Month: September 2016

Adelson Goes All-In For Trump

Buck Banks

$45 million

Amount conservative mega-donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, have committed so far to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and down-ballot Republicans’ attempt to control Congress, CNN reports. “The spending amounts to a historic investment in the Republican Party ticket’s hopes for November, putting millions of dollars behind Trump’s bid in a groundbreaking donation that could redefine the final two months of the 2016 campaign.”

Rubio Says Women Don’t Need the ERA

Trish

Good news, ladies! You might not have noticed it, but your rights in America are totally equal. Your protections are the same as men. Discrimination based on gender is over. Feels good, huh?

Apparently that’s what Sen. Marco Rubio thinks. When he was asked at a rally before he quit his race for president earlier this year if he would support the Equal Rights Amendment, Rubio guffawed. “That old thing?” he seemed to say in a newly released video. “That’s so 1979!”

In fact, efforts continue to this day to enshrine equal protection of rights for women in the United States Constitution.

Now Rubio is back in Florida, running for the U.S. Senate seat he virtually abandoned because he was so convinced America would elect him their president in November. Yet even as he campaigns, he won’t commit to serving the full term, lest he again decide America wants him more than Florida does. How Rubio has any support in his state, and any votes among those of us paying pink taxes is a mystery.

Trump Denounces Birtherism As a ‘Smear,’ Calls Birthers ‘Nasty,’ ‘Vicious and Conniving’

Jon Ponder

photo-angry-birherjpg

On Friday Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee for president, reluctantly admitted that the issue he’d used to launch his political career was a lie.

“Who should have been demanding answers about a nasty smear? If it’s bogus, nobody.”
– CNN host Michael Smerconish

“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” Trump said, in a sound bite at the end of 20-minute news conference at his new White-House adjacent hotel in Washington, D.C.

True to form, Trump refused to accept personal responsibility for the racially tinged falsehood that made him the darling of the GOP base, of course. Instead, he blamed someone else.

“She started it,” Trump said, in effect. Literally, he said, “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” which is a lie.

And then he told another lie. “I finished it,” he said. “I finished it.” In fact, after the president released his long-form birth certificate, Trump refused to acknowledge its authenticity.

Trump’s announcement was preceded on Thursday by a bizarre, amateurishly constructed statement issued by his campaign (but likely written by the candidate himself) that laid the groundwork for blameshifting the rise of birtherism onto Clinton. In doing so, however, Trump inadvertently excoriated the birther movement and the 61 percent of his own followers who believe the president is foreign-born and thus ineligible to be president.

In the statement, he called birtherism a “smear” and an “ugly incident,” and described those who peddle it as “very nasty” and “vicious and conniving.”

[…]

Donald Trump, Ex-Birther

Buck Banks

Not to mention her in the same breath but Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America great again.

— Donald Trump, reversing himself and acknowledging the fact that President Obama was born in the United States, the AP reports.

Trump Could Win

Buck Banks

If you aren’t seriously contemplating the biggest black-swan event in American electoral history, you aren’t paying attention. … Fifteen months ago, Donald Trump was a reality-TV star with a spotty business record and a weird penchant for proclaiming he was on the verge of running for president. Now, he’s perhaps a few big breaks and a couple of sterling debate performances away from being elected 45th president of the United States. … And, no, stranger things haven’t happened.

— Rich Lowry

Hillary Stuck in a Bubble

Buck Banks

For all the public grind of this campaign, for all her public presence on the world stage over the past two decades, Clinton herself has increasingly spent her days in a kind of purdah, suppressing spontaneous utterances and surrounded by loyalists whose chief role is her care and feeding. She communicates only through a veil of unyielding self-protection, surrounded by a curtain of defensiveness. … So nowadays, almost no one outside Clinton’s innermost circle ever sees the tender side that loyal aides and friends insist is such a palpable part of her personality, but I can attest that it is there.

— Todd Purdum

Older White Voters Could Win Florida for Trump

Buck Banks

12.4 million

Number of active registered voters in Florida, more than 3.3 million of whom are older than 65, making it the largest age group on the rolls (followed by those 50 to 64). The elderly also have the highest turnout rate in Florida, Politico reports. “Without the backing of older whites, polls indicate Trump would lose Florida — in this retirement mecca, the elderly are still a force at the ballot box. … But at its core, the race is about race, about motivating white versus non-white voters. The whiter the electorate, the likelier it is Trump wins. And older whites are keeping Trump in the hunt. … When it comes to race, non-Hispanic whites are 65 percent of the overall voter rolls and are the most-reliable voters.”