“Veneto regional council, which is located on Venice’s Grand Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history on Tuesday night — just after it rejected measures to combat climate change,” CNN reports.
“The historic Italian city has been brought to its knees this week by the worst flooding there in more than 50 years.”
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) conceded the race for governor Thursday, ending more than a week of speculation over whether he would contest the results of the Nov. 5 election, which he narrowly lost to Andy Beshear (D), the Lexington Herald Leader reports.
“A second U.S. Embassy staffer in Kyiv overheard a cellphone call between President Trump and his ambassador to the European Union discussing a need for Ukrainian officials to pursue ‘investigations,’” the AP reports.
“The July 26 call between Trump and Gordon Sondland was first described during testimony Wednesday by William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Taylor said one of his staffers overhead the call while Sondland was in a Kyiv restaurant the day after Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that triggered the House impeachment inquiry.”
“The second diplomatic staffer also at the table was Suriya Jayanti, a foreign service officer based in Kyiv.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to question President Trump’s intelligence at a news conference: “If the president has something that is exculpatory — Mr. President, that means you have anything that shows your innocence — then he should make that known. So far we haven’t see that.”
In a telephone interview with The Guardian, in response to a question about whether he was nervous that President Trump might “throw him under a bus” in the impeachment crisis, Giuliani said with a slight laugh: “I’m not, but I do have very, very good insurance, so if he does, all my hospital bills will be paid.”
Giuliani’s lawyer, Mark Costello, who was also on the call then interjected: “He’s joking.”
“Delusion runs deep in the vein of Massachusetts politicians thinking of running for president.”
— Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), quoted by the HuffPost, when asked if he has any advice for former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s presidential campaign.
Bloomberg News: “In the absence of efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the earth could warm by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, cutting global gross domestic product by 2.5% to 7.5%, Oxford estimates, with the worst affected countries being in Africa and Asia. Longer term, a rise in temperatures of 4 degrees by 2100 could cut output by as much as 30%.”
Washington Post: “Like virtually everything else in Washington over the past three years, even without the president in the room, this was another episode of the Trump Show — the transformation of the U.S. government into a long-running drama about one outsize personality.”
“Even as the hearing’s spotlight stayed fixed on Trump — his phone calls, his policy shifts, his quest to find usable dirt about a leading Democratic rival — the possible removal of the president seemed to lack the potency and gravity of previous impeachments. Committee members largely steered clear of the kind of dark oratory that launched impeachment debates in 1973 and 1998… Trump’s remarkable ability to skate through crises that wreck other people’s lives — bankruptcies of his businesses, abandoned projects, divorces and accusations of sexual misbehavior — seemed again to be at work.”
“I’m horrified. I’m appalled. If you had told me three years ago it would come to this, I wouldn’t have believed this. I don’t think I could have imagined a president, any president, engaging in this sort of conduct.”
— George Conway, husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, in a rare appearance on MSNBC.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that testimony presented by two career diplomats during Wednesday’s open impeachment hearing “corroborated evidence of bribery” by President Trump in his relations with Ukraine, the Washington Post reports.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) presidential campaign is is selling coffee mugs with the words, “Billionaire Tears.”
If you read the first letter of all of Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-AZ) tweets yesterday, in reverse-chronological order, it spells “Epstein didn’t kill himself,” the Washington Post reports.
A new Morning Call/Muhlenberg College poll in Pennsylvania shows nearly six in 10 don’t believe President Trump should be re-elected.
Asked the first word that enters their mind when they hear Trump’s name, the top response was “arrogant/pompous/jerk,” followed by “idiot/moron.” The third most-common response was a tie between “effective/accomplished,” “corrupt/criminal,” and “great/awesome/good.”
In general election match ups, Joe Biden performs the best in a head-to-head match-up, leading Trump 52% to 43%. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren also topped Trump, 50% to 45%, though that result was within the poll’s 6 percentage point margin of error.”
Matthew Yglesias digs into yesterday’s poll showing top Democrats leading President Trump in Georgia and notes “the fine print on the poll contains a sentence that should be a huge red flag to contemporary consumers of political polling: The data are weighted based on race, age and sex to accurately reflect the demographics of the state.”
“There’s nothing wrong with weighting your sample based on race, age, and sex to match the demographics of the state. That’s standard practice in the industry. The problem is what the poll didn’t weight on — educational attainment. Many state-level polls omitted this factor in 2016, leading them to underestimate Trump’s strength in key swing states. The most responsible pollsters responded to 2016 by making sure to improve their weighting. But many pollsters — especially those doing state-level polling — continue not to weight by education.”
“This failure to weight not only leads to errors (which could be compensated for by averaging), it leads to systematic bias against Trump and the GOP, meaning everyone who publishes or disseminates unweighted polls ends up contributing to misinformation about the real state of American politics.”
A new AP-NORC poll finds 47% of those surveyed said they believe it’s difficult to determine if the information they encounter is correct, while 31% said it is easy to do so.
Key finding: “Democrats are more likely to say they rely on scientists and academics, while Republicans are more likely to trust what they hear from President Trump.”
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would slow the United States economy, reducing growth by nearly 0.2 percentage points a year over the course of a decade, an outside analysis of the plan estimates,” the New York Times reports.
“The preliminary projection from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which will be unveiled on Thursday in Philadelphia, is the first attempt by an independent budget group to forecast the economic effects of the tax that has become a centerpiece of Ms. Warren’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.”
Former Rep. Rick Lazio (R-NY) told thew New York Post that he is seriously considering running for the seat being vacated by fellow Republican Peter King.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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