There’s no question that the Clinton email ‘scandal’ has become a major issue for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Not that it should necessarily but it has. It’s the focus of negative press stories that appear clearly to have at least helped pull down her favorability numbers nationwide. And yet at least the ‘classification’ aspect of it all turns on an administrative tug of war which occurred long after the emails were sent: should some information that was not considered classified at the time now be re-designated as classified? And if that happens, should Hillary be in trouble for discussing classified information on her personal email server by some sort of time warp logic because some government officials now think these documents should be classified differently.
If you’ve been paying attention to this pseudo-scandal you’re probably aware of all this. But now Reuters comes into the mix with an “exclusive” which dresses up the same basic issue in new clothes.
So in addition to being evil and civically awful, ending birthright citizenship would be an administrative nightmare that would actually require vastly more intrusive and complicated immigration bureaucracy and laws.
In case you missed it, my thoughts on the Associated Press pulling a New York Times by failing to come clean on its bogus Iran self-inspections story.
TPM is looking for a Fall polling intern for our New York office. Could that be you? See the full listing after the jump …
This is, quite honestly, a big deal. The opponents of the Iran nuclear deal are doing fairly well in the media-pundit-sphere. But they’ve had an extremely difficult time making substantive arguments against the deal because according to almost all technical experts it is about as tight and comprehensive and total a surveillance regime as we’ve ever seen. Ever. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon under any circumstances for 10 to 20 years. Unless they choose to cheat. And if they do, the U.S. and the international community will almost certainly catch them and catch them before they’re able to weaponize. But here’s the problem — that’s only the opinion of people who actually know what they’re talking about.
You have seen that two guys in South Boston beat up and urinated on what they believed to be a hispanic homeless man yesterday, citing Donald Trump as their inspiration. It’s an example of what over-the-top xenophobic borderline hate speech can lead to. But a candidate cannot be responsible for what every violent loser does in reaction to their campaign. What makes this story more than a sick oddity though is Trump’s reaction. When asked about it, he issued a mild condemnation before quickly pivoting to how “passionate” his supporters are to make America great again. Check it out.
Is the joke on us or are we all in on the joke? That’s the tension in reality TV and with the Trump campaign. And so it is when Time magazine flies in a bald eagle for Trump to pose with in his Manhattan office.
The former president will be discussing his cancer diagnosis. Watch.