Delaware Liberal

Open Thread – Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Delaware Dem

“Donald Trump has run head-first into an electoral wall,” Politico reports. “In poll after poll, Trump isn’t even close to winning a majority of the vote. While he’s narrowed the gap between his campaign and Hillary Clinton in recent weeks, in the past 21 national polls conducted using conventional phone or internet methodologies over the last five weeks, Trump’s high-water mark in a head-to-head matchup with Clinton is 45 percent.”

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–CNN/ORC–Trump 45, Clinton 43
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–NBC News/SM–Clinton 48, Trump 42

One of these polls is wrong. It is likely the CNN poll, not because I am biased, but it is their first since switching to their likely voter screen for this year, and sometimes that produces screwy results. But it will get TONS of play this week. Trump is now winning the race. And I actually don’t mind it. It will do three things: 1) wake up the Clinton campaign, 2) wake up the media to get off their three week Clinton bashing and 3) wake up Clinton supporters and liberals.

Meanwhile, it would appear, from a new Washington Post Poll of all 50 states, that Hillary leads in Texas. I need time to decipher this piece more because it just dropped, but still. Texas.

Unbelievable.

Donald Trump said that he has an “obligation” to go head-to-head with his rival Hillary Clinton in all three upcoming general election debates, Politico reports.

Said Trump: “I think you have an obligation to do the debates. I did them with the other, you know, the other cases. We had, I guess 11 debates. Obviously I did well in the debates. Obviously according to the polls. The online polls they did right after the debates. And I think I’m doing the same thing.”

He added that only a “natural disaster” could deter him from sparring against Clinton. A disaster like his campaign?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump “ran virtually parallel campaigns on Monday as they geared up for the final stretch of the presidential race. She made nice with the news media by opening up her campaign plane and chatting with reporters. He followed suit, inviting a smaller group of reporters onto his plane and answering questions during the 30-minute flight,” the New York Times reports.

“She took along her running mate, and so did he, as both focused on Ohio and nearly crossed paths in Cleveland. Their motorcades all but passed each other, and all four candidates’ planes ended up on the tarmac at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport at the same time.”

A must-read piece from Paul Krugman, who says Hillary is getting Gored:

Americans of a certain age who follow politics and policy closely still have vivid memories of the 2000 election — bad memories, and not just because the man who lost the popular vote somehow ended up in office. For the campaign leading up to that end game was nightmarish too.

You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.

Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore’s mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.

And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it’s happening again.

Good. The world is a better place because it has a little less hate in it today. I don’t know where she went, but I am glad she is no longer here.

Josh Marshall to the press: You Failed, Chumps

The Times uniquely, though only as a leading example for the rest of the national press, has a decades’ long history of being lead around by rightwing opposition researchers into dead ends which amount to journalistic comedy – especially when it comes to the Clintons. But here, while all this is happening we have a real live specimen example of direct political and prosecutorial corruption, misuse of a 501c3 nonprofit and various efforts to conceal this corruption and the underlying corruption of Trump’s ‘Trump University’ real estate seminar scam. It’s all there – lightly reported here and there – but largely ignored.

The core information here isn’t new and it’s definitely not based on my reporting. Much of it stems form the on-going and seemingly indefatigable work of Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold who’s been chronicling Trump’s long list of non-existent or promised but non-existent charitable contributions. In this case, it goes to a $25,000 contribution Trump made to the reelection campaign of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013. The neglected story has only popped up again now because Trump was penalized by the IRS for a relatively technical part of the corrupt act.

This first problem was elementary and obvious, probably stemming from Trump’s almost pathological cheapness. He made the campaign contribution from his Foundation. This part is straightforward. You can’t do that.

But then, as Fahrenthold details, Trump or however was handling the paperwork went to great lengths to conceal the improper contribution. In this case, the efforts to conceal the contributions from the relevant federal authorities is a much bigger deal than the underlying offense since the initial contribution could conceivably have been made by someone in Trump’s organization who didn’t realize that funds couldn’t be commingled in this way. The first step could have been based in ignorance or haste; the second clearly stems from bad faith and possibly criminal intent.

Except for Putin. And that horrible Trumpian Phillipine President.

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