NEW YORK—FOX News–Trump 54, Kasich 22, Cruz 15
NEW YORK—FOX News–Clinton 53, Sanders 37
PENNSYLVANIA—FOX News–Trump 48, Cruz 22, Kasich 20
PENNSYLVANIA—FOX News–Clinton 49, Sanders 38
PENNSYLVANIA—Morning Call–Trump 37, Cruz 29, Kasich 28
Laura Vozella reports at The Washington Post that “Nearly a third of Virginia Republicans will vote for Hillary Clinton, pick a third-party candidate or sit out the election if Donald Trump is the GOP’s nominee for president,” according to a newly-released Christopher Newport University poll.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that one-third of Donald Trump supporters said they would not support the Republican party in the general election if the businessman is blocked from the nomination. They said they would instead vote Democrat, vote third-party or sit out the election.
CIA Director John Brennan told NBC News that his agency will not engage in harsh “enhanced interrogation” practices, including waterboarding, even if ordered to by a future president. Said Brennan said: “I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure.”
If Trump becomes President, I put the odds of a coup by the military at 75%, and the odds of a full scale civil war at 60%.
“Since the first day of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said that he gave more than $102 million to charity in the past five years. To back up that claim, Trump’s campaign compiled a list of his contributions — 4,844 of them, filling 93 pages.
“But, in that massive list, one thing was missing. Not a single one of those donations was actually a personal gift of Trump’s own money. Instead, according to a Washington Post analysis, many of the gifts that Trump cited to prove his generosity were free rounds of golf, given away by his courses for charity auctions and raffles.”
For those on the left who have resorted to the Republican tactic calling Hillary a criminal likely to be indicted, perhaps they should know this: A Politico review of dozens of recent federal investigations for mishandling of classified records suggests that it’s highly unlikely.
The examination, which included cases spanning the past two decades, found some with parallels to Clinton’s use of a private server for her emails, but — in nearly all instances that were prosecuted — aggravating circumstances that don’t appear to be present in Clinton’s case.
The relatively few cases that drew prosecution almost always involved a deliberate intent to violate classification rules as well as some add-on element: An FBI agent who took home highly sensitive agency records while having an affair with a Chinese agent; a Boeing engineer who brought home 2000 classified documents and whose travel to Israel raised suspicions; a National Security Agency official who removed boxes of classified documents and also lied on a job application form.
Clinton herself, gearing up for her FBI testimony, said last week that a prosecution is “not gonna happen.” And former prosecutors, investigators and defense attorneys generally agree that prosecution for classified information breaches is the exception rather than the rule, with criminal charges being reserved for cases the government views as the most egregious or flagrant.
CNN: “April 10 marked the first time since November that Trump did not take part in the Sunday morning TV interview circuit.With the GOP frontrunner enjoying a commanding lead in New York state polls ahead of the April 19 primary, the silence seems emblematic of a new approach.”
And the world did not end.
Republican state legislators and governors in several southern states have stepped in it big time, with the growing negative reaction to a rash of their gay-bashing legislation in Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, Virginia and Tennessee. The NFL and the NCAA essentially killed the Georgia’s bill, forcing Governor Nathan Deal (R) to veto it amid threats of the removal of the Super Bowl and the Final Fourt. Virginia’s Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe also vetoed a bill passed by the GOP legislative majority that permitted businesses and individuals to “cite their religious beliefs as a reason for refusing services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.” Bruce Springsteen has already cancelled a Greensboro, NC concert because of the “newly-enacted Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, which prohibits transgender individuals from using the bathroom of their choosing.”
But Springsteen is a well known liberal rocker. When country music stars in Tennessee start coming out against the Discrimination bills, Tennessee Republicans should take notice. Top country artist Emmylou Harris issued a statement saying “Those who love and make country music do so because at its best it speaks to the pain and suffering everyone shares in this life…Let’s not make that life harder still for some, with this mean spirited and unnecessary legislation” in response to a bill which “seeks to prohibit students in public institutions from using the bathroom that does not conform to their gender at birth” and another, which would let counselors refuse mental health services to clients based on their religious beliefs. Country music stars Chely Wright and Ty Herndon have also released statements condemning the legislation, as has TN-born Miley Cyrus.
Martin Longman on Bernie Sander’s frustrating wins:
It’s tough to see Sanders win strong victories in Wisconsin and Wyoming and discover that he’s getting further away rather than closer to winning the nomination. You can argue about whether this is fair or not, but the rules haven’t been changed in the middle of the game. Candidates don’t set out to win some abstract and idealized version of the process. They set out to win a contest with defined challenges and obstacles, and their strategies should match those requirements. If there are no delegates to be netted out of Wyoming, it’s probably not worth spending any time, money or effort on it, especially if the polls show you’re going to win it easily without any effort.
This contest was won or lost (depending on your perspective) in the South. Beyond that, it was won far earlier when Clinton won enough party support to dissuade others from challenging her and to get most of the party officials in her corner. The reason this was so easy to accomplish is that Clinton maintained sky-high approval ratings throughout Obama’s second term, including better than 80% support from self-described progressive Democrats. That support among progressives is what made me realize as far back as 2014 that it would be fruitless to try to take her on from the left. And that’s when I knew that she’d be the nominee.
Of course, I wouldn’t call Sanders’ challenge fruitless at all if we’re talking broadly about positive influences and outcomes. But he won’t win, and I don’t think he could have won in an environment where most progressives, particularly in the South, have a very positive view of Hillary.
White progressives struggle to accept these facts because Clinton is not popular in white liberal circles. But that doesn’t get you very far, as white progressive champions always fall short unless they can unite the entire progressive community and still appeal to the middle.
Obama could do that. But there aren’t many Obamas out there.
Harold Meyerson says Republicans face a culture war backlash: “If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s become hi-definition clear in the past few weeks that the culture wars, long a powerful wedge that Republicans wielded against the Democrats, have now become a dagger that cleaves GOP ranks down the middle.”
“In one GOP-controlled state after another, legislatures have enacted measures that enabled businesses to discriminate against same-sex marriage partners or against gays and lesbians generally, only to face ferocious opposition from that pillar of Republican rectitude, American business. In many cases, opposition is so fierce it has led a number of Republican governors to veto the measures.”
The Weekly Standard argues that a brokered or contested convention is not the failure of the system: “If the primaries and caucuses produce no consensus candidate, then it is perfectly legitimate for the delegates to exercise their sovereign authority. In fact, it is essential for them to do so. Since the first party nominations— dating all the way back to the congressional caucuses in the Jeffersonian era— the mandate has been for a candidate to win a majority of the participants before he becomes the nominee, and for good reason. A party nominee is not running just as an individual, but as the representative of a coalition. If a majority of caucus members, delegates, or voters have selected somebody else, how can that nominee be said to be representative of the whole? This is the one constant amidst all the changes in the presidential nominating process from 1796 through 2016: The nominee must represent the whole party.”
“And it is in this way that the convention is not simply an appendix. Today, it serves a function similar to the House of Representatives whenever no presidential candidate receives an Electoral College majority: The House selects from the top three finishers, with the winner being the candidate who receives a majority of votes from the state delegations. The logic behind this rule is that the president is the government officer who represents the whole country, and if a majority of the country — acting through the Electoral College — fails to agree on a candidate, selection devolves to the House, which must continue to vote until a majority coalesces. The House has not been required to serve this function since 1824, as the people have reached agreement on their own. But the procedure is in place as a fail-safe. The same goes for the GOP nominating convention. If the Republican electorate fails to agree amongst itself, the choice devolves to the delegates.”