If she takes Nevada, she could loose every other swing state and still win the Presidency

As they have all preseason, players and coaches for the Miami Heat locked arms during the national anthem on Friday. Some bowed their heads. It’s the way the team has agreed to pay respect to the flag while also standing up against social injustice and police brutality against minorities.

The only difference this time was that the young woman who performed the Star-Spangled Banner, identified by the Heat as Denasia Lawrence, did so while kneeling at midcourt and opening her jacket to display a shirt that read “Black Lives Matter.”

The NBA has supported its players in speaking out against racial injustice, but has also asked its players and coaches to stand during the anthem to pay respect to the flag.

“It would be my hope that they would continue to stand for the national anthem. I think that is the appropriate thing to do,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier Friday during a news conference in New York.

The Heat said in a statement it was “unaware ahead of time,” Lawrence would kneel during the anthem.

Guard Wayne Ellington said he didn’t notice Lawrence was kneeling at first because he had his eyes closed, which he normally does.

th little more than two weeks until Election Day, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner's personal investment in eroding the ranks of legislative Democrats led by House Speaker Michael Madigan has grown to nearly $46 million, state campaign finance records show.

The massive influx of cash represents the election-year battle lines playing out in Illinois after more than a year of fighting between Rauner, the first-term governor, and Madigan, the nation’s longest-serving speaker, over the future of the state.

Democrats hold supermajorities in the House and Senate and have been able to stymie Rauner’s economic agenda, which calls for changes in laws that would weaken traditional Democratic allies in organized labor and among workers’ compensation attorneys. The Democrats' refusal to move on those issues led to a lengthy budget stalemate, which culminated in a temporary spending plan that expires Jan. 1.

State filings show the governor and wife Diana Rauner donated another $9 million Thursday to the campaign fund of House Republican leader Jim Durkin of Western Springs. Durkin almost immediately transferred $5 million to the House Republican Organization, the campaign arm of the House GOP, and $3 million to the Illinois Republican Party.

The latest influx comes after Rauner’s campaign fund about a week earlier sent an additional $3 million to Durkin, to be funneled to individual Republican House campaigns.

Durkin’s campaign fund also benefited from a $3 million donation Friday from billionaire hedge-fund founder Ken Griffin, a Rauner ally.

All told, Rauner, his family and his campaign fund have doled out $45.8 million in political contributions this year. Of the $29 million the Illinois Republican Party has raised this year, nearly $21 million has come from Rauner and $4 million this month through Durkin’s campaign fund.

In a 1969 speech, then-President Richard Nixon directly addressed the “silent majority” of Americans who he hoped would support his middle path policy on Vietnam. The speech itself, if you read it, is rather banal and unremarkable, but the turn of phrase came to be a powerful icon of the politics of the era. At a time when American society seemed in many ways to be pulling apart, Nixon argued for stability.

And with that phrase, he offered recognition to the large number of Americans who were neither Black Panthers nor Klansmen, neither war hawks nor hippies, just basically normal middle-class white people who rejected Jim Crow without embracing Black Power, disliked the war but disliked communism even more.

Nixon’s presidency itself descended into oblivion, but his silent majority of hard hats and conformists carried forward, dominating American politics for the rest of the 20th century. Under George W. Bush, Republican rhetoric took a different turn — more overtly pious and messianic — but in the wake of Bushism’s self-discrediting collapse, Nixonian themes have strongly reemerged under the leadership of Donald Trump.

Trump-branded signs intoning the slogan “THE SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP” festoon his rallies, and optimistic writers invoke the notion of a silent majority to tout theories that the polls are undercounting Trump voters.

But though Trumpniks are certainly the demographic descendants of Nixon’s white working-class silent majority, the basic reality is that they are anything but silent. Trump’s rallies are, as Trump would be the first to tell you, enormous, raucous affairs. He brings in big ratings. He attracts constant coverage, and so do his supporters, in the form of endlessly writerly explorations of the agonizing anxieties of “Trump Country” communities afflicted by everything from deindustrialization to opiate addiction to an influx of immigrants from the Dominican Republic.