Open Thread for Wednesday, September 14, 2016

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign, heavy on attacks against Donald Trump, has concluded that it hasn’t done enough to telegraph a positive message, and plans a series of speeches aimed at defining her vision for the presidency,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “With the November election fast approaching, the campaign also is seeking to demonstrate that she would lead in a bipartisan manner, a quality that could draw independents and Republicans to her cause.”

Can't a girl have a sick day or two? https://t.co/KlilMdU8GP

— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) September 12, 2016

Washington Post: “The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner. For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation. Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money. In two cases, he has used money from his charity to buy himself a gift. In one of those cases — not previously reported — Trump spent $20,000 of money earmarked for charitable purposes to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself. Money from the Trump Foundation has also been used for political purposes, which is against the law.”

“Five times, the Trump Foundation’s tax filings described giving a specific amount of money to a specific charity — in some cases, even including the recipient’s address. But when the Washington Post called, the charities listed said the tax filings appeared wrong. They’d never received anything from Trump or his foundation.”

PRESIDENT
VIRGINIA–PPP–Clinton 50, Trump 42

Deplorable is too nice a word for these fucks.

Yes. He has a vast and documented history of lying.

“The presidential election map is undergoing a fundamental change, with shifts that will make it easier for Democrats to win not only in 2016 but also for years to come,” McClatchy reports.

“Driving the change are two demographic trends: The share of Hispanic and under-30 voters, who favor Democrats in big numbers, is growing significantly in states that in the last decade were decent bets to vote Republican.”

“Colorado, Nevada and Pennsylvania illustrate how the demographic changes are giving Hillary Clinton an electoral advantage Democrats are unlikely to lose anytime soon. Clinton leads in Pennsylvania and Colorado, which for years were regarded as swing states, and she has a polling edge in Nevada.”

In May, Donald Trump thought the Federal Reserve handled interest rates exactly right, NBC News reports. Said Trump: “Right now I am for low interest rates, and I think we keep them low.”

Yesterday, he said Fed chair Janet Yellen’s interest rate decisions proved she was “obviously not independent” and is out to help Democrats: “It’s staying at zero because she’s obviously political and she’s doing what Obama wants her to do. And I know that’s not supposed to be the way it is, but that’s why it’s low.”

Bill Schneider: “What happens to high-income voters who are well-educated? Sociologists call them ‘cross-pressured,’ meaning pulled in different directions. If they vote their interests, they vote Republican. If they vote their values, they vote Democratic.”

“Way back in 1896, Democrats nominated the whole populist package: William Jennings Bryan, an economic radical, religious fundamentalist and foreign policy isolationist. Bryan’s candidacy turned off cosmopolitan America. He did well in rural America and the South, but lost the fast-growing, urbanizing and industrializing states that were attracting immigrants. Democrats nominated Bryan three times (1896, 1900 and 1908). Each time he did worse. Democrats became the nation’s minority party for 36 years.”

“With Trump as their standard-bearer, Republicans may be inviting a similar fate. They are becoming the party of declining America. Democrats are becoming the educated cosmopolitan party.”

Incomes in the U.S. surged in 2015, delivering the first increase for family households in eight years, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The median annual household income—the level at which half are above and half are below—rose 5.2% from a year earlier, or $2,800, after adjusting for inflation, to $56,500… The boost leaves household incomes around 1.6% below the 2007 level, before the last recession began.”

Thanks Obama.

Brian Beutler on why the media is botching this election:

The press is not a pro-democracy trade, it is a pro-media trade. By and large, it doesn’t act as a guardian of civic norms and liberal institutions—except when press freedoms and access itself are at stake. Much like an advocacy group or lobbying firm will reserve value judgments for issues that directly touch upon the things they’re invested in, reporters and media organizations are far more concerned with things like transparency, the treatment of reporters, and first-in-line access to information of public interest, than they are with other forms of democratic accountability.

That’s not a value set that’s well calibrated to gauging Trump’s unmatched, omnidirectional assault on our civil life. Trump can do and say outrageous things all the time, and those things get covered in a familiar “did he really say that?” fashion, but his individual controversies don’t usually get sustained negative coverage unless he is specifically undermining press freedom in some clear and simple way.

Even then, though, the press has no language for explicating which affronts to press freedom are more urgent and dangerous than others. All such affronts are generally lumped together in a way that makes it unclear whether the media thinks it’s worse that Trump blacklists outlets and wants to sue journalists into penury or that Clinton doesn’t like holding press conferences.

The result is the evident skewing of editorial judgment we see in favor of stories where media interests are most at stake: where Clinton gets ceaseless scrutiny for conducting public business on a private email server; Trump gets sustained negative coverage for several weeks when his campaign manager allegedly batters a reporter; where Clinton appears to faint, but the story becomes about when it was appropriate for her to disclose her pneumonia diagnosis; where because of her illness, she and Trump will both be hounded about their medical records, and Trump will be further hounded for his tax returns—but where bombshell stories about the ways Trump used other people’s charity dollars for personal enrichment have a hard time breaking through.

Jeet Heer on the sexist speculation about Hillary’s health.

On Monday, on the podcast Keeping It 1600, former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett astutely analyzed Trump’s strategy:

Trump’s bet has been “I can paint her as weak and vulnerable. Part of that will be making things up about her health because I have an old-fashioned notion of masculinity. Presidents should look and act like men do in some old-fashioned macho kind of way.” That’s a bet. I agree that it will ultimately not pay off but I don’t think you can totally dismiss that there won’t be people affected by that.

Focusing on Clinton’s supposed frailty is a continuation of Trump’s exploitation of gender norms, seen earlier in the primaries both in his assertions of his own masculinity (assuring debate watchers of the size of his penis) and also in his emasculation of his rivals, especially his jibes about “low energy” Jeb Bush and “Little Marco” Rubio. Trump’s oft-expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin is another facet of the Republican nominee’s cult of manliness: The Russian president, who’s fond of being photographed bare-chested in the outdoors, is a strongman in more ways than one. Trump is selling the promise that he, too, is brimming with testosterone, unlike the wasting-away Clinton.

The health of both Clinton, 68, and Trump, 70, are legitimate issues worthy of exploration. The presidency is a demanding job, after all. To date, Clinton has released a relatively detailed two-page letter from her doctor that divulged her drug prescriptions, cholesterol levels, and various diagnoses over the years. Trump released a four-paragraph letter that his doctor wrote in five minutes and declared, in language that sounded a lot like Trump himself, “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary…. If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Jonathan Chait on Republicans’ claims that Hillary will be Obama’s third term: YES PLEASE!!

Today’s Census report reveals that real (that is, inflation-adjusted) median income rose 5.2 percent in 2015 — the fastest rate recorded in any years since the Census began recording such data almost 50 years ago. The gains were spread up and down the income spectrum, with lowest-earning households enjoying the biggest increase:

These numbers only go through last year. Presumably another year of continued low unemployment will see continued income growth.

It is almost impossible to overstate how thoroughly this data nullifies the central charges made against the administration’s policies. The left-wing version of the economic stagnation claim charges that Obama’s program has failed at the root level, allowing the rich to hoover up all the gains and doing almost nothing for the suffering masses. The more popular right-wing version argues that, whatever social benefits Obama has purchased — 20 million more insured, strict new regulations on Wall Street, lower greenhouse gas emissions — they have come at a terrible and unacceptable price. Obama’s big-government agenda has snuffed out the entrepreneurial genius of American capitalism, dooming its people to endless stagnation, unless and until Paul Ryan can liberate them from stifling taxes and regulation. These sweeping philosophical arguments hinged in large measure on a now-moot statistical artifact.