No F*cks to Give Obama is the best Obama. Yesterday, President Obama is finally done pussyfooting with Republican idiots who insist that if he would just say “Radical Islamic Terrorism” or “Radical Islam,” then all terrorists everywhere would be so shocked that they would turn their guns on themselves and boom ISIS is defeated.
Obama_06-14-2016 by DailyPolitics
What Republicans really mean when they demand their magic words is that they actually do want to go to full scale war with an entire religion. They want a war on all Muslims, everywhere. A war on Islam. It is what Trump wants.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is slated to address supporters with a video live stream on Thursday night, his campaign confirmed Tuesday. He may announce a transition to a platform campaign to press for changes to the party primary process and platform. Hillary seems to be doing a very good job of consolidating the Democratic base on her own without Bernie’s help, so I am less concerned about an enthusiastic endorsement being made as soon as possible. Hillary has carved out some space for Bernie, Hillary and the DNC to negotiate and slowly tamp down the primary heat. Which is a good thing.
A new Bloomberg poll finds that Hillary Clinton has opened up a double-digit lead nationally over Donald Trump, 49% to 37%, with Libertarian Gary Johnson getting 9%. Take out Johnson, and Hillary leads 54-36. That is simply a massive landslide that would sweep the country blue and give us back the House with a 20-30 seat majority.
Very interesting: 55% of those polled saying they could never vote for Trump.
Said pollster Ann Selzer: “Clinton has a number of advantages in this poll, in addition to her lead. Her supporters are more enthusiastic than Trump’s and more voters overall see her becoming a more appealing candidate than say that for Trump.”
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll also shows Clinton leading by 12 points.
Charlie Cook: “If anything that either Clinton or Trump says or does turns out to be a determining factor, Trump is more likely to play that role. Whether one likes or dislikes Hillary Clinton, or agrees or disagrees with her on issues, she is a tested and experienced candidate and considered a safe pair of hands.”
“Trump, by contrast, is a grenade with the pin halfway out. The possibility of a sudden explosion is never far away, and this prospect gives sleepless nights to Republican elected officials and strategists. GOP pollsters are probably doing a land-office business these days, surveying states and districts to advise their Republican clients exactly how they should position themselves—whether they should stand close to Trump or dig a protective trench.”
First Read: “Remember when Trump advisers were suggesting that their candidate would back off or moderate his temporary Muslim ban? Well, there’s no backing off after yesterday’s speech. And it raises a series of questions for every Republican out there, including House GOP leaders… Do you support or oppose Trump’s speech? Do you support his temporary Muslim ban? Do you believe that the U.S. should suspend all immigration from places where there is a proven history of terrorism? And do you agree with Trump’s insinuation — from his remarks Monday morning — that President Obama is somehow complicit in the Orlando mass shooting?”
“Senate Republicans have tried to work with Donald Trump. They’ve offered gentle advice and firm guidance, hoping he’ll morph into a general election candidate who won’t kill their chances of keeping the Senate, or better yet, will give Hillary Clinton a run for her money,” Politico reports.
“None of it has worked. And now a palpable mix of despair and resignation has permeated the Senate Republican Conference. Many lawmakers are openly frustrated, and refusing to defend the comments and actions of their own standard-bearer, the man they’ve endorsed for president.”
Sam Stein interviews Danny Diaz (Jeb Bush’s campaign manager), Jeff Roe (Ted Cruz’s campaign manager) and Alex Conant (Marco Rubio’s communications director).
“Well-compensated, highly intelligent and very publicly defeated, each one of them is still angry, both at Trump and at the media. Each one of them has theories about how we got to this very disconcerting place in American political history. And not one of them is prepared to vote for Trump.”
“The stories they told me over a 90-minute conversation at a bar called Black Jack in Washington DC provided an entirely different view of the campaign and of elite Republican thinking. They spoke with unusual candor about which strategies they pushed that they now regret, how they believe network executives conspired against their candidates, what a disaster the Republican convention will be and why a Hillary Clinton blowout may be upon us.”
James Hohmann: “Clinton made a savvy strategic decision last year not to tack left on national security during the primaries. She lurched leftward on everything from trade to Wall Street to head off Bernie Sanders’s unexpectedly strong insurgency, but she more or less stuck to her guns on national security – even in the face of intense attacks over her Iraq vote. She vigorously defended her hawkish posture in Libya and Syria during the debates, while expressing more regret for her vote on Iraq than she did last time. She also defended her relationship with Henry Kissinger, who many on the left loathe. The campaign was playing a long game, and they knew that there would be long-term costs for articulating more dovish positions.”
“Now that the nomination is wrapped up, if anything, she can take a harder line.”
I know Sanders supporters might not like it, but politically speaking, as things have turned out, it was the right strategic decision.
Florida AG Pam Bondi, who took a bribe from Donald Trump to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University, bombs in an interview with Anderson Cooper over her anti-gay record.
Rick Klein: “All conventional wisdom about how a politician responds to a terrorist attack or a mass shooting had gone out the window with Trump’s first series of Tweets, where he accepted congratulations for being right and called on President Obama to resign from office. Before Trump started speaking in New Hampshire, he had suggested that the president secretly might want ISIS to succeed. By the time he was done, he had misled his audience about the Orlando shooter’s birth status, and expanded his proposed Muslim ban to include all immigration from parts of the world with established ties to terrorism.”
“At some point, the talk about a new Donald Trump, or a reined in Donald Trump, or a ‘presidential’ Donald Trump – all of it will fade away. What’s left is a man who has played to the anger and fears of the American people to astounding effect, and apparently won’t stop until he’s either elected, or not.”
Josh Marshall says Donald Trump is a heavily leveraged property:
Like a highly leveraged business that does great as long as it’s doing well but can collapse under the weight of debt if anything goes wrong, Trump is uniquely dependent on winning poll numbers. [A]lmost the entirety of Trump’s campaign is based on his poll numbers, because they are a proxy for his strength and supposed ability to win in all cases.
A lot of this is ego and narcissism – the kind of thing that was on display when he couldn’t help giving out virtual high fives to supporters after the atrocity in Orlando supposedly “proved I was right.” But it’s more than that, numerical evidence of ‘winning’ is central to the Trump cult of winning. Bad polls hurt any campaign. For Trump they’re devastating.
If you’re campaign is based on winning and bragging about winning but you’re demonstrably losing – and perhaps losing badly – you start to look ridiculous. Like a highly leveraged business, without high poll numbers or some premise that he’s winning, he’s not just losing, he barely has a campaign.
More Josh Marshall on the denial we find in the many excuses and rationales pundits employ to understand or explain Trump:
These all seem rooted in collective denial because the United States has little historical experience, certainly not in living memory, of a major party nominee who is a mentally unstable narcissist, someone who is capable of almost anything but impulse control. Trump isn’t just someone who speaks out of turn, runs an intuition based campaign or isn’t politically correct. There’s something much, much darker about him. As happens with many would be demagogues or authoritarian rulers the prospect of real power isn’t steadying him. We’re seeing no process – either instigated by the candidate or by those around him – to bottle the magic, build some campaign structure around him to stabilize the campaign and make it more sustainable. On the contrary, as happens with demagogues and violent authoritarians, proximity to power is making him more unbridled, hotter and less restrained.
You want to understand Trump? It is very simple. He is fascist and he is a racist. He is Hitler. If we elect him, World War III will be fought to liberate America from his evil clutches. In 50 years, we will gather to celebrate the Brit’s landing at Dewey Beach.
For supporters of Bernie Sanders, this is one of the more important ways in which his campaign can have lasting influence. You make all the impassioned Facebook posts and Tweets that you want, but there’s no substitute for being in the actual arena. To truly influence a major political party, you have to do more than vote. You have to organize, and you have to infiltrate.
I don’t even like using the word “infiltrate” because it sounds suspicious and illegitimate, as if you’re doing something underhanded or even unpatriotic. But, the point is, you have to get yourself into a position of power and influence to actually have any power or influence. At first, these positions may seen quite modest. You’re some deputy assistant for campus outreach or a delegate at the National Convention with a vote on some seemingly unimportant committee. But multiply that story dozens of times, and suddenly you have a small army of progressive-minded people creating a network that can further advance their values within the party and within the national political culture.
Of course, there’s an alternative. The alternative is that you grow despondent and disillusioned because your progressive champion came up short in the primaries and you reject making common cause with a Clinton campaign that you consider impure or hostile to your interests. You go back to being an outsider, an anti-establishmentarian cynic who calls for a pox on everyone’s house.
If you take that route, you may feel that your hands are clean, but you’ll be getting off a still moving bus. The Sanders movement isn’t over. It’s just getting started. And melding with the Clinton campaign is the next stop.
The Washington Post takes apart Trump’s response to the attack and his speech on terrorism, condemning Trump’s “assault on our values”:
Mr. Trump capped a day of assaulting fundamental liberal democratic values by announcing he would ban Post reporters from covering his campaign events. If this is his inclination now, imagine how he might wield the powers of the presidency.
Before the Orlando shooting, Beltway analysts speculated about how a terrorist attack might affect the presidential election. Now we know at least part of the answer: Mr. Trump would reveal himself more clearly than ever as a man unfit to lead.
Chris Cillizza on Trump’s press bans:
This should worry you. And by “you,” I mean everyone who is a citizen of the United States.
How long will it be before American Muslims are forced to wear yellow badges with the star and crescent? Donald Trump, the man Republicans will nominate to be president, has already said that, in addition to banning Muslim immigration, he would also look at closing mosques and forcing Muslims already in the country to register with the authorities. […] He does deserve congratulations — for a new wave of radicalization. Trump’s anti-Muslim hostility makes it easier for terrorists to recruit and to inspire disaffected young Muslims. Trump warned Monday that the terrorism seen in Orlando “is going to get worse and worse” — and, thanks to him, that’s probably true.