Donald Trump has sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to the perennially corrupt and tendentious “Club for Growth” demanding they stop running ads against him. They’re defamatory, mean, false, bad, etc. There’s no direct connection to Citizens United. But I would say it’s all of a piece. “Speech” in the form of unlimited spending by billionaires becomes entirely unfettered. But we also import the moguls’ habit of unbridled litigiousness to clamp down on actual speech. Welcome to the future.
McConnell puts in motion a plan to prevent the latest government shutdown.
Good luck.
I’m not sure how much play this will get. But this poll tells you a lot about the candidacies of Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. A new PPP polls shows Trump, not surprisingly, at the head of the GOP pack. But when PPP created head to head match ups with the other contenders, Carson, Fiorina, Rubio and Walker all beat Trump and in most cases handily. Except Jeb. Trump beat Jeb. So Trump really isn’t that strong. He’s just got a committed following that holds the ground in a crowded field. Another way of putting it is that as big a plurality as Trump has, the bigger deal is the majority that is clearly against him.
Meanwhile, Jeb is weak and nobody likes him.
Remember that crazy Fox News segment earlier this year on so-called Muslim “no-go zones”? A UK regulator has now ruled that it was “materially misleading” and that Fox is in violation of the country’s broadcast standards. That might explain why Fox scrambled at the time to apologize repeatedly for the segment. But the UK regulator said the apologies were basically too little too late.
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Just in time to take advantage of Scott Walker’s departure from the race, Chris Christie gets a heaping new spoonful of BridgeGate news.
As I’ve said before, I’m something of a Hillary Agnostic. There’s no question that the email story has done her a great deal of harm, regardless of the merits of the story itself. But it’s worth stopping now and then and taking a look at just how nonsensical most of the coverage of the story is at this point. Beside the point that the relevant Inspector General has said that none of the stuff the DC press corps has been hyperventilating about can, by definition, have violated any law, you also have stories like this new one today from Bloomberg.
Moderate House GOPer (yes, they exist) calls anti-Boehner coup plotters (yes, they’re back) “right-wing Marxists.”