After being pressed for a response through the day on the events over the weekend in Nevada, Sanders or the Sanders campaign has responded with a blistering reply which blames national party leaders, the rigged process and issues what I think amounts to an ultimatum. “If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November, it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect that they have earned.” The statement puts in about as bold a relief as I’ve seen so far the idea that it’s the Sanders campaign versus everyone else in the thrall of the 1%.
Democrats are clearly a bit spooked by the narrowing margin between Trump and Clinton. I’m also seeing a lot of chatter about Trump’s owning the campaign narrative and a bunch of similar stuff. I see things a bit different.
Donald Trump went to Twitter to complain that he was ‘misquoted’ in the new pro-Hillary Super Pac ad “Speak”. The ad is mainly about degrading comments about women. But it also includes him using the F-word. And he’s upset that it suggests he said that word about women. It may vaguely suggest that since it’s in the same ad. But it doesn’t remotely say that. What really strikes me here is that for all the storm of the last ten months, Trump is still really not used to getting any serious criticism. I suspect the Dems, if they’ve got a good strategy here, can really get under his skin.
Tierney Sneed does a nice job here piecing together what the Supreme Court tried to do yesterday on the Obamacare contraceptive mandate and why it’s really hard to see how it’s going to work out like the court wants it to.
National horse race numbers are easy to over-interpret this early in the cycle. A few polls shouldn’t affect our sense of the race too much. But there’s no question that there’s been a small but significant tightening of the Clinton v Trump polls over the last week or so. So why is that?
For a lot of readers, the freakout over transgender bathroom usage has settled into a low level background noise. But the deep and breadth of the freakout has reached whole new levels since the U.S. Department of Education sent out a letter giving guidance to local schools on how to accommodate trans students.
Now instead of a diffuse set of targets — the Charlotte City Council, the Fort Worth school superintendent, etc — the anti-LGBT forces have a familiar and comfortable villain: OBAMA!
I’ve been writing for months now that it’s simply not true that Donald Trump is bringing millions of new people or really any new people into the GOP. The people who are voting for Trump aren’t new to voting and they’re not even new to the GOP. What they are new to is voting in the primaries as opposed to just reliably voting for whoever the GOP puts up in November.
A number of readers wrote in over the weekend saying they had tried to sign up for Prime but were unable to. We also heard from others who weren’t able to sign into the site. Those issues should both be fixed now. So buy all means sign up for Prime and sign in to the site. Here’s the story. We rolled out a major retooling of the site architecture over the course of last week. That introduced a few glitches that we were able to get fixed over the weekend or by the end of yesterday. A lot of you should see a faster site, especially on the front page. If you’ve continued to have any of these problems please let us know. Otherwise, definitely sign up for Prime! And of course sign in.
For the last six years I’ve been the odd man out when it comes to appreciating the innate political skills of Marco Rubio. Just didn’t see it. I tried. It was actually a little frustrating. Why couldn’t I see what so many colleagues took as a given? So I’m a bit relieved that I find the post-politics Rubio genuinely funny. There was his joke last week with our Lauren Fox, and then last night’s hilarious Twitter rant. Don’t ruin this for me by telling me he’s not really that funny. I need this.