Last Call For The First Pebble In The Avalanche

There's been a lot of discussion around here in general about whether or not Republicans will eventually find Trump so distasteful that they will no longer be able to support him in November.  I'm very skeptical of this view, as I believe Trump is an inevitable symptom of a terminal GOP. Eight years Republicans looking the other way on thinly-veiled racism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia and worse, preceded by eight years of Bush/Cheney weaponized partisanship, which in turn was preceded by eight years of Clinton Derangement Syndrome and the rise of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and the FOX News juggernaut, all lead me to believe that Republicans saying that Donald Trump is somehow too much will not happen. Twenty-four years of enabling this behavior is not something soon forgotten, even for "moderate" Republicans.

And then a Republican comes along and maybe, maybe proves me wrong.

U.S. Rep. Richard Hanna, a three-term Republican, said Tuesday he will vote for Hillary Clinton for president because Donald Trump is "unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country." 

Hanna becomes the first Republican member of Congress to publicly declare he will vote for Clinton in November. 

Other GOP members of Congress have refused to endorse Trump, but until now none had promised to vote for his Democratic opponent. 

Hanna announced his decision Tuesday morning in an op-ed and interview exclusive to Syracuse.com. The retiring congressman previously said he could never support Trump, but he had stopped short of backing Clinton. 

Now Hanna's decision could give political cover in the coming weeks to other like-minded GOP members of Congress who have criticized Trump, but have not said whether they would support Clinton. 

Hanna, who represents an eight-county district in Upstate New York, said in an interview that he considered giving his support to Clinton for several months. He decided to take action this week after watching Trump criticize the Muslim American parents of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq, he said.

Granted, Rich Hanna is a blue-state Republican in a barely red upstate district who is retiring anyway, so it's not like he's going to cost himself the election.  But...but....if there's anyone who does have enough cover to say "Peace out, screw Trump" it's this guy.

So the question now is this: are there any other Republican members of Congress willing to jump off the SS Trumptanic before it hits the iceberg, or are they going to continue to rearrange the deck chairs?

I still don't have much hope, but it's more than the zero hope I had before. Frankly I think it's far more likely that defecting Republicans will flock to the Libertarian ticket and Gary Johnson just like I expect the Berniebro hardliners to go to Jill Stein, and that we'll see 10-15% of America vote for a third party ticket this year, or that even more likely, both groups will simply not vote at all and give us one of the lowest turnouts in presidential contest history.

What that will mean for the electoral map will come into focus as we get closer to November.

Gaming Out Rio

It's starting to look like the 2016 Summer Games in Rio may be an even bigger disaster than the 2014 Sochi winter version with the opening ceremonies just a few days away.

The Olympic Village has been declared “uninhabitable” by some, a private security firm has been sacked due to incompetence, and some competition venues are filled with shit, while others are simply collapsing. 

The Australian team has had it the worst. Last week, the team refused to stay in the Village when, upon arrival, the athletes were faced with “blocked toilets, leaking pipes, exposed wiring, darkened stairwells where no lighting has been installed and dirty floors in need of a massive clean,” said Australian Olympic Committee Chef De Mission Kitty Chiller, in addition to “large puddles on the floor around cabling and wiring” in operations areas. 

The team stayed in nearby hotels until the accommodations were complete, and moved in last Wednesday. The honeymoon phase didn’t last long, though. On Friday, a small fire in their building led to an evacuation, and while the team was gone from their rooms a laptop and team shirts were stolen.

Oh, but it gets worse:

Other athletes have had security concerns too. Shortly after arriving to Rio, Chinese hurdler Shi Dongpeng checked into his hotel with a cameraman in tow when a drunk local approached him and vomited all over Shi. The cameraman chased the drunk man away while Shi went to clean up, and when they returned, all of their camera equipment and luggage had been stolen. 

According to Inside the Games, when the two men went to the police station to report the crime, they had to wait for over two hours in line because there were so many other mugging victims there. An Argentinian official actually believed his team’s rooms had been sabotaged they were so subpar. 

With only four days until the Opening Ceremonies, Rio and the International Olympic Games are frantically working to beef up security and upgrade accommodations for athletes and members of the media. On Saturday, the Ministry of Justice fired a private security firm that had been in charge of venue security because of “incompetence and irresponsibility.” As of last Monday, only 12 of the 31 buildings in the Olympic Athlete’s Village had passed safety inspection.

Let's not forget Sochi ended up a ghost town, with a light rail system that nobody uses, a classic example of Putin-era cronyism and mismanagement.  Brazil isn't doing much better with suspended President Dilma Rousseff facing calls for her formal removal before the Games begin.

Luckily the 2018 winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea and the 2020 Tokyo summer games seem to be on track for a much better performance, for now.

That's little help for Rio, however.

Debbie's Double Trouble

Getting unceremoniously (and rightfully) booted out of the DNC driver's seat last month, Debbie Wasserman Schultz now faces a primary challenge from Tim Canova who may very well unseat her from her long-time Florida district as she faces the first real political fight she's had in ages.

Her House seat is on the line in a primary race against well-funded challenger Tim Canova, and the battle is heating up amid the fallout from her resignation following the leak of hacked emails that showed DNC officials plotting to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders's (I-Vt.) presidential campaign in the Democratic primary. 

Some think the race has changed after the former chairwoman’s tough week. 

“I think this has really shifted the race,” said Kathryn DePalo, a political science professor at Florida International University. “I think she’s going to have a tough fight. I think she’s probably going to win, but it’ll be close.” 

She added that a Canova victory would not be a surprise. “I think that’s how devastating these email leaks have been,” DePalo said. 

Wasserman Schultz was booed off the stage by Sanders supporters at the Florida delegation breakfast on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week. 

“The constant refrain that I heard is she can eke it out,” said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at University of South Florida in Tampa. 

But MacManus said it won’t be without a fight. 

“She’s got to come home and work her constituency,” she said. “She hasn’t had to for years.

For his part, challenger Tim Canova says his polling shows him within eight points.

The poll showed that Wasserman Schultz leads 46-38 percent with 16 percent undecided. Her lead narrows after the pollster provided positive and negative information about the candidates, but the press release from Canova's campaign didn't reveal the information provided to voters. 

Canova and Wasserman Schultz are competing in a Democratic primary in the Broward/Miami-Dade Congressional District 23. The primary is Aug. 30th but voters are already casting ballots by mail. 

The poll showed that 52 percent of respondents view Wasserman Schultz favorably and 35 percent unfavorably while 13 percent have no opinion of her or never heard of her. For Canova, his favorable-unfavorable split is 32-8 percent. 

But the poll shows Canova's biggest weakness: 60 percent of voters have no opinion/never heard of him. Despite his national media exposure due to Bernie Sanders endorsing him and his prolific fundraising, he is a first-time candidate who isn't well known in the district. Wasserman Schultz has been an elected official for more than two decades -- first in the state Legislature and elected to Congress in 2004.

Frankly, I'm alright with DWS being in Congress, it's not my call if the people in her district want to be represented by her.  My problem was that she was an abysmal party chair, and now that's over and done with.  Driving her out of Congress completely was plan B as far as I was concerned, as long as she was ousted as chair.  She of course was.

Canova of course is welcome to challenge her and is doing so.  We'll see what the voters decide.

StupidiNews!

• Billionaire investor Warren Buffet is challenging Donald Trump to release his tax returns publicly along with Buffet in a public discussion forum.
• Florida GOP Gov. Rick Snyder is asking for federal assistance with fighting an outbreak of the Zika virus traced to at least 10 new cases caused by mosquitoes in Miami.
• A Syrian humanitarian rescue service is reporting that a helicopter dropped what appeared to be chlorine gas on an area near where a Russian helicopter was shot down Monday.
• The Israeli construction firm that built fencing in Gaza is reportedly interested in taking up Donald Trump's offer to build a US border wall with Mexico.
• A federal judge has thrown out a $625 million patent verdict against Apple, citing a possibly tainted jury and ordered a new trial to begin in September.

Last Call For The Bouncy Castle

As Donald Trump got a bounce from the Republican convention two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton got one from last week's Democratic convention and is now firmly back in the lead.

Hillary Clinton has received a bump in support after the Democratic convention and has now pulled ahead of Donald Trump. 

Forty-six percent of voters nationwide say they'll vote for Clinton in November, while 39 percent say they'll back Trump. The race was tied last week after the Republican convention. Clinton led by a similar margin in June. 

Clinton got a four-point bounce after her party's convention, compared to a two-point bump for Trump after his convention. 

When compared to previous Democratic presidential nominees, Clinton's bounce is similar to those President Obama got in 2012 and 2008, but short of the 13-point bounce her husband, Bill Clinton, received in 1992. In 2000, support for Al Gore rose 10 points after the Democratic convention, but he went on to lose a close race that fall.

Indeed, 538's daily election forecast shows a big reversion back to a Clinton lead in the overall post-convention polling from the weekend.



A couple things from that CBS poll: Clinton maintains her lead with college-educated white voters. If that holds up through election day, she wins.  Also, one in six registered independent voters say that they definitely will not vote this year, but independent voters tend to be older, white male voters: Trump's base.  If that's true, that also helps Clinton.

Still, as August opens we're a good 90+ days away from the election, a lifetime in politics.  It's also getting close to the time for pollsters to start switching to their "likely voters" versus "registered voters" models, and that's where we're going to see stuff all over the place until we have multiple polls in with those models, probably starting next month.

Finally, we'll start seeing more state polls too.  Those are going to be very interesting "likely voter" models this time around.

In other words, expect a lot of jumps in polls one way or another through August and into Labor Day week, where traditionally polls start getting more serious and consistent.

As The Nina Turner Turns

It looks like former Ohio state lawmaker and Bernie Sanders supporter may be defecting to Dr. Jill Stein and the Green Party in a move that I can't say surprises me.

Nina Turner, the Democratic former state senator from Cleveland who has emerged as a rallying figure for Bernie Sanders' disappointed supporters, said she is considering an offer to run for vice president on the Green Party's national ticket. 

Massachusetts physician Jill Stein, the party's presumptive presidential nominee, reached out with the pitch, Turner told cleveland.com Sunday evening in a telephone interview. 

The Green Party opens its convention Thursday in Houston. Turner would stand for nomination there if she agrees to be Stein's running mate. Her decision is expected in the coming days. 

Turner is less than a year removed for a top position at the Ohio Democratic Party, which she left last fall after joining Sanders' Democratic presidential bid as a high-profile surrogate. The move caused a stir. Turner initially had favored Hillary Clinton, whose husband, former President Bill Clinton, helped Turner raise money for her unsuccessful Ohio secretary of state run in 2014.

Turner bailing on being an Ohio state senator was probably a smart move to make for someone with national ambitions.  But backing Sanders over Clinton, and then become the post child for the "Never Hillary" movement pretty much ends that chapter in her career.

Turner could have moved on to bigger and better things, but if she becomes Stein's VP, she's going to be an unfortunate electoral history footnote rather than a real contender.  There's certainly room on the Democratic bench for somebody as obviously intelligent and passionate as Turner is, but not if she tells the entire party to go screw itself.

We'll see what happens, but I've got little sympathy for her when this blows up in her face and she comes crawling back to the Democrats.

Trump Cards, Con't

Republicans are scrambling once again to contain the damage from Donald Trump, this time from Trump attacking the parents of a Muslim Army Captain who died in Iraq in 2004.  Leading the damage control charge is none other than "my senator" Mitch the Turtle himself.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, on Sunday called Muslim fallen Army Captain Humayun Khan "an American hero," and said that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslims seeking to enter the country did not fit American values.

"I agree with the (Khans) and families across the country that a travel ban on all members of a religion is simply contrary to American values," McConnell said in a statement.

That will only open up McConnell to charges of being a "cuckservative", the all-purpose insult for the Trump crowd against what they see as those womanish, wimpy Republican males too emasculated to admit Trump is always right.  So far the careers of dozens of "cucks" are littering the ashes of the modern GOP right now, and the casting of Trump as America's ultimate alpha male that will win over women voters is an important part of the narrative.

Americans have been rattled by recent attacks in France and Florida, the murder of police officers in Texas and Louisiana, and widespread protests over the killings of unarmed black men, polls show.

“We’re not electing a husband, we’re not electing a preacher, we’re electing a leader,” said Kay White, a Republican delegate to the nominating convention from Tennessee who originally supported U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the early nominating contests, or primaries.

For White, it’s a one-issue election. “Security,” she said. “Nothing else matters.”

A year ago, Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, a conservative advocacy group, was a blistering critic of the thrice-married Trump because of comments he made about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly that many felt were sexist.

But Nance now supports Trump and says the candidate can fashion an effective message for women centered on national security, she told Reuters on the sidelines of the convention. “Every day we wake up and get our kids ready for school and the television is on and there is another attack,” she said.

So no, Trump attacking the Khan family won't hurt him with his base in the least.  The only thing that will is if Trump surrenders to the "cucks".

StupidiNews!

• A Russian helicopter with five people aboard has been shot down over the Syrian city of Aleppo, Moscow says the helicopter was delivering humanitarian aid.
• California firefighters continue to battle wildfires blazing across the state, the largest in Big Sur near Los Padres National Forest.
• Turkish special forces have captured 11 soldiers the government says were responsible for trying to seize President Erdogan during last month's failed coup attempt.
• Ride-sharing giant Uber will sell the remains of its Chinese business to rival Didi Chuxing as the companies each spent billions to battle one another.
• Tech company Philips is entering the wearable device market with a smartwatch aimed at people who need to monitor chronic illnesses.

Last Call For Trump, Master Debater

With the first presidential debate scheduled in just under two months, Donald Trump is already doing everything he can to try to get out of them because he's terrified of Hillary Clinton embarrassing him on live television.

Donald Trump says the fall debate schedule is "unacceptable," raising the specter that he may try to skip them.

In a tweet on Friday night, Trump incorrectly said that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are "trying to rig the debates."

In fact, the fall debate schedule was determined almost a year ago by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, a private group made up of both Republicans and Democrats.

His primary complaint is that two of the debates are scheduled on the same nights as NFL games.

That's true. (It was also true in 2012, and the debates were still high-rated.)

In an interview with ABC News, Trump said he's "fine" with the commission's three debates, but objected to the specific dates.

"I'll tell you what I don't like. It's against two NFL games," he said. "I got a letter from the NFL saying, 'This is ridiculous.'"

An NFL spokesman said Saturday: "While we'd obviously wish the debate commission could find another night, we did not send a letter to Trump." 

On Sunday morning, a Trump aide said that "Mr. Trump was made aware of the conflicting dates by a source close to the league."

"It's unfortunate that millions of voters will be disenfranchised by these chosen dates," the aide added.

Let's get this out of the way now: Trump will show up for maybe, maybe one debate.  He'll scream and whine that debates are part of the "rigged system" (thanks Bernie!) and will declare that he's winning and doesn't need to do them.  The American people, he'll say, already know exactly what the candidates stand for, the campaign's been going on since Spring 2015.

The real issue of course is that Trump will get smashed in a one-on-one debate.  Clinton will ridicule him and get him to rise to the bait so quickly that he may actually drop bad language in front of a live audience with tens of millions watching.  He'll be destroyed and he knows it.

Therefore, he will do everything in his power over the next several weeks to neuter the debates as much as possible, casting them as un-American and rigged as possible against not just him but "the people" as well and it will most likely work.  The story will be Trump refusing to do it, but what price will the rest of us make him pay?  Only the voters will do that, and his racist, hateful supporters will find a way to back him up on not debating like they have everything else.

Indeed the GOP is already backing Trump on his call.

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus said he will stand by Donald Trump in his protest of the presidential debate schedule. 

"We're not going to agree with anything our nominee doesn't agree with," Priebus said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We're not going to be having debates on Saturday and Sunday night."

And we're not going to have debates on the weekends will become "we're not going to have debates at all."  Watch.

If Trump doesn't play the game, he can't lose it.

Trump's Buckeye Bullseye

Any path to a Trump victory in November goes through Ohio, period.  It's the one state he absolutely has to win, no Republican has ever claimed the White House without it.  If Trump wins Ohio, he could certainly lose the presidency and almost certainly will if he loses Pennsylvania and Florida as I expect he will.  But if he loses Ohio, he's done for, and as usual the Cincinnati suburbs up in Boehner Country will decide the state.

Take the cluster of counties around Cincinnati, in southwestern Ohio, which constitute a crucial Republican counterweight. Trump needs to run up large margins there to offset Clinton’s built-in advantages in the cities of Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.

Warren County, Ohio, hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. A typical Republican nominee is expected to notch 70 percent of the vote there.

This year, however, there is a prominent Never Trump movement in Warren, and the county’s Republican chairman, Jeff Monroe, indicated that that dynamic could cut into what are typically strong turnout numbers for the GOP nominee.

“We anticipate our folks will certainly turn out for a Trump campaign,” he said. “Whether or not they turn out in the numbers we want is another question, and that’s yet to be answered.”

Winning the bulk of the rank-and-file — which Trump currently looks poised to do — isn’t enough.

“If we don’t get Republicans to turn out in Warren County, it is extremely difficult for the Trump campaign to win Ohio,” he said, adding that even an underperformance of 2 percent there could make a difference in a state that Obama only won by around 100,000 votes in 2012—and it would also signal an enthusiasm gap in a critical region for Republicans.

“Warren County is important because it provides a net gain for Republicans to offset where Republicans are disadvantaged,” he continued, pointing to the major urban areas. “If we don’t show up to vote, it does two things: One, it tells us we can’t have the net gain, and second, it’s likely indicative of what we’re seeing elsewhere, which means their Republican vote would also be down.”

That worry is playing out in suburban and exurban areas across the state, in counties like Delaware and Licking, outside of Columbus; and in Lake County, near Cleveland, Weaver said.

In those places, “Donald Trump has many people on the sidelines wondering whether to vote Republican this year. These are folks who voted for Romney last time, John McCain the time before that. One of Trump’s biggest challenges is to convince these Republican-leaning voters that it’s OK to vote Republican this year.”

Trump doesn't need to piss off a lot of Republicans in order to lose in November.  He just needs to do so in the right counties in the right key battleground states to flip it to Clinton.  I believe that's how she's going to win and win big.

They don't have to vote for Clinton, but if they don't vote for Trump, he's toast.

Sunday Long Read: Gold Fever

This week's Sunday Long Read is a good old fashioned treasure hunt mystery, as a Colorado man named Randy Bilyeu was convinced he was on track to find a fortune in gold and jewels hidden in the deserts near Santa Fe, a belief that eventually led to his disappearance and death.

One night early this year, Randy Bilyeu was on the phone with his best friend. He wanted to share some good news: After more than two years of searching Colorado and New Mexico for a hidden treasure chest filled with gold and jewels, he thought he’d finally discovered its location. It wasn’t too far from Santa Fe. Now he just needed to go get it.

Bilyeu was looking for the celebrated Fenn treasure—a 12th-century Romanesque chest hidden by an eccentric arts and antiquities collector that’s said to be packed with 42 pounds of gold coins, rubies, diamonds, sapphires, ancient jade carvings, pre-Columbian bracelets, and gold nuggets. Between 2014 and 2015, Bilyeu made nearly a dozen trips from his Broomfield apartment to Santa Fe in search of the chest. During his hunts, Bilyeu, who was 54 years old and twice divorced, had sent photos to his two adult daughters and to a dwindling number of close confidants, most of whom worried about his safety during his excursions and had become skeptical of the fortune’s existence.

Among them was Tom Martino, a longtime friend in Orlando, Florida, who talked to Bilyeu on January 4. The stash, Bilyeu said, was near the Rio Grande, in a place called Frijoles Canyon on Bandelier National Monument land between Santa Fe and Los Alamos. It would be difficult to get, though. In early January, temperatures, especially at night, would fall far below freezing. He’d been near the spot in the past month, and Bilyeu knew he would need a raft to move down the river and deliver him to a sandy patch from which he could begin his search. Further complicating matters was the fact that Bilyeu wanted to bring his traveling companion, Leo, a nine-year-old poodle-terrier mix. Bilyeu had never piloted a raft, and Leo was afraid of water. “It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard,” Martino says of Bilyeu’s plan. He told Bilyeu the search seemed risky. Bilyeu agreed: It was too cold and the weather was too dangerous to make a hasty search. Even still, he wanted to try.

In fact, he was already close. Bilyeu had driven the roughly 400 miles from Broomfield to Santa Fe with Leo, he explained to Martino. He was staying in a Motel 6 outside downtown. He’d purchased an $89 raft from a local sporting goods store, and he had waders, a wet suit, a backpack, maps, and his phone. Bilyeu sounded impatient. The Rio Grande was fewer than two dozen miles away. Bilyeu would drive there, inflate the raft, and begin his search despite his misgivings about the dangers he might face.

The next morning, a light dusting of snow covered the ground. Bilyeu backed his 2011 Nissan Murano into a space near a well field just off the Rio Grande. A thick cottonwood tree, its bare branches exposed to the elements, stood almost directly in front of him. The river was at least 50 yards wide and likely barely above freezing. Leo wore a miniature white sweater to protect him from the chill.

Bilyeu inflated his new blue-and-gray raft, then loaded the dog, two metal oars, and a manual air pump into it. His phone was turned off, perhaps to conserve battery power. Bilyeu finally lowered himself into the raft and shoved off. Within seconds, he and Leo began moving down the Rio Grande. A few minutes later, they disappeared into the canyon.

Bilyeu's body was found only a few weeks ago and identified last week, but the story of what led him to the Rio Grande canyons of New Mexico is a definite page-turner, the legendary Fenn treasure, worth millions, hidden by a reclusive author.  It's the stuff dreams are made of, even when those dreams become a nightmare that can claim lives.

Last Call For Trump's Lonely Road

As I've been saying for months now, Hillary Clinton has a distinct electoral college advantage, where she can win only a couple of swing states and take the White House.  Donald Trump on the other hand has to run the table and things have gotten so bad for him now that there's effectively only one path Trump has to the White House, and it goes through the traditional "Big Three" swing states of American presidential politics: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Even as Mr. Trump has ticked up in national polls in recent weeks, senior Republicans say his path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed for election has remained narrow — and may have grown even more precarious. It now looks exceedingly difficult for him to assemble even the barest Electoral College majority without beating Hillary Clinton in a trifecta of the biggest swing states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

President Obama won all three states in 2008 and 2012, and no Republican has won Pennsylvania in nearly three decades.

With a divisive campaign message that has alienated many women and Hispanics, Mr. Trump appears to have pushed several traditional swing states out of his own reach. According to strategists on both sides of the race, polling indicates that Mrs. Clinton has a solid upper hand in Colorado and Virginia, the home state of Senator Tim Kaine, her running mate. Both states voted twice for George W. Bush, who assiduously courted Hispanic voters and suburban moderates.

In addition, Trump allies have grown concerned about North Carolina, a Republican-leaning state that has large communities of black voters and college-educated whites — two audiences with which Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular.

While Mr. Trump is not ready to give up entirely on any of the major battlegrounds, advisers have become increasingly convinced that his most plausible route to the presidency, and perhaps his only realistic victory scenario, involves capturing all three of the biggest electoral prizes on the map, and keeping North Carolina in the Republican column.

Right now Trump has basically given up on Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.  Taking the four states Trump needs aside, that gives Clinton 265 of 270 Electoral votes:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

In other words, this is the map that's now Trump's best case scenario.  Trump needs all four states to win, and that only actually matters if he doesn't lose any more states to Clinton, like Arizona, Missouri, Utah or Georgia.  If Clinton swipes even one of those eight states, Trump loses.

Trump has the run the table just to squeak out a win.  I don't think he can do it, I think he can maybe pull off Ohio and edge out NC but he'll lose both PA and Florida and that will end him.

Clinton's best case scenario however looks like this:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

It would be a bloodbath, and if she runs the table, she gets to 390. Like it or not, the electoral college may be what ultimately saves up from Trump.

Trump Cards, Con't

It's a good thing Hillary Clinton wasn't right about Donald Trump being someone you could "bait with a tweet" or anything, because otherwise we would see all sorts of nasty attacks on DNC speakers or something.

In his first response to a searing charge from bereaved Army father Khizr Khan that he’d “sacrificed nothing” for his country, Donald Trumpclaimed that he had in fact sacrificed by employing “thousands and thousands of people.” He also suggested that Khan’s wife didn’t speak because she was forbidden to as a Muslim and questioned whether Khan’s words were his own.

“Who wrote that? Did Hillary's script writers write it?” Trump said in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.”

Oh, well, there goes that theory.

Trump appeared to try to brush the speech aside, saying that Khan “was, you know, very emotional and probably looked like a nice guy to me.”

Trump also said, “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”

Pressed by Stephanopoulos to name the sacrifices he’d made for his country, Trump said: “I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've had tremendous success. I think I've done a lot.”

Trump also cited his work on behalf of veterans, including helping to build a Vietnam War memorial in Manhattan, and raising “millions of dollars” for vets.

You mean the millions of dollars for veterans that the Trump campaign didn't actually raise and in fact cannot tell us he did raise for sure or not?  Those millions?

Good thing this guy is stable.

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

This month both Texas and Wisconsin voter ID laws were partially struck down, now an appeals court has found North Carolina's GOP-created voter suppression law (and I know I keep calling it that for a reason) really actually is a voter suppression law and is unconstitutional.

A three-judge panel of the U.S Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has found North Carolina's controversial GOP-backed voting restrictions were intended to discriminate against African American voters. 

The Friday ruling is a huge win for voting rights activists in a closely watched case in a potential 2016 swing state. The appeals court reversed the ruling of a district court siding with the state. 

"In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with
discriminatory intent, the court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees," the opinion said. 

In the opinion, the panel of judges said that the law restricted voting in ways that "disproportionately affected African Americans" and that its provisions targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision." It said the state's defense of the law was "meager." 

"Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the state’s true motivation," the opinion said. 

It noted that the legislation was passed as African American voter turnout had expanded to almost the rates of whites, and that the legislature enacted the legislation after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had required North Carolina to seek federal approval for changes to its voting policies. The appeals court -- citing a lower court's findings -- pointed out that state lawmakers sought data breaking down voting practices by race. The judges said that the law's provisions singled out the practices disproportionately popular among African Americans, such as preregisteration and provisional voting. 

"The district court found that not only did SL 2013-381 eliminate or restrict these voting mechanisms used disproportionately by African Americans, and require IDs that African Americans disproportionately lacked, but also that African Americans were more likely to 'experience socioeconomic factors that may hinder their political participation,'" the opinion said.

In other words the court affirms everything I've been saying about GOP voter suppression laws over the years, chiefly that Republicans use them to limit black and Latino voter turnout as much as possible in order to hurt Democrats.

Finally, finally we have a court stating the obvious.

For example, the circuit-court decision makes much of the fact that legislators requested relevant data before passing the bill. 

“Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans,” Motz wrote. “Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.” 

For example, the voter-ID law was both “too restrictive and not restrictive enough.” The circuit court found that the law harmed African American participation, but did little to combat fraud, the stated purpose, because fraud was more common in mail-in absentee voting, which was not affected.

Again, the 4th Circuit found that this was deliberate racism on the part of North Carolina Republicans, designed specifically to limit black turnout.  Practices like analyzing voter data to see that black voters took advantage of the first week of early voting in the state, and then Republicans specifically eliminating the first week of early voting.  This isn't something that was being done in the state's dark past or during Jim Crow, this happened two years ago after Republicans took over the state in 2010 in the backlash against a black president winning the state in 2008.

Republicans tried to make sure that North Carolina would never go blue again.  They were caught.

Where this goes now is still up in the air.  I'm sure Pat McCrory would like to see the Supreme Court step in and put the 4th Circuit's order on hold until after November's election, and that could very well happen.

We'll see in the weeks and months ahead, but let's not lose sight here of the sheer scope of this ruling, that Republicans in North Carolina passed an omnibus voter ID law with the express intent of limiting the black and Latino vote and hurting Democrats in a southern state.

Even the gutted Voting Rights Act would still allow the Justice Department to take over NC's voting process if that ruling holds.

More detailed analysis from Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog here.

Water We Waiting For, Con't

After nearly a year, it looks like somebody's finally going to be held responsible for the Flint water crisis in Michigan, just not anybody from GOP Gov. Rick Snyder's administration.

Six state employees were criminally charged this morning in district court in connection with the Flint water crisis. 

Charged are Michigan Department of Health and Human Services workers Nancy Peeler, Corinne Miller and Robert Scott, and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees Liane Shekter-Smith; Adam Rosenthal and Patrick Cook, according to testimony this morning in Flint’s district court. 

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette and Todd Flood, the Royal Oak attorney heading the AG's investigation, have called an 11:30 a.m. news conference at U-M Flint to further discuss today's criminal charges. 

In April, Schuette announced felony charges against two Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials and one City of Flint official. At that time, he promised more criminal charges would be forthcoming.

The city employee, Mike Glasgow, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor and is cooperating with the investigation as other charges were dropped. The two DEQ employees, Stephen Busch and Mike Prysby, are awaiting preliminary examinations. 

He later brought a civil lawsuit against engineering and consulting firms who had consulted on the Flint Water Treatment Plant. 

The civil lawsuit, filed in Flint in Genesee County Circuit Court, accuses engineering firm Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam and environmental consultant Veolia North America, plus related companies, of causing "the Flint Water Crisis to occur, continue and worsen." Both companies have denied any wrongdoing and vowed to fight the lawsuit.

What I'm seeing here is all the blame being put on testing and quality workers and not anyone actually responsible for the decisions that led to the problem in the first place.  However I'm hopeful that some sort of plea deal can be reached where these six workers turn states' evidence on the Snyder administration.

We can hope, at least.  Meanwhile, as Chris Savage at Eclectablog reminds us, Gov. Snyder continues to do nothing in order to try to fix Flint's water supply, and won't until Republicans are thrown out of power in Michigan.