June 18, 2016

Democrats to give Trump ‘rude awakening’ in summer onslaught

Source: Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Donald Trump’s unconventional campaign is about to feel the heat of political organization.

Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies have invested at least $27 million in commercials in crucial states such as Ohio, Florida and Nevada over the next six weeks. That’s for a series of broadsides against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Those messages will be echoed by hundreds of Clinton workers in those same states — and amplified by President Barack Obama and other top Democrats.

Trump has made few preparations for contending with that sort of well-oiled political machine.

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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2016/06/18/democrats_to_give_trump_rude_awakening_in_summer_onslaught/

June 18, 2016

Top aide: Sanders could endorse Clinton before convention

Bernie Sanders could endorse Hillary Clinton for president before the Democratic National Convention this summer, his top aide told The Washington Post on Friday.

But Jeff Weaver, Sanders's campaign manager, cautioned that the candidate was not ready to formally concede and that the timetable would depend on talks regarding the party's agenda.

“The resolution of those issues are important to determining any timetable” for a potential endorsement, Weaver said.
The outcome could also determine "how closely the campaigns work together" to defeat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in the general election, he added.

Weaver cautioned that even if Sanders endorses Clinton before the July convention, he doesn't plan to end his campaign before then.

more
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/283976-sanders-could-endorse-clinton-before-convention-report

June 18, 2016

Florida state prosecutor suspended after smearing Orlando: ‘melting pot of miscreants and thugs’

Florida Assistant State Attorney Kenneth Lewis was suspended on Friday after insulting the city of Orlando on his Facebook page, WESH-TV reported. Lewis first posted the disparaging remarks on Sunday, hours after the mass shooting attack at the Pulse nightclub that left 49 people dead and 53 others injured.

“The entire city should be leveled. It is void of a single redeeming quality. It is a melting pot of 3rd world miscreants and ghetto thugs,” he wrote. “It is void of culture. If you live down there you do it at your own risk and at your own peril. If you go down there after dark there is seriously something wrong with you.”

Officials with the state attorney’s office said that Lewis’ post violated its policy regarding social media, and could be grounds for termination. Lewis also attracted criticism in 2014, when he sent a Facebook message stating the following:

Happy Mother’s Day to all the crack hoes out there. It’ never too late to turn it around, tie your tubes, clean up your life and make difference to someone out there that deserves a better mother.

more
https://www.rawstory.com/2016/06/florida-state-prosecutor-suspended-after-smearing-orlando-melting-pot-of-miscreants-and-thugs/

June 18, 2016

Dem tensions rising over Israel

Democrats are heading into their convention next month with deep divisions over U.S. policy toward Israel.

The issue created deep rifts at the Democrats' convention four years ago, and that discord is likely to grow more pronounced due to the influence of Bernie Sanders, the insurgent liberal populist who's been much more critical of Israel and its approach to Palestine than Hillary Clinton and most of the party brass.

Clinton has secured enough delegates to win the party’s presidential nomination, but Sanders is vowing to take his campaign all the way to the Philadelphia convention in order to maximize his leverage and yank the still-evolving platform to the left.

Sanders supporters have wasted no time advocating their position during the platform drafting process, where they're calling to exclude references to Jerusalem while advancing the notion that Israeli settlements in the West Bank represent "an occupation" –– language adamantly opposed by many Clinton backers, who say it would undermine the peace process.

"For too long the Democratic Party's been beholden to AIPAC [and] didn't take seriously the humanity of Palestinian brothers and sisters," Cornel West, an educator and activist appointed by Sanders to the drafting committee, said last week, referring to the pro-Israel lobbying group.

more
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/283984-dem-tensions-rising-over-israel

June 18, 2016

Republicans Should Worry About Losing the House - By Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a senior editor for National Review, where he has covered national politics for more than 20 years, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Republicans accept the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is favored to win the presidency, and they know that her election would probably end their majority in the Senate. But in a year that has upended political expectations, they have clung to one comforting assumption: Their hold on the House is secure.

Their majority is protected by gerrymandering, the geographic distribution of Republican voters, the power of incumbency and its own sheer size. Republicans have 247 seats in the House, the most since 1931. Democrats would have to win 30 to take back the chamber. And that includes many seats in districts that usually go Republican in presidential contests. That sets the House apart from the Senate, where to keep their majority Republicans will have to hold seats in states that usually vote for Democratic presidential candidates.

But Clinton’s lead in the polls is widening to the point that Republicans need to set aside their complacency. Split-ticket voting has declined over the last generation. If Clinton wins big — because Republican voters stay home, or swing voters choose her party, or both — House Republicans will struggle to win re-election. Henry Olsen, the co-author of a recent book about the Republican party, tells me that an eight-point win would put Republicans in the danger zone.

Now it may be that the decline of split-ticket voting is another pattern this year will disrupt. Maybe voters will distinguish between Donald Trump and other Republicans, rejecting him but not them. Maybe Republican voters will come to the polls to vote for a third-party presidential candidate, such as Libertarian Gary Johnson, and then vote for Republican congressmen while they are there.

-snip-

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/republicans-should-worry-about-losing-the-house

June 18, 2016

How the Party of Sarah Palin Became the Party of Donald Trump - By Jonathan Chait

Donald Trump appeared on the national political stage almost eight years ago. Only then he was called “Sarah Palin.” The circumstances of Palin’s ascent came very differently. While Trump nurtured his fame for decades in the New York media spotlight and won the Republican nomination after a protracted nationwide campaign, Palin was plucked in her political youth from the most remote state in the union and presented to the party as a fait accompli. Having no chance to consider or debate her selection, Republicans defended her unreservedly. What critics saw as dangerous ignorance buttressed by anti-intellectual resentment, conservatives defended as populist authenticity, a noble victim of venal coastal elites.

The actual Palin, transparent to her handlers behind the scenes, was even more horrifyingly buffoonish than the public version. She required remedial ninth-grade-history-level tutorials on events like World War I, World War II, and the fact that there are actually two Koreas. She appeared to be mentally unstable. Some of her handlers found the prospect that she might assume the vice-presidency so dangerous that, in the weeks leading up to the election, they prepared a contingency plan to warn the public in the event John McCain had a chance to win. After the campaign, Palin’s defenders — that is, the entire Republican Party — began to slowly edge away as it became increasingly difficult to defend her erratic persona. Palin indulged conspiracy theories, like “death panels” in Obamacare and the allegedly murky circumstances surrounding the president’s birth, and praised Trump for pursuing the investigation (“He’s not just throwing stones from the sidelines, he’s digging in, he’s paying for researchers to find out why President Obama would have spent $2 million to not show his birth certificate.”). Her various attempts to monetize her gullible followers devolved into an embarrassing reality-television freak show.

One conservative who did not abandon Palin was Matthew Continetti, who wrote for The Weekly Standard, the editor of which, his father-in-law William Kristol, helped bring Palin to the attention of Washington Republicans. Now the editor of the Washington Free Beacon, Continetti continues to nurse grievances against Palin’s critics within the party. As recently as last summer, Continetti accused the McCain staffers who denounced Palin for their “back-stabbing vindictiveness and self-seeking,” for being small enough to curry favor with “the liberal press” by “leak[ing] disparaging material about their vice presidential candidate even before Election Day.”

The rise of Trump has given many Republicans, including Continetti, a different perspective on these very same questions. Trump’s candidacy has given them the chance to debate the merits of an ignorant demagogue, rather than defend him reflexively. Many of them have decided that a president who knows things about public policy, and does not indulge conspiracy theories from email chains, has a certain charm. They have even come to view the dissent against such a candidate as an act of nobility, rather than traitorous currying of favor with the elite liberal media. And they have even begun questioning what pathologies have driven Republican voters into the arms of such patently unqualified demagogues. Continetti has a column today making the point in admirably clear terms:

-snip-

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/how-the-party-of-palin-became-the-party-of-trump.html

June 18, 2016

Condi Rice rules out being Trump’s VP

Olivier Knox
Chief Washington Correspondent
June 17, 2016

Condoleezza Rice, who served George W. Bush as national security adviser and then secretary of state, has zero interest in being Donald Trump’s running mate, her chief of staff said Friday.

“Dr. Rice has repeatedly said in past cycles as well as this one, she’s not interested in being vice president,” Georgia Godfrey told Yahoo News in a statement. “She’s happy at Stanford and plans to stay.”

Rice will also stay away from Cleveland, where Republicans are expected to anoint the volatile entrepreneur as their candidate. “She does not plan to go to the convention,” Godfrey said.

Since President Bush left office in January 2009, “Draft Condi for (TBD elected office)” speculation has never fully gone away. She’s the highest-profile African-American woman in the party and a former secretary of state who consistently rates well with voters. Various news outlets have recently fed that fire. In the past week, right-leaning Newsmax and Breitbart News each ran a story touting the possibility that Rice, now a professor of political science at Stanford University and fellow at its Hoover Institution, might run with Trump.

more
https://www.yahoo.com/news/condi-rice-says-no-to-being-trumps-vp-193941558.html

June 18, 2016

If More Guns Keep America Safe, Why Did Trump Ban All Guns From The GOP Convention?

By Jason Easley on Fri, Jun 17th, 2016 at 2:18 pm

Republicans argue that mass shootings and acts of terror can be prevented if more people have guns, but if this true why has Trump made the Republican convention less safe by banning guns?

Republicans argue that mass shootings and acts of terror can be prevented if more people have guns, but if this true why has Trump made the Republican convention less safe by banning guns?

Here is a list of items that are banned at the Republican convention:

[image][/image]

During a rally in Atlanta, Trump claimed that if more people would have guns, the Pulse nightclub attack would have been prevented, “If the bullets were going in the other direction, aimed at the guy who was just in open target practice, you would have had a situation folks, which would have been horrible, but nothing like the carnage that we as all people suffered this weekend.”

If America is safer when more people have guns, why did Trump ban all guns from the Republican convention? Does Trump not want convention attendees to be safe?

more
http://www.politicususa.com/2016/06/17/guns-america-safe-trump-ban-guns-gop-convention.html

June 18, 2016

20-Plus Years Of Anti-Gay Hate From The NRA

Timothy Johnson

NRA Top Lobbyist On May 20: Societal Acceptance Of Transgender People Is “Perverted” And “Twisted.” Chris Cox, who is the NRA’s top lobbyist and directs political efforts as the head of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, said at the NRA annual meeting that “everything we’ve always known to be good, and right, and true has been twisted, perverted,” before citing as an example, “The media tells them Bruce Jenner is a national hero for transforming his body, while our wounded warriors, whose bodies were transformed by IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades, can’t even get basic healthcare from the VA”:

CHRIS COX: The America we know is becoming unrecognizable. Everything we believe in, everything we’ve always known to be good, and right, and true has been twisted, perverted and repackaged to our kids as wrong, backwards, and abnormal.

(…)

Who are our kids supposed to respect and admire? The media tells them Bruce Jenner is a national hero for transforming his body, while our wounded warriors, whose bodies were transformed by IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades, can’t even get basic healthcare from the VA. (NRA Annual Meeting, 5/20/16)

NRA Head Wayne LaPierre: Obama Admin. Is “In The Toilet” Because Of Efforts To Prevent Discrimination Against Transgender Students. NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre railed against the Obama administration’s recent guidance explaining that public schools must allow transgender students to use facilities, like bathrooms and locker rooms, that correspond to their gender identity:

more
http://www.nationalmemo.com/20-plus-years-anti-gay-hate-nra/

June 18, 2016

The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear

By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg

Donald Trump was a brash scion of a real estate empire, a young developer anxious to leave his mark on New York. Roy Cohn was a legendary New York fixer, a ruthless lawyer in the hunt for new clients.

They came together by chance one night at Le Club, a hangout for Manhattan’s rich and famous. Trump introduced himself to Cohn, who was sitting at a nearby table, and sought advice: How should he and his father respond to Justice Department allegations that their company had systematically discriminated against black people seeking housing?

“My view is tell them to go to hell,” Cohn said, “and fight the thing in court.”

It was October 1973 and the start of one of the most influential relationships of Trump’s career. Cohn soon represented Trump in legal battles, counseled him about his marriage and introduced Trump to New York power brokers, money men and socialites.

Cohn also showed Trump how to exploit power and instill fear through a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologize.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/former-mccarthy-aide-showed-trump-how-to-exploit-power-and-draw-attention/2016/06/16/e9f44f20-2bf3-11e6-9b37-42985f6a265c_story.html