Take my advice for tonight’s debate. Don’t watch the pundits or you’ll need some form of tranquilizer. Have I mentioned how horrible Andrea Mitchell is lately?
So, the debate is tonight and of course, we’ll be live blogging the drama. I am assuming there will be drama. I’m still trying to figure out if there will be blood. Several little bits about the particulars first before we get on with the big build up to the event.
Bloomberg TV will conduct on-screen fact checks of statements made by both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during Monday night’s debate, POLITICO has confirmed.
The channel’s decision to conduct an on-screen fact-check sets Bloomberg apart from the other major TV networks, none of whom have committed to doing on-screen fact checks during the debate. Most will leave the fact-checking to segments in the post-debate analysis coverage.
Clinton’s supporters have called for aggressive fact-checking during Monday’s debate, saying that members of the media have failed to adequately fact-check and correct falsehoods from her Republican rival. NBC’s Matt Lauer was recently criticized for not correcting several false statements from Trump during a presidential forum on the network.
Spokespeople for the networks told POLITICO that on-screen fact checks would be hard to execute in real-time, which is why they were opting out. That leaves the real-time fact-checking up to NBC’s Lester Holt, the debate moderator, or Clinton herself.
The first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern. It will be televised on all major broadcast and cable news networks.
AIR TIME: The debate will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern. It’s scheduled to end at 10:30 p.m. Eastern.
TV CHANNEL: This debate will be broadcast live on all the major networks and leading cable sites, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox, Fox News, MSNBC, and PBS NewsHour and Univision.
To find out what channel the station you want to watch is on for you, click here to go to TV Guide’s listings. Then change the “Provider” (right under TV Listings) to your local provider. You’ll be able to scroll down to see what channel the station you’re interested in is on for you.
Over that stretch I have tried to develop my own pressthink in reply to “theirs,” meaning the ideas most campaign journalists have about their work, and the explanations they tend to give when criticized for it. I tried to summarize the first 20 years of this tension in my 2011 lecture: Why Political Coverage is Broken. What I said there is still basic to how I do my criticism, but Trump’s spectacular intervention has raised the stakes and altered the terms of the debate.
Trump is not a normal candidate and can’t be covered like one. Journalists have finally accepted that. Just the other day Dean Baquet, editor of the New York Times, said this about Trump
He’s been hugely challenging. I don’t think we’ve ever had somebody who in my time as a journalist so openly lies, and that was a word that we struggled to actually utter. We’re used to, I think as journalists, we’re used to philosophical debates, like one party thinks we should go to war on Iraq, makes its case—exaggerates its case, we now know. But there are warring philosophies. I’ve never quite seen anything like [Trump], and I think it’s a real challenge for us.
Elections were about warring philosophies. Journalists sat in the press box and brought you the action. Baquet admits: this organizing image no longer organizes much. But even his phrase “hugely challenging” understates it, I think. Here are the major propositions I have been using to understand this unique and perilous moment.
1. Political journalism rests on a picture of politics that journalists and politicos share.
As practiced by the “mainstream media” (the professionals who work at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, Politico, Time magazine) political journalism is constructed — it rests entirely — on a mental picture of the American system in which the two major parties are similar actors with, as Baquet put it, “warring philosophies.”
Elections are the big contests that distribute power between them. The day-to-day of politics is a series of minor battles for tactical advantage. The press is part of this picture because it distributes attention, but — in this view of things — it doesn’t participate in politics itself. It reports on battles large and small, questions the power holders, tries to reveal machinations going on behind the scenes and generates public interest in the drama of politics. But it is unaligned with the major players and unaffected by the outcome of the contests it chronicles.
To report successfully on such a system you need sources who trust you inside both parties. You need people in both parties who will return your calls and have drinks with you at the Des Moines Marriott. The simplest way to guarantee that is to look at politics in the same way that people in the party establishments do. The political pros who staff the committees and run the campaigns and consult with the big players are the closest readers of political journalism and closest in outlook to the journalists who consider reporting on politics their profession.
I called this a mental picture, but it’s more than that. It’s a stable framework within which work can be done, coverage can be planned, knowledge can be refined, reputation can be won, careers can be built. The image of two similar parties with warring philosophies that compete for tactical advantage also positions the mainstream press in a comfortable way: between partisan players as chronicler, questioner and referee. Among those most comfortable with that position: media owners and managers hoping to alienate as few people as possible.
In other words: powerful forces keep the mental picture in place.
2. Asymmetry between the parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.
Now imagine what happens when over time the base of one party, far more than the base of the other, begins to treat the press as a hostile actor, and its own establishment as part of the rot; when it not only opposes but denies the legitimacy — and loyalty to the state — of the other side’s leader; when it prefers conspiracy theory to party-friendly narratives that at least cope with verified fact; when it is scornful of the reality that in a divided system you never get everything you want.
This is the thesis that Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein developed in their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. They are think tank scholars with PhDs and Washington insiders who were frequently called on by journalists to explain trends and furnish quotes. They had the same incentives as journalists to stay on conversant terms with politicos in both parties. Mann and Ornstein came to the conclusion that something had changed in the Republican Party. Their summary of it: #
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
Political scandals, whether focused on Hillary Clinton’s email use or Donald Trump’s shady business dealings, have emerged as one of the most popular talking points of the 2016 presidential election. But as John Oliver explained on the latest“Last Week Tonight,” when you break down all the alleged scandals plaguing both candidates, it’s overwhelmingly clear that there is no contest: Trump is “unethically compromised to an almost unprecedented degree.”
“This campaign has been dominated by scandals, but it is dangerous to think that there is an equal number on both sides,” Oliver said. “You can be irritated by some of Hillary’s—that is understandable—but you should then be fucking outraged by Trump’s.”
–ANALYSIS — ABC’s RICK KLEIN: What if he apologizes? What if he behaves himself? What if he drops “Crooked Hillary” for “Madam Secretary”? What if – stay with us here – he doesn’t stretch the truth? Forget the no-holds-barred attacks Donald Trump has proven himself capable of. Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare might be humble Trump, since that would flip storylines enough to potentially dominate the takeaways regardless of what else happens at Hofstra. Clinton’s camp is pressuring Lester Holt to do the fact-checking the candidate doesn’t want to do by herself. But she may be in the position of wanting and needing to draw Trump out – to bait him into a discussion of President Obama’s birth status, for instance, or a real policy discussion on Iraq or Afghanistan or ISIS. Clinton-as-aggressor would surely be unexpected. It also may be helpful in a race where she continues to struggle to lock down her base. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Trump getting a larger share of Republicans and of Romney voters than Clinton is of Democrats and Obama voters. Clinton isn’t known for smackdowns. But it may not hurt for her to show some fight.
— Reviewing the coverage ahead of Trump’s 9 p.m. showdown with Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University makes it sound like all the GOP nominee really needs to do is not talk about how well-endowed he is…
“I think that Trump is buoyed by the very low expectations. This is a guy who’s never debated one-on-one … So if he does passably, we’ll all say he won,” a Politico reporter said last week. The headline of a lead story on Politico this morning, citing anonymous “insiders,” declares that “The heat is on Hillary.”
“A lot of people are going to look at Donald Trump and think, ‘Hey, if he can even get out a good sentence and show off his experience, then he’s doing well,’” New York Times correspondent Yamiche Alcindor said on “Morning Joe” last week, addressing the Clinton campaign’s complaints that she’s being subjected to a double standard.
“Clinton has the much tougher task tonight,” NPR declares in its curtain-raiser this morning.“She has the burden of high expectations. The former senator and secretary of state, who’s now been through two presidential campaigns, is an experienced debater who knows policy inside and out. But her job is very hard — Clinton has to convince voters who don’t want to vote for Trump but haven’t warmed up to her that she is likeable, honest and trustworthy. And she has to press her case that Trump is unqualified to be president without being overly aggressive or ‘harsh.’”
“I do think that the stakes are much higher in this debate and all the debates for Hillary Clinton,” CNN’s Dana Bash said on the air recently. “Because she is a seasoned politician. She is a seasoned debater. Yes, we saw Donald Trump in the primaries debate for the first time, but he is a first-time politician. So for lots of reasons—maybe it’s not fair, but it’s the way it is—the onus is on her.”
The liberal group Media Matters has rounded up several other examples in this vein. The editor in chief of The Hill, Bob Cusack, also said on Fox News earlier this month that the bar for Clinton is “higher” than for Trump. “So there is an opportunity for Trump—if he can do the prep work and land some zingers—he could really make up some ground in the battleground states,” Cusack said.
As the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel notes, tongue in cheek, “Debate Bar So Low For Donald Trump That If He Doesn’t Vomit, He’s Exceeded Expectations.”
— This tenor of coverage has influenced public perceptions about the debate. Our new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows the race is within the margin of error nationally. Likely voters split 46 percent for Clinton and 44 percent for Trump. Among registered voters, Clinton and Trump are tied at 41 percent. The poll finds that eight in 10 voters plan to watch tonight’s debate, prompting some to estimate that upwards of 100 million could tune in. Overall, no matter who they’re supporting,44 percent expect Clinton to win versus 34 percent who expect Trump to come out ahead. Many who say they’ll watch have already made up their minds. While about one in five registered voters say the debate could change their minds, only 6 percent said there is a good chance of that occurring.
Just one point separates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in two states that are critical to both candidates’ chances of becoming president, according to new CNN/ORC polls in Pennsylvania and Colorado.
In Colorado, likely voters break 42% for Trump, 41% for Clinton, 13% for Libertarian Gary Johnson and 3% for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Pennsylvania’s likely voters split 45% for Clinton, 44% for Trump, 6% for Johnson and 3% for Stein. Those divides are well within each poll’s 3.5-point margin of sampling error.
Polls are likely to move after the debate. It is the moment when voters get to make a direct, side-by-side comparison of the two candidates. This may also be the last time for any significant shift in the race.
Both before and after the debate, pundits will emit opinions about “expectations.” This commentary does not have predictive value. It would be better if they kept their focus on policy substance or factchecking.
Here are three reasons why you should basically ignore the onslaught of horserace punditry that is about to rain down.
Above is a mild example of what you can expect in the coming 24 hours. This particular statement is a bit circular: of course Trump will probably be perceived as “winning” if his numbers improve. However, there’s a bigger problem: the premise of “meeting expectations” itself carries no predictive value.
Trump could take the lead, but it would go against what we know so far. I would characterize the race as being very close, but not as uncertain as you might think. Why? The unappreciated story of 2016 is the amazing stability of public opinion. As measured by national polls, 2016 marks the most stable Presidential race in >60 years of modern polling. At the level of state-poll-based analysis, the stability is even greater. This basic fact should inform all analysis.
Wang provides 3 reasons and explanations. I’ll just list the points here and let you go read the explanations.
1. What commentators think about “exceeding expectations” is an anti-indicator.
2. If polls move after the debate, the reasons were baked in a long time ago
3. Polarization has made it difficult for opinion to move much.
I think his bottom line is most interesting here.
The groups that may choose up sides are self-described undecideds (4%), Gary Johnson supporters (8%), and Jill Stein supporters (3%). Undecideds andJohnson supporters are likely to split evenly between Clinton and Trump, while Stein supporters should break heavily toward Clinton. Tomorrow is a chance for them to get on the bus.
We’re closing in on the first general election debate of the season and speculation is running hot and heavy in the pundit class. I think they’re actually taking bets as to which one of Donald Trump’s persona will appear on stage. They’re also trying to find out who is standing in for Trump at Clinton’s practice debates. That’s just soooooo scoopworthy and newsworthy and très importante.
Donald Trump says NBC’s Lester Holt should not correct his or Hillary Clinton’s facts while moderating the first presidential debate.
“I think he has to be a moderator,” the Republican nominee said on “Fox & Friends” Thursday.
“I mean, if you’re debating somebody and if she makes a mistake or I make a mistake … we’ll take each other on,” he added. “But I certainly don’t think you want Candy Crowley again.”
I’m never quit sure why they actually pick “news” personalities to do these things rather than ask a few experts to grill the candidates on their subject of expertise. But, like anything on TV news poof these days, it’s a ratings game and they’re after those sound bytes from hell. Josh Vorhees from Slate has done Lester’s homework for him which is usually what the bright kids do for the rest of the planet. Don’t forget, we’ve got letters from economics experts, foreign policy experts, diplomats and military experts and scientists all begging folks to leave Donald Trump to the trashbins of TV and scams. Really, check my links that’s about 300-400 of the world’s biggest brains flashing a don’t go there America sign!!! It’s like between 50 -100 of them per link up there.
The list of lies covered by Vorhees include lies that that Donald Dumbf tells about himself, the country, the economy, the world, the criminal justice system, the state of US inner cities and a host of topics. Go check them out. They’re full cited. Here are the lies he tells about our country and our extremely good economy.
Lies Trump Tells About the Country
Immigration
Lie: There could be as few as 3 million or as many as 30 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
Truth: The Department of Homeland Security last estimated the size of the undocumented population at 11.4 million at the start of 2012, down from a peak of 12.2 million five years earlier. As PolitiFact points out, that figure is line with the most recent estimates from the Pew Research Center (11.3 million in 2014), the Center for Migration Studies (10.9 million in 2014), and the Center for Immigrations Studies (11.7 million in 2016). While the government does not know the exact number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, there are no credible estimates that approach either Trump’s high- or low-end numbers.
Lie: Assimilation among American Muslims is nearly “non-existent.”
Truth: The Pew Research Center conducted a major survey on the topic in 2011 and concluded “Muslim Americans appear to be highly assimilated into American society.” Public polling of Muslim Americans likewise suggests that a majority identify strongly with the United States.
The electoral process
Lie: The general election debates are “rigged” against him because two overlap with NFL games.
Truth: The Commission on Presidential Debates consulted with both parties before setting the fall schedule for the three presidential debates and the single vice presidential one. Furthermore, the bipartisan panel announced the dates in September of last year, more than four months before this year’s first nominating contest and nearly seven months before the NFL released its schedule for the season. Scheduling conflicts between major sporting events and the general election debates are also neither new—there were two NFL conflicts in 2012 alone—nor easily avoidable, given the NFL now plays on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays, while MLB playoff games up to and including the World Series can fall on any day of the week. (Bonus lie: Trump claims the NFL sent him a letter alerting him about the conflict; the NFL says that didn’t happen.)
Lie: The election itself is “rigged” against him.
Truth: Trump’s claim was, in the words of the usually staid Associated Press, an “unprecedented assertion by a modern presidential candidate,” one that could “threaten the tradition of peacefully contested elections and challenge the very essence of a fair democratic process.” Trump has laid the groundwork for only two possible outcomes in the eyes of his most passionate supporters: He wins the presidency, or he has it stolen from him. Meanwhile, his campaign has produced no credible evidence to support the extraordinary claim that the outcome of an election that has yet to happen will be illegitimate.
Truth: This is a slightly softer version of his original claim that America is the most taxed nation, though the rewrite still isn’t enough to save it. According to a Pew Research Center report from this year—based on 2014 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—Americans’ tax bills are below average among developed nations.
Truth: The Bureau of Labor Statistics latest estimate pegs the nation’s unemployment rate at 4.9 percent, roughly where it has been for the past year. That figure does not factor in those Americans who are unemployed but not currently looking for work. BLS, however, offers a second statistic—known as the labor underutilization rate—that in addition to the officially unemployed, also counts part-time workers who would like to be working more and those who want to work but are not currently looking for a job. That figure was 9.7 percent in August.
Lie: The black youth unemployment rate is 59 percent.
Truth: Again, no. According to BLS, the unemployment rate for blacks between 16 and 24 years old was 26.1 percent in August. While Trump has never said where his figure came from, the most likely scenario is that he is relying on a metric that misleadingly factors in those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job, including high school and college students.
With his wife Rosalynn Carter looking on at center, Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, center left, shakes hands with President Gerald Ford at the conclusion of their debate at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, Oct. 6, 1976, San Francisco, Calif. Others unidentified. (AP Photo)
Meanwhile, Clinton picks up the endorsement of another of the nation’s major newspapers. This time it’s the LA Times. No one in the know or a functioning brain wants Donald Dumpf near the White House. No.One. How’s this for a headline? “Hillary Clinton would make a sober, smart and pragmatic president. Donald Trump would be a catastrophe.”
American voters have a clear choice on Nov. 8. We can elect an experienced, thoughtful and deeply knowledgeable public servant or a thin-skinned demagogue who is unqualified and unsuited to be president.
Donald J. Trump, a billionaire businessman and television personality, is the latter. He has never held elected office and has shown himself temperamentally unfit to do so. He has run a divisive, belligerent, dishonest campaign, repeatedly aligning himself with racists, strongmen and thugs while maligning or dismissing large segments of the American public. Electing Trump could be catastrophic for the nation.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton is one of the best prepared candidates to seek the presidency in many years. As a first lady, a Democratic senator from New York and secretary of State in President Obama’s first term, she immersed herself in the details of government, which is why her positions on the issues today are infinitely better thought-out than those of her opponent.
She stands for rational, comprehensive immigration reform and an improvement rather than an abandonment of the Affordable Care Act. She supports abortion rights, wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour, hopes to reform the sentencing laws that have overcrowded American prisons, would repair the Voting Rights Act and help students to leave college without enormous debt. Abroad she would strengthen America’s traditional alliances, continue the Obama administration’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately defeat” Islamic State and negotiate with potential adversaries such as Russia and China in a way that balances realism and the protection of American interests. Unlike Trump, Clinton accepts the prevailing science on climate change and considers the issue to be “the defining challenge of our time.”
The racists are out in droves over the protests in Charlotte, N.C. which is one of the key swing states in this election. The first two nights of protests saw some vandalism and even a shooting. However, last night was peaceful. I noticed that the presence of the National Guard mixed in with Police in NOPD after Katrina was a good thing. The police behaved when they were being monitored by the Guard. People also were more calm and the usual agitators and criminals that follow protests around to take advantage were gone last night. I’m beginning to think that a state’s national guard is key to policing in places where the police aren’t all that professional. Anyway, here’s the latest idiots suggesting protesters should be harmed or are some how doing something illegal. This one is from a Tennessee (no surprises there) Law Professor.
The University of Tennessee is investigating a tweet by one of its law professors after the faculty member and contributing columnist for USA TODAY and the Knoxville News Sentinel urged motorists to run over demonstrators blocking traffic in Charlotte, N.C.
Twitter briefly suspended Glenn Reynolds’ account after he responded to a tweet from a TV news station in Charlotte that showed protesters on Interstate 277. “Run them down,” he wrote.
He posted to Twitter shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday that his account had been unblocked after he agreed to delete the offending tweet.
UT College of Law Dean Melanie D. Wilson said in a statement Thursday morning that she and university administrators are investigating the matter, calling Reynolds’ post an “irresponsible use of his platform.”
“The university is committed to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and diverse viewpoints, all of which are important for an institution of higher education and the free exchange of ideas,” she wrote. “My colleagues and I in the university’s leadership support peaceful disobedience and all forms of free speech, but we do not support violence or language that encourages violence.”
She called the concerns about the tweet from students and staff, along with those from citizens across the country, “serious and legitimate.”
Chancellor Jimmy Cheek released a statement about an hour later supporting Wilson and her comments.
“Wilson’s statement about the faculty member’s social media post reinforces the university’s commitment to fostering a civil and inclusive learning environment,” he said in a news release.
U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger apologized Thursday after saying the violence in Charlotte stems from protesters who “hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not.”
Pittenger is a Republican whose district includes parts of the city where protests have turned violent in the wake of a police shooting of a black man.
He made the statement on a BBC-TV news program Thursday when asked to describe the “grievance” of the protesters.
“The grievance in their minds – the animus, the anger – they hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not,” Pittenger said. He then criticized people who receive welfare. “It is a welfare state. We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, and we’ve put people in bondage, so they can’t be all they’re capable of being.”
He later apologized on Twitter, saying his answer “doesn’t reflect who I am. I was quoting statements made by angry protesters last night on national TV. My intent was to discuss the lack of economic mobility for African Americans because of failed policies.”
Yeah. Right. Lack of “economic mobility” because “they all hate white people”, I suppose.
Which brings us to Glenn Reynolds, known online as InstaPundit, one of the most prolific bloggers on the Internet. On Wednesday night, Reynolds tweeted this.
The tweet involved protesters who were blocking a highway near Charlotte in protest of the killing of Keith Lamont Scott.
After being suspended, however, Reynolds defended his tweet. He allowed that “run them down” didn’t capture his intent “fully” — but he blamed Twitter’s character count, not his own judgment, for the message.
But riots aren’t peaceful protest. And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest — it’s threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn’t actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn’t stop because I’d fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would.
“Run them down” perhaps didn’t capture this fully, but it’s Twitter, where character limits stand in the way of nuance.
Reynolds’ tweet was just 14 characters — far below Twitter’s limit of 140, which could have allowed for at least a little more nuance.
What makes white people tick? This question will occupy campaign strategists and forecasters through November. Given that voters of color have, on the whole, decided resoundingly against Donald Trump, the coveted swing voters who will decide this election are overwhelmingly white. This is nothing new, of course, but in the wake of a campaign season that has played heavily on white identity politics, rejection of diversity and race-baiting dog whistles, the specific concerns of white voters have taken on a renewed salience.
It’s an open secret in electoral politics that you can guess someone’s vote pretty accurately based only on her census form. So rather than trying to suss out the sentiments and ideological profiles of voters based on individual testimony, let’s tackle a simpler question: Which demographic traits affect how white Americans vote?
…
Instead, the two most predictive variables are religious attendance and education. Crucially, these two variables are still more explanatory when considered together. Roughly speaking, a white voter will lean left if she is “more college than church” and will lean right if she is “more church than college.”4
More precisely, we can assign an educational score (no college = 0, some college = 1, college degree = 2) and religious attendance score (never attend = 0, sometimes attend = 1, attend weekly = 2) to each white American. Those with a higher education score are likely to support Clinton, those with a higher religious attendance score are more likely to support Trump, and those with equal scores are more divided.
So, I’m not going to comment in the post about that but you can read more at the FiveThirtyEight link above. There’s more in depth analysis from Milo Beckman there. I’ll be more open with my thoughts downthread but needless to say, if you’re already gullible enough to take iron age myths literally, you’re pretty far removed from reality. If you’ve never really studied science and learned about how theories come about and hypotheses are tested, you’re going to be doubly vulnerable to scam artists. Opps … I went there.
So, don’t forget to join us for the first debate next week and our live blog!
It’s been another weird week in the good ol’ USA. New Jersey seems to be the epicenter of cray cray these days. It doesn’t quite rival Florida yet, however. The coverage of the US presidential election may have taken a turn and a few of the polls are looking up for the future of all civilization. Meanwhile, I’m still down here in the swampland of America in need of a plan. Let’s look at some of the weirdness that is the news these days.
Peter Beinart–writing for The Atlantic–has noticed a distinct change of tone at the NYT since they got played good by Trump on Friday’s extended advertisement for a hotel. They may have gotten their mojo back. Or not. Beinart is hoping some of the worst of modern journalism is going away. We have a ray of hope that there may be some Fourth Estate left in the old girl yet!
But the Times, once a champion practitioner of the “he said, she said” campaign story, discarded it with astonishing bluntness. The Times responded to Trump’s press conference by running a “News Analysis,” a genre that gives reporters more freedom to explain a story’s significance. But “News Analysis” pieces generally supplement traditional news stories. On Saturday, by contrast, the Times ran its “News Analysis” atop Page One while relegating its news story on Trump’s press conference to page A10. Moreover, “News Analysis” stories generally offer context. They don’t offer thundering condemnation.
Yet thundering condemnation is exactly what the Times story provided. Its headline read, “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.” Not “falsehood,” which leaves open the possibility that Trump was merely mistaken, but “lie,” which suggests, accurately, that Trump had every reason to know that what he was saying about Obama’s citizenship was false.
The article’s text was even more striking. It read like an opinion column. It began by reciting the history of Trump’s campaign to discredit Obama’s citizenship. “It was not true in 2011,” began the first paragraph. “It was not true in 2012,” began the second paragraph. “It was not true in 2014,” began the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth paragraph: “It was not true, any of it.” The article called Trump’s claim that he had put to rest rumors about Obama’s citizenship “a bizarre new deception” and his allegation that Clinton had fomented them “another falsehood.” Then, in summation, it declared that while Trump has “exhausted an army of fact checkers with his mischaracterizations, exaggerations and fabrications,” the birther lie was particularly “insidious” because it “sought to undo the embrace of an African American president by the 69 million voters who elected him.”
Insert Mic Drop here.
Hillary Clinton volunteers here in Louisiana are working diligently to GOTV in Florida. This is why I’m watching the polls of that state carefully. It’s also because it may be the only state that can shut down a potential Trump presidency completely. Sound familiar?
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and businessman Donald Trump are nearly tied in a four-way race for Florida’s key electoral votes, according to a New York Times Upshot/Siena College Research Institute poll of likely Florida voters released today. Clinton currently has the support of 41 percent of likely voters to Trump’s 40 percent with former Governor Gary Johnson garnering 9 percent and Green Party Candidate Jill Stein with 2 percent. Senator Marco Rubio leads his Democratic challenger, Congressman Patrick Murphy by 48 to 42 percent.
Likely voters support passage of additional federal gun control legislation (49-43 percent), oppose building a wall the length of the Mexican border (50-43 percent), and favor, rather than oppose government stimulus programs (44-37 percent). But, they disapprove of the Affordable Care Act (51-42 percent), and are evenly divided when it comes to deporting undocumented immigrants here illegally (44-43 percent).
“Trump has as large a lead among Republicans (78 points) as Clinton does with Democrats (77 points) and independents are evenly split at 34 percent for Trump and 32 percent for Clinton with 18 percent for Johnson. Women lean towards Clinton but men tend to support Trump,” said Siena College Poll Director Don Levy. “Trump leads in the North, Bay Area and Central portions of the state, while Clinton leads in the vote rich Southeast and the Southwest is a toss-up.
“There is not only a significant gender gap in this race, but also large racial divides,” Levy said. “Trump is up 51 to 30 percent among white voters, while Clinton has a commanding 82-4 percent lead with African-Americans and 61-21 percent among Hispanics/Latinos.”
“Both candidates suffer from a majority of Florida voters having an unfavorable opinion of them. Clinton is viewed favorably by 40 percent and unfavorably by 53 percent while Trump’s numbers are 39 positive and 55 percent negative. Equal percentages, 37 percent, view one of the candidate’s favorably and the other negatively while 15 percent view them both unfavorably and only 2 percent have a favorable opinion of both. Majorities of Blacks and Latinos view Clinton favorably while half of white likely voters have a favorable opinion of Trump. Of those with an unfavorable opinion of both, a third say they will vote for Johnson, 22 percent for Clinton and 17 percent for Trump,” Levy said.
I still don’t understand how any one but a card carrying member of the KKK could have a favorable opinion of Trump unless you haven’t been paying attention to what comes out of his mouth. But, evidently some white people are just very fragile and cannot properly identify the source of their stress. (ProTip: If you’re blaming immigrants and African Americans you’re a racist.)
Florida is one of those states where a lot of people seem to be on the edge of crazy a lot of the time. There just seems to be a lot of this running about the state: Deputies: Naked man breaks in home, bites resident, then dies. I never know when I call there if I’m getting a nice retiree, a nice university student or a “Florida man”. But, Florida is key to the election. Sane Louisianans all over the state are trying to reach out to our sane counterparts in the Sunshine State.
Florida is a make-or-break state for Donald Trump. To win the presidency, he needs to lock down the Sunshine State — or else beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire, plus a state like Michigan or Virginia, where she is currently comfortably ahead in the polls.
And according to analysis by The New York Times‘ Upshot, Florida is going to be a nail-biter of a contest come November. The New York Times Upshot/Siena College poll reports that in a four-way race with the Libertarian and Green Party candidates, Clinton leads 41 to 40, and in a head-to-head, it is a tie at 43-43.
Instead of being a mix of purple cities, the Upshot’s analysis shows that most regions are almost cleanly divided as red or blue voting pockets based on demographics. In Florida, Trump keeps his hopes alive with white voters, both college educated and not — he leads 51 percent to Clinton’s 30 percent. But when it comes to Hispanic communities, Clinton has a 61 percent to 21 percent lead, doing even better with the demographic than President Obama in 2012. Black voters also overwhelmingly back Clinton, 82 percent to 4 percent.
Many regions of the state are becoming less competitive, with Miami-Dade County looking to be a Democratic hold and north Tampa and Daytona Beach solidifying as Republican. A retirement community, The Villages, with a population of 150,000, looks to be a comfortable win for Trump; older voters in the state strongly prefer him. Young voters back Clinton by a healthy margin, although over half say they don’t view her favorably.
I cannot figure out for the life of me why the Woodstock Generation is going for such an asshole. Oh, btw, if you haven’t followed Michigan’s own Little Miss Flint on Twitter, please do so! That little girl has leadership potential! She also recognizes leaders from assholes that shouldn’t be anywhere near children or the public.
You know, you can always tell something about the character of a person by the way young children respond to them and by the way they respond to young children. I had a friend talk about visiting her grandchild the other day. She basically said her grandaughter wanted to make sure the nice lady won for her instead of the scary man. (That’s our own JSLAT by the way who came out and corrected me on the gender assignment btw which I just did.) Out of the mouths of babes, my friends, out of the mouths of babes.
Another state seemingly going off the rails this weekend is New Jersey who has a nutter for a governor and what appears to be a home grown terrorist cell. The gang that–luckily–couldn’t shoot straight may have been motivated more by local treatment of them than by much else. Anyway, to our dear Sky Dancers in NJ, please stay away from rogue pressure cookers.
The FBI took five people with possible links to the Chelsea explosion into custody Sunday night in Brooklyn as authorities shut down a busy New Jersey rail station after finding multiple pipe bombs in a garbage can, police and New Jersey officials said.
The weekend trail of terror continued along the Belt Parkway where federal agents nabbed several people of interest with a weapons stash inside an SUV, according to law enforcement sources.
The five taken into custody had come over the Verrazano Bridge from Staten Island. Investigators were trying to determine if the occupants of the SUV were about to drive out of town or take a plane, sources said.
The prime suspect in the New York and New Jersey bombings sued his local police force and claimed they were persecuting him for being a Muslim.
Ahmad Rahami said in a lawsuit that cops in Elizabeth, New Jersey subjected his and his family to discrimination and ‘selective enforcement’ based on their religion.
The family claimed that police tried to shut down their chicken restaurant, called First American, too early each night with ‘baseless’ tickets and summonses.
New Jersey is also looking forward to the Trial for Bridgegate where it may be shown that Chris Christie’s involvement was a factor in either a cover up or the occurrence itself. Federal Prosecuters believe Christie knew about the closures. What did he know and when did he know it?
Gov. Chris Christie was told of the George Washington Bridge lane closures as they were occurring in 2013, a federal prosecutor told jurors on Monday in U.S. District Court.
David Wildstein, who has already pleaded guilty to playing a role in the incident, and Bill Baroni, who is now on trial for his alleged role in the scheme, “bragged” about the traffic gridlock that lane closures were causing when they spoke with the Republican governor at a Sept. 11 memorial in Lower Manhattan, Assistant U.S. Attorney Vikas Khanna said.
The two Christie-appointed former Port Authority officials mentioned the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, whom they are accused to trying to punish after he refused to endorse Christie’s reelection campaign, the prosecutor said.
“The evidence will show that Baroni and Wildstein were so committed to their plan that, during the precious moments they had alone with the governor, they bragged about the fact that there were traffic problems in Fort Lee and that Mayor Sokolich was not getting his calls returned,” Khanna told jurors during his opening remarks on Monday morning.
Khanna did not elaborate on what was allegedly said during the conversation with Christie, but told jurors that “evidence in this case may show that others could have, should have, perhaps knew certain aspects of what was going on.”
Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, were indicted last May on charges of conspiracy, fraud and civil rights violations.
Well, the real place to notice the meltdown in the Republican party is ritzy cocktail dates, I guess. I know that I frankly will not deal with any one that would vote for Trump. I consider it the acid test for if you’re with or against humanity. Even America’s babies know better than get close to the orange Creepazoid. BTW, I really just did a Google search for images of babies with Trump and got all these poor screaming kids standing next to a grown man sporting a similar sour puss face. What exactly does that say?
A few months ago, Matt Schlapp, the former White House political director under President George W. Bush, walked into a cocktail party and tried to join a conversation with Republican consultants he has known for years.
“The conversation quickly ended,” Schlapp, the chairman of the nation’s oldest conservative grassroots organization, told The Hill in a recent interview. “Everyone looked down at their expensive loafers.”
“I hadn’t had that happen to me in a professional setting before,” he added. “It’s one of those moments when you wonder, ‘Hey, do I have something on my face?’”
Schlapp’s decision to support Donald Trump for president has cost him friends in Washington’s elite Republican circles. Invitations he would normally receive no longer arrive. The vibe he says he’s getting is: “You’re out of the club.”
He’s hardly alone. Old allies in Washington and across the establishment Northeast are no longer on speaking terms because one backs Trump and the other loathes the nominee. Divisions have run so deep in some cases that they could take years to heal.
Something remarkable happened on Sunday morning’s Face the Nation, or rather, something that would be remarkable in any normal presidential election. Host John Dickerson got Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway to issue two stunning tacit admissions that her candidate is a liar, and then Dickerson remarkably sort of apologized for it.
On Friday morning, Donald Trump ended his years-long crusade to smear President Obama by lying about Hillary Clinton, lying about his own actions, and finally stating the obvious fact that everyone else already knew: that Barack Obama was born in the United States. When Dickerson confronted Conway with the lie that Trump’s campaign put out and Trump repeated, that Trump had put an end to the controversy in 2011, she didn’t challenge that the lie was a lie, and when Dickerson followed up by asking Conway why Trump promoted a lie for five years, Conway similarly accepted that characterization as truth (emphasis mine):
Those in Donald Trump’s orbit appear to be nervous about the swirling scandal around the Trump Foundation—and they should be: The stakes are incredibly high.
The allegations of a quid pro quo between Trump and Florida Attorney General, improper use of the charity for personal benefit, and employment of the charity for political purposes have serious penalties beyond mere campaign optics—the possible consequences range from hefty fines to jail time.
The last seven days has been all bad news on the Trump Foundation front: House Democrats have publicly sought a Justice Department investigation into the charity, while left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington alleged that Trump appeared to have bribed Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi by giving her a $25,000 contribution so that she would not join a lawsuit against Trump University.
And a New York Times investigation this past week showed that Trump had personally signed the check that constituted the illegal campaign contribution from his charity to Bondi.
Add this to a dose of personal animosity: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told CNN this week that “we have been looking into the Trump Foundation to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.” The Trump camp already despises Schneiderman due to his legal crusade on the controversial Trump University business.
“This reaches above a distraction for them due to the legal implications of it and long litigation possibility,” a former senior aide to Trump said. “Look, Donald signed those checks… he’s on there. He’s liable.”
On a September night when he gave a rousing valedictory speech to the famed Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) at the dinner for its annual legislative weekend, as awareness is setting in about how adroit and blessed Barack Obama has been as our national leader, with reported numbers showing a giant drop in poverty, a rise in jobs, and growth in family income despite the legislative blocks that stubbornly refused to fund stimulative policies for labor, wages and jobs, the President in his remarks took an unusual tact for him: the first black President, Barack Obama openly reclaimed his history and legacy and put it firmly in the history of race in America. He shared the historic challenges of a historically oppressed community formed in America when they were imported to be slaves—humans sold as property, controlled without rights for the benefit of the privileged. He described how this historical beginning was a force within him and within the community itself. How it gave birth to a driving passion for justice.
Because of this remarkable precedent, his speech deserves a close reading. It is an oratory triumph! It is also the historical moment many have been waiting for—the moment when the nation’s first African-American President put himself, by his own words, into a history of America where race mattered and still matters. His speech cast light on the veil and shadows that fall on the African-American character. It highlighted African success, including his own.
His speech was masterful storytelling: examples, irony, metaphor, repetition/analepsis, contrasts, even ridicule and anticlimax; bathos and epistrophe were among the rhetoric devices he used to deconstruct the competing versions of history used to deny his place as he built the case for a new Americal historical centerpiece, one arranged by truth and merit, admired for its accomplishments, as unique as America’s deeply rooted dream. His words were remarkably clear of gestures and insults. He cast no blame. He relied on the oral tradition, the method for teaching and transmitting ideas when the enslaved were punished for being able to read or write. The oral tradition shared and stored the community’s most valuable lessons. It emphasized performance and creativity.
He also had a compelling argument for Hillary and a huge African American Voter GOTV effort. Again, go watch the entire thing. However, just look at the face of those babies and you’ll see who the future of America supports and loves. Spoiler Alert! It had a lot to do with telling every one that we all had a lot to lose if we got sent back in time!
So, that’s my two cents today! What’s on your reading and blogging list?
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So, I promised I’d try to avoid politics today even though that’s very difficult given our proximity to the elections and the fact that one of the candidates is uniquely unfit for office. I’m trying to avoid it as much as possible but it just seems that I can only do it for so long. So, let’s start out with some other news and then, I have to go there because like most sane Americans, I know my President was born in Hawaii, earned his way into top Ivy League Schools, and practices a form of agnostic,secular Christianity like a good portion of the country and who cares about that sort of thing any way? We sorta kinda heard that from the nation’s most visible conspiracy theorist and white nationalist today. But let me save that for last!
The National Book Foundation announced Thursday its longlist of 10 titles in the running for the National Book Award for fiction, which celebrates the best in American literature over the past year.
Garth Greenwell (What Belongs to You) is the sole debut novelist in this year’s longlist, released in The New Yorker. There are veteran writers in the form of Chris Bachelder for The Throwback Special, his fourth book; Paulette Jiles for News of the World, Karan Mahajan for The Association of Small Bombs, Elizabeth McKenzie forThe Portable Veblen, and Lydia Millet for the Sweet Lamb of Heaven.
Previous finalists also made the list, including Adam Haslett, (also previously nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) for Imagine Me Gone, Brad Watson, for his second novel, Miss Jane, and Jacqueline Woodson, who previously won in the Young People’s Literature category for her 2014 memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, this time longlisted for her novel Another Brooklyn. Colson Whitehead is nominated for the critically acclaimed The Underground Railroad, which follows a slave’s adventures in the antebellum South.
The fiction longlist follows a week full of announcements, with the National Book Foundation unveiling the contenders for the Young People’s Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction categories. The 40 books in the running this year span a diverse range of genres, writers, and experiences.
So, I guess I will add a little bit on politics in here but not any race horse coverage. I’m not sure if you heard, but Wisconsin’s Governor Scot Walker is under investigation for campaign finance irregularities. One of the fascinating things about the links is that they uncover a web of deceit and dark money. Will this investigation lead to a case before the Supreme Court and trouble for one of the Koch Puppets? The documents show the influence of right wing mega donors in the Republican Party.
Rarely do members of the public get to see behind the closed doors of political nonprofits, which may receive unlimited amounts of money from mega-donors without disclosing anything about their operations. But a trove of leaked documents from an investigation into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall election campaign has offered an unprecedented look at how politicians operate in a post-Citizens United world that features record levels of undisclosed political money.
The documents, leaked to The Guardian newspaper, detail the allegedly illegal coordination between Walker’s campaign and an outside group.
Walker, in a scramble to win a bitterly contested election, asked a slew of right-wing billionaires in 2011 and 2012 to pour money into the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a dark money group working closely with a top aide to the governor. After Walker won, a special prosecutor opened an investigation into the campaign’s alleged coordination with the group. The leaked documents come from that controversial investigation, which Walker and his allies had dismissed as a partisan witch-hunt.
In 2015, the Wisconsin Supreme Court even shut down the investigation, ruling that the Walker campaign did not violate the law because coordination between candidates and outside groups is only prohibited for so-called express advocacy—direct calls to vote for or against a specific candidate. The Walker campaign only coordinated with Wisconsin Club for Growth on issue advocacy ads, which don’t expressly tell voters how to vote, the court ruled, and the activity was therefore legal. The decision infuriated government watchdogs, especially since two conservative justices refused to recuse themselves despite having received outside support from the Wisconsin Club for Growth during their own previous judicial elections.
Not only has the Walker scandal roared back into the spotlight, it may be headed for the Supreme Court. In April, the special prosecutor in the case called on the high court to overturn the state Supreme Court’s decision to end the investigation, arguing that coordination on issue advocacy is, in fact, illegal, and that the plaintiffs didn’t receive a fair trial because the two justices failed to recuse themselves. The Supreme Court is expected to announce later this month whether it will hear the case.
The documents revealed by The Guardian provide a detailed look at how Walker and his aides used Wisconsin Club for Growth to circumvent traditional campaign contribution limits, and get around a state ban on political donations from corporations.
In one leaked email, Walker casually mentions that he got John Menard, CEO of the home improvement chain Menard’s, to contribute $1 million directly from his corporation to the Wisconsin dark money group. A $10,000 check to the group from a wealthy financier had the words “Because Scott Walker asked” written on the memo line.
Another previously undisclosed check to Wisconsin Club for Growth for $10,000 from finance executive Frederick Kasten Jr. includes a memo line that reads: “Because Scott Walker asked.”
The documents show Walker also solicited donations from several wealthy individuals, many of whom or their companies made contributions to the Club, not Walker’s campaign. Contributions from Wisconsin donors and companies included $25,000 from Brookfield-based Hammes Co., $25,000 from Green Bay-based Schneider Enterprise Resources; and $100,000 from Ted Kellner, CEO of Milwaukee-based Fiduciary Management.
Among others from whom Walker sought money, the records show, were business magnate T. Boone Pickens and Lowry Mays, then-chairman of Clear Channel Communications.
In an August 2011 email, after the first wave of Senate recalls, Walker asked “did I send out thank you notes to all our (c)4 donors?”
The s0-called “John Doe investigation” has been going on since August, 20102 and no charges have been filed yet.
Gov. Robert Bentley issued an executive order Thursday declaring a state of emergency in Alabama over concerns about fuel shortages in the wake of a gasoline pipeline spill that released about 250,000 gallons of gasoline south of Birmingham and shut down a major pipeline connecting refineries in Houston with the rest of the country.
The pipeline operator, Colonial Pipeline, released the following information Thursday afternoon:
“Based on current projections and consultations with industry partners, parts of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina will be the first markets to be impacted by any potential disruption in supply.”
“Colonial has briefed officials in these states and will continue to provide timely information to the public so that they can plan accordingly.”
The executive orders will allow fuel delivery truck drivers in each state to work longer shifts and exceed maximum hour limits established by the U.S. Department of Transportation in order to prevent gasoline outages.
The orders apply only to trucks that are transporting fuel to areas served by the pipeline.
The pipeline has been shut down since Friday and normally transports 1.3 million barrels per day of refined gasoline and other petroleum products from refineries in Houston to the south and eastern seaboard. The pipeline terminates at New York Harbor.
A grim new study led by a UCLA geography professor revealed that the current 5-year drought in California could last indefinitely, with the resulting arid conditions becoming “the new normal” for the state.
The study, which looked at prolonged periods of dryness in California over the past 10,000 years, was published Thursday in the Nature.com journal Scientific Reports.
It noted that the state’s drought in the 21st century has been the most intense ever recorded, with drier than normal conditions in 10 of the past 14 years; the last three years have also been the hottest and driest in about 120 years.
The study investigated how natural climatic forces such as sun spots, a slightly different earth orbit and decreased volcanic activity intermittently warmed the region through radiative forcing, contributing to historic periods of dryness that lasted for hundreds and even thousands of years. It also looked at the presence and impact of greenhouse gases, another more recent warming force.
A grim new study led by a UCLA geography professor revealed that the current 5-year drought in California could last indefinitely, with the resulting arid conditions becoming “the new normal” for the state.
Maybe they can find other uses for golf courses, avocado and almond farms, and swimming pools in the state.
In an alarming victory for the gun lobby, Missouri’s Republican-controlled Legislature voted Wednesday to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto and enact a wholesale retreat from gun safety in the state.
The law will let citizens carry concealed weapons in public without a state gun permit, criminal background check or firearms training. It strips local law enforcement of its current authority to deny firearms to those guilty of domestic violence and to other high-risk individuals. And it establishes a dangerous “stand your ground” standard that will allow gun owners to shoot and claim self-defense based on their own sense of feeling threatened.
The measure has drawn no great national attention, but it certainly provides further evidence that gun safety cannot be left to state lawmakers beholden to the gun lobby. Democrats opposed to the Missouri bill called it a “perfect storm” of lowered standards for the use of deadly force and an invitation for people to be armed without responsible controls. The measure was enacted by the Republicans, despite strong public opposition and warnings about the threat to public safety from the state Police Chiefs Association. Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the groups fighting the gun lobby, noted that stand-your-ground laws result in disproportionate harm to communities of color.
Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, vetoed the measure in June, saying it would allow individuals with a criminal record to legally carry a concealed firearm even though they had been, or would have been, denied a permit under the old law’s background check. Mayors Sly James of Kansas City and Francis Slay of St. Louis warned against restricting the power of the local police to deny guns to those who commit domestic violence. They cited sharp spikes in domestic violence homicides in their cities, and they noted that the police would be left at greater risk by this bill.
Republican legislative leaders, who cut short debate on the override vote on the last day of the session, were ebullient in overriding a variety of the governor’s vetoes beyond the gun measure, including one that will force voters to show a government photo ID.
The Justice Department is preparing to launch a renewed strategy to address the unrelenting scourge of heroin and opioid addiction, in part by placing greater emphasis on identifying links between over-prescribing doctors and distribution networks across the country.
The plan, outlined by Attorney General Loretta Lynch in an interview with USA TODAY, is part of an eleventh-hour push by the Obama administration against a public health crisis that continues to claim nearly 100 people each day in the United States.
In a memo that is expected to be circulated next week to all 94 U.S. attorney offices, Lynch said prosecutors are being urged to more readily share information across state lines about prescription drug abuses by physicians that could identify traffickers and far-flung trafficking routes more quickly.
At the same time, Lynch said federal prosecutors will be directed to coordinate their enforcement efforts with public health authorities in their districts as part of an overall strategy that puts equal emphasis on prevention and treatment.
“I’m not calling anybody out, because I think the people who look at this problem realize quickly how devastating it has been to families, to communities, to public health dollars, to law enforcement resources,” the attorney general said. “There is no one magic bullet for this.”
While opioid and heroin addiction have earned the distinction as the single greatest drug threat in the U.S., largely due to a casualty rate that has nearly quadrupled since 1999, the federal government’s effort to counter it — or even slow it — has been spotty.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration requested nearly $1.1 billion as part of a plan to pay for drug treatment, invoking a common refrain that drug overdoses — driven increasingly by heroin and other opioids, such as oxycodone, hydrocodone and methadone — are responsible for more deaths than car crashes. Yet after Congress approved landmark legislation in July for expanded drug addiction treatment and prevention, it did not include the $181 million to actually fund the measure.
Meanwhile, the deadly drug epidemic, which shadowed the early presidential primaries in addiction-plagued New Hampshire and Ohio, has largely receded from the public discussion during the general election.
“I have never seen anything like this,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said during an appearance earlier this year before the Senate Judiciary Committee with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., to outline the human wreckage that addiction has left behind in their tiny state. “This is about real people dying.”
Michael Botticelli, director of National Drug Control Policy, said Thursday that a key part of the administration’s renewed effort against heroin and opioid abuse will be to push Congress in the remaining days of the administration to provide the funding for both the legislation it approved earlier this year and the $1.1 billion in grants sought by the White House, which is staging a series of public events next week to call attention to the problem.
“The biggest area where we have fallen short is filling the gap between people who need treatment and those able to get it,” Botticelli said, adding that it remains a challenge to “keep people alive so that they can get into treatment.”
“We need more treatment capacity. We cannot wait to save people. This requires a response commensurate with the size of the epidemic,” the director said.
It’s already remarkable — in a bad way — that a nominee for president of the United States has to make a major speech to disavow the racist, baseless conspiracy theory he started about the president’s birth certificate.
But it’s even stranger that Donald Trump has managed to turn it into an advertisement for his new hotel in Washington, DC:
I am now going to the brand new Trump International, Hotel D.C. for a major statement. (via Twitter)
“Nice hotel,” he opened his remarks, which were part of a ceremony honoring
Medal of Honor winners. He went on to call it one of the best hotels, maybe, in the world.
Most presidential candidates — well, most presidential candidates wouldn’t need to make this speech in the first place. But if they did, they’d find some kind of neutral ground to do it, somewhere like the National Press Club.
Of course, Trump does own the hotel, so there’s nothing wrong with him having an event there instead of somewhere else. But using the speech, and the Medal of Honor winner’s he honoring, to actively promote his own business and brag about how great it is is part of a long history of Trump using his campaign and his foundation to personally enrich himself. (Ivanka Trump, who’s using his policy platform to promote her own brand, is following in her father’s footsteps.)
Donald Trump on Friday stated that he no longer believes President Barack Obama was born outside the United States, breaking away from a conspiracy theory that helped fuel his political rise.
“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again,” Trump said at his new Washington hotel, flanked by Medal of Honor recipients, in an appearance that often seemed like a plug for his property and an extended endorsement of Trump by veterans.
He also blamed Hillary Clinton for raising questions about Obama’s citizenship during the 2008 campaign, despite no evidence that she did so.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it,” he said on Friday morning, referencing his public pressure campaign in 2011 that resulted in Obama releasing his long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii.
The reversal came after his aides and allies had publicly pressured him to disavow the theories, which had furthered the racist and xenophobic undertones of his presidential campaign. But Trump had continued to play coy, often saying in interviews that the issue didn’t matter anymore, even as he refused to state outright that he no longer believed Obama could have been born in Kenya.
Many of Clinton’s allies reacted to Trump’s statement with disgust.
“Trump doubled down on lie-filled statement from his campaign last night & took no responsibility for his bigoted attacks on our President,” Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted.
My guess is that he did this under duress. I frankly agree with TPM: STONE COLD LIAR. This is from Josh Marshall.
As I said earlier, birtherism is not about a factual error. It’s conscious and deliberate racist agitation. Indeed, it was birtherism which built Trump’s political profile and his base among white supremacists which enabled him to mount his successful primary campaign. His political career was built birtherism and racism. He’s never apologized. Indeed, he’s said he deserves praise for it. So he’s doubled down on more lies, apologized for nothing, and says he deserves credit for what he did. Think about that.
Anyway, this is obviously LOL, because offhand Holocaust references are one of the best ways to show casual onlookers that your funny bone is in good, working order, at least in the dank, nasty, racist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi parts of the internet. Hey remember a few days ago when Trump Junior shared that really disgusting white supremacist meme? Good times.
But anyway, this is all a false alarm, because the Trump campaign says Baby Trumpers was clearly just talking about a capital punishment gas chamber, which is definitely, totally the most common and up-to-date way people are executed in the United States. Gosh almighty, it’s been used in the United States TEN WHOLE TIMES since 1976, so it’s definitely more seared into the public consciousness than the electric chair or lethal injection, when people think “capital punishment.” (This whole paragraph contains many Big Sarcasms, if you did not know!)
The Holocaust, on the other hand … gas chambers are kinda what comes to mind.
You can call me shocked. I figured he’d have grabbed for something like “lynching”. That would have another level of appeal to their fan boys from Storm Front and the American Nazi Party.
Meanwhile, I’m going back to the good book sitting on my nightstand. I can’t take much more of this Trump nightmare. The horrifying Economics “policy” speech yesterday did me in. It was like a flash back to the worst part of the 80s.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m going back to ranting about the election since yesterday’s media coverage was so over the top. We heard more about the Crackpot Republican nominee putting on a Barnum & Bailey worthy side show on the TV show of a crackpot Doctor than we heard about the solid criminal investigation into his family’s Foundation which is an obvious scam and the excellent research into his business ties with foreign agents that are not friendly to US interests. Crackpots appear to have a major footing in the 2016 Presidential Election coverage. Dr. Oz is just the latest one.
The wonderful cartoons are from TNR’s coverage of the unqualified disasters “advising” Donald Trump. Trump has gathered up a team of crackpots and you can read about them in the article cited below. The illustrator is MICHAEL WITTE and I’ve lifted many of his accompanying caricatures. You may see more of his illustrations here. I’m sure you’ll recognize a few of them. Rest assured, they are all losers and they are all crackpots. Every. Single. One. of. them.
With his showman’s flair, Trump has assured anyone who will listen that he will compensate for his political inexperience and policy indifference by surrounding himself with the “best people.” They’ll be the “smartest.” Not to mention the “greatest.” Unfortunately for Trump, no one with those qualifications wants to work for him. When his campaign approached hundreds of aides to the 16 losing GOP candidates—including more than 150 who worked for Ted Cruz—the vast majority passed on the opportunity. When Trump tried to scare up endorsements in Congress, he ended up with a handful of backbench extremists. When he cobbled together a foreign policy team, he couldn’t even find a respectable ex-general from CNN, much less a credible think-tank wonk. When he put together an economic advisory team, he found exactly one willing economist.
So Trump has been forced, for reasons of his own making, to assemble what could well be the worst political team in presidential history: a rogues’ gallery of outcasts and opportunists, has-beens and never-weres, conspiracy-mongers and crackpots. Few of the advisers in his inner circle possess any real qualifications for the positions they hold. Some have been ousted from their previous jobs for incompetence, corruption, or outright craziness. Many, exiled to the political fringes, see the campaign as a way to get back into the game. Most of them, sad to say, have sunk so low that Trump looks like a big step up.
A CNN/ORC poll this month found that by a margin of 15 percentage points, voters thought Donald Trump was “more honest and trustworthy” than Hillary Clinton. Let’s be frank: This public perception is completely at odds with all evidence.
On the PolitiFact website, 13 percent of Clinton’s statements that were checked were rated “false” or “pants on fire,” compared with 53 percent of Trump’s. Conversely, half of Clinton’s are rated “true” or “mostly true” compared to 15 percent of Trump statements.
Clearly, Clinton shades the truth — yet there’s no comparison with Trump.
I’m not sure that journalism bears responsibility, but this does raise the thorny issue of false equivalence, which has been hotly debated among journalists this campaign. Here’s the question: Is it journalistic malpractice to quote each side and leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions, even if one side seems to fabricate facts or make ludicrous comments?
President Obama weighed in this week, saying that “we can’t afford to act as if there’s some equivalence here.”
I’m wary of grand conclusions about false equivalence from 30,000 feet. But at the grass roots of a campaign, I think we can do better at signaling that one side is a clown.
Even while explaining how Trump is a mythomaniac and a systematic cheater, Kristoff can’t help but run the narrative on Hillary Clinton that is based all of the debunked and discounted charges leveled at her for over 40 years.
What’s a voter to do?
We were regaled yesterday with two polls supposedly showing Trump ahead in Ohio. Looking at the details and the polls themselves you’ll see the conclusions are quite spurious. The CNN poll literally reports results on no voters under 50 because they couldn’t get a sample large enough to get reliable results.
A new poll showing Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by 4 points in Ohio set the media buzzing, but a look at the polling data reveals that CNN under polled younger voters.
CNN touted their new poll of Ohio as Trump making gains in swing states, “With eight weeks to go before Election Day, Donald Trump holds a narrow lead over Hillary Clinton in Ohio and the two are locked in a near-even contest in Florida, according to new CNN/ORC polls in the two critical battleground states.”
Well, that certainly sounds dramatic, but a look at the crosstabs of the poll shows that things may not be exactly what CNN is suggesting they are in the Buckeye State.
There was something odd about the age of the respondents: (Note: go to the link to see the image of poll results here.)
Younger voters are not listed.
This could be a mistake in the CNN/ORC Poll crosstabs, but it is also easy to understand how Trump suddenly got a lead in Ohio when CNN under polled younger voters.
The CNN poll is a good reminder that all polls, whether they contain good or bad news for the candidate that you support, should be taken with a big grain of salt.
The Bloomberg poll uses a distribution based on 2004 when turnout by Republicans was unusually high. How do we know that this and not the two most recent presidential elections will be the likely pattern? What’s the rationale here? I frankly can’t imagine any racial or religious minority NOT rushing to the polls to ensure a Trump loss. I frankly expect Hispanic turnout to be at an all time high although there may be only a few states where this matters. But still, the media are going crazy over two polls with extremely dubious polling methodology.
The Bloomberg poll differs from most other Ohio public polling in the race. A CBS News/YouGov poll, which was conducted via the internet last Wednesday through Friday and overlaps with the Bloomberg poll by one night, gave Clinton a 7-point lead over Trump, 46 percent to 39 percent.
A Quinnipiac University survey, conducted in late August and early September and released last week, showed Trump ahead of Clinton in Ohio by 1 point in a head-to-head matchup. But Trump held a 4-point lead in a subsequent question that gave respondents the option of choosing Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
In the Bloomberg poll, Trump maintains a 5-point advantage over Clinton with Johnson and Stein included, 44 percent to 39 percent, with Johnson at 10 percent and Stein at 3 percent.
Incumbent GOP Sen. Rob Portman holds a big lead in Ohio’s closely watched Senate race, the poll also shows. Portman, who is seeking a second term, leads former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, 53 percent to 36 percent.
Recent polls have given Portman a significant advantage, but not to this degree. His previous high-water mark in a live-interview survey had been an 11-point lead in last week’s Quinnipiac poll.
Ann Selzer, the well-respected Iowa pollster who produced the survey, provided Bloomberg with a possible explanation for its divergent results: Voters who identified as Republicans were more likely to be classified as likely voters than those who said they identified as Democrats. Including those who lean toward one party, Republicans comprised about 43 percent of the sample, while Democrats made up roughly 36 percent.
“Our party breakdown differs from other polls, but resembles what happened in Ohio in 2004,” Selzer told Bloomberg, pointing to exit polling from 12 years ago when George W. Bush carried the state. “It is very difficult to say today who will and who will not show up to vote on Election Day. Our poll suggests more Republicans than Democrats would do that in an Ohio election held today.”
My guess is that Ohio is a dead heat with a slight advantage to Clinton given the Republicans in office don’t like Trump and won’t campaign for him. This is one of the reasons why I don’t put much faith in any one poll at any one point in time but prefer to defer to two mathematical laws: the law of large numbers and the law of averages. I’ve been trained through 4 degrees to evaluate trends and averages based on time series only. This suggests the methodology used by Nate Silver and Sam Wang who forecast based on using all polls and producing an average and trend based on all polls with weights based on reliability of methodology. They are also quite aware of the tricks used by various pollsters which depends heavily on their political affiliation. It appears Trump could have a route to the White House without winning the popular vote according to FiveThirtyEight writer David Wasserman. This path is unlikely but frightening.
OK, before I say anything, a quick disclaimer: This piece is not a prediction. In fact, I’m a religious (maybe fanatical) adherent of FiveThirtyEight’s 2016 election forecast model, which I find to be both methodologically rigorous and intellectually honest. I don’t dispute its assessment that Hillary Clinton has a 63 or 64 percent chance of winning the election.
That said, in the event this race does tighten to a coin flip by Nov. 8, there is an unusually high chance Donald Trump could win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — basically, Democrats’ version of the apocalypse.
Here’s why: Several of Trump’s worst demographic groups happen to be concentrated in states, such as California, New York, Texas and Utah, that are either not competitive or that aren’t on Trump’s must-win list. Conversely, whites without a college degree — one of Trump’s strongest groups — represent a huge bloc in three blue states he would need to turn red to have the best chance of winning 270 electoral votes: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
A repeat of 2000’s split verdict — except with more potential to plunge this much more polarized and anxious country into chaos — is still not very likely. Right now, the FiveThirtyEight polls-only model posits a 6.1 percent chance of Trump winning the Electoral College while losing the popular, and a 1.5 chance of the reverse outcome. But that’s not so remote, either, and if the national ballot were ever to tighten further, both “crazy” scenarios’ odds could rise.
The secret to how Clinton could win more votes nationally yet still fall short of the White House lies with Trump’s weakness among three geographically disadvantaged groups of voters:
You can go read the analysis or not depending on the strength of your heart. Larry Sabato of Rasmussen Reportshas some additional analysis on the fundamentals as they exist today. He even refers to this a “strange race” which is probably why the press seem completely unable to cover the maniac in the room.
Nonetheless, the defining difference in this election is not Clinton but Trump. Forget Wendell Willkie: There has never been a presidential nominee like him. He has divided the Republican Party — separating party elites from much of the party’s populist base — and he has rearranged the electorate in ways we haven’t ever seen, at least to this extent. Minority groups appear to be rejecting him by margins as bad or worse than recent GOP nominees. Trump is having trouble winning a group that isnormally quite Republican: college-educated whites. At the same time, he has drawn very sizable, exceptionally intense backing from non-college whites and, disproportionately, blue-collar white men, and he has the potential to out-perform Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing among that group.
Regular readers will have noticed that we have been publishing political scientists’ predictive models for 2016, the quadrennial attempt to use certain variables to project the election results (at least the popular vote) months in advance. We’re publishing our final update on these models this week. They are mostly derived from election fundamentals that don’t change much over time — economic conditions, the number of consecutive terms a party has held the White House, and so on. Averaging all the forecasts together shows a two-party vote of Clinton 50.5% and Trump 49.5%. Obviously, that’s very close, and taken together these models produced a very similar prediction in 2012 (Obama 50.2%, Romney 49.8%). That undersold Obama, who won with 52.0% of the two-party vote.
The problem in 2016 is that the assumptions that undergird some models are disputable. Take our senior columnist, Alan Abramowitz of Emory University. His “Time for Change” model has an admirable record of prediction over many years, nailing the popular-vote winner in every cycle going back to 1988. Yet this time, Abramowitz has declared that his model will probably miss the mark. Why? As Abramowitz explains it, the assumptions upon which the model is built are unsound: “First, that both major parties will nominate mainstream candidates capable of unifying their parties and, second, that the candidates will conduct equally effective campaigns so that the overall outcome will closely reflect the ‘fundamentals’ incorporated in the model.”
Abramowitz’s model predicts a modest Republican victory this November, and considering Clinton’s myriad weaknesses and a competitive political environment, it is easy to imagine it if the GOP had nominated a mainstream candidate. (We’ll let you go through the 17 contestants and decide which ones might have been able to unite the party, run a solid campaign, and win.) Trump is neither mainstream nor conducting a campaign that is anything close technologically and financially to the Clinton effort.
In our view, this is why — along with strong partisan polarization — the contest, while close, has had Clinton pretty consistently in the lead: Trump is underperforming the fundamentals and reducing the odds of a GOP win. In another era, say the 1960s through the 1980s, the 2016 contest might well have produced a Democratic landslide much as outlier candidates in 1964 (Barry Goldwater) and in 1972 (George McGovern) generated big swings to the other party. Yet dislike of Clinton and polarization have kept her margin to a few points, excepting the post-convention bounce period. Clinton also faces an unprecedented challenge: She is not simply seeking President Obama’s third term and, in a sense, being responsible for the Obama record (good and bad), but in a way she is also pursuing Bill Clinton’s third term, too. Never before has a party nominee been held accountable for two two-term presidents.
It may be that Clinton, if she does indeed win, will mimic one of Obama’s victory margins (four percentage points in 2012 or seven in 2008). Polarization was especially evident in Obama’s reelection contest. A four-point margin would be consistent with the Electoral College map the Crystal Ball has largely maintained since March: Her total of 348 electoral votes would place her performance in between Obama 2012 (332) and Obama 2008 (365). For Clinton to duplicate Obama’s 2008 broader sweep, Trump would probably have to collapse in the final weeks because of the accumulation of controversies and the lack of preparation in the ground game. If Clinton barely wins or Trump pulls an upset to rival 1948 (Harry Truman over Thomas Dewey), it probably means that Trump did something to improve voters’ perceptions of his qualifications for office — right now, a majority of the electorate does not believe he’s qualified — and Clinton, through a combination of mistakes, controversies, and Democratic apathy, can’t generate the kind of Democratic turnout she needs.
The challenge for the Democrats is to keep 2016 from becoming a change election, which it might have been without Trump (and could still become). Prospective Clinton voters will have to be reminded constantly why she believes Trump is unacceptable and why they have to swallow hard and vote for a candidate many are not enthused about. While our Electoral College ratings still show a Clinton victory, the polls have clearly gotten closer in recent weeks. Clinton is generally up about two-to-four points nationally in polling averages (based on RealClearPolitics and HuffPost Pollster ), considerably tighter than the lofty eight-point lead she enjoyed in both averages about a month ago, when she was still basking in a post-convention glow and Trump was making mistake after mistake. In the lead-up to Labor Day, Clinton faced several questions about her emails and the Clinton Foundation, and Trump’s coverage became less negative by comparison.
There is actually rumbling among Republicans who really really don’t want Trump to win and a few little glimmers of hope like the fact that the New Hampshire Union Leader just endorsed spacey, libertarian pothead Gary Johnson. I’m sorry, the man just reminds me of every freaking pot dependent person I’ve ever known. “Allepo, man, what’s that, man?” I have no idea why William Weld wasn’t put at the top of that ticket other than every libertarian I’ve ever met these days seems to hate the idea of being drafting and loves the idea of legal pot. Maybe they’re all potheads these days.
The most joyful day moment of the day was watching a Flint Methodist Minister kick Trump’s political grandstanding at her church to the ground. She totally caught him reading prepared remarks that were just more vile anti-Hillary bile. He was so unable to make a comeback that he flipped the page and read the last bits rather than doing what he was invited to do which was praise her community for coming to the aid of Flint Residents who still can’t drink their water. Brian Williams said Trump “pivoted”. No, he did not. He was basically totally flummoxed and he had that “bad dog” look on his face.
The pastor who hosted Donald Trump at her church in Flint, Michigan, interrupted the Republican presidential nominee during his speech Wednesday to ask him to refrain from attacking his rival Hillary Clinton.
“Mr. Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint, not give a political speech,” Rev. Faith Green Timmons of the Bethel United Methodist Church told Trump after walking to the podium while Trump was speaking.
“OK. That’s good. Then I’m going back onto Flint, OK? Flint’s pain is a result of so many different failures,” Trump said.
Timmons, in a statement provided at the event, noted her church welcomes “all people.”
“This public event is open to all and today Donald Trump came to observe. Trump’s presence at Bethel United Methodist in no way represents an endorsement of his candidacy,” she had said.
On Thursday, Trump told Fox News “something was up” with Timmons, but he wasn’t bothered because “everyone plays their games.”
Trump was responding to the host’s question about whether he was “bothered” by the fact that she purportedly had written on Facebook (according to the Fox hosts, who noted it was later erased) that she hoped to “educate” Trump on what had been going on in Flint.
“She was so nervous, she was shaking. And I said, ‘wow, this was kind of strange.’ And then she came up. So she had that in mind, no question about it,” Trump said, adding that he suspected that he might face an unfriendly reception at the church.
Now this is how I want my pastor to deal with a hater, not get on TV and proclaim him the candidate of Christians.
So, I’m going to give us a break from all of this again tomorrow, I promise. I will leave you with some words from the great poet Wendell Berry who has written a beautiful essay on racism in the age of Obama in the Lexington Herald Leader.
A good many people hoped and even believed that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency signified the end of racism in the United States.
It seems arguable to me that the result has been virtually the opposite: Obama’s election has brought about a revival of racism.
Like nothing since the Southern Strategy, it has solidified the racist vote as a political quantity recognizable to politicians and apparently large enough in some places to decide an election.
I grant the polite assumption that not one of the elected officers of the states or the nation is a racist. But politicians do not need to be racist themselves in order to covet, to solicit, or to be influenced by the racist vote. This is shown by the pronounced difference between two by-now established ways of opposing the president.
There is the opposition that is truly political and varyingly respectable. This opposition is identifiable by its incompleteness, which is to say by its focus upon particular issues about which a particular case or argument can be made. Such opposition is credible as such because it implicitly concedes the president’s humanity: Like the rest of us, he is a partial and fallible mortal who, if he is partly wrong, may also be partly right.
The other way of opposition is total. The president must be opposed, not on this or that issue, but upon all issues.
This opposition is often expressed in tones of contempt, not only of the president himself, but of the office he holds so long as it is held by him. Opposition to the president on a particular issue is understood by these opponents as incidental to a general condemnation: the intent, not only to defeat the president in any and all disagreements with him, but entirely to discredit and punish him and to nullify his administration.
This opposition is never mitigated by tokens or gestures of respect for the president’s office, any of his aims or programs, his character, his person or his family. An opposition so complete and so vividly emotional cannot be, in any respectable sense, political.
Some of the president’s congressional enemies – and these may be the most honest of them – have openly insulted him. But such candor is not necessary. Elected officials or candidates seeking the support or the votes of racists do not need to question the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate or to call him a Muslim, a communist, a Nazi or a traitor.
They need only to stand silently by while such slurs and falsehoods are loudly voiced in public by others. To the racist constituency, their silence is a message that secures votes. Their silence declares that no truth or dignity is worth as much as a vote.
Nobody can doubt that virtually all of the president’s political enemies would vehemently defend themselves against a charge of racism. Virtually all of them observe the forms and taboos of political correctness. If any very visible one of their own should insult the president by a recognized racial slur, they would all join in the predictable outrage. But the paramount fact of this moment in the history of racism is that you don’t have to denominate the president by a recognized racial slur when his very name can be used as a synonym.
This subtilized racism is not only a perhaps unignorable lure to Republican politicians; it can also be noticeably corrupting to Democrats.
You can read the rest of his essay at the link. BostonBoomer is on her way back to Boston so hopefully, she’ll have some great comments to add tonight when she gets to her motel and the half way point some where in Ohio!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today Sky Dancers?
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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.
My guess is that the debate will either be very uninteresting or very volatile. I can’t see much room for moderation in anything with Donald Trump participating. He’s the very definition of ASSymmetric political warfare. Jay Rosen–professor of journalism and media critic–believes that asymmetry between the parties right now has caused issues for the media. What do you do when one party has gone completely off the rails explicitly supporting policy that wouldn’t pass constitutional muster, is openly xenophobic, racist, and sexist, plus delegitimatizes private choices concerning love and religion?
James Hohmann from WAPO says Trump has won the expectations game already.
Good Afternoon!
They’re full cited. Here are the lies he tells about our country and our extremely good economy.
noticed that the presence of the National Guard mixed in with Police in NOPD after Katrina was a good thing. The police behaved when they were being monitored by the Guard. People also were more calm and the usual agitators and criminals that follow protests around to take advantage were gone last night. I’m beginning to think that a state’s national guard is key to policing in places where the police aren’t all that professional. Anyway, here’s the latest idiots suggesting protesters should be harmed or are some how doing something illegal. This one is from a Tennessee (no surprises there) Law Professor.
A North Carolina Congressman suggested that “Charlotte protesters ‘hate white people’.” That sounds like something straight out of the Alt-Reich handbook of racism.
Yeah. Right. Lack of “economic mobility” because “they all hate white people”, I suppose.
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
I still don’t understand how any one but a card carrying member of the KKK could have a favorable opinion of Trump unless you haven’t been paying attention to what comes out of his mouth. But, evidently some white people are just very fragile and cannot properly identify the source of their stress. (ProTip: If you’re blaming immigrants and African Americans you’re a racist.)
You know, you can always tell something about the character of a person by the way young children respond to them and by the way they respond to young children. I had a friend talk about visiting her grandchild the other day. She basically said her grandaughter wanted to make sure the nice lady won for her instead of the scary man. (That’s our own JSLAT by the way who came out and corrected me on the gender assignment btw which I just did.) Out of the mouths of babes, my friends, out of the mouths of babes.
The gang that–luckily–couldn’t shoot straight may have been motivated more by local treatment of them than by much else. Anyway, to our dear Sky Dancers in NJ, please stay away from rogue pressure cookers.
Supposedly, the Trump team is now shaking in their boots over the Trump Foundation investigation also. No wonder all the babies cry around Trump. He steals their candy.
So, I guess I will add a little bit on politics in here but not any race horse coverage. I’m not sure if you heard, but Wisconsin’s Governor Scot Walker is under investigation for campaign finance irregularities. One of the fascinating things about the links is that they uncover a web of deceit and dark money. Will this investigation lead to a case before the Supreme Court and trouble for one of the Koch Puppets? The documents show the influence of right wing mega donors in the Republican Party.
A report on Madison.com shows other mega donors solicited by Walker that then sent contributions to The Club for Growth. These contributions would not have to be exposed and are not subject to the usual restrictions. I’d really love to see all these folks taken down and sent to jail.
Okay, on to that one last bit of news and because it’s fresh off the TV and the buzz of the day,. Donald Trump kind’ve sort’ve walked backed his birth nonsense. But first, let’s notice he advertised his hotel and will likely be sending campaign money to his hotel to do so.
My guess is that he did this under duress. I frankly agree with TPM: STONE COLD LIAR. This is from Josh Marshall.
Good Afternoon!
The Bloomberg poll uses a distribution based on 2004 when turnout by Republicans was unusually high. How do we know that this and not the two most recent presidential elections will be the likely pattern? What’s the rationale here? I frankly can’t imagine any racial or religious minority NOT rushing to the polls to ensure a Trump loss. I frankly expect Hispanic turnout to be at an all time high although there may be only a few states where this matters. But still, the media are going crazy over two polls with extremely dubious polling methodology.
My guess is that Ohio is a dead heat with a slight advantage to Clinton given the Republicans in office don’t like Trump and won’t campaign for him. This is one of the reasons why I don’t put much faith in any one poll at any one point in time but prefer to defer to two mathematical laws: the law of large numbers and the law of averages. I’ve been trained through 4 degrees to evaluate trends and averages based on time series only. This suggests the methodology used by Nate Silver and Sam Wang who forecast based on using all polls and producing an average and trend based on all polls with weights based on reliability of methodology. They are also quite aware of the tricks used by various pollsters which depends heavily on their political affiliation. It appears Trump could have a route to the White House without winning the popular vote according to FiveThirtyEight writer David Wasserman. This path is unlikely but frightening.
There is actually rumbling among Republicans who really really don’t want Trump to win and a few little glimmers of hope like the fact that the New Hampshire Union Leader just endorsed spacey, libertarian pothead Gary Johnson. I’m sorry, the man just reminds me of every freaking pot dependent person I’ve ever known. “Allepo, man, what’s that, man?” I have no idea why William Weld wasn’t put at the top of that ticket other than every libertarian I’ve ever met these days seems to hate the idea of being drafting and loves the idea of legal pot. Maybe they’re all potheads these days.
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