Last Call For The Deplorable Election

In Florida, the people keeping Donald Trump close in the most important swing state prize are white suburban voters like the folks of Pasco County north of Tampa.  Given years of a Republican governor and GOP supermajority in the state legislature in Jacksonville, they blame Obama for their considerable problems and will take Donald Trump in a heartbeat if it means destroying Hillary Clinton and a legacy of those people having real political power previously only reserved for a country of white, male presidents.

Southwest Pasco County looks tailor-made for Trump: 90 percent white, nearly 90 percent without college degrees, median household income of about $34,000. Also, widespread anxiety over crime and a deteriorating quality of life.

In the 1970s, this was a blue-collar retirement mecca that attracted Northeasterners who could buy a comfortable two-bedroom ranch with attached garage for $10,000. Many of these same homes sold for more than $140,000 during the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, only to see their values plummet to less than $50,000 today.

The numbers help explain how Trump is defying the conventional political wisdom that Florida's fast-changing demographics will make the state a steep climb for a Republican nominee so weak among minority voters.

That conventional wisdom also may underestimate Clinton's unpopularity based on conversations inside the VFW post, outside the Walmart and inside Jimmy's Restaurant.

"She should be in jail, and you or me would be if we did what she did with those emails," said Dorothy Jay of Holiday over lunch at Jimmy's with her husband. "At least Trump is not going to be taking payoffs from people wanting something."

"I don't trust her, and we don't need another four years of Obama," said Alan Jay, who moved with his wife to the area from Long Island in 1994. "Trump's problem is that he has diarrhea of the mouth. He speaks before he thinks, but what comes out of his mouth is honest."

Republican pollster Wes Anderson, who works for the Rebuilding America Now super PAC helping Trump, said Clinton has at least as much to do with Trump's strength in Florida as Trump.

"Everyone talks about Trump's negatives, and we kind of miss the point that Hillary Clinton has just as strong negatives as he does — and in some ways hers are more telling," Anderson said. "This is a change election, and she is anything but that. Whether she likes it or not, she wears the mantle of the political establishment. ... That is actually what's happening in Florida."

Even as Clinton dramatically outspends Trump on TV ads in Florida and builds a more robust voter-turnout operation, the candidates are virtually tied. The average of recent Florida polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.com on Friday had Trump with 45.1 percent support and Clinton with 44.4 percent.

"The assumption is it's because Trump is running up the score in the markets where Republicans have to run up the score when they win Florida," said Anderson. "I think that's only half of the story. There are lots of places where she is underperforming, and I do think it's going to come down to Tampa and Orlando."

The I-4 corridor in the center of the state connecting Tampa to Orlando to Daytona Beach will most likely decide Florida, and Florida is by far the largest swing state up for grabs in November.  As Cincinnati is to Ohio, Tampa and Orlando are to Florida, the place where voters will decide the presidency.  Donald Trump is counting on Pasco County to turn out heavily for him.

The question is can Clinton mobilize her voters?  Barack Obama showed the way in 2008 and 2012.  Will Clinton do the same to counter the rage Trump voters have to punish and shatter the Obama coalition?

I hope so.

Unlikely Voter Models

The only thing more ridiculous than the LA Times and its "likely voter model" presidential tracking poll is the irresponsible reporting of the anti-Clinton NY Post about it.

Donald Trump is gaining support among African-American voters — whose enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is eroding, a tracking poll released Saturday revealed.

Trump saw a 16.5 percentage-point increase in backing from African-American voters in a Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California tracking poll, up from 3.1 percent on Sept. 10 to 19.6 percent through Friday.

Meanwhile, the same poll showed Clinton’s support among that group plummeting from 90.4 percent on Sept. 10 to 71.4 percent.

Clinton’s nearly 20-point crash began Sunday, said Dan Schnur of USC. Sunday was the day Clinton was recorded collapsing while entering a Secret Service van at a 9/11 event.

The survey, which spanned through Friday, included the days in which Trump reignited the divisive “birther” issue — which critics contend is a thinly veiled attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the country’s first black president.

Late Wednesday, Trump had refused to acknowledge that President Obama was born in the United States, demurring on the topic in a Washington Post interview published the next day.

But at a bizarre press conference at Trump International, his new ­hotel in Washington, DC, on Friday, the tycoon conceded, “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”

For the week, the poll found a 6-point rise for Trump. The Republican is now at 47.2 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 41.2 percent.

Nobody on earth believes Trump is up six points nationally, let alone that he's getting 20% of black voters.  Nobody.  The poll also shows Trump with an 8-point lead among millennials, 6 points among voters 35-64, and 6 points among seniors.

If you for a second think Donald Trump is doing better among voters under 35 than with voters over 65, I have some beachfront property on the moon to sell you.

On top of all that, Trump is doing better with Asian voters than Clinton by 7 points, according to the LA Times.

It's ludicrous, the poll is off by 8-12 points, and yet the NY Post is running with it as gospel.

Our media is broken.

Sunday Long Read: Bored Walk Empire

This week's Sunday Long Read is Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen's case that as he looks back at growing up in New Jersey, the forces most responsible for the downfall of Atlantic City are people you, as ZVTS readers, might have heard of in passing: one Chris Christie and one Donald J. Trump.

I FIRST NOTICED THIS SEA CHANGE LAST FALL, when a certain type of red-faced, overweight, whatcha-gonna-do-about-it New Jersey/New York male commandeered our national politics. Both Donald Trump and Chris Christie were talked about in my family constantly—Trump since before I was even in utero, and Christie since George W. Bush appointed him US Attorney for New Jersey in 2001, and especially since he became governor in 2010. But it was only after suffering through their schoolyard-bully penis-contests during the 2016 Republican primaries that I began to recognize how similar they were, how alike in personality and in unctuous, disingenuous style. If I hadn’t detected their toxic resemblance before, it was only because they’d been menacing different playgrounds: Trump having always been nominally private sector, brandishing the better, or just more recognizable, brand; Christie having always been nominally public sector, an elected official who must be held to higher standards. The ongoing SEC and Congressional and New Jersey State investigations into Christie’s alleged misappropriation of Port Authority monies, his allegedly having made federal emergency relief funds available to Jersey cities affected by Hurricane Sandy contingent on city-government support of unrelated state-government initiatives, and, finally, his allegedly having ordered the George Washington Bridge closed as an act of political retaliation against the mayor of Fort Lee—and so snarling a major artery from Manhattan—will likely continue beyond the conclusion of his term in 2018. Jersey’s governor has always been such an unmitigated prick that what stunned me most last spring wasn’t Trump’s emergence as the GOP frontrunner, but Christie’s dutiful dropping-out and endorsing him—his assuming a role, even after Trump passed him over for VP, halfway between that of a catamite-butler and henchman-capo, the butt of Trump’s insulting fat jokes and the fetcher of his milkshakes and fries.

The Republican primary debates marked the televised degeneration of their friendship—or whatever a friendship can mean in politics—which began only in 2002, when Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, then a Philadelphia-based judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, nominated to that position by Bill Clinton, introduced her brother to the governor. The Christies were invited to Trump’s third wedding, to Melania; the Trumps were invited to Christie’s first inauguration. A year into Christie’s first term, and six years after the State of New Jersey had started to pursue collection of the almost $30 million in back taxes owed by Trump’s casinos, the State suddenly reversed course and settled for $5 million. Trump contributed an exceedingly modest share of the money he saved to the restoration of New Jersey’s historic gubernatorial residence, Drumthwacket. New Jersey’s near-miraculous tax-forgiveness must be understood in the same way as its governor’s near-miraculous abjection: neither are demonstrations of Trump’s master outmaneuvering, but rather of Christie’s cravenness. Christie will do anything to win, or be on the winning team. If he can’t be President, or VP, he’ll plump for chief of staff, or attorney general, or even just settle for a monogrammed-T swag bag with a Trump hat, Trump steaks, Trump wine. Christie’s not only inept, he’s also running out of options: there isn’t much of his party left to knock around. Politics (budget meetings in the State House in Trenton) used to be distinct from entertainment (The Celebrity Apprentice in syndication), but no more. Christie seems jealous of Trump, not just of his financial success or his nomination, but of how well and recklessly Trump, as a former/current reality TV star, can lie. Christie has always just ignored, withheld, or fastidiously obfuscated. Trump, by contrast, can’t afford not to be blatant or audacious in his untruths, so as to keep earning free airtime from the cable networks and radio stations whose ratings and ad revenues increase—blatantly, audaciously—in correspondence.

To me, Trump was always a blusterer, a conniver, a mouth: a cotton-candy-haired clown who crashed the AC party late and left it early and ugly. To my parents and their cadre, the Republican nominee was a more malevolent breed of fraud: a dishonest client and dysfunctional boss. I spent my first weekend in AC convincing my parents to introduce me, or reintroduce me, to their casino friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and spent my first week explaining my presence to many concerned and baffled adults, to people who didn’t recognize me from childhood, to people I didn’t recognize from childhood, and to strangers and all and sundry who’d make the time to talk Trump with me. The word I heard most often in reference to the GOP candidate—from Steven Perskie, the former New Jersey assemblyman and state senator whose original gaming referendum brought casinos to AC in 1976; from Nelson Johnson, the New Jersey superior court judge who wrote the book version of Boardwalk Empire; from Mayor Don Guardian, one of the few AC mayors in my lifetime not to have been charged with corruption; from Ibrahim Abdali and his cousin who’d only identify himself as Mohammed, Afghan refugees who sell pipes and bongs and martial arts weaponry on the Boardwalk—the word I heard most often was failure.

Every Trump account I was given in AC described a man so extraordinarily bad at business, or at being anything besides a business-celebrity, that he was forced to switch from building casinos to branding casinos with his name, that polysemous pentagrammaton he charged his partners to use and then sued them to remove once the decaying properties became a liability. In the 1980s and ’90s, the casinos with which Trump was associated comprised between a third and a quarter of AC’s gaming industry. The Playboy Hotel and Casino, which was founded in ’81, became the Atlantis in ’84, and went bankrupt in ’85, was acquired by Trump in ’89 and renamed The Trump Regency; he renamed it again as Trump’s World’s Fair in ’96, and it was closed in ’99 and demolished in 2000. Trump Castle, built in cooperation with Hilton in ’85, was rebranded as Trump Marina in ’97, sold at a loss to Landry’s Inc. in 2011, and is now operated by Landry’s as the Golden Nugget. Trump Plaza, built in cooperation with Harrah’s in ’84, went bankrupt and shuttered in 2014 and now just rots.

And then there’s the Trump Taj Mahal, which Trump built with the help of Resorts International in 1990 on financial footings so shaky and negligent that by the end of the decade he’d racked up more than $3.4 billion in debt, including business (mostly high-interest junk-bond) and personal debt which he handled by conflating them. By lumping them together under the auspices of a publicly traded company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, he dumped all his burdens onto the backs of his shareholders even as he continued to treat his casino receipts as profits, to be raided and reinvested in development in New York. Even while Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts bled an average of $49 million a year into the late ’90s, even while its share price plummeted from $35 to $0.17 through the early 2000s, Trump himself continued to receive a salary in the millions, not to mention bonuses and the monies his personally held companies made from his publicly traded company leasing office space in Manhattan’s Trump Tower and renting Trump Shuttle helicopters and Trump Airlines airplanes to fly around showroom-acts and high-rollers. Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts finally went bankrupt in 2004, and in its restructuring became Trump Entertainment Resorts, which itself went bankrupt in 2014 and was fire-sold to Icahn Enterprises, whose subsidiary, Tropicana Entertainment Inc., has run the Taj into a $100 million hole. Carl Icahn, the conglomerate’s chairman, was once a wary adversary who now endorses Trump, though he’s declined Trump’s offer to become the next secretary of the treasury: “I am flattered but do not get up early enough in the morning to accept this opportunity.”

On July 1, at the height of the season, the Taj’s unionized employees from UNITE HERE Local 54 went on strike, demanding a wage increase and the reinstatement of health and pension benefits suspended in the transfer of ownership. Negotiations were never scheduled; Icahn and the union couldn’t agree on a venue, let alone an agenda. In early August, Icahn announced that he’d be closing the Taj after Labor Day. And so the fall forecast kept getting grimmer, with the loss of the city’s most prominent casino and more than 2,800 jobs.

The Taj’s demise would be chronicled throughout the summer by the New York Times and the Washington Post, in articles framed as analyses of Trump’s finances. These articles, like the leveraged-debt practices they documented, were virtuoso feats, given that they were researched without access to the candidate’s tax returns, which he refuses to release. But reading them induced headaches: all those loans and defaults and shell-companies shattered, keeping track of them was like counting the beach, grain by grain.

As several of you have mentioned before, Trump is the evil carney barker of American entrepreneurship, the blending of Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko of Wall Street and Jonathan Pryce's Mr. Dark of Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Nothing brings this to the forefront like Trump's abject failures in Atlantic City and the lengths to which he went to cover them up. 

The reality is that the one guy in America who could have absolutely ended Donald Trump's political career before it started was Chris Christie, who could have easily opened the boardwalk books on Trump and sunk him, but my suspicion is Christie, being a lawyer and federal prosecutor himself, realized too late that cozying up to Trump was a thread that if he pulled at would have unraveled his own campaign as well.  Perhaps that why Trump was so confident he could run against Christie and win, and did just that.

Cohen neatly dissects the pathology of Trump, the con man who failed at business spectacularly, but who succeeded beyond his wildest dreams at convincing everyone else he was a success, and the trail of victims in Trump's wake certainly includes the current governor of New Jersey.  If anything Cohen's piece giving voice to the warnings about Atlantic City stands as a prediction of what awaits America's economy in a Trump administration should the unthinkable happen.

Maybe it's not so unthinkable after all.

Hillary Clinton's Not-So-Secret Weapon

One of the reasons I believe that Hillary Clinton will win in November is because of the efforts of the current head of the Democratic party, President Barack Obama.  He has grown increasingly popular as the economy has improved over the last year and as the rise of Trump has proven false the claims Republicans have made about being a serious alternative to the White House as a way forward for America.

As the final stretch of the 2016 campaign nears, President Obama is making the case that in order to continue his legacy and to protect the programs that have improved the lives of tens of millions of us, voters need to back Hillary Clinton, especially voters of color, and that message is starting to really hit home.

President Barack Obama said Saturday night he will take it as a "personal insult" if the African-American community fails to turn out for the presidential election and encouraged black voters to support Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Obama delivered his final keynote address to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, symbolically passing the torch to the person he hopes will succeed him next year. Clinton, his former secretary of state, was honored for becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major party.

Obama said his name may not be on the ballot, but issues of importance to the black community were, including justice, good schools and ending mass incarceration.

"I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election," Obama said with a stern look and booming passion. "You want to give me a good send-off, go vote."

For the last two presidential election cycles, the pundits and the Republicans have badly underestimated voters of color and especially the black vote in this country, and record turnout among black voters has helped propel Democrats across the country.  2016 will be no different, and Barack Obama is a major reason why. We're going to be there for Hillary, if only to save the country from itself.  We turned out at a higher rate than white voters in 2012, but there's still much room for improvement.

In her own pitch to African-Americans at the same dinner, Clinton implored the crowd to help protect Obama's legacy, warning of a "dangerous and divisive vision" that could come from Republican opponent Donald Trump.

Obama joked about the "birther" issue long promoted and now dismissed by Trump, telling his audience that there's an extra spring in his step now that the "whole birther thing is over." But his main message was about voter turnout among blacks.

He turned quite serious when speaking about voting. He said Republicans have actively added barriers to voting by closing polling places mostly in minority communities, cutting early voting and imposing more voter ID requirements. He called the efforts a national scandal, but even if all restrictions on voting were eliminated, African-Americans would still have one of the lowest voting rates.

"That's not good. That is on us," Obama said. He then told the crowd if they wanted to give Michelle Obama and him a good send-off, "don't just watch us walk off into the sunset, now. Get people registered to vote."

Obama also sought to blunt Trump's recent efforts to reach out to black voters, saying Trump at one point in the race had said there's never been a worse time to be a black person.

"I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery and Jim Crow, but we've got a museum for him to visit," Obama said, a reference to next week's opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. "We will educate him."

You're damn right we will, Mr. President.

Count on it.

Last Call For The Bodyguard

Donald Trump must be feeling pretty confident, because he's right back to stroking his ego and being utterly awful again, and it just may take the heat off Clinton for a while.

The New York Times says Donald Trump on Friday night "once again raised the specter of violence against Hillary Clinton." The Guardian, meanwhile, titled its tweet "Trump hints at Clinton's assassination again."

If you just glanced at those recaps and noted the word "again," you might think Trump had brought up his controversial "Second Amendment people" comment — the one about how Republicans could prevent a President Clinton from appointing liberal judges.

But Trump was actually repeating a formulation that he has used many times before, about how Clinton should have her guards disarm if she believes so strongly that guns aren't the answer to stopping violence.

And it's not even an argument that's unique to him. It's an extension of a favored argument used by the National Rifle Association -- "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" -- and it's one the gun rights crowd has used with gusto against Democrats who support gun control, including President Obama. There was even a White House petition a few years back calling on the White House to disarm security guards for Obama, Vice President Biden and their families, given the White House's stance on guns.

So Trump was on well-trodden ground here. The difference Friday night, though, is that he took a comment that was worn and not all that interesting and spun it forward with just a few extra words, giving it new life by painting a more violent picture. 

Depressing stuff?  Trump's actual quote is far worse than the Post lets on.

She goes around with armed bodyguards like you have never seen before. I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm. Right? Right? I think they should disarm immediately. What do you think? Yes? Yes. Yeah. Take their guns away. She doesn't want guns. ... Let's see what happens to her. Take their guns away, okay? It would be very dangerous.

That's not a  "borderline" threat, or "moderately" disturbing, it's an outright invitation to test the mettle of the United States Secret Service in their capacity to protect a possible president and former First Lady.  That's an open "Second Amendment remedy" attack on his opponent, and it should be roundly condemned.

But of course a lot of Trump statements should be roundly condemned, and yet this man is seven weeks away from maybe being President.

To Hell In A Deplorables Basket

Allen Abel at Maclean's give us some north of the border perspective on who Trump voters are and why they want to vote for him, and the reasons really shouldn't surprise you at this point in the game.

These are Donald Trump’s “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton calls them—11 unashamed Trump-train riders from across the United States, writing in their own words. 

To Clinton, they—or at least “half of them,” as the Democratic nominee chuckled last weekend in a stunning display of contempt before hurriedly apologizing­—can be lumped together as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic­­—you name it.” 

Our contributors would disagree. The Trump supporters who volunteered to write for Maclean’s this week are collegians and golden agers, whites and non-whites, retirees and working people. One studies bioterrorism; one teaches Grade 7. They hail from locales as variegated as Boynton Beach, Mayfield Heights, Wichita Falls, and Punxsutawney. (One of them is this writer’s first cousin.)

Two weeks ago, Trump said, “Becoming the nominee of the party of Abraham Lincoln . . . has been the greatest honour of my life. It is on his legacy that I hope to build the future of the party, but more important, the future of the country.” It is likely that, when they harken to Trump on the stump, only a minority of American citizens espy the second coming of Honest Abe. Even within his own party, Trump’s disapproval rating is unprecedented for a major-party nominee. But even if he is routed by Clinton on Nov. 8, at least 40 million Americans will vote Trump. Here’s why.

And the reasons are myriad:  He's not the career politician in the race, he's "not afraid to speak the unpopular truth" about immigrants, Muslims, and black people, but most of all these are people who really, really, really hate Hillary Clinton, folks like Royce Barnes in the swing state of Florida.

I am a 68-year-old American voter. I am a white American. I am a combat veteran of the U.S. Army; I served for 18½ years, received an honourable medical discharge, and was declared 100 per cent Service Connected Disabled. I have been married to the same wonderful woman for over 33 years, have four children with her. 

I grew up on a farm in the state of Maryland, which in the ’50s and ’60s, made my parents automatically Democrat. In 1966, I graduated from high school and joined the Army (U.S. one year, Korea one year, Vietnam one year). I never registered to vote until Jimmy Carter and I registered Democrat. He was the most destructive president in history until the current administration. I immediately changed to Republican after Carter. 

Since then, I have followed and participated in the political process with a steadfast conviction, hoping to see either party honour the Constitution of the United States of America. What I have observed is that both parties have separated themselves from the Constitution because of political correctness, which was strongly introduced in the Bill Clinton administration. Now I live in a country where I am considered a terrorist, because I am a Christian, a veteran, a white conservative, law-abiding, born-in-America citizen. 

What do I make of Mr Trump’s statements? I almost support all of his statements, because they are not polictically correct, they are mostly the honest truth. Finally, I believe that he is America’s last hope . . . if Clinton wins, America will never come back. 

Most people have been dummy-downed by the lies and deception of their leaders, and are not even aware that their God-given liberty and rights have been almost completely stolen from them. American leadership has declined since JFK’s assassination to the point of treason and total corruption. The political system must be totally remodelled and redeemed. 

I believe that God anointed Trump to be the agent of change necessary to defeat the so-called wise politically correct crowd that presently stands in the position of power and authority.

So yeah, I think that 40 million is low by half.  Plenty of people will vote Trump, and they will rationalize away his racism, bigotry, misogyny, and Islamophobia because it doesn't affect them personally.

The question is will at least that many of the rest of us show up and vote for Clinton?   Will Johnson and Stein really get 20 million votes between them on top of that?

Are we really going to put this asshole in the White House?

Last Call For Red State Blues

It's tough being a red state Democratic senator in 2016 because you basically have to publicly hate Obama and Clinton to keep your job.  This week's example: North Dakota Dem Sen. Heidi Heitkamp on the Basket of Deplorables.

Heitkamp was asked on WZFG AM 1100 if she renounced the comments. 

“Yes, I do,” said the Democratic senator on Thursday. “I think it was a wrong thing to say. I think that it ignores the very true concerns that we have about needing change in this country. I think that it was ill-advised. 

“I think [Secretary Clinton] said it was ill-advised,” he continued. “I think she walked it back, and I think that it was unfortunate that she said it. I’m glad that she’s denounced that statement, and I do not agree with her.”

Like it or not, the alternative to Heidi Heitkamp is having another lunatic cowboy Republican from the Dick Cheney school of public "service" like Wyoming's John Enzi or Montana climate change "skeptic" Steve Daines in the Senate. You may not like Democrats like Heitkamp (or yes, even Joe F'ckin Manchin and Evan F'ckin Bayh) but they are lawmakers who will at least vote with the Dems most of the time, and not fall in line with Team GOP on things that count.

As a Kentucky liberal commie pinko agnostic type, you take your victories in the states where you can get them, because we need as many wins as you can get.  Remember, in the end, lawmakers and presidents are elected by the people they represent, so if you can get a Heitkamp or Manchin as opposed to, I dunno, Ted Cruz or Jeff Sessions, you go with the Blue Dogs every time.

Sometimes the useful idiots do serve a purpose.

Cruz Controlled, Con't

Don't look now, but the federal government shuts down without a funding bill in two weeks, and while the last things Republicans running for re-election this year want is a shutdown fight six weeks before a presidential election, our old friend Sen. Ted Cruz isn't one of those on the ballot this time around.  As such, he may be up to his old tricks, this time latching onto control of the internet as his hill to die on.

The Texas Republican senator’s latest crusade is to block an Obama administration plan to give up U.S. oversight of domain names to international supervision, warning in a Senate subcommittee hearing Wednesday that could be a threat to freedom. He warned against giving power to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private non-profit group based in Los Angeles. 

“Imagine an internet run like China or Russia, that punish and incarcerate those who engage in political dissent,” Cruz said. Earlier on the Senate floor, Cruz said he didn’t want “to tell our children and our children’s children what it was once like when the internet wasn’t censored, wasn’t in the control of the foreign governments."

Cruz and some senior Republicans want to block the transfer as part of the stopgap spending bill required to avoid a government shutdown Oct. 1, although neither party has explicitly threatened to block the measure over the fight. 

The issue drew notice elsewhere in Washington. White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday that Cruz’s position “is, frankly, not really supported by anybody” and called for a spending measure without extra language. In the House, Representative Bill Flores of Texas, head of the influential Republican Study Committee, recommended his chamber move first with a spending measure that should include language blocking the internet transition. 

Republican leaders are hoping to wrap up a deal with Democrats and the White House quickly, but the internet issue is among about a half dozen yet to be resolved, Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune told reporters Tuesday. 

Thune predicted the funding bill would block the internet transition. 

“They’re trying to work out what that would look like, what would be effective in terms of putting the brakes on this,” he told reporters.

If the GOP is willing to shut down the government in a presidential election year over ICANN, then things just might get really interesting in November.  Please proceed, senator.

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump is feeling pretty good these days as his message of "normalized" racism and bigotry continues to resonate with Republican voters, in Ohio yesterday he refused to walk back his long-held birther beliefs.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said in an interview here that he remains unwilling to say that President Obama was born in the United States, that he is more bullish than ever on his chances to win and that he is not exploring the launch of a new media company in case he loses the race.

Trump also made a far-from-subtle push — in the interview and in a letter from his doctor released Thursday — to be seen as vigorous and healthy, as his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, returned to the campaign trail after being treated for mild pneumonia.

In the interview, conducted late Wednesday aboard his private plane as it idled on the tarmac here, Trump suggested he is not eager to change his pitch or his positions even as he works to reach out to minority voters, many of whom are deeply offended by his long-refuted suggestion that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in Hawaii.

“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”

And why would Trump ever answer?  The Basket of Deplorables overwhelmingly believe Barack Obama is secretly Kenyan and never was eligible for the office of President, and there's no public penalty for such outright, overt racism among the voting public.  There are plenty of folks that think being a birther is better than voting for Hillary and they'll gladly vote in November.

Meanwhile, Trump's latest policy nugget is that he'll rid the nation of those awful food safety regulations that keep your kids from munching on broken glass.

In a fact sheet posted online Thursday, the campaign highlighted a number of "specific regulations to be eliminated" under the GOP nominee's economic plan, including what they called the "FDA Food Police." 

“The FDA Food Police, which dictate how the federal government expects farmers to produce fruits and vegetables and even dictates the nutritional content of dog food,” it read.

“The rules govern the soil farmers use, farm and food production hygiene, food packaging, food temperatures and even what animals may roam which fields and when,” the statement continued. "It also greatly increased inspections of food 'facilities,' and levies new taxes to pay for this inspection overkill."

Sure is gonna be fun in a Trump administration.  Just don't plan to eat anything for the next four years.

StupidiNews!

• Gas prices in the Southeast are expected to rise sharply as a leak shutting down the Colonial Pipeline will disrupt gasoline supplies until at least next week.
• The FBI is looking into indictments for Russian hackers who have hit the DNC and other political organizations.
• The cease fire in Syria appears to be holding tenuously but aid supplies are still having issues getting through Syrian army held checkpoints in Aleppo.
• Tesla's Powerpack battery technology will help California's electric grid stand up to blackouts in a major new contract with the state, the batteries will be deployed before year's end.
• Archaeologists have discovered evidence that indigo dye was being used in Peru 6,000 years ago, almost two millennia before being recorded in use anywhere else.

Last Call For The Fraud Squad

Years of Republicans undermining the voting process has led to the widespread and erroneous belief that America's elections are rigged, with one in three Americans believing that votes will not be counted correctly in November, and that 46% believe voter fraud happens regularly.

Nearly half of Americans say that voter fraud occurs at least somewhat often according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a viewpoint at odds with studies showing it rarely occurs in U.S. elections. 

The poll also finds 63 percent of voters are confident that votes in this year’s presidential election will be counted accurately, down from about 7 in 10 in 2004. 

Republicans and Donald Trump supporters express the greatest concern about voter fraud and election accuracy -- worries which the GOP nominee has stoked on the campaign trail. The dynamic marks a reversal from 2004, when Democrats were more doubtful about the legitimacy of the vote. 

The Post-ABC poll finds 46 percent of registered voters say voter fraud -- described as multiple votes being cast by a single person, or an ineligible person casting a ballot -- occurs very or somewhat often, while 50 percent say it occurs occasionally or rarely. 

Over two-thirds of Trump voters say voter fraud occurs often, compared with less than one-third of Clinton supporters. Whatever the partisan differences, at least one-fifth of every major demographic and political group says voter fraud occurs somewhat or very often. 

The prevalence of voter fraud appears to be widely overestimated. A 2012 investigation by the News21 investigative reporting project published in The Washington Post found only 2,068 cases of alleged voter fraud had been reported since 2000, including only 10 cases of voter impersonation over the entire period. A separate study by Loyola Law School professor Justen Levitt found 241 potentially fraudulent ballots over a 14-year period out of 1 billion ballots cast. 

The Post-ABC poll also finds a sizable gap in skepticism of vote counting accuracy between Clinton and Trump supporters. Just under half of Trump supporters (49 percent) say they are “not too” or “not at all” confident” will be counted accurately, while just 18 percent of Clinton supporters are similarly skeptical.

So again, what happens when Trump loses in November?  These folks aren't just going to shrug and go "oh well" and behave, as the last eight years can attest to the mass delegitimization of the federal government.

That's a problem across the board.

Nailing The 45-Yard Field Goal

As pollsters switch over to their likely voter models and away from registered voter models, we're now starting to see state polls showing a much tighter race across the board.  Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, and Missouri are no longer considered anything close to competitive, and talk of the Av-Hill-Lanche is somewhat muted at this point.

Ed Kilgore reminds us that if the likely voter models at this point truly are correct, then the possibility of a Trump win is disturbingly real.

Sometimes you can get lulled into complacency by win-probability projections that sound immutable but really aren’t. Citigroup put out a warning about that today: 

A new note from Citigroup Inc. says that while the firm still puts the probability of Hillary Clinton securing the U.S. presidential election at 65 percent, investors are not taking the remaining chance of a win by Donald Trump very seriously. 

“A 35 percent probability for a Trump victory is more meaningful than investors may be appreciating,” the team, led by Chief Global Political Analyst Tina Fordham, writes in a note published on Tuesday. “Political probabilities are not like blackjack — there is only one roll of the dice, and 35 percent probability events happen frequently in real life.” 

The Upshot, which rates Clinton at an even higher 79 percent win probability, offers this sobering analogy: “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a 45-yard field goal.” 

So, in the fourth quarter of a very close game, when that placekicker trots out onto the field with everything on the line, how confident are you that he will nail that “high-probability” field goal? Are you a tad nervous? 

Those who have laughed off Donald Trump’s chances while believing his election would represent a turn for the worse in their own lives should be nervous right now.

Once again, I don't think the Trump will win and I believe voters will turn out to stop him.  But Clinton does have to make that field goal in November.  That means being able to execute on the fundamentals, and that's where Clinton's campaign does have the advantage.

Intercourse With Various Members Of The Genus Rattus

Republicans understand two things about politics: First, that black voters are the heart and soul of the Democratic party, and second, any efforts by the GOP to peel us away from voting blue is always "newsworthy" no matter how ridiculous.  But this time it really is worth noting, as I see our friend Bruce Carter from "Black Men for Bernie" is back...and now he's teaming up with the Trump campaign.

Promising to deliver Donald Trump and the Republicans the highest percentage of black votes since 1965 Voting Rights Act, the founder of Black Men for Bernie is now launching Trump for Urban Communities.

Bruce Carter is touting the effort “largest ground game in the country” targeted at black voters — with a platform focused on urban investment, self-sufficiency, and resources for small businesses. “It’s about teaching people how to fish instead of giving them a fish and walking away,” Carter told BuzzFeed News in an interview. 

He said he’s aiming to place 2,000 staffers in North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania, hiring them to make direct voter contact and pitch Trump’s gospel by setting up barbershops as “our information hubs.” This would be an enormous project; by comparison, Hillary Clinton’s campaign had about 700 staffers total in recent months. 

Carter believes his “partnership” with the Trump campaign is “ten times the value” of an endorsement. “A partnership means that both [sides] have an obligation to do something. It allows me to hold people accountable.” 

“It’s about getting people to buy into the partnership. No other campaign has considered spending this kind of money.” 

Carter said he had assurances from top Trump aides that the candidate and campaign was committed to making the effort successful, but he didn’t have specifics on what the Trump campaign plans to spend on Trump for Urban Communities. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. A website for the outreach strategy previewed by BuzzFeed News describes it as “a movement to ensure that Donald Trump wins the presidency and the Republicans retain Congress during the 2016 Election.” 

Carter criticized political parties and campaigns who send staff from outside of areas instead of hiring inside communities where people need help. “We’re going to have train them and teach them how to market Donald Trump.” 

The site also features video clips of Louis Farrakhan slamming Clinton as “a wicked woman,” clashing with Barack Obama on the debate stage, and her using the term “superpredators” in a 1996 speech. “We cannot afford to allow a self-serving POTUS and the Democrats to prevail, especially in light of the Supreme Court appointments (one to potentially three) that will occur this election cycle,” the site reads.

Who knew that the endgame of the anti-Clinton grift targeting black voters was to recycle the playbook and ride the Trump Train?

Oh wait.

StupidiNews!

• Hillary Clinton will be back on the campaign trail in Greensboro, North Carolina today following her recovery from pneumonia over the last few days.
• A federal lawsuit accuses Georgia's GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp of using "strict matching" of voter rolls to reject registrations of tens of thousands of minority voters.
• A train collision in central Pakistan has killed six and injured at least 150 as an express passenger train hit a stopped cargo train, overturning four passenger cars.
• Saudi Arabia has once again become the largest producer of oil, outpacing the US as America cuts back on shale oil amid a global supply glut. 
• China is expected to launch its second Tiangong orbital laboratory today on its way to having a full-sized space station in orbit in ten years.

Last Call For The Big Con Job

It looks like our pundit class is finally asking the tough questions about Trump's financial information, questions that should have been asked 12 months ago, regarding the Trump Organization and its financial ties to Donald Trump, his family, and a number of potential national security conflicts of interest should Trump be elected to public office. Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek investigates Trump's business dealings:

A close examination by Newsweek of the Trump Organization, including confidential interviews with business executives and some of its international partners, reveals an enterprise with deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians and even criminals, although there is no evidence the Trump Organization has engaged in any illegal activities. It also reveals a web of contractual entanglements that could not be just canceled. If Trump moves into the White House and his family continues to receive any benefit from the company, during or even after his presidency, almost every foreign policy decision he makes will raise serious conflicts of interest and ethical quagmires.

The Trump Organization is not like the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the charitable enterprise that has been the subject of intense scrutiny about possible conflicts for the Democratic presidential nominee. There are allegations that Hillary Clinton bestowed benefits on contributors to the foundation in some sort of “pay to play” scandal when she was secretary of state, but that makes no sense because there was no “pay.” Money contributed to the foundation was publicly disclosed and went to charitable efforts, such as fighting neglected tropical diseases that infect as many as a billion people. The financials audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global independent accounting company, and the foundation’s tax filings show that about 90 percent of the money it raised went to its charitable programs. (Trump surrogates have falsely claimed that it was only 10 percent and that the rest was used as a Clinton “slush fund.”) No member of the Clinton family received any cash from the foundation, nor did it finance any political campaigns. In fact, like the Clintons, almost the entire board of directors works for free. 

On the other hand, the Trump family rakes in untold millions of dollars from the Trump Organization every year. Much of that comes from deals with international financiers and developers, many of whom have been tied to controversial and even illegal activities. None of Trump’s overseas contractual business relationships examined by Newsweek were revealed in his campaign’s financial filings with the Federal Election Commission, nor was the amount paid to him by his foreign partners. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for the names of all foreign entities in partnership or contractually tied to the Trump Organization.) Trump’s financial filings also indicate he is a shareholder or beneficiary of several overseas entities, including Excel Venture LLC in the French West Indies and Caribusiness Investments SRL, based in the Dominican Republic, one of the world’s tax havens.

Trump’s business conflicts with America’s national security interests cannot be resolved so long as he or any member of his family maintains a financial interest in the Trump Organization during a Trump administration, or even if they leave open the possibility of returning to the company later. The Trump Organization cannot be placed into a blind trust, an arrangement used by many politicians to prevent them from knowing their financial interests; the Trump family is already aware of who their overseas partners are and could easily learn about any new ones. 

Many foreign governments retain close ties to and even control of companies in their country, including several that already are partnered with the Trump Organization. Any government wanting to seek future influence with President Trump could do so by arranging for a partnership with the Trump Organization, feeding money directly to the family or simply stashing it away inside the company for their use once Trump is out of the White House. This is why, without a permanent departure of the entire Trump family from their company, the prospect of legal bribery by overseas powers seeking to influence American foreign policy, either through existing or future partnerships, will remain a reality throughout a Trump presidency. 

Moreover, the identity of every partner cannot be discovered if Trump reverses course and decided to release his taxes. The partnerships are struck with some of the more than 500 entities disclosed in Trump’s financial disclosure forms; each of those entities has its own records that would have to be revealed for a full accounting of all of Trump’s foreign entanglements to be made public.

The problem of overseas conflicts emerges from the nature of Trump’s business in recent years. Much of the public believes Trump is a hugely successful developer, a television personality and a failed casino operator. But his primary business deals for almost a decade have been a quite different endeavor. The GOP nominee is essentially a licensor who leverages his celebrity into streams of cash from partners from all over the world. The business model for Trump’s company started to change around 2007, after he became the star of NBC’s The Apprentice, which boosted his national and international fame. Rather than constructing Trump’s own hotels, office towers and other buildings, much of his business involved striking deals with overseas developers who pay his company for the right to slap his name on their buildings. (The last building constructed by Trump with his name on it is the Trump-SoHo hotel and condominium project, completed in 2007.) 

In public statements, Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. have celebrated their company’s international branding business and announced their intentions to expand it. “The opportunities for growth are endless, and I look forward to building upon the tremendous success we have enjoyed,” Donald Trump Jr. said in 2013. Trump Jr. has cited prospects in Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, Thailand, Argentina and other countries.

In other words, everything the Republican party is accusing Clinton of doing while at State: shady, backroom "pay-for-play" deals, slush fund money laundering, taking bribes from foreign nationals, all becomes instant and disturbing reality for Donald Trump should he ever take public office.  The rabbit warren of shell companies, offshore accounts, using family members as proxies, goes pretty deep in this article, and that's just from public information.

The details, as noted above, are hidden.  And there's zero reason to believe Trump will ever disclose it, in fact he's done everything in his power to hide it.  The reality is that we've never had a presidential candidate so boldly violate every concept of campaign finance law, and nobody seems to think this is a serious enough problem to immediately disqualify Trump from the White House.

Clinton on the other hand, well that's a different story it seems.  That's the problem.