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The money the Obama administration has managed to cobble together to fight Zika is about to run out, while the Republican Congress yawns. One of the biggest yawners is Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, one of the key committees that is supposed to be responding to public health crises. For months now Blunt has been ignoring the crisis and his opponent, Democrat Jason Kander, has been pushing him on it.

Kander has some back up now, from health professionals all over the state.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Health professionals from across the state of Missouri called on Senator Blunt and his colleagues in Congress to cut short a seven week recess and fund a comprehensive approach to combat the Zika virus. The letter, copied below, came after the first cases of the Zika virus transmitted by mosquitoes in the continental U.S. were reported last week. […]

Today’s letter, signed by 11 doctors and nurses, calls on Senator Blunt and his colleagues to cut their recess short and return to Washington so they can finish funding a comprehensive response to the Zika crisis. If Congress waits until September to pass a deal, funding to develop a vaccine may have run out, a major setback to progress.

“We need a bill that will help protect Missourians from this virus, and one that will help speed up progress on a vaccine so we can eventually eliminate the threat of this virus,” the letter reads. “Missourians don’t get to take a vacation for seven weeks without doing their job, Senator Blunt, and neither should you. It’s time to get back to Washington and do what we elected you to do six years ago—work across the aisle, pass legislation, and keep us safe.”

Missouri now has twelve confirmed cases as of this Tuesday, all of which are travel-related. As of June, two of those cases were in pregnant women. What does Roy Blunt have to say to those women?

Please donate $3 today to help Jason Kander get this guy out of the Senate.

The story of Ileana Garcia gives us a little glimpse into the Trump campaign’s “efforts” to reach Latino voters. Garcia, a former radio host and founder of Latinas for Trump, was approached to conduct Latino outreach for Trump. But she apparently overstepped at the RNC when she declared herself a national Latino spokesperson for the campaign. That’s when the relationship went south, writes Adrian Carrasquillo:

“Do whatever the fuck you want,” the [Florida Trump] official said to Garcia, according to the source. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, anyway.”

Oops! Seems they wanted to confine her to Florida because going "national" was a little too much Latino exposure for the Trump train. Poor Reince had such high hopes.

“I know Donald Trump is going to be doing a Hispanic engagement tour coming up soon… He understands we need to grow the party,” Reince Priebus said a day before the Republican convention. The RNC Hispanic political and media team — comprising Jennifer Korn, Helen Aguirre Ferre, and Sofia Boza — spoke with the Trump campaign and delivered a Latino outreach playbook.

But that plan is gathering dust, Republican operatives said, and the “engagement tour” hasn’t happened.

Canceled: July 5 event with San Antonio business leaders and Texas Republicans.

Canceled: July 8 roundtable with Cuban business and faith leaders in Miami.

“I think they couldn’t get enough people to come to the event because their support among Hispanic voters is 14%. What do they expect?” said Artemio Muniz, a Republican from Texas who was aware of the event and opposes Trump.

Just like with GOTV efforts in battleground states, the Trump campaign has reportedly left the RNC to make up for its shortfalls with Latino outreach. Apparently that’s “the best!” Trump can do.

The latest New Hampshire polling suggests that it doesn't matter how much GOP candidates try to distance themselves from Donald Trump—if they're still endorsing him, voters take note. Anthony Brooks writes:

The WBUR poll also found the presidential contest is having a big effect on New Hampshire's Senate race between the incumbent Republican, Kelly Ayotte, and the Democrat, Gov. Maggie Hassan. According to the poll, Hassan now leads by 10 points in a race that could determine which party will control the Senate.

"There's a very close relationship between the votes for Kelly Ayotte and Donald Trump," pollster Koczela said. "Their support is sort of locked together. And with the direction that Donald Trump seems to be heading in, Kelly Ayotte's task is to somehow decouple those two."

Trump = Toxic. The last WBUR poll, three months ago, had Hassan leading Ayotte by just two points, virtually a toss up.

Please donate $3 to help turn the Senate blue. The future of the Supreme Court depends on it.

At Donald Trump’s rally in Portland, Maine, protesters silently held up small copies of the United States Constitution in imitation of Khizr Khan’s actions at the DNC. That was enough to set the crowd boiling and stop Trump in the middle of his “build a wall” routine.

Trump gave a wave out to his audience.

Trump: Do whatever you want. Go ahead. Do whatever you want. 

As the crowd booed, security led away those holding copies of the Constitution. 

At yesterday’s rally in Florida, Donald Trump went into great detail in describing a video he watched. According to Trump the video was a  “perfect” shot from a “perfect angle, nice and steady.” The video was of Iranian officials offloading millions of dollars delivered by the United States.

But here’s a funny thing: there is no such video.

As Fox News reported on the controversial transfer of $400 million in cash to Iran in January, it repeatedly played dark, grainy footage of shadowy figures walking off a small private plane with bags with hand. The video is often labeled as being from Jan. 17 in Geneva where three Americans first landed after being released from prison in Tehran.

Republican nominee Donald Trump watched this sort of footage, according to his spokeswoman, and concluded that it showed the controversial money transfer that was described in detail for the first time this week by the Wall Street Journal.

In Donald Trump’s ever churning mind, a dark, grainy video of three freed hostages with carry-on bags exiting a plane in Switzerland, became a perfect, nice and steady video of Iranians unloading cash in Tehran.

That’s crazy enough. But what’s really crazy is that, even though his own campaign issued a correction after he told the video story in Florida, Donald Trump is now in Maine … and he’s telling the same story again.

Even Fox News can't polish this one.

According to a new Fox News poll, 77 percent of voters knew of the harsh words exchanged between Trump and the Khans in the wake of Khizr Khan’s fiery anti-Trump speech at the Democratic National Convention. Nearly 7 in 10 of those who have heard about the controversy think Trump stepped over the line.  

Even Republicans are split on Trump’s response: 40 percent say his criticism of the Khans was “in bounds,” while 41 consider his reaction “out of bounds.”

Curiously, launching a weeklong verbal war against the family of a dead American soldier is not high on the list of things American voters want to see from their prospective president, go figure, although Republicans appear to be torn between that stance and that special conservative muscle twitch that obliges them to blurt "but Muslim!" when faced with such a choice.

There are other alarming signs.

Among Trump supporters, a majority says their vote is better described as being against Clinton (52 percent), while less than half are voting because they like him (44 percent). [...]

On temperament, 64 percent [of voters] say Clinton has it. Just 37 percent say Trump does.

So even Trump voters don't like Trump, and only a third of voters even consider him to have the mental wherewithal for the job. That's ... interesting. The sort of "interesting" that could see even Fox News bail from their presidential candidate before the election comes around, if he keeps stinking up the place with rants against everything from Gold Star families to the moms of crying babies.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has a good question for Republican senators running for re-election in the form of a video called "Why." 

The spot, which will be featured and promoted on YouTube, prominently presents President Obama, who on Monday publicly questioned how Republicans can stand by Trump through all of his controversial positions, including his latest outburst at Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of an American soldier who was killed in the Iraq War.

It also quotes Khizr Khan, who went on MSNBC earlier in the week and said Republicans are only supporting Trump due to feared “political consequences.”

Interspersed with Obama's comments are statements from Republican Sens. Richard Burr (NC), John McCain (AZ), and Kelly Ayotte (NH) all refusing to pull their endorsement of Trump. "What does this say about your party, that this is your standard-bearer," Obama says in the video. "Why are you still endorsing him?"

Good question.

Please donate $3 today for a sane Senate.

Every single one of these amazing headlines is from just the past day:

Bloomberg: Republicans Stuck With Trump Despite Fears He’ll Destroy Them

Real Clear Politics: GOP Alarm Over Trump Hits New High

Los Angeles Times: ‘A sense of panic is rising’ among Republicans over Trump, including talk of what to do if he quits

Washington Post: GOP reaches ‘new level of panic’ over Trump’s candidacy

CNN: The GOP's Donald Trump freak-out

NPR: Can This Campaign Be Saved? GOP Scrambles To 'Reset' Trump

Christian Science Monitor: Trump’s unraveling Republican Party: How we reached this point

But the most telling passage comes from the Post:

A Republican consultant who is working on Senate and gubernatorial races nationwide says the situation is wreaking havoc.

"The level of uncertainty with Trump just throws everyone off. It really hurts all of them," the consultant said. "The Republican Party to him is like any kind of real estate deal. It's all transactional. ... He's willing to burn the house down."

If the situation has not improved by Labor Day, the RNC may need to begin redirecting resources to bolster vulnerable House and Senate candidates, as it did when Dole's defeat became apparent in the fall of 1996, a senior Republican said.

Indeed, Donald Trump’s damage to the GOP could stretch from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue all the way to Capitol Hill. And amazingly, it’s not just the Senate that Republicans are worried about but now the House as well, despite the gerrymandering that’s given them their largest majority in 85 years.

That’s why Daily Kos has endorsed a new slate of House candidates, so that we can take advantage of the havoc Trump is wreaking and put ourselves in a position to deliver both chambers for the Democrats. Can you imagine what Hillary Clinton could accomplish if we took back the speaker’s gavel from Paul Ryan? It could happen, with our help.

Please give $1 to each of our six House candidates so that we can turn Congress blue again!

It's now been well over a month since Democrat Deborah Ross challenged incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Burr to four debates. That was back in June, and in the intervening time a federal appeals court has ordered the state of North Carolina to restore a week of early voting. In light of that, Ross is pushing Burr to hurry up and agree to the debates, and Burr is whining about it.

Ross sent a letter to Burr on Wednesday stressing the importance of voters hearing directly from the candidates before heading to the polls.

“Too often in campaigns like this, the airwaves will become crowded with political ads. It’s important that voters hear where we stand on the issues important to them,” Ross said.

Burr’s campaign spokesman Jesse Hunt said Ross’ letter is a strategy to distract from other issues.

“We find Deborah Ross’ actions (Wednesday) to be nothing more than political gamesmanship given the campaigns sat down with the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters last week for negotiations,” Hunt said. “This undermines the spirit of those discussions, and raises serious questions and doubts about the candidate’s campaign negotiating team.”

Uh, huh. Burr is also only negotiating with the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters at the time, while Ross has asked for additional debates with Time Warner Cable News, ABC11 and WECT-TV of Wilmington. Maybe Burr is reluctant to engage because he's rusty at this—he refused to debate his primary opponents this year.

Whatever the reason he's dragging his heels, it's only giving more fuel to Ross's insurgent campaign.

Please spend $3 to help Deborah Ross get to the Senate.

Hillary Clinton's new ad features Donald Trump flaunting his new clothing line on the Late Show with David Letterman. As Letterman holds up Trump's shirts and ties, he asks Trump where they were made.

"These were made—I don't know where they were made but they were made some place—but they're great," says Trump.

Someone off camera tells Letterman the shirts were made in Bangladesh and the ties were made in China. In other words, not in the U.S.

"He outsourced jobs to 12 countries," says a text layover on the screen.

The ad echoes a theme Clinton has been hammering home in her stump speech: if Trump “wants to make America great again, maybe he should start by actually making things in America again.”

Watch the ad below.

LGBT issues and the continued effort to form "a more perfect union" figured prominently in vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine's message Wednesday at a Greensboro, North Carolina, rally. Kaine said GOP lawmakers had forced through the discriminatory HB2 law "in the dead of night" and urged the crowd to move "forward, not backward" on issues related to fair treatment of LGBTQ Americans by voting for Hillary Clinton and the state's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Roy Cooper. Louis Nelson writes:

“Now, I know in North Carolina, there’s been some pain over this issue. They snuck through in the legislature this HB 2, and they tried to introduce it kind of in the dead of night,” the Virginia senator said. “You all have stood up in a major way and you’ve said this is not who we are. This is not who North Carolina is. These are not our values. And that’s one of the reasons why North Carolina is so intensely focused on this race.” [...]

Kaine recalled a 2006 speech that Mike Pence delivered supporting a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, in which the then-congressman suggested that “societal collapse” would follow the “deterioration of marriage and family.”

HuffPost Pollster currently has Clinton/Kaine over Trump/Pence in North Carolina 44 to 42 percent. Although President Obama won North Carolina by a hair in 2008, it's been a reliably red state for several decades. In some ways it's remarkable to see both how the race is shaping up, and the fact that Democrats are specifically pressing on LGBTQ issues to advance their chances there. Onward!