In an interview on Australian television, famed entertainer Barbra Streisand, a life long Democrat and supporter of Hillary Clinton, said that she will move down under if the Republican wins the presidency in November.
“I’m either coming to your country, if you’ll let me in, or Canada,” Streisand said.
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You do realize that this will be the last week that food stores will be listing summer fruits, vegetables and other items in their sales flyers, right? After Labor Day it will suddenly be soup, oatmeal and cold/flu medicine time even though it’s likely to be near 80 degrees where most of us live. Such are the vagaries of the seasons and the need to sell stuff.
But it also means that the political races will turn for home as people return to work after a vacation, if they can afford it, and politicians return to their capitals for a fleeting moment of relevance before spending full time campaigning. For all the talk about how this year was going to see a different campaign with different rules, it has been a remarkably stable presidential race, and the Senate is coming down to a few important races to see if the Democrats can take control of the chamber. Donald Trump has changed the tenor of the campaign somewhat, but most of what he’s done has not helped him and I can’t see future races taking serious notes from his playbook.
At this point, the polling for the presidential race shows that Hillary Clinton has a solid lead that hasn’t really changed much since the Democratic Convention in July. According to the RealClearPolitics national average, she has a 6 point lead as of today and is ahead in enough states to garner 272 electoral votes if the election was held today. Which it is not. Other state polling sites like electoral-vote.com, the Princeton Election Consortium, and Electionprojection.com show Hillary with a bigger lead.
Most polling shows Trump with about 42% of the national vote, and that has been his ceiling since July. If anything, this is his biggest problem. He will somehow need to expand his appeal significantly if he is to seriously challenge Hillary over the next month, before the first debate on September 26. This will likely be his last chance to help himself since most research says that the first debate is the most important for possibly changing people’s minds.
Of course, this all presupposes that Trump’s potential pivot on immigration doesn’t cause him to lose support from his base, or that something overly consequential is lurking in Clinton’s email server or that we are attacked at home or abroad. Enjoy the last quiet week of August. Next week the real show begins
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
The day after Donald Trump and a bunch of black pastors met, one of those pastors joined Morning Joe on MSNBC to talk about the meeting they had with Trump and the policies they discussed.
Host Mika Brzezinski began the interview by asking the pastor if Donald Trump has anything to do with the deplorable race relations in America. She asked him about Trump’s recent fight with a Federal Judge of Mexican descent, and asked the pastor if he thought Trump’s claims about the judge was racist.
The pastor apparently took offense to this question and he looked visible annoyed when he answered that he knows all about racism because he is “a black man from the deep south.” An answer that had nothing to do with Mika’s question about Trump, but… okay!
Then Rev. Al Sharpton took the banton from Mika, informing the pastor that, “we lose the moral imperative if we start saying that something that is green, is red.” Rev. Al went on to ask the pastor, “what is the policy” of Mr. Trump that will help blacks and other minorities if he becomes president?
For the next 11 minutes, the interview rambled on with other members of the panel asking for Trump’s policies, but getting nothing from Pastor Burns, an avid and outspoken Trump supporter.
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Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show has done it again! Using some of Donald Trump’s favorite adjectives and the biglyness of a make-up team, Fallon transformed himself into the Republican presidential candidate. Joined by superstar Barbra Streisand, the two joined in a rendition of Anything You Can Do.
Must see video, and must see how accurate the eye makeup is for the donald!
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Donald Trump called her a bigot, among other things. But when Clinton addressed Trump’s racism today, Trump and his followers cried foul! Apparently, what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander.
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If there was one policy you thought Donald Trump wiuld be consistent with, it was his stance on immigration.
When he announced his candidacy over a year ago, shipping immigrants back to their country was Trump’s number one talking point, and he rode that talking point all the way to his party’s nomination. He would balk at his supporters at rallies telling of his deport all immigrants plan and his supporters would happily applaud in anticipation of finally getting their country back.
But all things come to an end apparently and Trump has jumped off his gravy train choosing instead to flip-flop on his most sacred issue.
Clearly motivated by his sagging poll numbers in the general election, Trump tried to con voters his way during an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, by softening his immigration stance. The Republican businessman/politician told his followers that his plan to ship people out if the country was basically illegal, and that he would now “follow the laws” instead.
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You know it was all political. Donald Trump’s visit to the flood areas of Baton Rouge last week had nothing to do with the truckload of supplies he brought, but everything to do with the upcoming election and the fact that the sitting president, Barack Obama, had not made a personal visit to the Louisiana.
Yes, the President has sent other members of his administration to inspect the damages and yes, Mr. Obama has made the necessary emergency declarations, thus clearing the way for federal funds to the state. It should also be noted that the decision to postpone the president’s visit to a later date was done by the local government. But Trump’s political stunt worked and the uninformed people began asking, where is Obama? Why isn’t he here?
That question even made its way into the White House briefing. Asked if President Obama decided to go to Baton Rouge because of Donald Trump, Jay Carney appeared flustered as he shut down the reporter and his dumb question.
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Rudy Giuliani has said and done some stupid things in the past. And today was no exception. In an interview on Fox News, the former Republican mayor of New York offered his proof that Hillary Clinton is seriously ill, “go online” he said, “and take a look at the videos for yourself.”
“She doesn’t need to campaign,” the former New York City mayor, who has emerged as one of the Republican nominee’s most visible surrogates, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “She has the New York Times, she has the [New York] Daily News, she has ABC, she has CBS, she has NBC. She has an entire media empire that constantly demonizes Donald Trump and fails to point out that she hasn’t had a press conference in 300 days — 200 days, 100 days, I don’t know how long — and fails to point out several signs of illness by her.”
Fox News host Shannon Bream noted that the Clinton campaign has said “there’s nothing factual” to claims about her health.
“All you’ve got to do is go online,” Giuliani replied. “Go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness’ and take a look at the videos for yourself.”
The irony of Giuliani, the mayor of New York City during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, citing Internet videos to prove a conspiracy theory was not lost on some viewers.
The Clinton campaign has pushed back against conspiratorial claims about her health in recent days after fake medical records for the former secretary of state surfaced on right-wing websites.
“As Secretary Clinton’s longtime physician, I released a medical statement during the campaign indicating that she is in excellent health,” Lisa Bardack said in a statement released by the Clinton campaign on Thursday. “I have recently been made aware of allegedly ‘leaked’ medical documents regarding Secretary Clinton with my name on them. These documents are false, were not written by me and are not based on any medical facts. To reiterate what I said in my previous statement, Secretary Clinton is in excellent health and fit to serve as President of the United States.”
Which, of course, is an absolute lie, no matter who says it. But the fact that it was Donald Trump, all-of-a-sudden apologizing and blabbering on about how in the heat of a campaign he might have said some nasty things about, oh, African-Americans, women, Hispanics, judges, pollsters, Bush, Republicans etc., makes it doubly ironic and self-defeating.
This is the Trump Pivot; the moment in the campaign where he gets serious and presidential and wants to be judged by what he says from this point forward and for us lowly voters to forget what got him the Republican nomination in the first place. That would be hate, accusation, blame, xenophobia, denial, sexism and blaming the victim. The only thing that would make his standing worse in the eyes of many Americans is if he publicly insulted the family of a fallen United States soldier because of some ethnic slur or ignorant remark.
Oh, wait.
And then the first issue he publicized was Hillary Clinton’s health. Which turns out to be rather fine, thank you very much. And that came straight from her doctor. But I guess if you’re going to deny climate change, you might as well double down and dismiss all scientific inquiry. So go ahead and smoke, right?
There will be no Trump Pivot. His new Breitbart-led campaign will be the height of cynicism and chock full of the right’s 1990 greatest hits list, which includes the Clintons murdering Vincent Foster, trying to manipulate the money supply and all of the other untruths that the fringe has been dying to run on since 1994. Dump in a heavy dose of Benghazi and e-mails, and you pretty much have the Trump campaign’s tactics right in front of you. It’s the campaign the far right has wanted to run since the Reagan era began, but the party kept nominating politicians who actually had ideas. Not good ones, but actual governing experience. With Trump, they have their perfect front man–a huckster who only cares about spreading his name and enough ignorance to just say stuff and hope that it leads the news cycle.
The truth will unfortunately have to wait its turn, if it comes at all.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
These are the types of people advising Donald Trump… although… Trump had previously stated in an interviews that does not rely on advisers, he watches television for advise and advises himself…
Joseph Schmitz, named as one of five advisers by the Trump campaign in March, is accused of bragging when he was Defense Department inspector general a decade ago that he pushed out Jewish employees.
The revelations feed two themes that his opponent Hillary Clinton has used to erode Trump’s credibility: That he is a foreign policy neophyte, and that his campaign, at times, has offended Jews and other minorities.
Schmitz, who is a lawyer in private practice in Washington, says the allegations against him are lies. All three people who have cited the remarks, including one who testified under oath about them, have pending employment grievances with the federal government.
Daniel Meyer, a senior official within the intelligence community, described Schmitz’s remarks in his complaint file.
“His summary of his tenure’s achievement reported as ‘…I fired the Jews,’ ” wrote Meyer, a former official in the Pentagon inspector general’s office whose grievance was obtained by McClatchy.
Meyer, who declined to comment about the matter, cited in his complaint another former top Pentagon official, John Crane, as the source and witness to the remarks. Crane worked with Schmitz, who served as inspector general between April 2002 and September 2005.
Remember a few days ago when Donald Trump stood on stage and swore up and down that all was well in his campaign? That the campaign is the happiest it’s ever been? Well that too, was a lie.
Just hours after Donald Trump shook up his campaign leadership, installing the leader of a conservative blog site to run his campaign operations, Paul Manafort – the man who was responsible for turning Trump from a primary candidate to a general election candidate – sent in his resignation.
Trump issued a statement on Manafort’s resignation in which he said he was “very appreciative for his great work in helping us get to where we are today.” Trump in particular praised Manafort for getting Trump’s campaign through the “delegate and nomination process.”
Manafort, who saw his role as campaign boss diminished this week when Trump appointed Breitbart News boss Stephen Bannon as his new campaign CEO, has been taking fire after multiple reports have revealed his connections to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
Earlier this week, a leaked memo revealed that Ukrainian authorities have accused Manafort of organizing protests against a NATO military exercise in Ukraine on behalf of the pro-Russian Party of Regions. One American soldier who was in Ukraine at the time revealed that protesters organized by Manafort threw rocks at NATO troops en route to the training exercise.
Former Bush official and former U.S Treasurer, Rosario Martin, said on Wednesday that although she is a Republican and worked in a Republican White House under George Bush, she will not be voting for the Republican candidate in 2016, but will instead vote for Hillary Clinton.
“I have disagreed with and criticized Hillary Clinton’s positions, but I have come to the conclusion that she would be a far better president than the Republican candidate could ever be,” Rosario Marin said.
“She understands that words spoken from the White House have consequences, that sarcasm is not a strategy when dealing with delicate world situations, that our friends and foes listen to every word spoken by our president and react accordingly,” Marin added.
“There is too much at stake both domestically and abroad to have a thoughtless individual at the helm of the most important economy in the world. My party and its standard-bearer leave me no choice; on November 8, I will vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Marin, who is Hispanic, said she could not tolerate GOP nominee Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and the Hispanics.
“I have come to the devastatingly painful realization that my party right now doesn’t want my vote nor that of my community,” she said. “Evidently it is not important, or not as important as some other voting bloc. So, for me to consider the unthinkable — to vote for a Democrat — has been a profound soul-searching process.
