty, when Trump was so willing.

Who Lost Trump? will be the battle cry that haunts and likely takes down many Republican leaders in the next four years if he loses.

That will be bitter justice for those Republicans so unconcerned with actual good ideas about shrinking government that they failed to see through both Trump's persona and his policies early. But a Republican Party obsessed with that sort of recrimination won't be likely to support any forces more likely to make the Party more conducive to being any kind of force for smaller and saner government.

Third party options, or politicians willing to use the major parties for what they provide (name recognition, ballot access, money) and not feel obligated to support all the dumb shit they stand for, will remain Americans' only likely political options. Win or lose, the wrecking ball of Trump has done its damage. And while Republicans may find electoral advantage in trying to embrace Trump's crummy mix of authoritarian nativism, they'll just keep hurting America doing so.

Ben Domenech at Federalist has a more cynical realpolitik take on a post-Trump-loss Republican future, concluding more or less that given the unwillingness of actual party leaders to leave the stage or change, that nothing much will actually shift with the GOP as a political entity. Rather, he sees both hardcore Trump fans and anti-Trumpers just walking away wounded from the Party.

That's certainly an option for voters, who can always shift back to the largely ignored 40 percent or more who tend to not vote at all.

And if the Libertarian Party can hold its head proud through the rest of this mess, they will clearly benefit from an election season that has treated them for the most part as legitimate, even if hopeless, players. Pro-liberty Republicans may see the need for that sort of true realignment.

But apparatchiks and politicians gotta do politics, and I do fear that Frum's arguments will make all too much sense to them: hey, that crummy protectionist big-spending mix won the primaries, it's apparently what the people want. God help them.

Apicture alliance / Frank May/Newscom Texas father's story of "Snapchat sex traffickers" has gone viral as he pushes for legislation that would, among other things, allow parents to have their 18- to 20-year-old offspring involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities for engaging in sex work. His measure would also raise the minimum-age threshold for working at strip clubs and other sexually-oriented business from 18 to 21. He is selling it as a way to fight human trafficking, and says Texas lawmakers are on board.

The Fort Bend County father, John Clark, became interested in the issue last spring after his 18-year-old daughter, Heather, ran away from home and may have been having sex for money. Clark has claimed repeatedly that Heather was lured by a sex trafficker whom she met on Snapchat as a 16-year-old, and he strongly implies that this man abducted or held her captive and forced her into prostitution. But while it's understandable why Clark might want to diminish his daughter's agency here, the facts he offers suggest Heather left her parents' home willingly, did not want to return, and only did so after Clark had her tracked down by FBI agents and private investigators.

According to Clark, the ordeal started when his daughter left home on Saturday, April 30, to go to the gym. Once there, Heather ditched her car and cell phone and headed with friends to a party. When she didn't return home, the Clarks reported their daughter missing with the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office.

Six days later, on May 5, Heather contacted her parents and told them to call off the search—and reward money—for her. "She's said that she doesn't want to come home," her dad told the Houston Chronicle. "We don't know what is behind her choice."

At this point, Heather's family and Fort Bend police still believed, understandably, that she may have been abducted and was only ordering her family to stop looking for her under duress. The cellphone abandonment certainly raises red flags—what kind of 21st-Century teen ditches their phone in their car before going to a party?

Perhaps one who's worried her parents are tracking it. According to a May 21 Facebook post from John Clark, he and his wife had been concerned about Heather's friends and phone-app usage long before she ran away, and taken extreme measures to monitor her whereabouts physical and digital. After laying out his theory of how sexual predators "groom" teen girls to be their victims, a process he believed befell his daughter, Clark writes that we "may get the impression [they] were uninvolved parents" who didn't pay attention to Heather. "That was not the case."

Heather's parents "went through her phone several times a week," her dad explains. At home, the 18-year-old wasn't allowed to take her cellphone upstairs to her bedroom and "when she went upstairs she had to leave her phone on the kitchen counter, so we could check it." They required Heather to provide them with "all her passwords," sometimes grabbed her phone out of her hands "unexpectedly (before she could log out of the app)" to check her recent Snapchat communications, and installed a GPS tracker on her car.

In addition to monitoring the car GPS "every time she left the house," Clark notes that they "Facetimed her every time she went out to make sure she was where she was supposed to be, and she was with the people she was supposed to be seeing." (These were "friends from high school," he later points out, because human trafficking isn't "limited to the inner city.") Heather was grounded "every time she had contact with one of the people we thought were trouble," and Clark writes that he "went face-to-face with a few of them and assertively demanded they stay away from my daughter."

Clark doesn't say if he had tracking software installed on Heather's phone, but in his advice to other parents, he writes: "Children of parents have no right to privacy. We have a responsibility to search EVERYTHING. Install an application like mobistealth or Mobil-spy on your kid's phone. Mobile-spy monitors a few more things, mobistealth doesn't let the child know a monitoring application is installed."

Andrew HeatonTune into Kennedy on the Fox Business Network (FBN) tonight at 8p ET, where I'll be talking with the show's beloved hostess and friend of Reason about the foreign policy alternative offered by Gary Johnson, which I wrote about yesterday for Reason.

In addition to calling for reasonable cuts in military spending and for Congress to re-assume its constitutional duty as the entity that declares war, Johnson actually dared to speak to the American voting populace as if they were adults:

Johnson concluded with a call to end the "naive and misleading" fantasy that there will ever be a "V-I Day" to celebrate a decisive military victory over ISIS or any other iteration of the "Global War on Terror." His plan for battling Islamic extremism focuses on "isolating" and "containing them," by "starving them of the funds and support they must have to mount large-scale attacks," rather than "dropping bombs" or putting "tens of thousands of boots on the ground."

Tune in tonight at 8p or set your DVRs for Kennedy on FBN to see the segment.

• NASALeaked speech transcripts purportedly show Hillary Clinton praising Russia President Vladimir Putin as recently as 2014. An ultra-nationalist ally of Putin warns that a vote for Clinton is a vote for "World War III" while a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for "world peace." On a C-SPAN town hall Gary Johnson named two law professors as his top picks for the Supreme Court.
• Voter registration has been extended in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Matthew.
• Rebels in Yemen launched another failed missile strike at a U.S. navy ship in the region.
• The government of the United Kingdom is pushing for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Syria.
• Chip Kelly has made Colin Kaepernick the starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers in Week 6.
• Following Elon Musk, President Obama says he wants the U.S. to send a man to Mars by the 2030s.

SHAWN THEW/EPA/NewscomMore than 40,000 fans are expected to pack into Nationals Park on Thursday night for a winner-take-all playoff game between the Washington Nationals and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

When the game ends, though, many of those fans might find themselves stranded.

That's because the D.C. subway system closes at midnight during the week, and the WMTA, which runs mass transit in the nation's capital, says it will not extend operating hours to accommodate fans attending Thursday's Game 5 of the National League Division Series. First pitch is scheduled for 8:08 p.m. and the first four games in the series have taken an average of nearly four hours to play. That makes it likely that the final out of Thursday's game won't be recorded until near—or just past—closing time for the metro.

Max Scherzer, the Nationals' superstar pitcher and expected starter in Thursday's game, thinks the WTMA should extend its operating hours on Thursday. Anyone familiar with the D.C. metro will get a little chuckle out of his logic.

"God, I would hope to believe that playoff games here in D.C. would mean more than shutting down the lines for a couple hours," Scherzer said last week during an appearence on a local sports talk radio program. "I mean, isn't it a supply-and-demand issue? We have a supply of people that demand to use the line to go to the park. Why wouldn't you want to meet that?"

Scherzer gets paid to throw baseballs, not to analyze public policy, so give him a pass for failing to understand that concepts like "supply" and "demand" don't mean a whole lot to government bureacracies like the WMTA.

And the DC metro is the worst kind of bureaucracy. It's a toxic mix of unaccountable staff, broken escalators, burning tracks and misplaced spending priorities. All the problems are driving people away from using the subway, a trend the WMTA says they are trying to reverse.

That might seem like a reason to stay open an hour later on Thursday night for the chance to capture tens of thousands of potential riders leaving Nationals Park. Nope.

Were the DC subway a private business, Scherzer would probably be right. Alas, the DC metro doesn't have to turn a profit to continue to operate because it's going to get its funding from the taxpayers of Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., whether it's open at the conclusion of Thursday's game or not—in fact, it recently got an extra $1 billion annually because it's so awful.

Without a profit motive, the only thing that can get the metro to change policies is political pressure. That's not proving too effective in this case, despite Jack Evans, chairman of the WMTA board of directors, saying last week that it will look "foolish" if 15,000 people have to leave a Nationals playoff game early to catch the last train of the night.

It's just an embarrassment," he said, according to the Washington Post, which reports that Evans wants to keep the subway open late if the Nationals make the World Series (getting there would require winning Thursday and winning another series after that, which brings with it the potential of three more home games with 8 p.m. start times).

Other local officials in D.C. are mostly shrugging their shoulders. Mayor Muriel Bowser suggested that Nationals' fans should be "creative" about getting home from the game on Thursday.

Luckily for Nats' fans, there are other transportation networks in the D.C. area that do cater to supply and demand. Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft will be available after the game on Thursday, but expect to pay surge prices if you want a ride home—that's part of supply and demand too, after all.

John Orvis / Splash News/NewscomBy now everybody must be hip to the fact that social media companies make a good chunk of their money not off us users tweeting about the latest outrage, Instagramming our lunches, or Facebooking political memes with completely inaccurate or made up information. It makes money by taking what we voluntarily reveal about ourselves, packaging it up (or allowing software developers to package it up), and selling it to customers.

It has also become increasingly obvious that governments—local, national, and international—understand social media as an organizational and tracking tool and have adjusted their information-gathering techniques accordingly. This is not inherently a negative—it helps police and emergency responders map out how to react to a crisis, for example.

But that's also the problem. Governments have a noted trend toward seeing anything from its own citizenry that disrupts its own precious order as a "crisis," including groups of people gathering in public to loudly express opinions that their government sucks.

We already know full well that local police and the FBI have been using surveillance tools to snoop on its own citizens, particularly during protests. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has discovered as a result of records requests that American law enforcement agencies are social media datamining tools to keep tabs on protesters and activists.

Specifically, law enforcement agencies have been using tools by a company called Geofeedia to keep track of location-based social media trends in real time. It was doing so via its access to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram user data, and according to the ACLU, it was marketing itself to law enforcement specifically for easier surveillance purposes.

Based on what the ACLU was able to gather, it doesn't appear Geofeedia had access to private information. Rather it had access to database info of what people publicly choose to share on social media and was able to use the same tools marketers use to try to promote products to you based on what you talk about on social media.

Catalin205Sierra College students: if you whistle, make "kissing" noises, ask someone to smile, try to get someone's attention with a "Pssst" noise, honk or shout at another person, or say something racist, sexist, or transphobic, or invade someone's space… prepare to be carded.

In a move that may seem to designed to parody far-left feminism, but is apparently totally serious, Sierra's Feminist Action Club will be handing out harassment citations to people guilty of the above transgressions.

"You have received this card because you did something that made me feel uncomfortable and/or threatened," the card reads, according to Campus Reform. At the bottom, it says, "This is HARASSMENT! Stop harassing!"

The feminists can hand out as many cards as they like—as long as they keep in mind that not everything that makes them uncomfortable is, legally speaking, harassment, and that the college is under no obligation to take action against students who offend them. On the contrary: the college is obligated not to punish students for making comments that might be perceived by some as sexist, or transphobic.

But I'm all for non-coercive social improvement, so if the feminists want to encourage their fellow students to reform their obnoxious behaviors in the most passive-aggressive way possible, they are free to do so. My prediction: this will backfire, but entertainingly so.

Wikimedia CommonsA new solar plant that would supply as much electricity as the Hoover Dam is being proposed for Nevada, was hailed in a report on NPR's Morning Edition today. The plant would also store heat in the form of molten salt so that it could produce power at night and on cloudy days. The cost? The NPR reporter did not blink an eye when told it would cost a mere $5 billion to build.

So how much did the Hoover Dam cost to build? According to a 2010 Public Radio Media program Marketplace, it cost a $49 million in the 1930s, which is worth under $750 million today. In other words, the new solar power plant would cost in today's dollars more than six times what it cost to complete the Hoover Dam.

University of California energy professor Daniel Kammen told Marketplace that the Hoover Dam was a visionary public/private partnership. "That was essentially a government-designed vision, and it found partners in the private sector, and partners in the developers of many big cities in the southwest,' he said. "So that tied together an energy plan and a development plan."

Private/public partnerships have evidently gotten at lot more expensive of the past 80 years.

At the Sunday presidential debate, Donald Trump claimed that he would appoint justices in the mold of late Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. By that he presumably means originalists.DonkeyHoter Foter.com

But Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia warns conservatives tempted to vote for him over Hillary Clinton because of that promise ought to think again. Hillary Clinton will be bad for the Constitution and originalism, no doubt. But Trump may well be worse.

And this is not just because Trump is an ignoramus who does not have a constitutional bone in his body, but because his authoritarian agenda cuts squarely against individual rights, separation of powers, and checks and balances. Odds are if he gets elected, which is becoming less and less likely by the day, Trump will have a transformative effect on the GOP, eroding whatever commitment it has to these ideas.

PAUL BUCK/EPA/NewscomJefferson County has produced more death row inmates than any other county Alabama, and it's no accident. In one case, a Jefferson County prosecutor claimed a man with an IQ of 56 was faking mental retardation. In another, prosecutors secured a death penalty sentence by presenting illegal evidence to the jury.

Jefferson County is one of a dwindling number of counties in the U.S. where prosecutors still doggedly pursue the death penalty, and where it is plagued by inadequate defense, prosecutorial misconduct, and racial bias, according to a report released Wednesday by the Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project.

While the death penalty is still on the books in 30 states—although it is inactive in four of those due to governor-imposed moratoriums—only a dwindling handful of "outlier counties" are responsible for the vast majority of new death penalty sentences being imposed. The Fair Punishment Project released a report earlier this year finding that, out of the roughly 3,000 counties in the U.S., only 16 have imposed more than five death penalty sentences since 2010. The majority of those counties are in Southern states like Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama, but they also include Dallas County, Tx. and populous Southern California counties like Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Bernardino, and Riverside.

But in the few places where the "machinery of death," as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun once famously called it, is still up and running, it is seriously flawed. Wednesday's report, part two of The Fair Punishment Project's study on these outlier counties, identifies what it says are systemic constitutional deficiencies with how the death penalty is applied.

Polaris/NEWSCOMReality television personality Kim Kardashian was robbed while in Paris for fashion week, with masked armed men allegedly breaking into her hotel room, tying her up, holding her gunpoint, and stealing millions of dollars' worth of her jewels.

Because Kardashian is a prominent celebrity on social media, the story went viral pretty quickly, as did conjecture about the robbery, including speculation that she had staged the event. Although there appeared to be no evidence of that, it's not surprising speculation given that much of reality television is staged and most of Kardashian's fans are fans of that format.

Now Kardashian has filed a federal lawsuit against MediaTakeOut.com, a celebrity gossip site, over three stories it ran about the Paris robbery—including one that reported there was evidence the robbery was staged while likely relying solely on social media speculation and one that reported that unnamed French authorities said Kardashian opened the door for the robbers—and refused to take down and apologize for promptly when Kardashian's attorneys demanded it, as TMZ reports.

While the articles still show up in Google's cache, they appear to have been taken down by MediaTakeOut.com. The article that suggested Kardashian may have staged the robbery included pretty garden-variety conspiracy theorizing. The unbylined post repeatedly qualifies itself by saying she "may" have staged the robbery, and declares that the "evidence" (in scare quotes) was "not making sense" (a pretty subjective statement). "We're not yet ready to say with 100% certainty that Kim FAKED THE ROBBERY," the post ends, "but it's really starting to look that way."

On the face of it, the issue seems like a simple First Amendment matter. If the posts did not make any out-and-out knowingly untruthful claims they ought to be protected by the First Amendment. Of course that wasn't the case with Gawker, which was bankrupted by a lawsuit filed by Hulk Hogan after Gawker posted clips of a sex tape featuring the wrestler and reality television personality having sex with the wife of a radio host with whom he often discussed his sex life. Hogan found a friendly venue in Florida, no one particularly liked Gawker, and so the managing editor, Nick Denton, as well as the writer of the post about Hogan were found liable to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars for, essentially, violating the privacy of a man who has extended a career that should've ended when he stopped wrestling by making his private life very public. Kardashian has done the same thing, sans a wrestling career to get her started. She gained prominence in the public eye after a sex tape featuring her and R&B; singer Ray J was leaked, and has stayed in the public eye largely by opening up her private life for general consumption. The speculation and gossip that produces should not be the subject of lawsuits. Donal Trump has similarly used lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits to silence media outlets when he hasn't agree with their reporting of a private life he's placed in the public eye as leverage for more fame.

Kardashian's robbery in Paris, incidentally, also yielded a response from the National Rifle Association, which used the incident as an opportunity to point out the holes in Kardashian's pro-gun control position. Guns are heavily regulated in France. Kardashian has armed bodyguards who were not with her when the robbery took place. TMZ reported that after the robbery the Kardashian family spoke with security experts and Kardashian will now travel in an armored car and be accompanied by two bodyguards "armed to the teeth" at all times. MediaTakeOut.com reported on that TMZ story, adding that her bodyguards would be carrying fully automatic weapons (called machine guns in their headline) without any sourcing for that claim. Is it reasonable to expect better from a celebrity gossip site?

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A new poll out of Utah shows Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump tied with Democrat Hillary Clinton at 26 percent each, with independent candidate Evan McMullin a close third at 22 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson pulling 14 percent of the vote.

Why does Utah, often one of the the most reliably Republican states in the union, dislike Donald Trump so much? And are there possible inroads for libertarians in the heavily religious, socially conservative state? Reason TV asked these questions of several former Republican voters in Utah, many of whom drew surprising connections between the teachings of the Latter Day Saints church and the libertarian philosophy.

Watch the video above to find out what they had to say.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alex Manning and Zach Weissmueller. Music by Nick Jaina.

Click the link below for downloadable versions of this video.

Poll after poll shows a widening of the electoral gender-gap in the less than a week since Donald Trump's 2005 boasts about groping women were unearthed and subsequently splashed non-stop across cable news, including during the second presidential debate last Sunday. U.S. women across the country are indicating that no matter if men's support for Trump is steady, female voters could spike the election out of his reach.

Nate Silver posted a roundup of recent polls last night. In a dozen national polls conducted since the start of October, Hillary Clinton leads by an average of 15 percentage points with women and Donald Trump leads by an average of 5 percentage points among men.

Clinton's lead among women is consistent throughout the polls, ranging from a relatively small 6 percentage points in one to a 33 percentage point lead among women in the most recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic (in the same poll, Clinton trailed Trump by 11 points with men). Clinton also led among men in three of the national national polls, by a range of 2 to 5 percentage points. Trump led among men in nine of the 12 polls, by margins ranging from 2 to 14 percentage points.

"It seems fair to say that, if Trump loses the election, it will be because women voted against him," Silver concluded.

I took a look at how men and women split their votes four years ago, according to polls conducted in November 2012. On average, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 7 percentage points among men, about the same as Trump's 5-point lead among men now. But Romney held his own among women, losing them by 8 points, whereas they're going against Trump by 15 points. That's the difference between a close election — as you'll remember, those national polls in late 2012 showed the race neck-and-neck³ — and one that's starting to look like a blowout.

Silver cautions that "there isn't yet enough data from after Sunday night's debate to really gauge its impact." And "for that matter, the polls may not yet have fully caught up to the effects of the release on Friday of the 2005 videotape."

That also means they haven't caught up to newly unearthed (or re-media blitzed) allegations of the Republican presidential nominee acting in gross and predatory ways toward women. Trump has recently been accused of walking in on Miss Teen USA pageant contestants while they were changing and kissing an '80s Miss USA contestant directly on the lips upon meeting her. Jill Harth, who accused Trump of attempted rape in 1997, has also been back in the spotlight, along with the thousands of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination against Trump's company.

Evangelical women, including New York Times-bestselling religious author Beth Moore, have been showing signs of turning against Trump recently. And on Tuesday night, the president of the Iowa Federation of Republican Women resigned, stating that she "cannot support Donald J. Trump for president, nor can I advocate for his election."

In a new interview, Bill O'Reilly told Republican nominee he was behind with women. Trump's response? "I'm not sure I believe that."

Jeff Muceus/FlickrWhen Portland (Ore.) Mayor Charlie Hales leaves office on Jan 1, 2017, there will be six months remaining on the current contract with the city's police union, the Portland Police Association (PPA). But the lame-duck Hales has been negotiating for months with the PPA on a new contract, which Mayor-elect Ted Wheeler will be bound to honor, even though his office will have had no say in the negotiations.

According to Check the Police—the Black Lives Matter-affiliated database which tracks police union contracts—the Portland Police Bureau already enjoys one of the U.S.'s more officer-friendly contracts. Portland officers can delay interrogations into their conduct for up to 48 hours following an incident, they can review video footage of incidents before giving interviews or submitting reports, misconduct records can have pertinent details omitted, and disciplinary actions taken against the officers by the department can be overturned by binding arbitration.

The biggest issue with the newly proposed police union contract, which Hales is pushing the City Council to swiftly ratify, are new policies regarding police body cameras. As reported by the Portland Mercury:

Under the policy, gang cops, transit cops, patrol officers, and others are all specifically required to wear body cameras. Left out? Cops working on the Special Emergency Reaction Team (SERT), Portland's version of SWAT.

That's a problem for oversight advocates. Portland Copwatch's Dan Handelman says the omission makes no sense, since such officers are "most likely as a unit to use implements of deadly force." The ACLU of Oregon has argued the same thing.

Hales, when asked about this omission on Monday, said he wasn't aware of it. But PPA President Daryl Turner argues the rule makes sense, since the city doesn't want to give up SERT's tactical secrets.

"They are highly trained individuals," Turner said. "We wouldn't want those things to be on camera."

There are also issues about what happens when an officer fails to turn his/her body camera on. The proposed contract grants officers the right to not record if they determine they are facing an "immediate threat" and don't have the time to press "record." And while Portland cops will be allowed to review their own body camera footage before writing up their report, oversight of such footage will be limited. Also according to the Mercury, "The policy contains provisions that say supervisors and professional standards officers can't look at video for a performance review or to discover policy violations, and that they may not 'randomly' review recordings of any officer."

In a searing op-ed published by Oregon Live, the president of Portland's NAACP chapter, Jo Ann Hardesty, also complained that "This contract is a big money giveaway without any public benefit." Hardesty adds:

The contract allows retired officers to be hired back for six years at the top of their pay grade — classic double-dipping at the expense of the taxpayer.

The contract ensures that the most expensive police officers are assigned to overtime first, rather than a mid-level employee or an officer who may be needed based on the situation. Both the taxpayer and the community suffer. 


Contract stipulations that benefit older and more tenured employees—regardless of whether or not they are the most able or qualified—is pretty much standard operating procedure for any union, but especially so when it comes to public sector unions. That the PPA would want to strengthen the benefits afforded to its most senior members, as well as limit the transparency and accountability demanded of all its members, shouldn't come as a surprise.

The City Council has not set a date to vote on the proposed contract, but last week, approximately two dozen protesters occupied a portion of City Hall after disrupting a City Council meeting where the police union contract was scheduled to be discussed, forcing the building into a lockdown. Two were arrested.