PoliticalWire: “Shortly after the nation’s latest mass shooting, which killed at least 18 children at an elementary school in Texas, the California Senate passed a bill Tuesday to allow private citizens to file suit for at least $10,000 — a bounty-hunter provision modeled on a Texas abortion law — against makers or sellers of untraceable ghost guns or illegal assault weapons,” the [paywalled] San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Event canceled due to emergency in Trump’s baseIt wasn’t surprising to hear that Trump was targeting disaster relief funds earmarked for victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the wildfires in California. After all, Hillary Clinton won handily in both those places in 2016 and punishing them by taking away desperately needed funding is exactly the kind of mean-spirited, cold-hearted retribution we’ve come to expect from Trump.
But now evenFox News is reporting that Trump will also strip disaster recovery funds from two big states he won: Florida and Texas.
Hillary Clinton has expanded her already large lead over Donald Trump in California to 30 points, 58% to 28%, according to a new Field poll in California. “The poll, unsurprising in this heavily Democratic state, comes as Trump continues to assert that he can compete with Clinton in the general election in California.”
Site of the Trump Baja resort; inset: Ivanka Trump and her father
After winning a behind-the-scenes power play in which she ousted campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Ivanka Trump has assumed a larger role in her father’s presidential campaign.
This change has heartened worried Republican elites. Ivanka’s public persona is a stark contrast from her father’s. He is a hotheaded, conspiracy-theory spouting vulgarian. She is poised and comes off as smart and cool. He is a world-class con artist. She seems to be squeaky clean.
But an investigation by the Los Angles Times into one Donald Trump’s many failed real estate ventures found that Ivanka, along with her brother, Donald Jr., played a supporting role in one of her father’s cons, a real estate deal in Baja, Mexico, that plundered the life savings of hundreds of unwitting condo buyers from Southern California.
According to the California Secretary of State, the number of Republicans registered to vote in the state is 4.7 million, or 27.5 percent of all registered voters. This is 200,000 fewer voters than the 4.9 million (28.8 percent) voters registered in other parties or as independents — and 2.8 million fewer than the 7.5 million registered Democrats, who comprise 43.7 percent of registered voters.
With the California primary just days away, 21 percent of Democrats and independents have already voted, and among them Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by 17 percentage points, 58 to 41 percent, according to polling from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. Clinton and Sanders are tied, 46 to 46 percent, among the 24 percent who plan to vote absentee. Among the remaining 55 percent who plan to vote in person next Tuesday, 50 percent say they plan to vote for Sanders and 47 percent will vote for Clinton.
The poll also finds that Clinton leads in Los Angeles, the state’s most populous and diverse area, 54 to 40 percent, which is perhaps not surprising — but she also leads 54 percent to 44 percent in the ultra-liberal Bay Area, which would seem to be Sanders country. Sanders is ahead in the inland/valley Red counties, 54 to 44 percent, and the coastal region, 58 to 36 percent.
In the general election, NBC/WSJ found Clinton beating Donald Trump by 24 points, 55 to 31 percent.
Hillary Clinton’s lead on Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, according to a new SurveyUSA poll in California. The results of the poll showed that Sanders continues to lead among the youngest voters, while Clinton leads by 12 points among voters age 35 to 49.
Thousands of people took to the streets in the annual May Day marches in downtown Los Angeles and Boyle Heights on Sunday to advocate for immigration reform, police accountability and an end to racism.
The diverse array of protesters shared one thing in common: all were offended by something Donald Trump had said. The Republican presidential candidate literally loomed over one of the rallies in the form of a giant balloon effigy carrying a Ku Klux Klan hood.
“He’s plastic, he doesn’t have a heart, he doesn’t have a brain,” organizer Francisco Moreno said, as he gestured at the swaying effigy. “We’re not going to vote for Trump!”
Donald Trump’s lead in the GOP presidential race in California, followed by Ted Cruz at 23% and John Kasich at 21%, according to a new Capitol Weekly/Sextant Strategies poll. “California is worth 172 delegates when it votes on June 7 — with the winner of each of the state’s 53 congressional districts receiving three delegates. The statewide winner receives 13 delegates. The Capitol Weekly/Sextant Strategies poll shows Trump winning in almost every corner of the state.”
Of California’s 17.2 million registered voters are members of the super-conservative American Independent Party. But, see, that “independent” part seems to be confusing people. A poll of 500 AIP members found 73 percent identified as having no party affiliation, according to The Los Angeles Times.
We’ve all been recruited to be on Madison Cawthorn Watch,
To keep up with when he’s lying or wearing lingerie and such.
It’s hard to take him seriously
When he just laughs deliriously,
When his friend videotapes his hand on Maddie’s crotch.
“Even if we cut some slack for Esper and all the others who served as honorably and conscientiously as they could until they were faced with either the dead end of resignation or being fired, the fact is that these men and women remained silent for far too long once they were out of government service. They held back important things that the American people and their elected representatives needed to know. They kept them as their own personal secrets, either out of some misplaced sense of bureaucratic propriety, or because they had a book deal and didn’t want to steal their own thunder from release day.”
“As Thomas settles into his fourth decade on the Supreme Court, his influence, even his control, is ascendant. Thomas began his career as a justice as a near outcast – an ideological fringe figure and a scarred veteran of a brutal confirmation fight. Today, he is a revered figure in the conservative movement, and he is watching ideas he championed from the margins turn into the law of the land.”
“Bill O’Reilly’s really talented. He’s more talented than I am… But I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick… built on perception that he is the character he plays… The moment that it’s revealed not to be true it’s over.”
— Tucker Carlson, on C-SPAN on September 13, 2003.
The percentage of roughly 450 total deadly political attacks in the United Sates committed by right-wing extremists in the past decade as counted by the Anti-Defamation League, according to the New York Times. The ADL found that 20 percent were committed by Islamic extremists and 4 percent by liberals.
“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, who refused to meet with the panel voluntarily,” the New York Times reports. “The committee’s leaders had previously been reluctant to issue subpoenas to their fellow lawmakers. That is an extraordinarily rare step for most congressional committees to take, though the House Ethics Committee, which is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by members, is known to do so.”
“In what may prove to be Florida’s last stand as a battleground state, Democrats are launching a $15 million voter organizing effort ahead of this year’s elections,” Politico reports. “Democratic candidates up and down the ballot — even those running in contested primaries — have agreed to pour in money that will be used to hire at least 200 organizers and open as many as 80 offices as part of a coordinated effort to pump up turnout across the state.”
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has dropped nearly 40 points among registered voters since 2020, when former Pres. Trump began packing the court with right-wing extremists. Overall confidence in the Court is down from 70 percent in September 2020 to 51 percent today. Among those who expressed no confidence in the court, the number has risen 19 points, from 7 percent in 2020 to 26 percent today.
Charles Gaba: “For the full year 2021, official Covid deaths ran more than three times higher in the reddest tenth of the U.S. than the bluest. This is something I’ve been tracking and writing about for nearly a year now, so while it’s pretty dramatic, it’s nothing new.” “What is new is the ‘other’ excess deaths in 2021: They ran a jaw-dropping twenty-one times higher in the reddest decile than the bluest… nearly 50 per 100K residents vs. only ~2.3 per 100K.”
