The only limit Russ Feingold has in finding fodder for his run against Republican Sen. Ron Johnson to get his Wisconsin Senate seat back is the hours in the day. Because Johnson says that many stupid things. Like this:
"Today—there are different studies on this—but somewhere between five-and-a-half to six years is the average length of time it takes somebody to get a four-year degree. Why is that? I'd argue, well, loans are actually pretty easy to get, and college is a lot of fun. […]
"I was spending my own money to get that education. I didn't want to linger in college," Johnson said, adding that some students might see loans as free money. "Young people don't necessarily understand finance."
Free money. Feingold take that and runs with it in his new ad.
The new Feingold ad plays that portion of Johnson's comments, then says the senator wants to eliminate federal student loans and "keep interest rates high."
"With Sen. Johnson, opportunity for middle-class kids would disappear," a voiceover says.
Johnson opposed Sen. Elizabeth Warren's legislation that would allow people to refinance student loans at lower interest rates, which is sort of pertinent to Wisconsin voters, or at least to the 815,000 Wisconsin residents who have student loan debt at an average, at the undergrad level, of $28,400. The total student debt weighing Wisconsinites down is $19 billion.
President Obama is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he’ll make a statement on the deadly and damaging floods that have hit the area. Noted disaster expert Donald Trump has assailed the president for not going to Louisiana sooner, but Gov. John Bel Edwards had specifically asked Obama not to visit until the situation was well enough controlled for presidential staffing and security needs not to detract from the disaster response.
The federal government has been actively involved in monitoring and assistance:
More than 979 housing inspectors are on the ground in Louisiana verifying damages reported by survivors who have registered for assistance. The number of inspectors is expected to increase rapidly over the next several days.
FEMA established an Incident Support Base in Camp Beauregard in Pineville, Louisiana to distribute supplies such as water, meals, cots and blankets to the state of Louisiana. These include over 800,000 liters of water, over 800,000 meals, over 20,000 cots, and 42,000 blankets.
FEMA Mobile Emergency Response Support (MERS) personnel and equipment are deployed to the Incident Support Base in Pineville to support the state with secure and non-secure voice, video and information services to support emergency response communications needs.
After the state requested a Federal Urban Search & Rescue task force, FEMA has deployed Texas Task Force 1 to Louisiana.
Six FEMA Incident Management Assistance Teams are deployed to Louisiana to support response activities and ensure there are no unmet needs.
“We are heartbroken by the loss of life” and will help people trying to track down loved ones. “People’s lives have been upended by this flood.” People have lost homes, possessions, businesses have been affected.
“This is not just about property damage, this is about people’s roots.” Also the school year is about to start, which will involve added needs.
“Over a week ago I directed the federal government to mobilize.” Fugate and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson have visited. More than 100,000 people have applied for federal assistance. People are being placed in temporary housing and can find resources by visiting FEMA.gov or calling 1-800-621-FEMA.
If you want to help, visit VolunteerLouisiana.gov, Obama says, calling for private donations. He thanks the Red Cross.
“Let me just remind folks, sometimes, once the flood waters pass, people’s attention spans pass. This is not a one-off. This is not a photo op issue. This is how do you make sure that a month from now, three months from now, six months from now, people are still getting the help they need.”
Scratch that—he quickly returns to the podium to talk about flood insurance and federal assistance. “Let’s get money out as fast as we can” then later Congress may be called on to address the longer-term needs as the needs are better known. Obama points out that several of Louisiana’s members of Congress are in the majority (i.e. Republicans) and should be able to talk to their leadership. But in the short term FEMA can cover the immediate needs.
“One of the benefits of being five months short of leaving here, I don’t worry about politics.” And disasters are an area where Washington is less likely to be political. People with flooded homes don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, they care if they get the help they need.
Obama reiterates how proud he is of FEMA and how it’s dealt with a number of natural disasters during his presidency.
In an exhaustive article at Vox, Dylan Matthews catalogs what's at stake, both at the top of the ticket and on the second tier—the U.S. Senate—this election. And, yes, it is all about the Supreme Court. Where it's been:
And where it could go with a Hillary Clinton presidency and Senate majority, beginning with replacing Antonin Scalia:
Clinton also stands a good chance of replacing the moderate-to-conservative Anthony Kennedy (who recently turned 80) with a reliable liberal, and keeping Ruth Bader Ginsburg (83 and a two-time cancer survivor) and Stephen Breyer’s (78) seats in liberal hands. The result would be a solid 6-3 liberal majority of a kind not seen in many decades. […]
A liberal Court could end long-term solitary confinement. It could mandate better prison conditions in general, making it more costly to maintain mass incarceration. It could conceivably end the death penalty. It could uphold tough state campaign finance rules and start to move away from Citizens United. It could start to develop a robust right to vote and limit gerrymandering. It could strengthen abortion rights, moving toward viewing abortion rights as a matter of equal protection for women.
But it's not going to take just a Clinton presidency, not in the near-term. It requires a Democratic majority in the Senate. Mitch McConnell has already set precedent for obstruction by refusing to allow even considering the Merrick Garland nomination in committee. He's committed his majority to only allowing the bare minimum of federal judges through the Senate system. There's no reason to believe he would change his stripes under a President Clinton. There are depths to which he certainly can still plunge, and he's just the guy to do it. An eight-justice Supreme Court can still function? He'll insist that a seven- or six- or five-justice court will operate just fine. A Mitch McConnell majority cannot stand, not for the future health of the nation.
It is 2016, right? Stanford did just go through an extremely high profile and damaging situation with the whole Brock Turner thing, right? The kid who sexually assaulted a woman visiting campus, blamed the assault on the "party culture" at school, and then got off lightly for it? Stanford seems to have taken the wrong lesson from the whole experience. Because, see, it's still all on the young woman getting raped, not the guy doing it.
The fix? Banning large containers of hard alcohol from campus undergraduate events and telling women to be careful about how they might be “perceived” by men if they drink. […]
A new website under Stanford’s homepage popped up shortly after Monday’s announcement, titled “Female Bodies and Alcohol.”
“A woman will get drunk faster than a man consuming the same amount of alcohol,” reads the page’s first bullet point. It goes on to detail how women should “optimize the positive effects of alcohol and avoid negative consequences.”
The page originally had a section specifically addressing alcohol and sex, but administrators have since deleted it. An archived version of the site holds the cut content.
That cut content? "Research tells us that women who are seen drinking alcohol are perceived to be more sexually available than they may actually be." Also "men who think they [women] have been drinking alcohol … feel sexually aroused and are more responsive to erotic stimuli, including rape scenarios." There is no corresponding page on the Stanford site for "Male Bodies and Alcohol," and no page saying "Men: Don't Rape." At least Stanford administrators realized they had a problem with the original content in their advice to young women. Too bad they couldn't also see the need to lecture their young men.
Standford law professor Michele Dauber is not impressed.
Any woman running for president would face some sexist attacks. But when the opponent is Donald Trump, those attacks are not even a little subtle. This is about as subtle as Trump gets:
Clinton, Trump said in a speech last week, "lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS and all the many adversaries we face."
Subtext: Weak girl. (Coming from the guy who complained that debates were too long, aimed at the woman who held up through an 11-hour Benghazi hearing.) Usually, though, it’s not subtext:
He has repeatedly called attention to Clinton's voice, saying listening to her gives him a headache. Last December, he mocked her wardrobe. "She puts on her pantsuit in the morning," he told a Las Vegas audience. At rallies and in speeches, the billionaire mogul has also used stereotypes about women to demean Clinton, who stands to become America's first female president if she wins in November.
A frequent point of criticism: Clinton doesn't look like a typical president.
"Now you tell me she looks presidential, folks," he said at a recent rally in New Hampshire.
Presidents are MEN, dammit. And here’s this woman, expecting to be listened to, even though she’s not a man. And she doesn’t dress in Donald-approved fashion. But this is the kicker:
Jimmy Kimmel questioned “the co-founder of ISIS” about debate prep on Monday night. Does Hillary Clinton “laugh, or do you get upset” about things like Donald Trump calling her the co-founder of ISIS?
“I don’t get upset anymore, because I’d be upset all the time,” and “I think it’s crazy,” but more seriously, it’s “giving aid and comfort to the bad guys.” But about that debate prep, speaking of a time when Clinton might face Trump calling her the co-founder of ISIS live and in person.
“You have to prepare,” Clinton said, but:
“I watched a lot of his debates during the primaries. And he insulted all of his opponents, he insulted all of the moderators, he insulted, I guess, about 80 percent of the American people and the rest of the world.”
So what does she plan to do with that?
“I am drawing on my experience in elementary school. You know, the guy who pulled your ponytail.”
According to Kimmel, “that meant he liked you, really,” but let’s put that one to bed: Donald Trump is clear evidence that the ponytail-puller might just be an abusive bully. This may be one situation where Hillary Clinton’s decades of experience at handling abuse from the right will come in handy.
Donald Trump went on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show Monday night to once and for all say whether he flipped or flopped on immigration, landing somewhere sort of in between. He will, he said, continue to do what President Obama is doing, but "perhaps with a lot more energy."
"The first thing we're going to do if and when I win is we're going to get rid of all of the bad ones," Trump said. "We've got gang members, we have killers, we have a lot of bad people that have to get out of this country. We're going to get them out, and the police know who they are. They're known by law enforcement who they are. We don't do anything. They go around killing people and hurting people, and they're going to be out of this country so fast your head will spin. We have existing laws that allow you to do that." […]
"As far as everybody else, we're going to go through the process," Trump said. "What people don't know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country. Bush, the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I'm going to do the same thing."
So about that mass deportation? Kind of sort of, with "energy." This version of Trump was quick to shoot down O'Reilly's suggestion that he would also create detention centers for undocumented immigrants tied up in the deportation process. "Bill, you're the first one to mention 'detention center.' You don't have to put them in a detention center. ... I'm not going to put them in a detention center. No." Fact check: The immigration plan Trump released at the beginning of his primary campaign a year ago includes "detention—not catch-and-release." But that was a year ago. How could anyone expect Trump to remember what he said a year ago?
Jeff Wood was scheduled to die by lethal injection last Wednesday, Aug. 18, even though he never killed anyone.
But miraculously, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted Wood a stay of execution on Friday, which was also his 43rd birthday. From Slate:
In a per curium decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that a portion of Wood’s habeas appeal pertaining to “his sentence [being] obtained in violation of due process because it was based on false testimony and false scientific evidence” satisfied the requirements to be reconsidered by a lower court. “Accordingly, we remand those two claims to the trial court for resolution,” the court wrote. “Applicant's motion to stay his execution is granted pending resolution of this application.”
The testimony and evidence in question is that of James Grigson, a psychiatrist who testified in Wood's case and said Wood would "most certainly" commit a violent crime again—despite never having met him.
Remarkably, of the nine judges on the Texas Criminal Appeals Court, two of them dissented from the ruling, including Presiding Judge Sharon Keller and Judge Lawrence Meyers.
Meyer's dissent is especially disappointing. He is quite literally the only Democrat to serve in a statewide office in Texas. He was a Republican up until 2013, and hasn't run for appeals court re-election since he became a Democrat. He did, however, run for the Texas Supreme Court in 2014. Unsurprisingly, he lost handily. Texas isn't very kind to Democrats—in 2014, the New York Times reported that the party hasn't won a statewide election since 1994. Meyer could easily lose in November against his Republican challenger, Mary Lou Keel.
Though the only Democrat voted to put Wood to death last Wednesday, seven of the eight Republicans voted in favor of staying his execution.
Is there anything Donald Trump could not solve in a week, according to Donald Trump? Monday, Bill O’Reilly asked Trump to discuss his promise to end “the chaos and violence on our streets and the assault on law enforcement.” Easy peasy, said Trump. “I know police in Chicago. If they were given the authority to do it, they would get it done.”
“You have unbelievable—how? By being very much tougher than they are right now. They are right now not tough. I mean, I could tell you this very long and quite boring story but when I was in Chicago, I got to meet a couple of very top police. I said, ‘How do you stop this? How do you stop this? If you were put in charge,’ to a specific person, ‘Do you think you could stop it?’ He said, ‘Mr. Trump, I would be able to stop it in one week.’ And I believed him 100 percent.”
How? How could this very top police man in one week put a stop to … all murder? Street violence?
Obviously: “He wants to use tough—he wants to use tough police tactics.” And we can believe he could work wonders, because “I could see by the way he was dealing with his people, he was a rough, tough guy.”
It’s not too hard to read between those lines: Donald Trump thinks that allowing the police to be as violent as they want would solve the problem of non-state violence, within a week or so. It’s a fantasy of lawless machismo and it’s totally Trump. Problems aren’t hard, they just haven’t had Donald Trump there to cut through the bullshit and crack some skulls—literally, in this case.
Naturally, gun reform is no part of Trump’s plan to end gun violence.
Poison control centers received 37,000 calls over two years about kids getting into detergent pods, which resulted in two deaths and two dozen life-threatening injuries. Doctors are urging parents not to buy them. No one really needs clown-colored chemical hackysacks to clean their underwear. Keurig’s plastic packaging poses an environmental problem, to the extent that the inventor of the ubiquitous “K-cup” now has regrets. More on that here.
I was going to use disposable toothbrushes pre-loaded with toothpaste as a gag in the last panel, but it turns out they already exist.
●WA Treasurer: On Friday, Washington's secretary of state certified the results of the state's Aug. 2 primaries, cementing an atrocious and under-reported outcome in this year's open treasurer's race. Thanks to Washington's top-two primary, a pair of Republicans will advance to the November general election, meaning no voter will be able to cast a ballot for a Democrat—this in a state that hasn't voted for a Republican for president since the Reagan landslide of 1984.
In fact, Washington hasn't elevated a Republican to the treasurer's office since 1952, when Republican Charles Maybury won a 1-point squeaker the same year Ike was cruising to victory. That trend should have and would have continued this year, had a perfect storm of suck not materialized, as just two Republicans ran for treasurer along with three Democrats. Under the top-two system, all candidates run together on a single primary ballot, and the two highest vote-getters move on to the general election, regardless of party. And because that trio of Democrats managed to split the vote ever so precisely, the two GOP candidates were able to take the top two slots, though it was very close.
As a consequence, the final battle will take place between Benton County Treasurer Duane Davidson, who wound up in first with 25 percent of the vote, and finance executive Michael Waite, the runner-up with 23. The top Democrat was state Sen. Marko Liias, who took finished just out of the money with 20 percent, while pension consultant John Comerford grabbed 18 and former Port of Seattle Commissioner Alec Fisken ended with 13. In other words, even though primary voters backed Democrats by a 52-48 margin overall, they won't get the chance to back a Democrat in the fall.
We've seen this same phenomenon before, but this is the first single-party statewide election ever to take place in Washington. That's just terrible for democracy. California also uses a top-two primary, and there, polls show that many Republican voters simply plan to sit out this year's Senate race between Democrats Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez. But at least we know that California, a very blue state, would likely have elected a Democrat to succeed retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer anyway. Washington, by contrast, almost certainly would have voted in another Democrat as treasurer, so the situation here is particularly perverse.
Supposed "good-government" reformers naïvely believed that eliminating partisan primaries would somehow crank down partisan gridlock by forcing office-seekers to moderate their views in order to win. Not only has that not happened, but voters have repeatedly been denied the opportunity to vote for the party of their choice thanks to debacles like these. It's long past time for proponents to acknowledge their mistake and advocate for a return to proper primaries—and proper democracy.
Now that he’s accepting contributions from donors, Donald Trump’s campaign for Grifter in Chief is in high gear:
Trump nearly quintupled the monthly rent his presidential campaign pays for its headquarters at Trump Tower to $169,758 in July, when he was raising funds from donors, compared with March, when he was self-funding his campaign, according to a Huffington Post review of Federal Election Commission filings. The rent jumped even though he was paying fewer staff in July than he did in March.
In addition to that, now that Mr. Self-Funder is relying on suckers to pay for his campaign, he’s paid his restaurants and golf courses more than $260,000 for hosting campaign events for … him.
