This is just a casual observation, but it doesn’t really help all that much for CNN to disclose that their new employee, Corey Lewandowski, is receiving severance payments from Donald Trump. Nor does it fix matters to let the viewers know that Lewandowski will be chairing the New Hampshire delegation at the Republican National Convention. That’s just basically warning people that the opinions they’re about to hear are not only biased but restricted by contractual obligations that prevent Lewandowski from freely discussing the campaign he managed through the primaries. What it doesn’t explain is why these opinions will be valuable or informative rather than banal and misleading.
Even if Lewandowski hadn’t narrowly avoided prosecution for committing battery against a Breitbart news reporter, and even if he hadn’t generally exhibited thuggish behavior toward the press during his time as Trump’s campaign manager, it still would be highly questionable to hire him as an analyst.
The fact that CNN now feels compelled to spend nearly as much time with disclaimers as they spend airing Lewandowski’s opinions is all the proof you need that they made a terrible decision in hiring him in the first place.
Good for Fox. They know that the disclosure on Lewandowski doesn’t impinge on their viewers brains. What it does do is lower the bar on when media should make such disclosures. This is throwing down the gauntlet for CNN, MSNBC, NYTimes, etc. that frequently omit such disclosures.
Oops — that should have been “good for CNN.” They must have some reason to suspect that their viewers won’t be bothered by the disclosure. Now we’ll have to wait and see if CNN follows its own standard wrt to others they feature or it’s merely a stunt to give it a gloss of honesty.
CNN devolved into infotainment several years ago, didn’t it? About the time the Malaysian airplane vanished over the Indian Ocean and they were broadcasting wacky conspiracy mongering 24/7….
Yes, Clinton is sinking in the polls. No, you should not panic. Here’s why.
Beyond the fact that Clinton still holds a lead after getting hit by sustained awful coverage, note that Trump has not hit 43 percent since last winter, and has not hit 42 percent since the spring. He remains at around 40 percent right now. Meanwhile, Clinton has fluctuated, hitting highs of 48 percent and 47 percent several times. She’s sliding now, but as Deace noted, that may reflect current negative information about her now bombarding voters. It could reverse again, just as it has in the past.
This basic difference isn’t just evident in the national polls. Mark Murray and the First Read Crew took a hard look at the multiple state polls released yesterday (which also prompted a freak-out), and concluded that while Trump is closing the gap, there is also this crucial point:
These polls — which mostly show Clinton either ahead or tied in these battlegrounds — were all taken during or after Clinton’s roughest week of the general election, with FBI Director James Comey’s rebuke over her emails. So you could view these battleground numbers as a floor for Clinton, while Trump is still unable to break 40% in many of these states.
This core dynamic is central to how Democrats view this race. They have undertaken a concerted effort to drive up Trump’s negatives with the explicit goal of preventing him from expanding his appeal. That’s why the pro-Clinton Super PAC, Priorities USA, has been pumping many millions of dollars of ads into the battleground states, ads that use Trump’s own words and antics to sow deep doubts about his temperament and fitness to be president.
The goal is to prevent Trump, whose campaign is all about winning blue collar whites in the industrial Midwest, from making inroads among college educated whites, which would limit the potential of Trump’s strategy of courting white backlash. (This may also drive up turnout and Clinton’s vote share among nonwhite voters, which would make the white-backlash strategy even tougher to pull off.) Polls suggest Trump may end up being the first GOP nominee in decades to lose among college educated whites — see Ron Brownstein’s terrific analysis on this point — and Democrats are targeting suburban and Republican women in particular to try to make this happen.
As Paul Begala, a senior adviser to Priorities USA, put it to me in an interview: “Trump wants to build a wall. I want to build a ceiling.”
Now, it is of course very possible that Trump will begin to rise, or that Clinton will continue falling. Things could change once Team Trump starts spending big on ads and Team Clinton’s ad barrage no longer goes unanswered. But the point is that, even if it is true that Clinton is sliding, there is still no evidence that Trump can expand his appeal in the manner he needs to. And that’s why senior Democratic pollsters are not terribly alarmed and believe we can’t really have a clear sense of where this race is going until the conventions have passed. We will learn whether Trump really can consolidate moderate Republicans who may be struggling to come to terms with him, and grow.
Meanwhile, the efforts to keep that ceiling firmly affixed in place are continuing today, with a new Clinton ad campaign.
This is one of those moments where I’m just totally baffled. Why did they hire this guy?
I’m not lacking in cynicism — I don’t need to be told how corrupt they are, or who owns them, or what their agenda is. I know all that. It’s a deeper question — Just, like, What was the fucking point? What did they think was going to happen that would be of any conceivable benefit to anyone in any way connected to CNN?
Why did they hire this guy?
Because Jeff Zucker is a human dumpster fire?
To bad that CNN does not just admit they made a very bad decision when they hired Corey Lewandowski and then fire him. I would be more inclined to believe and watch CNN if they just acted honestly about this matter. As it stands I currently do not watch them.
New cabinet may signal Britain’s retreat as a Western power
By Anne Applebaum July 14 at 8:43 AM
In fact, I get the logic. Theresa May’s first set of appointments — Liam Fox will become minister for international trade, David Davis will run the exit negotiations, and Boris Johnson will be foreign secretary — make a lot of sense. She has put hard-line Brexit proponents in charge of negotiating Britain’s retreat from European politics. It will be impossible, from now on, for anyone to argue that voters were cheated. If these three men can’t manage the United Kingdom’s divorce proceedings, then nobody can.
At the same time, May has deftly eliminated an obvious source of internal disharmony. Like Barack Obama appointing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, she has given her potentially most damaging critic a huge task that will prevent him from writing nasty articles in the Daily Telegraph. Johnson, bored and sidelined, would have had plenty of time to think up jokes about her and her government; now he’ll be on a plane to Timbuktu instead.
But May’s choices also suggest a more profound change, visible for some time but only just now swimming into focus: Britain, or at least Tory Britain, no longer aspires to be a leading Western power. Surely May knows that Johnson is a hated figure in Brussels. Surely she guessed that the reaction to his appointment would be laughter in Washington. But she doesn’t care because — like the leaders of all small countries without aspirations to international leadership — her concerns are more parochial. She doesn’t need a foreign secretary who is taken seriously in foreign capitals.
this certainly deserves nomination for wanker of the day. Yecch! “Britain no longer aspires to be a leading Western power”.
Meaning, no longer a reliable supporter of bad American ideas, and no longer willing to spend vastly more on their military than is called for by any reasonable definition of “defense”.
I don’t really have a position on Brexit but if it contributes to this outcome then that is a good thing. After all, being part of the EU didn’t stop the UK from joining our foreign adventures.
Bernie sanders and his much-maligned supporters are going to save the country from Trump.
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/26/donald-trumps-bad-month-just-got-worse-bec
ause-bernie-backers-just-rallied-to-clinton
A lot of the https:// links don’t seem to work as direct links, but if you just copy them and paste them into your address box, you’ll get there.
OK, try it now.
https:/duckduckgo.com?q=donald-trumps-bad-month-just-got-worse-because-bernie-backers-just-rallied
-to-clinton&t=ffab&ia=web
Sorry, that wasn’t right either. Here, this should work.
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/26/donald-trumps-bad-month-just-got-worse-bec
ause-bernie-backers-just-rallied-to-clinton
Internet’s getting too damn complicated.
At GOP convention, toy guns are banned, but real guns are not
07/14/16 10:00 AM
By Steve Benen
Four years ago, as Republicans were getting ready for their national convention in Tampa, Mayor Bob Buckhorn worked with law-enforcement officials to create as safe an environment as possible, including a ban on items that might be considered security threats. As we discussed at the time, that meant people outside the convention would face restrictions on things like water pistols and placards.
Under Florida law, however, officials couldn’t prohibit people from carrying real guns around the convention site, even if they wanted to. Tampa’s mayor asked Gov. Rick Scott (R) to use his discretion and make an exception to the state law in the interest of security and public safety. Scott refused.
Four years later, the Wall Street Journal reports on an eerily similar situation.
Can’t argue with that.
on a related topic Luke Russert is leaving NBC News on Friday
Terror attack in France. God help us if is an immigrant from an Islamic Country.
The move the Manchurian Candidate suggested that the far left and far right needed each other.
There is a relationship between Islamic Fundamentalism and Right Wing Conservatism (though they are not moral equivalents.)
Make no mistake, these attacks are an opportunity for Trump.
If they continue Trump is going to win.
Lorry driver a French citizen from Nice – Tunisian descent.
○ French President Hollande’s barber ‘makes €10,000 a month’, sworn to secrecy
Must include some barberic advice …
The wrong state to have an accident
Obamacare was supposed to improve health care equality. But for some people, state politics has made the problem much worse.
By Rachana Pradhan
07/13/16 04:55 AM EDT
ASHLAND CITY, TENN. — In December 2014, Donnie Gene Rippy fell off a roof while shooing away ducks, breaking his back and too many bones to count. He underwent four surgeries to fix his shoulder, wrists and vocal cords.
Rippy, a brick mason, had the misfortune to be uninsured. But his bad luck was compounded by where his accident happened. If he had lived about 50 miles north–that is, anywhere over the Kentucky border–he wouldn’t have to rely on ibuprofen and occasional cortisone shots from a local health department for his persistent back and knee pain. Chances are good he would also have gotten treatment for the memory and mood issues that developed after the fall. And he wouldn’t be mired in more than $60,000 in medical debt.
Kentucky and Tennessee are similar in many ways: geography, demographics, income. But in 2013, the governor of Kentucky embraced the Affordable Care Act, expanding Medicaid coverage to tens of thousands of low-income families. Tennessee did not. As a result, about 280,000 Tennesseans, people like Rippy, don’t have access to the free or low-cost health care enjoyed by their neighbors to the north.
“We’re all in the United States, but yet you have some states that have the Medicaid part of it and some states decided not to take it,” said Rippy’s partner, Betty Batey. “I just don’t think that’s fair.”
○ Aaron David Miller on ‘Jews and Power’ – May 8, 2008
○ Why U.S. diplomacy can’t fix the Middle East by David Aaron Miller on June 3rd 2016
○ Clinton’s AIPAC-affiliated Mideast staffers, among them Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller
From my diary – 77 Deaths: Horrible Attack In Nice on Quatorze Juilliet.
Donald Trump postpones his press conference on VP pick …
○ Donald Trump Postpones VP Announcement Due to Deadly ‘Attack’ in Nice | ABC News |