The Economy Is Too Good Apparently

Because Ben White at Politico is making the case that July's awesome job numbers will doom the Clinton campaign.

Friday’s surprisingly strong jobs numbers could carry an unwelcome September surprise for Hillary Clinton, courtesy of Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve.

The July employment report showed a gain of 255,000 jobs, outstripping analysts' forecasts and offering a short-term boost to the Democratic nominee’s presidential hopes after a dismal reading last month on economic growth.

But it also raises the politically dangerous prospect that the Fed could boost interest rates in September, in the heart of the campaign. That could spook markets, slow already tepid growth and complicate Clinton’s path to the White House.

“No question this jobs report along with June has raised the likelihood of a September rate hike,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS. “If the next jobs report right before the Fed’s September meeting is also very strong, I would pull the trigger and say they are going to move in September.”

Though they will never say it publicly, Fed governors generally try to avoid inserting themselves into the heart of political campaigns with major policy decisions. That consideration has many economists assuming the central bank will wait until December to raise rates again. The Fed hiked rates by a quarter point in December of last year, the first increase in nearly a decade.

But if jobs and wage growth continue to climb, and the unemployment rate falls below what the central bank considers full employment, Yellen and her colleagues may decide they have no choice but to move in September to avoid falling behind inflation. Rates remain extraordinarily low and the central bank is eager to return to a more normal footing. It is far easier for central bankers to snuff out inflation before it starts then to fight it once it takes hold.

The decision in September could be an excruciating one both for the Fed and the Clinton campaign. “Every central banker worth their salt will tell you politics means nothing in their decisions. But in fact they would like to avoid moving so close to the election,” said David Page, senior economist at AXA Investment Managers. “If the August number comes in somewhere around 280,000 jobs, it could become quite awkward for the Fed.”

If we're producing too many jobs then the Fed will have to step in and raise rates, hurt the markets, slow down growth, and the Trump wins or something.

This is an argument that someone was paid to make.

Sure.  The economy is always going to hurt Democrats.

Deadbeat Newt

I guess if your political career is already over, and has been for years, it's okay if you decide to welsh on you campaign debt (if you're a Republican, that is.)

Newt Gingrich apparently has no plans to pay back dozens of small businesses that made yard signs and TV ads for his 2012 presidential campaign.

Gingrich filed a document with the Federal Election Commission this week detailing a debt settlement plan to finally terminate his 2012 presidential campaign committee. The document shows that “Newt 2012” plans to stiff 114 businesses and consultants that are altogether owed $4.6 million.

The former House speaker, failed presidential candidate and Donald Trump vice president runner-up was forced to file the debt settlement plan with the FEC as part of its alternative dispute resolution process. Gingrich was the subject of a complaint alleging that his campaign had illegally commingled campaign funds with corporate funds from a company controlled by Gingrich and his wife Callista.

While the FEC general counsel found reason to believe the allegations in the complaint, the six commissioners split along ideological lines in a 3-3 vote, it did not penalize Gingrich. Instead, the campaign agreed to file a debt settlement plan and terminate in 2016. The plan was originally due on May 23, but Gingrich was granted an extension until August 1.

The debt settlement plan document indicates the “total amount to be paid to creditors” is zero dollars.

Gingrich did not respond to a request for comment made through two spokespeople.

So that's how Republicans really feel about America's small businesses. Hoocoodanode, right?

Last Call For The Defeated

I've been mentioning this for a while now here and on Twitter, but Foreign Policy magazine writer Sarah Kendzior asks a very important question: what happens to Trump-supporting losers when Trump loses in November?  Her answer is a very real warning.

If Trump loses, neither he nor his followers will take it well. Some pundits wonder whether Trump will even concede. On August 1, Trump declared that the election will be “rigged”: a preemptive move to delegitimize a possible loss as his poll numbers fall. The next day, Trump’s advisor, Roger Stone, proclaimed there will be a “bloodbath” if the election is “stolen.” When I interviewed Trump’s supporters in March, several told me they would form militias if he did not get the nomination, and other reporters have heard the same. Trump’s loss could be the cause that unites disparate hate groups across the country, potentially leading to standoffs against the government like that of the Bundys in Oregon, or to violent clashes like the neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento. 

The second major challenge is that, thanks to Trump, economic discontent has become linked to white populism. In an attempt to diagnose the Trump phenomenon, D.C. wonks have written profiles of imaginary Trump fans, as if his fan base were a monolith. In fact, the Americans voting for Trump are as diverse in their reasoning — open bigotry, economic agony, hatred of Clinton, vague longing for change — as the supporters of any other candidate. 

Where they are not diverse is race: Trump’s fan base is almost uniformly white. It includes the militia and hate organizations described above. But many Trump fans are simply down-and-out white male workers. This faction’s primary concerns are jobs, trade, and a feeling that the government has abandoned them while crowing aboutmisleading statistics of low unemployment. 

The problem is that, while not always openly racist, these voters implicitly condone racism through their support for Trump, contributing to the mainstreaming of white supremacy. The appeal of Trump’s racialist version of the economic discontent argument is so great that it has extended to surprising audiences. A small but vocal contingent of the Bernie Sanders fan base seems to have migrated to the Trump camp. Ideologically, this switch makes no sense, but given the precedent set in the primaries, it is not surprising. The Democratic primaries were the most racially divided in U.S. history — states with black or Latino populations of over 10 percent almost always went to Clinton. 

As white men with disparate ideological perspectives unite under the Trump banner, many of them have come to espouse or condone his racist views, tainting their legitimate economic grievances with an ugly nativist edge. Meanwhile, America’s much-vaunted economic recovery is still failing to create enough well-paying jobs. As a result, white populism is set not only to keep growing, but to become further incorporated into mainstream American politics. 

If the broken white male workers out there decide they can be talked into resistance or something far worse when Clinton wins, it's going to be awful.  As I keep saying, the 60 million people who will end up voting for Donald Trump aren't going to shrug and say "Well, good fight, we'll see you in 2020" and walk away.

If you thought America's white supremacist domestic terror problem was bad before, wait until 2017.

The Coming Av-Hill-Lanche

And if you see his election in the snow-colored hicks
Well her landslide will bring it down
Yes her landslide will bring it down

With all apologies to Fleetwood Mac, it's looking like the Trump campaign's collapse into flaming slag over the last two weeks may have dealt a mortal blow to his chances to become president.  Sure, there's three months left in the election, but we're at the point now where the polls are solidly starting to show a Clinton victory, and in some cases a Clinton blowout.

The best polling news for Donald Trump on Thursday was that an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll had him down only nine points to Hillary Clinton. 

That survey was released a little while after a poll from McClatchy/Marist that showed Trump down 15 points, pulling only 33 percent of the vote. Those numbers are, to put it bluntly, shocking. Mitt Romney was never down by that much to President Obama in 2012; his worst poll was a survey in June from Bloomberg that had him down 13, with 40 percent of the vote. 

In only one of the four major polls released this week is Trump over 40 percent, which is itself remarkable. Each of the four had Clinton gaining ground since the last time the same outlet released a poll, by an average of about five points. Three of the four showed Trump losing ground, by a little more than three points. 

The two new polls show a pattern that's consistent with other recent surveys, including at the state level. Clinton is getting more support from Democrats than Trump is from Republicans, and his advantage among men and white voters has diminished. In both of the new polls, Clinton leads with men, which has not been the trend over the course of this election.

Oh, but as we start looking at the state polls things are getting even worse for The Donald.

Democrat Hillary Clinton has built a slim lead over Donald Trump in Georgia after one of the worst weeks of the Republican’s campaign, according to a new Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. 

The poll released Friday shows Clinton at 44 percent and Trump at 40 percent, within the poll’s margin of error. It is the latest showing a close race between the two candidates in Georgia, a state that has voted for the GOP nominee since 1996. 

Clinton maintains a lead when third-party candidates are included. In a four-way race, Clinton led Trump 41-38, but Libertarian Gary Johnson cracked double-digits, with 11 percent of the support, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein notched 2 percent. 

The findings come after both conventions ended and a particularly rough patch for Trump, who engaged in a war of words with the family of a slain Muslim U.S. soldier and infuriated many Republicans when he refused to endorse two of the party’s top elected officials. 

Friday’s survey marks a change from the last AJC poll, commissioned in May, which gave Trump a 45-41 lead over Clinton. It also shows the former secretary of state besting Trump among independents, an influential Georgia voting bloc that typically votes Republican.

If things have gotten so bad for Trump that states like Georgia are moving into purple swing state status, joining North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada, then he's done, folks.

Clinton's Husker Do

So I overlooked this story on Monday: Hillary Clinton went to see Warren Buffet in his (and my) home state (I was born there) of Nebraska (Go Huskers!) on Monday but honestly when's the last time you can recall a Democratic presidential candidate making a campaign stop in Nebraska?

Barbara Carlson waited in the sun for more than two hours to attend Hillary Clinton’s rally in Omaha on Monday, but she never made it inside the gym.

Carlson was one of hundreds of people steered into overflow rooms at Clinton’s rally, after authorities shut down the gymnasium at Omaha North High School where the Democratic presidential candidate spoke.

The crowd that came to see Clinton exceeded the capacity of the gym where she spoke. A story in Tuesday’s Omaha World-Herald incorrectly reported that the turnout was not an “overflow” crowd, based on the fact that the gym still had room for more people.

But that was because authorities had diverted some people into overflow rooms. In addition, others who had come to the rally may not have been able to get through security and enter the building at all before the event began.

Officials with Clinton’s campaign said there were 3,300 people in the gym alone. There was no estimate given on how many people were in the overflow rooms or were not allowed into the school.

Anne Henderson, 71, of Omaha was one of those diverted into an overflow room. “I guess there were maybe 200 or more people in there. Most of them were sitting on the floor,” said Henderson. “The video was good but the audio went in and out.”

Neither Henderson nor Carlson was complaining. Both were happy they attended, even though they didn’t get into the gym for the rally.

But Carlson, 65, of Omaha, did get to see Clinton after the candidate stopped briefly outside the door of her overflow room to thank everyone for coming.

And Carlson said she will never forget arriving at the school before the rally and seeing thousands of people in line, waiting in the sun.

“When I saw all of those people — men, women and children of all ages and walks of life — it made my heart burst with pride,” said Carlson.

Yes, I know the trip was all about Buffett, but it could have been a video endorsement, or Buffett could have come to the convention and spoken.  There wasn't really a ironclad need for Clinton to make a campaign stop in a state that at best will give her a single electoral vote thanks to the state's laws that split electoral votes among congressional districts.

But she went anyway and 3,300 people showed up.

In Nebraska.  Not even her husband bothered to campaign there as far as I can find.  Obama never made any stops either as a candidate.

Clinton did.  I respect the effort.

StupidiNews!

• At least 12 are dead after attackers opened fire in an Indian market in New Delhi, authorities believe the attackers were from a Christian separatist group.
• Professors at the University of Texas are suing the state over campus open carry laws, saying college instructors have the right to ban guns from individual classrooms.
• US Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Turkey later this month, tensions are high between the two countries over last month's failed coup and an exiled Muslim cleric living in the US.
• Mercedes-Benz will reportedly be taking on Tesla and BMW as the German automaker will enter the electric vehicle market with an as-yet unnamed sub-brand.
• Apple will start up a bug bounty program similar to other tech giants that will offer up to $200,000 for finding security flaws in their hardware and software.

Last Call For The Real Trumpies

The NY Times collected the unfiltered comments and voices of Trump supporters to hear what they had to say, and what they had to say should scare the living daylights out of you.  Needless to say, this is extremely NSFW language used here.



 

These folks are pretty awful.  And these folks will definitely vote in November.

The View From Detroit And Derry

Donald Trump hasn't been doing the GOP brand any favors in Michigan, where GOP Gov. Rick Snyder still hasn't lifted a finger as far as a real solution to the ongoing Flint water crisis, and a new Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll shows Hillary Clinton with a 9-point lead in the Wolverine State.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has widened her lead over Republican Donald Trump in Michigan as 3-in-5 likely voters say the New York businessman is not qualified to be president, according to a new poll conducted for The Detroit News and WDIV-TV. 

Clinton led Trump 41 percent to 32 percent in the statewide survey of 600 likely voters conducted Saturday through Monday following Clinton’s formal nomination at last week’s Democratic National Convention. 

The poll contains many troubling signs for Trump’s White House campaign, including a “shocking” lead for Clinton in the Republican strongholds of west and southwest Michigan, pollster Richard Czuba said. 

Sixty-one percent of likely general election voters said Trump is ill-prepared to be the nation’s commander-in-chief. The figure grows to 67 percent among women, a group with whom Trump performs poorly. Clinton has a commanding 21-percentage-point lead among female voters. 

“He’s sitting in the cellar right now, and they’re going to have to do something to dramatically turn this around,” said Czuba, president of the Glengariff Group Inc. polling firm. “If I were a Republican running on this ticket right now, I’d be beyond nervous.”

If Trump is losing in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, he's done.  That would be the equivalent in Ohio of Trump losing in Cincinnati's northern suburbs or here in northern KY.  Most of all, the realization is setting in among Michigan Republicans that Trump is going to drag them to hell along with him.

Some 61% of Michiganders find Trump unqalified for the White House, while 57% find Clinton fit for the job..  Still, there's more than a quarter of voters in the state either still undecided or otherwise not voting for either Trump or Clinton, so there's still ground to be made up.

Still, these numbers are initially good for Clinton.  Trump isn't nearly as competitive in Rust Belt states as people seem so think he is.

And here's the rub: coming off the conventions, Clinton is doing even better in New Hampshire.

Hillary Clinton has opened up a 15-point advantage over Donald Trump in the battleground state of New Hampshire, according to the results of the latest WBUR poll released Thursday, which also found the state’s Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan with a double-digit lead over incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte. 

The survey, conducted in the days immediately following the Democratic National Convention, found Clinton with 47 percent support among likely voters. Trump has the backing of 32 percent of voters, while Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson finished a distant third with 8 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein took 3 percent. Another 2 percent indicated support for another candidate, while 7 percent did not know or refused to answer. 

Clinton held a much narrower two-point edge over Trump in a WMUR/University of New Hampshire poll taken before the convention. National polls taken after both conventions showed Clinton erasing any bounce Trump gained from the previous week when he briefly surged following the Republican National Convention.

Maggie Hassan is up by 10 over Kelly "The Third Amigo" Ayotte too.  Maybe America isn't as screwed as we thought.

School's Out In Hamilton

Oh Hamilton Ohio, never, ever change.

He doesn’t know what to say. 

“I’m actually stunned,” said Southwest Local Schools Superintendent John Hamstra. 

The school district had a levy on the ballot Tuesday, and it went down 2,425 votes to 1,811. Hamstra wasn’t expecting that. It would have paid for a new junior high building and a renovated high school. 

“I’m still a little speechless,” Hamstra said. “As far as what’s next,” and then, he trailed off. “I don’t know…” 

Tuesday was a tiny special election. There were only four issues on the ballot in Hamilton County, and three were renewals – for Mount Healthy, Elmwood Place police and Elmwood Place fire/EMS. All three renewals passed. 

Southwest Schools was asking for a combined 4.45-mill levy that would have cost the owner of a $100,000 home in the district an extra $156 a year. The district tried for a levy in November 2015, and that one failed. So, they cut the amount in half, Hamstra said. They scaled back the project – putting elementary school decisions to another time – and he thought voters were on board. 

He hosted open houses every Thursday to talk with whoever showed up. 

There were building tours every Tuesday so people could see the need firsthand.
He did podcasts, wrote letters, and there were 55 people on the district’s social media team, he said, “putting out the facts.” 

“We’re shocked,” he said. “… What do they want?” 

It's odd, because, comparatively, Southwest homeowners have it easy. They pay the lowest rate in the county for schools, $715 a year per $100,000 home. 

By comparison, the owner of a $100,000 home in the Cincinnati Public Schools district pays $1,424 a year, and school officials are asking for an extra $277.55 a year with a levy this fall. In Finneytown, top of the price list, the owner of a $100,000 home pays $1,909 a year for schools. 

A few days ago, a 10-foot-by-10-foot chunk of plaster fell from one of the classroom ceilings at Southwest, Hamstra said. It’s summer, so no one was hurt. 

“But if there were kids in that room at that time? That would not have been good," he said. "The buildings are not getting any younger, and the issues are not going away.

And the only people who care about voting in a special election in a sweltering Tuesday in August are people who don't want to see an extra dime given to public education, as evidenced by a vote that went down in flames by roughly 18 points.  Meanwhile, I'd like to know how many businesses in Hamilton get nice tax breaks to, you know, avoid paying for things like school districts.

I bet every one of the people who voted against the levy thinks kids these days are pretty stupid, too. Meanwhile you have a baffled superintendent who honestly doesn't know why a school levy in the reddest part of the state would fail.

I'd laugh, but it's really kind of pathetic.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Earl has made landfall in eastern Belize as a Category 1 storm, causing widespread power outages as the storm moves across the Yucatan Peninsula.
• Texas has reached a preliminary deal with civil rights groups to ease voting restrictions after the state's voter ID provisions were partially struck down last month by a federal judge.
• One woman is dead and five others wounded after a 19-year-old man went on a rampage with a knife in central London's Russell Square last night.
• Early results from elections in South Africa show the ruling African National Congress party is trailing the country's main opposition party in several key cities.
• Russian space agency Roscosmos says it has plans to send an orbiting spacecraft to Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede.

Last Call For Gunvenor Of Missouri

Meet the Republican candidate for Jay Nixon's job as Missouri's next governor.




No I mean the gun.  The gun is the one who won the primary, pretty sure.

Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

Kansas Republicans in the Gov. Sam Brownback austerity era are so unpopular even the congressional GOP is losing.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) is projected to lose his GOP primary, making him the fourth House incumbent this cycle to be defeated in a primary.

Huelskamp, a House Freedom Caucus member who helped push out former Speaker John Boehner, was defeated by physician Roger Marshall in a primary for a safe Republican seat.

He now joins Reps. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.), Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Randy Forbes (R-Va.), who all lost primaries this year. 

The race was close after polls closed, and Huelskamp's campaign asked the media to leave its watch party in Hutchinson, Kan., as it waited for results, according to The Associated Press. The AP called the race close to 11:30 p.m. Eastern.

Conservative groups that are typically allies found themselves on opposite sides of the Kansas primary fight. 

The Kansas Farm Bureau and Ending Spending Action Fund opposed Huelskamp for his vote against the farm bill. He was kicked off of the Agriculture and Budget committees in recent years for frequently bucking Boehner and establishment Republicans.

And Kansas voters finally got tired of his Tea Party stupidity and replaced him with Roger Marshall, a standard boilerplate corporate Republican instead, as voting against federal farm subsidies in a state like Kansas is too much for even the people who re-elected Brownback to take, apparently.

But the primary bloodbath wasn't limited to Hueslkamp's head being put on a pike.

A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators have lost their seats as moderate Republicans made GOP primary races a referendum on education funding and the state's persistent budget woes. 

Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce was among the lawmakers ousted amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies. 

The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state's fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Kansas has struggled to balance its budget since the GOP-dominated Legislature slashed personal income taxes in 2012 and 2013 at Brownback's urging to stimulate the economy. That's created concerns among educators about future spending on schools, even as many Republicans see the $4 billion-plus a year the state now spends as generous.

Bruce, from Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. 

Bruce was a particular target because of his visibility as the Senate's No. 2 leader. He also had disagreements with the Senate's top leader, President Susan Wagle, of Wichita. Bruce is closer to Brownback than Wagle is. 

"He seemed to care more about what the Brownback administration wanted rather than what the people he represented wanted," said Mary Dondlinger, an 80-year-old retired Hutchinson teacher and Republican who voted for Berger. 

Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state's most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.

Brownback is to Kansas what Trump is to national Republicans: an absolute disaster for the party.  Now the voters are speaking out, and hopefully starting the process of cleaning out the state's legislative pool filter.

President Obama Gives Them An Out

I have to hand it to President Obama, when he makes a political move to try to sink the GOP, he does it well.  Building on last night's story about GOP Rep. Hanna saying he's voting for Hillary Clinton in November being the first pebble in an avalanche, as Chuck Pierce notes, the president did everything he could to jump up and down on the rocks.

"The question they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?" Mr. Obama said at a news conference at the White House. Mr. Obama said that in addition to Mr. Trump's comments about the Khan family, the Republican nominee had demonstrated that he was "woefully unprepared to do this job." The president said Mr. Trump lacked knowledge about Europe, the Middle East and Asia. "This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily," Mr. Obama added. "There has to be a point at which you say, this is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party. The fact that that has not yet happened makes some of these denunciations ring hollow."

Ouch.  Just brutal.  Pierce weighs in:

I sometimes think this guy is going to leave office without enough people appreciating what a truly great partisan politician he is. Of course, he came to prominence with his speeches about how we, as Americans, can transcend our political differences and ride off together in glory. I cheered those speeches, too, although I thought he was dead wrong. There was all that "reaching across the aisle," and rumors of the Grand Bargain early on in his administration. But, for going on four decades now, I've studied several breeds of partisan politicians in their native habitat here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), and I never have seen one with the kind of perfect timing the president has. 

Look at what he just did, standing there with the president of Singapore, who must be baffled as to how this country ever came to the prominence it did, what with the kind of unmoored yahoos who can get nominated for high office. The president deftly dropped the harshest overhand right an incumbent president can drop on a contender—and this after a weekend in which said contender was reeling all over the landscape, yapping about fire marshals. And, at the same time, just at the moment when this reeling and yapping was forcing people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan into the "deplore-but-not-renounce" two-step, he threw an elbow at them, too. This wasn't the East Room. This was the Octagon. Step up or tap out, boys.

He saw a chance to drop the hammer not on Trump, but the people who enabled Trump.  These are the real villains in our story and always have been, and that's who President Obama went after with a vengeance.  He knows they are smart enough to realize what they've done. I respect that.

And it looks like President Obama has already knocked some more rocks loose.

Calling Donald Trump an "authoritarian character" and a threat to democracy, Meg Whitman, a prominent Republican fundraiser and chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton's White House bid late Tuesday.

"To vote Republican out of party loyalty alone would be to endorse a candidacy that I believe has exploited anger, grievance, xenophobia and racial division. Donald Trump’s demagoguery has undermined the fabric of our national character," Whitman posted on Facebook about the Republican nominee.

In an interview with the New York Times, which first reported the endorsement, Whitman said it was time "to put country first before party" and that she would give a "substantial" contribution to Clinton's campaign.

Whitman told the Times that Trump is a "dishonest demagogue" and said that those who look at other failed democracies and believe "it can't happen here" are mistaken.

"Trump's unsteady hand would endanger our prosperity and national security. His authoritarian character could threaten much more," Whitman wrote on Facebook.

Whitman's endorsement is the latest from a string of business leaders who have moved to back Clinton in recent days, including other high-profile Republicans.

Clinton reached out to Whitman personally about a month ago, according to the Times report. Her campaign also courted former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who delivered an endorsement speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week.

Understand that like Michael Bloomberg, Meg Whitman isn't just voting for Clinton, she's helping her raise money as well.  We'll see if this week was the turning point in the 2016 campaign, but if Trump loses as badly as I believe he will in November, the first week of August will go down as the point where Trump's campaign finally broke an axle.

StupidiNews!

• More than 20 people are missing after a bridge partially collapsed near Mumbai, India as a bus was swept away by the Savitri River.
• Delaware's state Supreme Court has struck down the state's death penalty provision allowing judges to sentence convicts to capital punishment without a jury.
• Nearly $72 million in bitcoins were stolen from the world's largest bitcoin exchange in Hong Kong, two months after the exchange was fined by US officials for security lapses.
• As the Rio Summer Games get underway today, new data shows that Rio is the world's most expensive city for lodging and Airbnb.
• After recommending flossing as part of dental care for nearly a century, it turns out the federal government has almost no scientific research on hand to prove flossing works.

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.