Friday Open Thread [8.19.16]

Filed in National by on August 19, 2016

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–NBC News–Clinton 50, Trump 40
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Pew Research–Clinton 41, Trump 37
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Reuters/Ipsos–Clinton 41, Trump 36
GEORGIA–PRESIDENT–Fox 5/Atlanta–Clinton 43, Trump 43
NEVADA–PRESIDENT–Suffolk–Clinton 44, Trump 42
NEVADA–SENATOR–Suffolk–Cortez Masto 37, Heck 37
COLORADO–SENATOR–Quinnipiac–Bennet 54, Glenn 38
IOWA–SENATOR–Quinnipiac–Grassley 51, Judge 42
INDIANA–SENATOR–Monmouth–Bayh 48, Young 41
INDIANA–GOVERNOR–Monmouth–Holcomb 42, Gregg 41

Panic is setting in among the Senate Republicans.

Hillary Clinton’s increasingly dominant lead in the presidential race is solidifying many Republicans’ worst 2016 fears that Donald Trump will cost the party not only the White House but also control of the Senate.

“The bottom is starting to fall out a little earlier than expected,” says a top Senate GOP campaign aide who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the race. “We started off with a very difficult map. No matter what, this was going to be a very difficult year.”

The aide says Trump’s ailing campaign is an additional drag on the Senate battlefield. The end result, the aide concedes, is a likely Democratic takeover this November.

The big news from last night is that, in a few brief sentences, Trump, reading from pre-written text, expressed “regret” for some of his campaign rhetoric. He did not specific which rhetoric he was referring to. Was it the time he attacked a grieving mother, or prisoners of war, or veterans, or Muslims, or women, or Latinos, or African Americans?

He was not specific, and he was not sincere. To prove that, he followed the regret line up with this: “sometimes I can be too honest. Hillary Clinton is the exact opposite, she never tells the truth.” (Also, that the media has been taking “words of mine out of context.”)

Fuck Donald Trump and his regret.

But the media will lap it up. IT IS THE LONG AWAITED PIVOT!!!!

Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post:

Trump’s decision to throw in with the likes of Bannon can only increase the probability of a GOP debacle. Does it have to be spelled out for you in neon lights, Republicans? Trump could not care less about the party, and he would happily destroy it to feed his own ego.

Bannon, likewise, appears to view the party of Lincoln as merely a vehicle for his own ambition, which is to nurture and grow a nationalist-right movement. His website is as critical of the Republican establishment as it is of the Democrats. He has no interest in making Trump more palatable to the general electorate. Like all would-be revolutionaries, he first wants to heighten the contradictions within the system he ultimately seeks to destroy.

It was perhaps foolish of me to hope that very many Republican elected officials would reject Trump on principle. But now, perhaps, more will do so for reasons of self-preservation.

John Cassidy in the New Yorker:

What better way to mark the news that the head of Breitbart.com, the alt-right news site, is now running Donald Trump’s campaign than with a conspiracy theory? And, unlike some of the conspiracy theories that appear on Breitbart, this one might actually be true.

The theory making the rounds is that Trump’s latest campaign reshuffle isn’t really about trying to win the election. In bringing in Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and recruiting Roger Ailes, the disgraced former head of Fox News, as an adviser, Trump is making a business play: he’s laying the groundwork for a new conservative media empire to challenge Fox. […]

The appointment of Bannon isn’t merely another affront to establishment Republicans, such as Paul Ryan, whom Breitbart News has lately been targeting. It is an acknowledgment by Trump that he no longer has any interest in modifying his strategy to appeal to college-educated voters in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia and Milwaukee, where he is running miles behind where Mitt Romney was in 2012. Instead, he has decided to retreat to his base, which is a surefire recipe for political failure. But not necessarily business failure.

In the biggest non-election story of the day:

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote…

The Justice Department’s inspector general last week released a critical report concluding that privately operated facilities incurred more safety and security incidents than those run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. The private facilities, for example, had higher rates of assaults — both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff — and had eight times as many contraband cellphones confiscated each year on average, according to the report.

The shares of the two largest private prison corporations crashed in the stock market. It was beautiful.

The Republican operative who wrote “Benghazi mom” Patricia Smith’s RNC speech, where Smith tearfully blamed Hillary Clinton for her son’s death, said he can never vote for Donald Trump in an op-ed published Wednesday, and says the only choice is Hillary. I could never be a speech writer. I cannot go from writing that Hillary is a murderer one day and voting for her the next. Well, I guess you could if you were a fiction writer, and that is what this guy is.

Dan Balz says Trump has lost his way: “The latest shake-up in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is rightly described as a move to ‘let Trump be Trump.’ In reality, the sudden changes highlight the fact that a politician whose instincts appeared so sure during the Republican primaries has lost his way as a general-election candidate. It remains questionable whether he can find the equilibrium and the discipline needed to turn his flailing campaign around.”

“That probably is what is behind the shifts… Coming 82 days before the general election, the staff changes had the distinct bouquet of desperation rather than the kind of routine and orderly “expansion” that the candidate and his senior advisers were saying.”

E. J. Dionne: “If you thought the old Donald Trump campaign was wild and crazy, just wait for the new Trump campaign now that Breitbart’s Steve Bannon has taken over as chief executive.”

“The new leadership — with Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway displacing Paul Manafort of the Ukrainian Connection at the top of the heap — is likely to steer Trump even more in the direction of the European far right. It also tells you something that Bannon sees Sarah Palin, about whom he made a laudatory documentary, as a model for anti-establishment politics.”

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  1. puck says:
    August 19, 2016 at 9:46 am

    “The Republican operative who wrote “Benghazi mom” Patricia Smith’s RNC speech, where Smith tearfully blamed Hillary Clinton for her son’s death, said he can never vote for Donald Trump in an op-ed published Wednesday, and says the only choice is Hillary. ”

    The bigger story is that what was supposed to be the impassioned cry of a mother, was in fact written by some dude.

  2. puck says:
    August 19, 2016 at 9:54 am

    “If you thought the old Donald Trump campaign was wild and crazy, just wait for the new Trump campaign now that Breitbart’s Steve Bannon has taken over as chief executive.”

    Trump apology: “I apologize for what I am about to do.”

  3. Jason330 says:
    August 19, 2016 at 10:00 am

    I love that Trump statue because I know it is driving him (more) crazy.

  4. Prop Joe says:
    August 19, 2016 at 10:10 am

    That is the most depressing image of Hollywood Squares I have ever seen!

  5. Dave says:
    August 19, 2016 at 10:34 am

    I cannot even conceive of the logic behind anyone voting for Trump or not voting for Clinton. If there ever was an imperative to act, this is it.

    Also, the statue has rather large hands. Perhaps it’s not to scale?

  6. anonymous says:
    August 19, 2016 at 10:55 am

    “That is the most depressing image of Hollywood Squares I have ever seen!”

    Yeah, that Ben Carson is no Paul Lynde.

  7. anonymous says:
    August 19, 2016 at 2:03 pm

    When “Ban the Box” legislation was being considered, some of us pointed out that it was window-dressing. Now it appears it’s something much worse:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/upshot/ban-the-box-an-effort-to-stop-discrimination-may-actually-increase-it.html?hpw&rref=upshot&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

    Key excerpt:

    “The researchers sent fictitious job applications to employers before and after the regulations took effect, focusing on jobs for “candidates with limited work experience, no postsecondary education and no specialized skills.” Some applications were randomly assigned a criminal history and some were not; some were assigned a first name found to be more common among American blacks (like Tyree), while others were given names that have been more common among whites (like Scott).

    Before the regulations took effect, candidates with criminal histories were far less likely to be called back, irrespective of race.

    After the regulations took effect, though, things changed. Lacking the ability to discern criminal history, employers became much less likely to call back any apparently black applicant. They seemed to treat all black applicants now as if they might have a criminal past.

    These were big and disheartening effects: Banning the box extended discrimination to virtually all black applicants.”

    Also, this:

    “The study illustrates a deeper economic lesson: Policies often go astray when we try to change behavior while leaving the motive for that behavior unchanged.”

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