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“These power grabs highlight one of the most disturbing facts about American politics today: The Republican Party has become institutionally indifferent to the health of democracy. It prioritizes power over principle to such an extreme degree that it undermines the most basic functioning of democracy. … In the long run, the GOP’s turn against democracy could well be a greater threat to the American experiment than anything President Trump has done.”
75%
“Without the phony Russia Witch Hunt, and with all that we have accomplished in the last almost two years (Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judge’s, Military, Vets, etc.) my approval rating would be at 75% rather than the 50% just reported by Rasmussen.” — President Trump, claiming in a tweet that his approval rating would be 75% if it wasn’t for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. FiveThirtyEight has Trump’s average approval at just 41%.
58%
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds 58% of American voters agree with the scientific consensus — and disagree with President Trump — that climate change is being caused by human activity.
“Bush’s funeral was so powerful a renunciation of his current successor because it was a celebration of character. Friendship was invoked 21 times by his eulogists. Loyalty, 10. ‘Honor,’ ‘integrity,’ ‘dignity,’ ‘decency’ and inner peace all recurred. Certainly, Bush could be a fierce partisan and a brutal politician (remember Willie Horton?), but his service in World War II — he was shot down over the Pacific — left him with lessons that fueled his generation’s greatness: The opposition is not the enemy. There are causes greater than self. Political defeat is not the worst thing. And American leadership in the world is indispensable. … Trump, for whom no cause is greater than self, must have struggled to sit through 90 minutes of something that was not all about him. Rather, it was all about what he is not.”
500
“Lobbyists representing the Saudi government reserved blocks of rooms at President Trump’s D.C. hotel within a month of Trump’s election in 2016 — paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months,” the Washington Post reports. “The visits were part of an unorthodox campaign that offered veterans a free trip to D.C.– then sent them to Capitol Hill to lobby against a law the Saudis opposed.”
8.5%
The Cook Political Report shows that the Democratic lead in the U.S. House popular vote for the 2018 midterms is now up to 8.5%. Steve Benen: “For comparison purposes, note that in 2010 – which was widely seen as a GOP ‘wave’ cycle – Republicans won the U.S. House popular vote by 6.6%. In 1994, which was seen as a Republican ‘revolution,’ the GOP won the U.S. House popular vote by 7.1%.”
“The idea is to die young as late as possible.”
— Former President George W. Bush, quoted by the Washington Post, delivering the eulogy at his father’s funeral.
