In the heat of a presidential campaign, you’d think that a story about one party’s nominee giving a large contribution to a state attorney general who promptly shut down an inquiry into that nominee’s scam “university” would be enormous news. But we continue to hear almost nothing about what happened between Donald Trump and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.
.. Trump paid a penalty to the IRS after his foundation made an illegal contribution to Bondi’s PAC.
.. And the comparison with stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation is extremely instructive. Whenever we get some new development in any of those Clinton stories, you see blanket coverage — every cable network, every network news program, every newspaper investigates it at length. And even when the new information serves to exonerate Clinton rather than implicate her in wrongdoing, the coverage still emphasizes that the whole thing just “raises questions” about her integrity.
.. The story of something like the Clinton Foundation gets stretched out over months and months with repeated tellings, always with the insistence that questions are being raised and the implication that shady things are going on, even if there isn’t any evidence at a particular moment to support that idea... The end result of this process is that because of all that repeated examination of Clinton’s affairs, people become convinced that she must be corrupt to the core. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day... But the truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering
- According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
.. the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.
No, the Battleground States Are Not a Terrific Fit for Donald Trump
For most of this conversation, we’ve been talking about the “white working class” as a single demographic category. But the white working class is fairly diverse. White working-class voters in Appalachia, for instance, have behaved very differently from those across the Northern tier in recent cycles (Obama lost a lot of ground in Appalachia, but did better than John Kerry or Al Gore in a place like Wisconsin). There was a fairly similar split with Trump in the primary. He did really well with white working-class voters in Appalachia and the industrial Midwest, but really struggled in places like Iowa and Wisconsin, or Vermont and Minnesota. So I wouldn’t be very surprised if it turned out that Trump made gains among white working-class voters nationally, but didn’t pick up much or anything in a state like Wisconsin.
.. I guess all I would say is that if Trump can’t be competitive in Ohio, he’s not going to even come close nationally, or in states like Virginia and Colorado.
.. Can Mr. Trump really win 40 percent of the Hispanic vote there again, especially after he went after home-state favorites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? Then factor in the rapid pace of demographic change and the extent that Obama already lost a ton of ground among older, white working-class voters in the state. Suddenly it’s really hard to figure out how Trump is going to win the closest battleground state from the last election, even if he fixes his problem with well-educated white voters nationally.
I think there’s a real case that Florida could save Democrats in a close election
.. Mitch Stewart, who served as battleground states director for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, said that Michigan was the state Democrats should worry most about being flipped.
.. I think a quick Hillary Clinton-Sanders unity tour through New Hampshire, Boulder, Ann Arbor and Madison wouldn’t be too surprising. I think Bill Clinton is probably at his best in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which is also where the Obama campaign tended to use him.
.. the Democratic advantage in the Electoral College would start to look pretty flimsy if the Republicans started to make further gains in the Upper Midwest instead of Appalachia.
Is Miami Beach Doomed? (Video)
Miami Beach could be underwater this century. The sea level around the tourist paradise has risen steadily in recent decades and flooding in the streets has become more frequent and severe. Most of the city sits just four to five feet above sea level, and on a foundation of porous limestone—making it especially susceptible to tidal flooding and surging oceans.
As experts predict the sea level to rise significantly in the coming years, the city of Miami Beach must decide how to keep itself afloat. This documentary examines how the city has taken unprecedented steps to save itself from the sea.