Wednesday Open Thread [7.15.15]
LOL.
Meanwhile, Trumps gets absolutely destroyed by Hillary. 51-34. A 17 point biblical landslide that will ensure than no Republican is elected or reelected anywhere in this country.
Clinton 51, Trump 34
Clinton 46, Bush 42
Clinton 48, Walker 37
Clinton 49, Carson 36
Clinton 48, Paul 38
Clinton 46, Rubio 40
Clinton 49, Huckabee 40
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds Donald Trump’s popularity has surged among Republicans after dominating several news cycles with his anti-illegal immigration rhetoric.
“Nearly six in 10 — 57% — Republicans now have a favorable view of Trump, compared to 40% who have an unfavorable one. That marks a complete reversal from a late-May Post-ABC poll, in which 65% of Republicans saw Trump unfavorably.”
However, among Latino voters Trump’s unfavorability has risen to 81% from 60%. Words cannot express how DEVASTATING this is for the Republicans. They may even lose the House in the landslide that is coming.
Alex Seitz-Wald reports at MSNBC that Democratic presidential candidate former Sen. Jim Webb is crafting his pitch as a centrist, appealing to white working-class and southern white voters, while dissing Dems on the left. (Webb can go fornicate with himself).
But in his NYT Sunday Review article entitled “The Dream World of the Southern Republicans,” Howell Raines explains “…Republican officeholders live in a dream world where they think rhetoric and repetition will somehow cause minority voters and center-left whites to turn into Republican voters. Alarmed Republican political professionals warn that unless their candidates stop obstructing on health care and make progress on gender issues, the party will lose the White House in 2016 and in quadrennial spurts see its Southern hegemony dismantled by new voters in the New Sunbelt….The longer they take to get it, the greater the odds that multiethnic Democrats will finally break the Republican lock on the solidly red South.”
This President is no lame duck:
I came across the transcript recently of the president’s year-end press conference from December and this line stood out for me:
“My presidency is entering the fourth quarter; interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter. And I’m looking forward to it.”
He apparently wasn’t kidding. Have you noticed just how busy the president has been since the 2014 elections ostensibly ended his time in office?
I started sketching out some of Obama’s successes from the last nine months, and it quickly dawned on me how long the list is. Obviously, the nuclear agreement with Iran is foremost on everyone’s mind today, but since November 2014, it’s not the only foreign policy accomplishment. Obama also reached a climate agreement with China – a breakthrough few thought possible – and overhauled U.S. relations with Cuba, reversing decades of failure.
As if that weren’t enough, he also continued to shrink the prison population at Guantanamo Bay and freed American prisoners in North Korea.
Domestically, since November, Obama announced a major new immigration policy protecting millions of families, improved important new overtime rules, saw his Affordable Care Act withstand a court challenge and push the uninsured rate to all-time lows, and welcomed marriage equality to the entirety of the nation.
Amy Chozick at The New York Times provides a rundown of Hillary Clinton’s speech on the economy:
Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday blamed Republicans for “35 years” of policies that have exacerbated income inequality by giving “more wealth to those at the top” through tax cuts and corporate loopholes.
“Twice now in the past 20 years a Democratic president has had to come in and clean up the mess,” Mrs. Clinton said in New York, as she called for tax relief for middle-class families, an increase in collective bargaining and other incentives to raise middle-class wages.
“I believe we have to build a growth and fairness economy — you can’t have one without the other,” she said.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post explains what the focus on inequality means for her messaging against Republicans:
The biggest advantage Clinton may have in this debate is that as a Democrat, she believes that government can take an active role in shaping the economy for people’s benefit. That means she can address a wide range of economic and workplace challenges and offer new ideas for how they might be confronted, whether it’s paid sick leave or Wall Street regulation or early childhood education.
You can argue that these ideas are good or bad, but she’ll have many more of them than Republicans will. Because Republicans think government’s role should be far more limited, they have much less to offer on those specific questions. They’d rather not have a debate on things like sick leave, because their default answer — just get out of the way and let the market work its magic — sounds like they don’t want to fix the problem.
Greg Sargent says that Republican shrieking over the Iran deal increase the likelihood that 2016 will be the rare elections in which foreign policy is a reasonably big deal. But he suggests that’s a debate Democrats should “lean into” rather than running scared like little cowards like they did in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s.
[T]he argument that develops around the agreement may also take shape around the virtues and risks of international engagement. And this could join other issues to feed into a broader contrast, in which Republicans are opposing international engagement on multiple fronts — including Cuba and climate change (on which we may have an accord later this year). Meanwhile, Clinton may well embrace international engagement on multiple fronts, and use this contrast to cast the GOP as too inward looking and trapped in the past to confront the challenges of the future.
For those of you who support late term abortions, unfortunately, this is what you contribute to.
http://www.lifenews.com/2015/07/14/rick-perry-and-carly-fiorina-slam-planned-parenthood-for-selling-body-parts-of-aborted-babies/
DelDem-
Why on earth would you think a USA Today (or any other Gannett pulbication) would publish an accurate poll?
Gannett Co. (along with other “consolidators” and “conglomerators”) have ruined the newspaper industry. These people think a rich lady getting a man-made gemstone instead of a naturally occuring gemstone constitutes front page news and Jeebus knows how many poorly edited column inches. Fuck them with a sharp stick, and don’t believe ANYTHING they say, even if what the say supports your opinion.
It figures that those dopes Perry and Fiorina were taken in by that sham video that was debunked two minutes after it turned up.
I don’t agree with the rational behind Bruce(Caitlyn) Jenner receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. His gender change has more to do with his personal choices and politics rather than sport. Where is the courage? All I have seen is that he/she is now receiving all the accolades and attention usually reserved for Kim and Kanye.
There are athletes out there that are far more deserving of this award, and who would have had life changing benefits from it.
Instead ESPN has opted for hype, publicity, and political correctness. It’s all about the money isn’t it.
Courage takes many forms. At the heart of it, I think courage is doing what you know to be right when the right thing is also the most difficult – least likely to “pay off” or end well. Doing what needs to be done, saying what needs to be said at some cost: the higher the potential losses, the more courageous.
By that standard I don’t think I’ve been very courageous throughout my life, so I’m not the one to pass judgement on whether or not Jenner is courageous. But I can see that Jenner, because of her celebrity status, doesn’t seem to have paid a very high price for her activism. So I agree, to some extent with fightingbluehen’s rambling shambling, stupidly worded comment.
But I can see that Jenner, because of her celebrity status, doesn’t seem to have paid a very high price for her activism.
I wonder how you know what price Jenner has paid for her activism or anything else, really.
FBH’s fundamental problem is in thinking that the ESPN award is about anything other than a ratings opportunity for ESPN.
“I wonder how you know what price Jenner has paid for her activism or anything else, really.”
Good point. The subtext of my comment was that I should probably just shut up. That should have been the super-text.
Yeah,we shouldn’t judge. There is a certain amount of courage in going about your daily search for publicity even though, just a few months ago, you crashed your toy ladened suv into the back of some woman’s car, and it resulted in her death.
@Rusty: It’s already been revealed as a heavily edited bit of fiction. You’re apparently the target audience.
Bruce Jenner was a fucked-up jerk. Is there any reason I should think Cait Jenner isn’t?
Alas… Some small part of me hoped my comment would cause a little self-reflection on FBH’s behalf. I’m sure he’s risked a great deal in pursuit of the courageous middle class white guy lifestyle.
It has nothing to do with me or my “middle class white guy lifestyle”. It has to do with people who actually deserve this award.
And the self-reflection part? Well, as far as sports go, I’ve seen some shit, and we’ll leave it at that.
Basically it’s about the kind of athletes that ESPN passed over in exchange for ratings.
It’s a fucking ESPY, brother, not a Nobel Medal. The entire thing is made-for-TV by ESPN. The fact that anyone even has an opinion is indicative of a great deal.
I’ll give you that one.
Tell you what though. There could have been some sick or disabled athlete out there, or just someone that had to overcome all kinds of obstacles to reach their athletic goals,who could have used that award.
“Tell you what though. There could have been some sick or disabled athlete out there, or just someone that had to overcome all kinds of obstacles to reach their athletic goals,who could have used that award.”
Which apparently is not what the award is for.
Look at the winners for the past 4 years.
We should applaud the ESPYs for recognizing SOMETHING, anything, that goes beyond the idolization of the jockocracy.
….and here you go.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3163299/Caitlyn-Jenner-s-reps-demanded-ESPYs-award-exchange-PR-plugs-Diane-Sawyer-interview.html
OH MY GOSH! you mean a SPORTZ award isn’t a, like, totes serious and honorable thing?
No surprise, perhaps, but Jenner has been trying to cash in on the Olympics victory for a long, long time. The Daily Mail story simply underlines the scorn from Bob Costas.