August 3, 2016

NYTimes: Meg Whitman says Trump could mean the end of democracy. She's with Hillary.

She's planning on making a very large donation and enlisting friends to do the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/us/politics/meg-whitman-hillary-clinton.html?_r=0

August 2, 2016

Service members share heartfelt memories of Capt. Humayun Khan

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/02/captain-khan-s-brigade-commander-in-iraq-the-khan-family-is-our-family.html

She did tell her boys how Capt. Humayun Khan had been the very soul of kindness and decency. How he had made her feel safe. How he had always said leaders lead from the front. How he understood that you have to know what it means to be at the bottom before you can rightly be at the top.

Her first encounter with that philosophy in action had been when her unit, the 201st Forward Support Battalion, was preparing to deploy to Iraq back in 2004. A sergeant had ordered her to dig a foxhole after she had been on guard duty all night. She was already exhausted, but she had set to digging when Khan happened past.

“What are you doing?” Khan asked by her recollection “You just did guard duty. Go sit down.”

“Sir?” a stunned Brenes-Ramirez asked.

“Go sit down,” Khan said. “That’s an order.”

The 19-year-old private found herself sitting and watching an officer work the shovel. The sergeant returned.
“What are you doing, sir?” the sergeant asked Khan.

“I’m helping,” Khan replied.

August 2, 2016

Funny that no one in the Don's camp saw this coming. That a tweet battle with Khizr Kahn,

Harvard trained attorney from Justice Robert's old law firm, would not end well.

A man who's lost his beloved son, whose sacrifice is being disrespected by the Don and his followers.

And Mr. Khan is of retirement age.

Maybe he has found a new life mission.

August 1, 2016

Now multi-billionaire Warren Buffet challenges Trump: If you show me your tax returns,

I'll show you mine.

Buffet says Trump is "afraid" of people finding out what's in there. Of course he is. And it can't be said often enough.

Buffet feels so strongly about the importance of voting that he's arranging for transportation to take Nebraska voters to vote -- and he's going to be on the vehicle, taking selfies with voters.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/warren-buffet-challenges-trump-show-tax-returns-afraid/story?id=41051768

Business magnate Warren Buffett took on Donald Trump over his refusal to release his tax returns -- issuing the real estate mogul a challenge to put his cards on the table.

Speaking at a Hillary Clinton rally in Omaha, Nebraska today, the multi-billionaire joked he would meet Trump "any place, any time between now and election" to go over each other's tax returns. The GOP nominee has claimed that he can't release his tax returns because he is being audited.

"Now I've got news for him, I'm under audit too," Buffett said. "There are no rules against showing your tax returns and just let people ask us questions about the items that are on there."

Buffett instead suggested that Trump is withholding his tax returns intentionally.

"You're only afraid if you've got something to be afraid about," he told to the crowd. "He's not afraid of the IRS. He's afraid because of you."

SNIP

August 1, 2016

Perhaps, as a country, we are not all going insane.

After those conventions, if somehow Trump had remained in the lead I would have been afraid that we were doomed -- that Trump was right, and all the "rules" had been thrown out the window: up was down and left was right and in was out.

Things should never have come to this point, and the media has been complicit. But at least our reaction to Hillary's convention -- that she did what she needed to do -- has been validated.

Just keep going, Hillary, like you always have. We have your back.

August 1, 2016

Zika: women who are or may become pregnant have actually been told by the CDC

to avoid being in a certain area of an American city.

A district of Miami where multiple cases of locally transmitted Zika have been discovered.

Where many women already live!


And yet Congress went on vacation without funding the money needed to address this crisis. At the last minute, after the funds had been agreed upon, the Rethugs attached an amendment -- taking the money from Planned Parenthood and the ACA.



http://www.cdc.gov/zika/intheus/florida-update.html

The Florida Department of Health has identified an area in one neighborhood of Miami where Zika is being spread by mosquitoes. This guidance is for people who live in or traveled to this area any time after June 15 (based on the earliest time symptoms can start and the maximum 2-week incubation period for Zika virus).

Pregnant women and their partners
Pregnant women should not travel to this area.
Pregnant women and their partners living in or traveling to this area should follow steps to prevent mosquito bites.
Women and men who live in or traveled to this area and who have a pregnant sex partner should use condoms or other barriers to prevent infection every time they have sex or not have sex during the pregnancy.
All pregnant women in the United States should be assessed for possible Zika virus exposure during each prenatal care visit.
Pregnant women who live in or frequently travel to this area should be tested in the first and second trimester of pregnancy.
Pregnant women with possible Zika exposure and signs or symptoms of Zika should be tested for Zika.
Pregnant women who traveled to or had unprotected sex with a partner that traveled to or lives in this area should talk to their healthcare provider and should be tested for Zika.
Couples thinking about getting pregnant
Women with Zika should wait at least 8 weeks and men with Zika should wait at least 6 months after symptoms began to try to get pregnant.
Women and men who live in or frequently travel to this area should talk to their healthcare provider.
Women and men who traveled to this area should wait at least 8 weeks before trying to get pregnant.

August 1, 2016

Election Update: Clinton’s Bounce Appears Bigger Than Trump’s

Source: fivethirtyeight

Initial polls conducted after the Democratic National Convention suggest that Hillary Clinton has received a convention bounce. In fact, it appears likely that Clinton’s bounce will exceed Donald Trump’s, which measured at 3 to 4 percentage points. Thus, Clinton will potentially exit the conventions in a stronger position than she entered them, perhaps also making up for some of the ground she lost to Trump earlier in July. This is good news for Clinton, but we’ll need to wait a few weeks to see if she can sustain her bounce before we can conclude that the race has been fundamentally changed.

Before we continue, a quick note or two about terminology. When we refer to a candidate’s “bounce,” we mean the net gain in her standing in the polls, including changes to her opponent’s vote share. For example, if the previous XYZ News poll had it Clinton 42 percent, Trump 40 percent, and their new poll has it Clinton 44, Trump 39, we’d call that a 3-point bounce for Clinton, since Clinton gained 2 percentage points and Trump lost 1 point.1

Also, when evaluating the gains a candidate has made, it’s important to note when the previous poll was conducted. Based on our models, Clinton led by 6 to 7 percentage points throughout most of June, but her lead dissipated to around 3 percentage points by mid- to late July, just before the conventions. Then, after the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump pulled into an approximate tie with Clinton. It’s those post-RNC polls that make for the best comparison when describing Clinton’s bounce.

So far, however, the post-convention polls have been strong enough for Clinton that there isn’t a lot of need to worry about semantics. They suggest that she possibly holds a lead over Trump in the mid- to high single digits, instead of being tied with him. Here are the fully post-convention polls we’ve seen so far:



Read more: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-clintons-bounce-appears-bigger-than-trumps/

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August 1, 2016

Poll: Clinton leads Trump by 7 points after convention

Source: Politico

Last week’s Democratic National Convention has vaulted Hillary Clinton back into the lead in the presidential race, according to a new poll released Monday.

The former secretary of state leads her Republican opponent Donald Trump by seven percentage points, 46 percent to 39 percent, in a fresh CBS News national poll. Clinton’s seven-point lead comes just one week after last week’s poll, in which she and Trump were tied at 42. Since then, Clinton’s support among poll respondents grew by four points while Trump’s dropped by three.

The Democratic convention also offered Clinton a substantial bounce to her favorability numbers: The number of respondents who said they had positive views of Clinton climbed to 36 percent from 31 percent a week ago. Similarly, the number of respondents who said they viewed the former secretary of state unfavorably dropped six points, from 56 percent to 50 percent, in the wake of the Philadelphia convention.

More than half of those who responded to the poll said they hold an unfavorable opinion of Trump, while just 31 percent said they view him favorably, down three points from his own post-convention bounce a week ago.




Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/cbs-poll-226493

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More details here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/campaign-2016-did-hillary-clinton-get-a-post-convention-bump/

August 1, 2016

Slate: Longtime Trump advisor claims Khizr Khan is a terrorist double-agent.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/08/01/roger_stone_says_khizr_khan_is_a_muslim_brotherhood_saboteur.html

The Donald Trump campaign's response to bereaved Muslim American military father Khizr Khan's speech at the Democratic National Convention has been, shall we say, erratic. Trump suggested Khan's wife Ghazala Khan had appeared beside him but not spoken as the result of misogynistic Muslim oppression; she subsequently wrote in the Washington Post that Trump was wrong. Trump also asserted that Khizr Khan "has no right" to attack him for being ignorant of the Constitution; as many observers immediately pointed out, the Constitution itself grants Khan that right. Then Sunday night, at about the same time that Trump's running mate Mike Pence put out a respectful statement praising the Khans' son for his sacrifice, longtime Trump adviser and friend Roger Stone escalated things way, way further than all but the most cynical/drug-addled among us could have imagined:





SNIP

Roger Stone is not just some guy; in fact, he appears to have been Donald Trump's primary political adviser for decades. Hell, maybe Trump won't try to distance himself from Stone. Maybe this is the response to Khizr Khan that Trump has decided to go with. At this point, would that really be all that surprising?

August 1, 2016

Did the Don himself leak his wife's nude photos as a distraction from the Khan story?

It seems all too plausible a theory . . . . What a monster, if he sacrificed his wife this way.

But he failed miserably. Since Dems are not Rethugs, he couldn't push the re-set button on the ongoing political controversy.

http://gawker.com/did-donald-trump-leak-nude-photographs-of-melania-to-di-1784622478

Late on Saturday night, amid Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the New York Post, which endorsed Trump in April, published several nude photographs of the candidate’s wife. “THE OGLE OFFICE,” the Post’s Sunday edition punned.

SNIP

At the DNC last week, Khizr Khan, whose son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a suicide bomber while fighting in Iraq in 2004, said that Trump had “sacrificed nothing” in his life. Trump said that yes, he has made sacrifices, and he works very hard, and also why didn’t Khizr’s wife speak at the DNC, is it because she is a Muslim woman and Muslim women are not permitted to speak? No, actually, it is because she is a mother overcome with grief. Trump’s comments, Khizr said later, were “typical of a person without a soul.”

This, coming on the heels of a pretty terrible Republican National Convention, makes for a rather inauspicious start to the general election for Donald Trump. Still, is it any wonder that his campaign might want to create a diversion? It’s also the second time in two weeks that Melania has gotten thrown under the bus for the Trump campaign’s ineptitude and routine mediocrity. So much for being “really good” for women!

Everybody knows that Melania is a former model, although that never seems to stop Trump from missing an opportunity to mention it. (Perhaps the most convincing argument that they were purposefully leaked is the fact that Trump hasn’t tweeted about it.) To use her past now as a political plow only feeds into his self-conception as a Strong Man and a Great Leader, further exoticizing and eroticizing his (largely silent!) mysterious European wife.