I have an emergency here, and I’m not going to be able to write a normal post. My water heater died and leaked all over my basement. On top of that, I’m having some strange computer problems. I have to clean up the mess in the basement and also figure out what I’m going to do next; so I’m just going to give you some links to check out for now. Sorry to have to do this on such an important news day!
I didn’t see Trump’s speech yesterday, but Michelle Goldberg thinks it was effective even though it was a pack of lies. She says the problem is that debunking the lies is requires complex explanations. Goldberg is quite liberal and she is feminist who wrote a book about women’s reproductive rights.
Washington Post op ed by Bernie Sanders: Here’s What We Want. I’d be willing to bet that 80% of the country wishes Bernie would quit whining and go away.
Last night Twitter was agog over Donald Trump’s May FEC filing. There’s been a lot of talk lately about chaos in Trump’s campaign and speculation about how wealthy he actually is. But the Trump campaign is in even worse condition than anyone suspected. Mother Jones breaks down the stunning news from his campaign finance documents:
The first glance: Hillary Clinton’s campaign has more than 35 times the cash Trump’s does.
Here’s the second glance: Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP primary on May 3, meaning that for the month of May, Trump was all but assured the nomination and the campaign should have been in prime fundraising mode. But it wasn’t. Even taking into account Trump’s long-stated claims that he had no interest in raising money from others (something he has reversed himself on)—filings the campaign made with the Federal Election Commission late Monday evening show that Trump simply couldn’t get any fundraising momentum going. He raised a grand total of $5.6 million from May 1 to May 31, $2.2 million of which was in the form of loans from Trump personally….
Trump, who spent more than he raised, has $1.2 million in cash on hand. True, Trump has always had very little cash on hand at the end of a reporting period. But this was because he was writing the checks and didn’t need to keep cash on hand. But now that Trump insists he won’t be self-financing, those low numbers are a problem. Even if Trump significantly increased his fundraising since May 31, he would have to be raising money at an almost unprecedented rate to catch up to Clinton.
It’s not just the low numbers that portend potential disaster for the GOP’s man. It’s the way he arrives at the low numbers that looks scary. There’s no real significant support from top donors—the bedrock of a strong monthly fundraising report. But the Trump campaign picked up just 133 donations that hit the maximum allowed amount of $2,700. Clinton had more donations of $2,700 on just May 17 (140) than Trump had all month, and almost 15 times as many for the entire month (1,981).
Not only is Trump getting lapped by Clinton financially, but his fundraising has been going so poorly that he’s actually behind a good number of U.S. House candidates….
The news sparked renewed concerns that Trump simply won’t be able to fundraise to the extent necessary to run a viable presidential campaign. But during a phone interview on the Today show Tuesday morning, Trump said that if worst comes to worst and Republican donors don’t come around, he could always just self-fund.
“If it gets to a point, what I’ll do is just do what I did in the primaries. I spent $55 million of my own money to win the primaries,” Trump said. “I may do that again in the general election… I have a lot of cash and I may do it again in the general election, but it would be nice to have some help from the party.”
But if he has so much cash, why isn’t he spending it instead of having to deal with being the butt of endless jokes in the media and on Twitter?
I got onto thinking about this when I saw John McQuaid’s short piece in Forbes. As McQuaid notes, this is the gaping hole, the burning question at the center of Trump’s campaign. Reports suggest that Trump has been unwilling to undergo the ego effacement of calling high dollar Republican donors and asking for money. His campaign has virtually no money in the bank ($2.4m at last count).
Even if Trump can’t not be Trump, the damage of being Trump could at least be off-set by pouring money into advertising in key swing states and field work. But at this moment, the Clinton campaign (and pro-Clinton superPACs) is rolling out a barrage of targeted swing state advertising focused on solidifying and embedding the highly negative image Trump has built for himself over the last year and especially the last eight weeks. That advertising is going entirely unanswered by the Trump campaign.
Why isn’t Trump using his own money, as he keeps threatening to do?
It may take a billion dollars to run a presidential campaign. But at this moment Trump is in dire need of a few million dollars. To go back to cash on hand, Trump currently has $2.4 million and Clinton has just over $30 million. Remember, Trump is allegedly worth $10 billion, which at the risk of stating the obvious means he is worth ten thousand million dollars. Someone in that position might be hard pressed to quickly produce billions of dollars or even hundreds of million in actual cash. But we’re talking tens of millions or even just a few million dollars he needs right now.
Trump may be stingy. He may be saying that the RNC should take responsibility for fundraising, which is something it’s clearly not capable of doing. (The RNC has massive fundraising capacity but it can’t simply take on singlehanded what the candidate was expected to raise.) But as big a disaster as Trump’s campaign is at the moment he stands a real shot at being the next president of the United States. It is simply not credible that he is standing on principle in not giving his campaign any more money at such a critical moment when his bid is being so deeply damaged.
The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash.
Here’s Marshall’s reaction to the FEC report (emphasis added):
I confess even I’m surprised at what the overnight FEC filings revealed about the Trump campaign. Posting the ‘Trump is Broke‘ column yesterday made me feel at least a touch exposed since I figured he’d add (either from his own money or fundraising) at least some additional funds to the paltry $2.4 million cash on hand in his previous filing. Appears not. Now on top of that it’s revealed that he’s been using his presidential campaign to funnel millions of dollars back into his own businesses. The new filing shows the campaign had only $1.3 million in cash on hand at the beginning of this month, in comparison to $42 million on hand for the Hillary campaign.
It’s important to see those numbers in the proper perspective.
Yes, Clinton has massively more money than Trump. But that’s about the amount of money she should have. This isn’t to take away from the accomplishment. It’s a lot of money and it came while she was still having to spend money on the on-going primaries. But it’s in the range of what you would expect from a well-oiled team of professionals drawing on a robust fundraising apparatus. Trump’s amount of cash wouldn’t be terribly impressive for a competitive House race. His campaign is essentially broke. Which, as I noted yesterday, means Trump must be broke, too, or so cash poor as to amount to the same thing for the purposes of this campaign….
Perhaps the most revealing detail about the May filing is that Trump actually did loan his campaign additional funds – a bit over $2 million. But this shows more just how hard up Trump is. His campaign is in desperate need of funds.
Let’s face it. Trump is an arrogant man and he’s going through a relentless public shaming right now. If he had the money to get paid staff on the ground and ads on the air, he’d be using it, if only to demonstrate his yuuuuge wealth.
But what really had folks on twitter busy last night was the part about Trump using his campaign funds to reimburse his own businesses and his family members. AP reports: Trump’s campaign cycles $6 million into Trump companies.
Donald Trump’s campaign likes to keep it in the family.
When Trump flies, he uses his airplane. When he campaigns, he often chooses his properties or his own Trump Tower in New York City, which serves as headquarters. His campaign even buys Trump bottled water and Trump wine.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has been on the campaign trail for a year now, and federal finance reports detail a campaign unafraid to co-mingle political and business endeavors in an unprecedented way — even as he is making appeals for donations.
Through the end of May, Trump’s campaign had plunged at least $6.2 million back into Trump corporate products and services, a review of Federal Election Commission filings shows. That’s about 10 percent of his total campaign expenditures…..
Wealthy political candidates in the past have walled off their business from their campaigns, but Trump embraces his companies. Public documents indicate his revenue has risen along with his presidential aspirations.
While Trump’s controversial comments have cost his businesses money — for example, the PGA Tour recently announced it would move its World Golf Championship from a Trump course to one in Mexico City — Trump reported in documents filed in May with federal regulators that his revenue had increased by roughly $190 million over the previous 17 months.
Apparently, running for the presidency is just another money-making scheme to Trump. You can read the details about how how Trump spent his campaign money in May at The Washington Post.
One more interesting bit from the Trump FEC filings: Trump paid $35,000 each to “Draper Sterling,” at an address in New Hampshire. It sounds a little like the fictional ad agency in Mad Men, and late last night lots of people were trying to figure out if it is a legitimate company. Josh Legum at Think Progress: The Weird Story Behind The Trump Campaign’s $35,000 Payment To ‘Draper Sterling’
The Trump campaign made $35,000 in payments to an entity called “Draper Sterling” for “web advertising.” Three $10,000 payments and one $5,000 payment were placed on the campaign’s American Express card on the same day (see the FEC details at the link) ….
Draper Sterling was registered with the New Hampshire Secretary of State to Jon Adkins, the co-founder of a medical device startup. Its headquarters is Adkins’ home address in residential New Hampshire.
Adkins co-founded the medical device company with Paul Holzer, a former Navy Seal and current medical student at Dartmouth. Holzer was involved in Charlie Baker’s run for governor in 2014 — he ran the campaign’s “voter contact strategy.” He was also part of the “management and strategy team” for Missourians For John Brunner, a candidate for governor.
Trump paid an additional $3,000 each to Holzer and Adkins in May for “field consulting.” Holzer listed Adkins’ home as his address.
Legum learned “Draper Sterling” was also mentioned in an FEC complaint. You’ll have to read about that in the article at Think Progress. It’s still not clear what these guys did for Trump.
I’m in an absolute haze from a summer cold that popped up yesterday and sent me directly to bed. I’m trying to write and work right now but it’s not easy at all. I want to try to discuss a lot of upcoming things that will be important including the SCOTUS decision on the Texas Trap laws regarding abortion and abortion clinics. These law certainly create an undue burden and they reflect specific religious view rather than medical or biological science. Here’s a few reads to prepare us all because it’s important for all of us to understand this basic constitutional right.
Abortion opponents regularly talk as though no restriction is off the table when it comes to stripping away reproductive rights. And supporters of abortion rights don’t always set them straight. If we don’t know what our established rights are, we can’t defend them. Pro-choicers need to know why abortion is a constitutional right and what boundaries the U.S. Supreme Court has set out to protect it.
1. Abortion is protected by the rights to bodily integrity and to make decisions about family. The Court explained that decades ago.
The 14th Amendment prohibits states from depriving a person of liberty without due process of law. A person has the right to end a pregnancy without undue interference from the government because that right to liberty includes (1) the right to make decisions about family and (2) the right to bodily integrity.
However, in order to portray abortion rights as illegitimate, conservatives like to argue—inaccurately—thatthe Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade by inventing a right to privacy that is not grounded in the Constitution’s actual text.
In the pre-Roe contraception case Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court did hold that “penumbras, formed by emanations” or various interpretations of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments protect a right to privacy. But in deciding Roe, the Warren court located the right to privacy in the 14th Amendment’s explicit protection of the right to liberty. Regardless, the Court’s understanding of the rights that protect reproductive freedom expanded beyond just privacy decades ago.
Privacy is barely mentioned in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which established the current law governing abortion rights more than 20 years ago. “The controlling word in the cases before us is ‘liberty,’” the decision explained. It was settled law prior to Roe that liberty includes “the right to make family decisions and the right to physical autonomy.”
Privacy is also a constitutional right, and it was indeed violated by the laws at issue in Roe and its companion case,Doe v. Bolton. Those laws required a woman seeking an abortion to share her reasons for wanting the procedure with legal or medical authorities to have any hope of receiving legal abortion care. However, the law and discourse around privacy at the time of Roe implied a woman should be permitted to use contraception or end a pregnancy because the state should not interfere in decisions made in secret with the permission of her doctor, husband, father, pastor, or others. Casey instead properly recognized that the 14th Amendment protects a person’s right to control her body and destiny.
So why has the idea persistedthat all we’ve got is a privacy right made up out of thin air? A counterintuitive and less textually based right serves abortion opponents, but abortion rights advocates also have a history of telling us abortion restrictions are primarily a threat to privacy. As William Saletan documented in Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the War on Abortion, in the run-up to Casey, pro-choice leaders emphasized privacy on the advice of pollsters and political consultants to appeal to anti-government, anti-welfare, anti-tax, and anti-integration sentiments. While reproductive rights lawyers argued to the Supreme Court that the Constitution’s protection of autonomy, bodily integrity, and equality protected abortion access, outside of court pro-choice leaders told the public the right at stake was privacy. But, ultimately, the Casey decision provided a much fuller discussion of why abortion is constitutionally protected by rights beyond privacy.
Abortion is protected by the due process clauses of the Fifth Amendment (which restricts the federal government) and the 14th Amendment (which was added to the Constitution to restrict the states). As Casey explained, “It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.” Using the force of law to compel a person to use her body against her will to bring a pregnancy to term is a violation of her physical autonomy and decisional freedom—which the Constitution does not allow.
Follow the link to read about the other two basic rights that include:” 2. Any pre-viability ban is unconstitutional. Period.” and “3. Casey‘s “undue burden” standard is a meaningful protection of abortion rights when courts apply it properly.”
The war on abortion access in Texas has already fundamentally shifted the landscape of women’s lives in the state. Now, the fallout continues: The closure of Planned Parenthood (PP) clinics in the state—which once served as primary sources of reproductive health care for women there—has left the few clinics remaining in west Texas underfunded, understaffed, and overwhelmed by demand.
According to new research, 60 percent of women receiving a low salary who were of reproductive age accessed health care through PP before the cuts and defunding which took place in 2013. The majority of those patients have since been directed to Texas Tech University and Midland County Health Services (MCHS) after PP’s clinics in west Texas closed—increasing demand at an overwhelming rate for their capacity to provide services.
“There are women [who] need these services but can’t afford them and we see as many as we can,” Michael Austin, director of MCHS, told Women’s Health Policy Report. “But the state program to help these folks along has basically evaporated. So I’m afraid there are probably a lot of folks flying under the radar who need care and aren’t getting it.” Austin pointed to the challenges of seeking funding in a state that has “eliminated or severely messed up” many of their programs which provide reproductive health care to women.
In 2011, the Texas State Assembly passed legislation which blocked funding to women’s health clinics, including Planned Parenthood, and cut the state’s family planning budget by two-thirds. Two years later, the draconian anti-abortion bill known as HB2 was signed into law by Governor Rick Perry, putting in place numerous obstacles meant to shutter clinics and restrict women’s access to safe and legal abortion. HB2 requires that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital and clinics are licensed ambulatory centers. It also bans surgical abortion after 20 weeks and medication abortion after seven. (Medication abortion is the most cost- and time-effective abortion procedure.)
HB2’s impact was immediate and drastic. 82 percent of family planning clinics closed. The number of abortion practitioners decreased by over 75 percent. Over half of the clinics performing abortion closed, which in turn drastically increased the time it would take for women to make an appointment to 28 days— essentially rendering the option of medication abortion moot. When it comes to clinics, Texas is in crisis.
The Supreme Court has rejected challenges to assault weapons bans in Connecticut and New York, in the aftermath of the shooting attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that left 50 people dead.
The justices on Monday left in place a lower court ruling that upheld laws that were passed in response to another mass shooting involving a semi-automatic weapon, the elementary school attack in Newtown, Connecticut.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly turned away challenges to gun restrictions since two landmark decisions that spelled out the right to a handgun to defend one’s own home.
The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will take up a case exploring when immigrants detained solely for immigration violations have the right to be released from jail.
The justices agreed to consider a federal appeals court decision that essentially found detained immigrants were entitled to a bond hearing after six months in custody and every six months thereafter.
The high court’s announcement comes as immigrant rights advocates are awaiting a Supreme Court decision on the legality of President Barack Obama’s executive actions granting quasi-legal status and work permits to millions of immigrants who entered or stayed in the U.S. illegally.
In that case, the Obama administration is aligned with most immigrants rights groups. However, in the case the court said Monday that it would take up, the Obama administration is pressing for fewer rights for detained immigrants. In fact, the administration is asking the justices to overturn the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that found immigrants have the right to regular review of their detention.
The newly-accepted case, Jennings v. Rodriguez, could also explore when immigrants accused of ties to terrorism have to be released if authorities are having difficulty deporting them.
Between tomorrow morning, when the Justices will take the bench at ten o’clock, and the end of June, the Court is expected to issue thirteen rulings in cases involving everything from tribal-court jurisdiction to abortion, immigration, and the scope of federal laws prohibiting political corruption. Here are summaries of each pending case:
Dollar General Stores v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (argued December 7, 2015). This case stems from accusations by a thirteen-year-old member of the tribe that a manager at a Dollar General store within the tribe’s reservation had sexually molested him while the boy was interning at the store. The child and his parents filed a lawsuit against the manager and the store in tribal court, arguing that the store was liable for the manager’s conduct. The issue before the Court is whether the tribal court has jurisdiction over tort claims against defendants, like Dollar General, who are not members of the tribe.
Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (argued December 9, 2015). This case, a challenge to the university’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process, is on its second trip to the Court. In 2013, the Court sent the case back to the lower courts for a more critical look at whether the university really needed to consider race to achieve a diverse student body. After the Fifth Circuit once again upheld the policy, the Court agreed to weigh in. Unlike some of the Court’s other high-profile cases this Term, no one expects the Court to deadlock: Justice Elena Kagan is not participating, which in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death leaves the Court with just seven Justices to decide the case.
Utah v. Strieff (argued February 22, 2016). When a police officer stops a pedestrian in violation of the law, asks him for identification, discovers that there is a traffic warrant for his arrest, arrests him, and in the process of searching him discovers drug paraphernalia and methamphetamines, can the evidence found in the search of the pedestrian be used against him? Edward Strieff argues that it cannot: because the police officer’s stop was illegal, then anything obtained as a result of the stop is also tainted. The state, on the other hand, contends that the evidence should be admitted because it resulted from the lawful warrant for his arrest, rather than the illegal stop.
Taylor v. United States (argued February 23, 2016). The petitioner in this case, David Taylor, was part of a Virginia gang that robbed drug dealers. The two robberies that led to this case, however, did not yield any drugs – only cellphones, jewelry, and a small amount of money. Taylor was indicted on federal charges that he had violated the Hobbs Act, which punishes robberies and extortion but applies only when the defendant “obstructs, delays, or affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce.” The question before the Court is whether the federal government is required to prove facts to show that the defendant’s conduct actually affects commerce.
Voisine v. United States (argued February 29, 2016). Stephen Voisine and William Armstrong, the other petitioner in this case, both pleaded guilty in state court to misdemeanor assaults on their respective domestic partners. Several years later, each man was charged with violating a federal law that prohibits the possession of firearms and ammunition by individuals who have previously been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. Voisine and Armstrong contend their state convictions do not automatically qualify as misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence because the state-law provisions can be violated by conduct that is merely reckless, rather than intentional.
Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (argued March 2, 2016). This is a challenge to the constitutionality of two provisions of a Texas law regulating abortion in that state. One provision requires doctors who perform abortions to have privileges to admit patients to a local hospital; the other requires abortion clinics to have facilities that are comparable to outpatient surgical centers. Texas contends that these new laws are constitutional because they were intended to protect women’s health, while the challengers argue that the law was actually intended to close most clinics and therefore limit women’s access to abortions.
RJR Nabisco v. The European Community (argued March 21, 2016). The issue in this case is whether and to what extent the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a 1970 law that was originally enacted to target organized crime, applies outside the United States. The European Community filed a lawsuit in the United States, seeking to hold RJR liable for what it says is the company’s role in an international money-laundering plot that harmed European countries. RJR counters that nothing in the law suggests that Congress intended it to apply to a situation like this. Justice Samuel Alito is almost certainly writing the Court’s opinion in this case, because he is the only Justice who has not yet written for the Court’s March sitting; based on the oral argument, that could bode well for RJR.
United States v. Texas (argued April 18, 2016). This case is a challenge to an Obama administration policy, announced in November 2014, that would allow some undocumented immigrants to apply to stay in the country and work legally for three years. Before the policy could go into effect, Texas and a large group of other states went to court to block its implementation, arguing that the administration lacks the authority to issue a policy like this. But before the Supreme Court can weigh in on that question, it will also have to agree that the states have the legal right, known as “standing,” to challenge the policy at all; the lower courts ruled that they did, because at least Texas would incur additional costs from the undocumented immigrants who would become eligible for driver’s licenses if the policy goes into effect.
Birchfield v. North Dakota (argued April 20, 2016). Twelve states and the National Park Service impose criminal penalties on suspected drunk drivers who refuse to submit to testing to measure their blood-alcohol levels. The question before the Court is whether those penalties violate the Fourth Amendment, which only allows police to “search” someone if they have a warrant or one of a handful of exceptions to the warrant requirement applies. Three drivers from North Dakota and Minnesota argue that neither of those conditions is met, and so the laws must fall.
Encino Motorcars v. Navarro (argued April 20, 2016). This case requires the Court to weigh in on the interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which generally requires employers to pay overtime to employees who work for more than forty hours in a week but also contains a variety of exceptions – including for a salesman whose primary job is selling or servicing cars. The respondents in this case are service advisors at a car dealership, who argue that they are not included in the exemption and are therefore entitled to overtime.
You can check out the rest on the link to SCOTUS blog. So, there’s a lot of interesting things coming down the pipe. We’ll definitely be following a lot of them.
The Washington Examiner Sunday afternoon posted a piece by DC insider columnist Paul Bedard that claims uber-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “is mulling retirement after the presidential election, according to court watchers.” Those “court watchers” of course are unnamed, so the actual source of the claim is unknown.
It could be true, it could be false, but the implications of course are tremendous. Assuming Republicans in the Senate successfully keeps their vow to not confirm any SCOTUS justice nominated by President Obama, and wait until the next president takes office, this would mean the next president would automatically nominate not one but two justices to the nation’s top court, controlling its destiny for decades.
So naturally, Clarence Thomas began trending on Twitter.
I’m feeling particularly lazy today–mostly I just don’t want to read any news. I’d rather be reading a novel, a true crime book, or maybe a biography. But I’ve been forcing myself to surf around to see what’s going on, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
The primaries are over, but Bernie Sanders is still hanging around like party guest who won’t leave even after everyone else has gone home and the party-givers have done the dishes and are dying to get some sleep.
Bernie Sanders is going to delay getting into the fight against Donald Trump so that he can get a few good ideas, a few iffy ideas, and a few bad ideas into the Democratic Party platform, a document that is about as useful as a roll of Charmin, but considerably less soothing to the skin. Just for good measure, he wants to get rid of Superdelegates and open up the primaries, which will work out great for Bernie Sanders from a year ago, but which will suck the first time Democrats have to run a primary against an incumbent Republican president, and Republican voters decide to vote in Democratic primaries just to mess with us. Brilliant, but none of which required him to continue to slight Hillary Clinton, except he might make Susan Sarandon and her purse dog mad.
Those Lazy Days of Summer, Jan Matson
Instead, Bernie will wait until he’s good and ready to make a half-assed endorsement of Hillary Clinton that will succeed only in winning a news cycle or two for Donald Trump, as he and the media rehash every attack he’s made against her, and every painstaking yank of the pliers it took to extract said half-assed endorsement.
But there’s something even more revealing about Bernie’s speech to supporters, because wrapped around those relevant 107 seconds was about 22 other minutes of Bernie boilerplate that neatly laid out his priorities. Throughout this campaign, Bernie and his supporters have continually insisted that if black voters would only stop and listen and give him a chance, they’d be dazzled by his down-ness and abandon their habitual support for Hillary….
Black people got tacked onto a few lists of other things, and some lines about failing schools and criminal justice reform. Or to put it another way, what black voters could expect from a Rand Paul speech. Not a syllable about ending police brutality or racial profiling, nothing about the Voting Rights Act or any other Republican schemes to disenfranchise black voters, and those are just the easy ones. Fifty-six seconds out of 23 minutes, and none of the bullet points he rushed up onto his website when #BlackLivesMatter protesters hassled him almost a year ago. Yeah, black voters had Bernie all wrong, didn’t they?
Watch Sanders’ almost-nonexistent thoughts on the Black vote at Mediaite.
As you can probably guess, most Democratic Party insiders were really hoping Bernie Sanders would formally drop out of the race this week and offer Hillary Clinton a fulsome endorsement. But they also recognize that he’s stopped attacking her, is promising to work against Donald Trump, and has basically accepted that the race is over — so if he wants to fade away slowly, they are happy to live with that.
The aspect of Sanders’s speech that really set them off last night was something entirely different. Not the fact that Sanders said he wanted his supporters to continue to influence the direction of the party but the specific way he characterized this direction:
I also look forward to working with Secretary Clinton to transform the Democratic Party so that it becomes a party of working people and young people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors: a party that has the courage to take on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel industry and the other powerful special interests that dominate our political and economic life.
It’s incredibly frustrating for people who’ve been working in mainstream Democratic Party politics to hear their party described as something other than a party for “working people.” Clinton won the votes of millions of working-class Americans, primarily people of color, throughout the 2016 primaries; and in the 2012, 2008, 2004, and 2000 election cycles there’s been a pronounced tendency for lower-income voters to back the Democratic candidate and higher-income ones to back the Republican.
Similarly, it comes as a shock to people who participated in the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill (or the White House’s series of later anti-bank regulatory actions) or who’ve worked to uphold the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plant rule that they apparently lack the courage to stand up to Wall Street and fossil fuel interests.
It’s one thing to disagree with people about policy substance or political tactics. But something Sanders has done throughout his campaign and very pointedly did here is straightforwardly challenge the good faith of the vast majority of his colleagues in Democratic Party politics. It’s worked pretty well for him on the stump, but it doesn’t win you a lot of friends. And to be honest, it’s simply wrong — you can raise a lot of objections to Obama’s approach to Wall Street or climate change, but the fact is that the financial services industry and the fossil fuel industries have been fighting him every step of the way.
Barney Frank was right. Bernie Sanders alienates his natural allies, whether deliberately or because he’s simply a terrible politician.
on Thursday, the Vermont senator announced he had an announcement to make. It’s been a long campaign, and Hillary Clinton bested him on every conceivable metric—albeit narrowly in some—other than the party-liquefying convention nuclear option to which Sanders doesn’t have the codes anyway. So, on Thursday night, the Vermont senator gathered friends, loved ones, and supporters around the country to huddle around a live video feed to humbly announce: He’s still running for president.
To be fair, Sanders hinted that soon he will be done and his “role” will change in a “very short period of time,” but he notably stopped well short of even remotely ending his campaign or endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Frankly, I doubt if he’ll ever endorse her, and I just don’t care. I don’t want him to campaign for her; I just want him to disappear.
Even with his path to the Democratic presidential nomination rapidly disappearing, Bernie Sanders couldn’t bring himself to publicly accept defeat. Along the way, he overplayed his hand and squandered the political capital he’ll need to force policy and procedural reforms on the Democratic Party, according to allies and party strategists.
“We’re already way past the maximum point of leverage that he and his movement built up. It’s definitely dissipating every day,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist and veteran of presidential campaigns.
Trippi put the high point of Sanders’ clout at April 9, after he won seven straight contests ending with Wyoming. But he lost seven of the last nine contests, walloped by 58 points in the District of Columbia, which held the final primary of the season on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton already had locked up the nomination with a decisive victory in California a week earlier, and some of the highest-profile Sanders supporters—including Senator Jeff Merkley, Representative Raul Grijalva, and the liberal activist group MoveOn—are now lining up behind her.
Read the rest at the link.
While Bernie continues to wallow in sour grapes, Hillary Clinton has been very busy defining Donald Trump for the folks who are just beginning to pay attention.
Lazy Summer, Mitch Caster
FirstPost.com: Hillary Clinton brings out ads to give Donald Trump “rude awakening.”
Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies have invested at least $41 million in commercials in crucial states such as Ohio, Florida and Nevada over the next six weeks, a series of summer broadsides against her Republican opponent. Those messages will be echoed by hundreds of Clinton workers in those same states and amplified by President Barack Obama and other top Democrats.
Trump has made few preparations for contending with that sort of well-oiled political machine. His campaign has no advertising plans and is just now hiring employees in important states. Republican leaders are far from agreement on how best to talk to voters about the polarising billionaire, or if they will at all. And Trump is running out of time: Early voting starts in Iowa in just three and a half months.
“It’s political malpractice,” said Mitch Stewart, Obama’s 2012 battleground states director and a Clinton backer. “He’s in for a rude awakening. This isn’t a national vote contest where you can be on cable news every day and dominate coverage. This is literally going state by state and coming up with a plan in each.”
Clinton’s large June and July ad buy comes as a reward for her near-constant fundraising. In May, she raised $27 million in primary election money that must be used before she accepts her party’s nomination at the convention in late July.
Trump is playing catch up. He did not begin raising money in earnest until 25 May, having largely financed his primary bid through personal loans to his campaign.
Clinton’s latest spots, highlighting her past advocacy for children, are an attempt to reintroduce the returning presidential candidate — she lost the 2008 Democratic primary to Obama — to general election voters. Her campaign is spending about $23 million on ads by the convention, according to advertising tracker Kantar Media’s CMAG.
But those voters are also hearing from Priorities USA, a super political action committee financed by millions of dollars from Clinton’s staunchest supporters. The goal of those that $18.7 million batch of ads: cast Trump as a con-man and bully unprepared to be commander in chief.
Key West, Thomas Kinkade
As I wrote on Thursday, it’s beginning to look like Trump isn’t making even a halfhearted attempt to run for president. He seems to be focusing on deep red and deep blue states and ignoring the swing states he would have to win in order to have any hope of beating Hillary. He spent yesterday in Texas.
His campaign roiled by infighting and Republican revolt, Donald Trump is working to address a battleground state staffing shortage that highlights his reliance on a skeptical GOP establishment.
The New York billionaire has slowly begun to add paid staff in a handful of swing states — Wisconsin and Iowa, among them — even as campaign officials concede the presumptive presidential nominee has little desire or capacity to construct the kind of massive national operation that has come to define modern-day White House campaigns. Trump plans instead to depend upon the national Republican Party to lead state-based efforts on his behalf, while Democrat Hillary Clinton has had an army of staff dedicated specifically to her campaign in general election battlegrounds for months.
“It would be disingenuous and wrongheaded to take a playbook that has been used over and over again,” said Trump senior aide Karen Giorno, in charge of an 11-state Southeastern bloc including battlegrounds Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. “We are creating the playbook.
The unconventional approach reflects Trump’s disdain for traditional Republican campaign practices and inclination to implement businesslike decision-making. It also carries substantial risk.If, for instance, Trump is lagging Clinton badly in polls come early fall, there is nothing to stop the RNC from cutting its losses and focusing instead on saving Republican control of the Senate or other competitive contests also on the ballot this November. Beth Myers, who managed 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, said White House candidates have unique needs that a broader-brush approach cannot always meet.
“We are creating the playbook.” Unbelievable.
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I would like to say that the primary season is totally over and that we can move on to more important things like destroying Donald Trump’s chances for getting near the White House but, not so fast. Bernie Sanders just will not concede to Hillary Clinton. The media opened up a a window for him to “address his supporters” hoping he’d go quietly into that great night. Once again, we got his stump speech. There was one big difference. The media cut him off after it was clear it was the same old stuff and the same old Bernie. He didn’t drop out but the media dropped him. THUD!
In his 30-minute speech live-streamed to his supporters and also shown on cable news channels, Sanders slammed Democratic leadership but said defeating Donald Trump in November was his top concern. The senator also said he would be announcing how he would be participating in the general election “at some point very soon.” This marked the point at which the news nets began to tune out.
The Democratic Party’s convention will be held in Philadelphia from July 25-28. The Obama- and Biden-endorsed Clinton is expected on the first ballot to be the first woman nominated by a major American party for President.
Sanders’ speech comes on a day that saw the President and Vice-President in Orlando meeting with victims of the fatal shooting at the Pulse nightclub saw 49 people killed. The speech also comes as the NBA Finals gets down to the near-wire with the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers facing off in what could be a clinching Game 6 for the defending champions.
The Sanders speech was short for him, and he reiterated the issues his campaign has long been focused on and urged supporters to keep fighting until the convention.
Clinton has been the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee since winning the California primary on June 7. At the time, Sanders vowed to keep campaigning to force a contested convention. As part of that, the Vermont senator played hard to voters in Washington, D.C. in advance of the final Democratic primary held there Tuesday, coming out in support of statehood for the U.S. capital. Clinton still decisively won the D.C. primary.
A new report from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy analyzes news coverage of the 2016 presidential candidates in the year leading up to the primaries. This crucial period, labeled “the invisible primary” by political scientists, is when candidates try to lay the groundwork for a winning campaign—with media exposure often playing a make or break role.
The report shows that during the year 2015, major news outlets covered Donald Trump in a way that was unusual given his low initial polling numbers—a high volume of media coverage preceded Trump’s rise in the polls. Trump’s coverage was positive in tone—he received far more “good press” than “bad press.” The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls.
The Democratic race in 2015 received less than half the coverage of the Republican race. Bernie Sanders’ campaign was largely ignored in the early months but, as it began to get coverage, it was overwhelmingly positive in tone. Sanders’ coverage in 2015 was the most favorable of any of the top candidates, Republican or Democratic. For her part, Hillary Clinton had by far the most negative coverage of any candidate. In 11 of the 12 months, her “bad news” outpaced her “good news,” usually by a wide margin, contributing to the increase in her unfavorable poll ratings in 2015.
The Shorenstein Center study is based on an analysis of thousands of news statements by CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. The study’s data were provided by Media Tenor, a firm that specializes in the content analysis of news coverage.
The study has a lot of interesting bits of wonky data and some good analysis. Here’s one covered in the conclusion.
The invisible primary is the stage of the campaign where journalists have the most latitude in deciding what and who to cover. It’s also the stage where the press forges its “metanarratives”—its dominant personal narratives of the leading contenders. The term was devised by former journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel to describe what they saw as the tendency of reporters in the 2000 campaign to portray the party nominees in simplified terms—“Bush is dumb,” “Gore is a liar.” They deplored the tendency, arguing that, once a metanarrative is in place, it’s hard for journalists to argue to the contrary and equally hard for them not to play up trivial developments that align with the stereotype.[43]
Even if metanarratives are not as self-fulfilling as Kovach and Rosenstiel suggest, there is no question that journalists create and apply them as a shorthand way to describe presidential candidates. In 2008, for example, journalists early on embraced the idea that Barack Obama represented hope and change and could deliver it through his charismatic leadership and communication skill.[44] It was a narrative that carried all the way to the November election.
Whether the metanarratives that emerged during the 2016 invisible primary will persist is a yet unanswered question but the outlines of these early narratives was unmistakable. Trump was the shoot-from-the-lip bully, given to braggadocio and insulting and outrageous comments. Yet, he also had a finger on the anger felt by many middle- and lower-class white voters. As regards Clinton, she was the candidate best prepared for the presidency as a result of her experience and detailed knowledge of policy issues. But this positive metanarrative competed with more frequently employed negative ones—that she was difficult to like, overly calculating, and hard to trust. As for Sanders, the storyline was that he means what he says—that he speaks, not from what the polls say is expedient, but from what he believes.
The candidates’ metanarratives, along with the contours of the news media’s 2016 election coverage, will be the subject of subsequent Shorenstein Center reports.
Notice the graphic showing Trump’s positive coverage by the media including WAPO which Trump says covered him unfavorably right before he removed their credentials. Even Paul Ryan thought that was an over the top reaction.
In a news conference Thursday morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was asked about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s move to deny press credentials to The Post. His immediate answer was unspectacular: “Don’t think I’ve ever heard about it before. I think that’s a new one. I don’t know a whole lot about it. I hope and assume this will get worked out.”
Then he did something that tells us what he really thinks about Trump and The Post. “Who’s with The Post here, by the way? Is [Mike] DeBonis here? [Paul] Kane’s here. Okay, last question.”
DeBonis proceeded to press Ryan on . . . Donald Trump: “This morning, Mr. Speaker, you rolled out your plan to . . . rein in executive power. Mr. Trump yesterday said this, addressing congressional leaders like yourself — ‘Be quiet. Just please be quiet. Don’t talk.’ What is your reaction to that and . . . how do you have any confidence that this is a guy who’s gonna have respect for separation of powers.”
“You can’t make this up sometimes,” responded Ryan, in part. He left the podium after riffing on the importance of “government by consent” and advising the press corps to call their fathers this weekend.
Point made: Ryan isn’t blacklisting The Post or any other media outlets. Since Trump clinched his status as presumptive nominee, his relationship with the House speaker has seesawed. For weeks, Ryan held off on endorsing Trump, only to declare that he’d vote for the longtime real-estate mogul. Following Trump’s comments doubting the ability of federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel — born in Indiana and of Mexican heritage — to adjudicate lawsuits affecting Trump University, Ryan blasted away, saying Trump had made the “textbook definition of a racist comment,” while still affirming his support of Trump over Hillary Clinton. Now we have Ryan repudiating Trump on The Post thing, not with his words, but with his actions.
The moment on Capitol Hill provides a good opportunity to check in on how Trump’s action against The Post is working. As the Trump campaign made clear on its website: “We no longer feel compelled to work with a publication which has put its need for ‘clicks’ above journalistic integrity.” That meant that the Trump people had, in effect, pulled the newspaper’s rally badge
The role of the media in this election has been as perplexing as the look on their faces and the words from the keyboards over the last year. We’ve got a serial liar as a major party candidate that no one even took seriously last year. We’ve got another one that has lost by every meaning of the word and will not concede. We’ve got right wing conspiracy theories flying around in the main stream press as if they’re as serious as our real issues. Here’s some further analysis by Carter Maness.
Though 28 percent of Clinton’s coverage was about issues, 84 percent of those stories were negative in tone. To compare, Trump only notched 12 percent on issues, with 43 percent negative in tone. That’s much heavier accountability for the Democratic nominee in a race that received less than half the coverage of the Republican contest. But, for Clinton, it’s easy to see the negative trend reversing as we enter the general election.
“The tide may be shifting as the campaign focuses on Clinton vs. Trump and she takes advantage of the focus and the contrast to strike a more ‘presidential’ tone,” said Frank Sesno, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. “If the recent Bloomberg poll is substantiated elsewhere, the narrative will likely shift to Hillary as frontrunner, which will produce some more sharp coverage—and Trump will never let up in his attacks—but also more positive coverage that reflects the shifting sands.”
Given that poll, which found Clinton with a commanding 12-point lead in the general election, the frontrunner scrutiny won’t let up. But increasingly negative coverage of Trump, whose private jet might finally be plummeting back to earth, will likely become a big positive for Clinton.
Her greatest asset as a candidate will be her opponent. Trump’s recent slate of controversies—from lambasting a federal judge’s Mexican heritage to his tonedeaf reaction to the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando—has kept his name on front pages, but the stories are much harsher in tone than when he was battling Ted Cruz for the nomination. Media coverage is becoming more concerted in its effort to debunk Trump’s lies and question his more outrageous statements.
Bill Jasso, professor of practice at the Newhouse School of Public Relations at Syracuse University, believes the media will start holding candidates to higher standards. “The most significant societal question for me is: Will the American news media—both traditional and new digital—hold the candidates accountable for the veracity of their statements and positions, or will they continue to cover the presidential campaign like it was a UFC cage match? I have faith that most journalists realize ‘the fun’s over’ and are ready to embark on the hard work of reporting on substantive issues and real-world solutions.”
A focus on real solutions should benefit Clinton, as should the competition in unfavorability ratings. Trump is currently receiving yet another round of negative coverage from a new ABC/Washington Post poll which shows he is disliked by 94 percent of African-Americans, 89 percent of Hispanics, 77 percent of women, and a whopping 70 percent of all adults. For at least the time being, nobody is talking about Hillary Clinton, which, for her, is positive coverage.
A newly released media analysis found that the “biggest news outlets have published more negative stories about Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate — including Donald Trump — since January 2015.” The study, conducted by social media software analytics company Crimson Hexagon, also found that “the media also wrote the smallest proportion of positive stories about her.”
As Media Matters has noted throughout the primary campaign, the coverage of Hillary Clinton has tended to focus on fake scandals such as her use of a private email server while her Republican counterparts have enjoyed more positive characterizations. This criticism has been backed up by a former New York Times editor who agreed that the publication has given the Clinton’s “an unfair ‘level of scrutiny.’”
Crimson Hexagon’s analysis, reported by Vox’s Jeff Stein, “shows that the media has battered Clinton more than any other candidate, perhaps because of the ongoing controversy over her emails.” Accusations of “the media being in the tank for Clinton,” Stein notes, simply “may not square with reality.” Crimson Hexagon’s analysis — which examined reporting from The Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, the Huffington Post, and CNN — ultimately found that more “negative stories” were published about Clinton than any other presidential candidate, and that Clinton herself received “the smallest proportion of positive stories.”
Gender bias and sensationalism in the media is something political figures like Hillary Clinton simply need to “deal with,” according to Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz.
In a May 28 column, Kurtz highlighted a newly released excerpt from Hillary Clinton’s upcoming book, Hard Choices, in an attempt to analyze Clinton’s purported wariness of the press. He gave particular attention to aNew Yorkerarticle, published the same day as the book excerpt, which detailed the media’s obsessive focus on Clinton. While the New Yorker noted that Clinton supporters attribute “some of the negative” coverage she has faced to sexism, Kurtz offered an alternate take:
My take is this: Let’s say Hillary’s people are right and that the press is petty, sensationalist, often unfair and sometimes mean to women? Deal with it. It’s like complaining about bad weather. Every candidate has to cope with an adversarial media, and Democrats usually get a break at least on social issues.
Clinton has had to “deal with” an inordinate amount of these baseless attacks in the media for years, sexist coverage that imparts a serious impact on women in politics.
Media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign was a gender debacle. Press featured “news” segmentson Hillary’s hair style, examinations of the Clinton “cackle,” and even a 750-word rumination on the “startling” amount of cleavage then-Sen. Clinton “displayed” on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
In recent months, right-wing media have worked overtime to stir up concern about Clinton’s age, an effort led in part by conservative strategist and Fox contributor Karl Rove in anticipation of a possible 2016 presidential run. The conservative bubbled first encouraged the media to revive old conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health,relentlessly hyped their own attack, and then demanded that Clinton respond with evidence to their specious claims. Far from subtle, as recently as May 27 Fox News painted Clinton “old and stale,” amplifying an affront first used by Rove.
Clinton’s age has long been a focus of right-wing media’s ire. Last year The Washington Timesclaimed that Clinton’s age by 2016 is “not particularly old for a man,” though at her age “a woman in public life is getting past her sell-by date.” Fox’s Erick Erickson asserted that by 2016, “I don’t know how far back they can pull her face.”
Gender bias is definitely at play here as is general CDS as stoked by the right. However, the unMerry Band of Bernie and his Dead-Enders continue to sally forth with less media hooplah than before.
SANDERS WILL JOIN EFFORT TO DEFEAT TRUMP IN A ‘VERY SHORT PERIOD OF TIME:’Bernie Sanders did not formally concede or back his primary rival Hillary Clinton during a live online address to his fans last night, despite Clinton last week securing enough delegates to become the Democratic Party’s nominee. Sanders did, however, promise to join her and the Democratic party in a more active role in their effort to defeat Donald Trump. “The major political task that together we face in the next five months is to make certain that Donald Trump is defeated and defeated badly, and I personally intend to begin my role in that process in a very short period of time,” he said in his remarks, which he filmed in a television studio in his hometown and read off of a teleprompter. ABC’s MARYALICE PARKS has more.http://abcn.ws/1Uz6NOh
What the hell does join the effort mean to Sanders? That’s wtf I would like to know. He’s weakening every position he may have had with the Democratic Party. Exactly what kind of leverage does he have other than threatening to turn the Dead-Enders into violence Zombies at the convention ala Trumpsters? Dudes, you lost!! You’re LOSERS!!!
Leverage: it’s the one thing Bernie Sanders’ advisors and aides consistently point to when asked why, exactly, he’s formally staying in the Democratic primary race that he’s lost to Hillary Clinton.
But it’s the one thing he’s been bleeding every day ever since he dropped California’s primary by a much wider-than-expected margin last week. Sanders’ summer was supposed to be all about building leverage for the Democratic convention, providing him with a better hand to play as he presses Clinton to accept his policy positions and party reform suggestions. Now, the people closest to him aren’t sure how exactly to get it back.
His first and most prominent endorsers have jumped off the bandwagon, congratulating and in some cases endorsing Clinton — from Sen. Jeff Merkley to Rep. Raul Grijalva, and from the Communications Workers of America to MoveOn.org.Each of the big-name Democrats and groups who steadfastly remained neutral in the primary have flocked to Clinton over the past week, from President Barack Obama to Sen. Elizabeth Warren to the AFL-CIO. Even Sanders’ highest-profile congressional endorsee, Nevada’s Lucy Flores, lost her primary bid on Tuesday despite his cash injection into her campaign.
Yet on Thursday night, speaking to over 200,000 viewers who tuned into his live-streamed video address, Sanders vowed to press on — pledging to fight to defeat Donald Trump but refusing to formally back Clinton and insisting his army of supporters isn’t going anywhere.
“We must continue our grassroots efforts to create the America that we know we can become,” he said, nearly acknowledging defeat but making a point not to concede while reading from a prompter in a cramped television studio deep in his hometown. “And we must take that energy into the Democratic National Convention on July 25 in Philadelphia where we will have more than 1,900 delegates.”
I’ve been told that we still have to pay attention to the Bernmeister because he got so many passionate voters. Trump has passionate voters too. Lots more of them. Whose crazy, delusional base deserves more coddling these days? I’m sure Hillary’s Veep pick and her general election strategy to include her recent ad buys are finding tranches of voters that outnumber BernieBros easily. I mean Utah is in play. FUCKING UTAH!
I can’t imagine most of the journalists in this country are big Trump fans. I’m pretty sure the ones that were slobbering all over Bernie have gotten sober. But, I’m certain that will see the gender bias, the sexism, the misogyny and the CDS carry on in media outlets beyond Fox. As long as Maureeen Dowd and Howard Kurtz can still get jobs, we’re in for a long summer and fall.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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