Former President George W. Bush backed Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in his first public endorsement of the 2020 election cycle, the AP reports.
“Bush has largely stayed out of the political fray since he left the White House in 2009, and his endorsement is a welcome boost for Collins, who is waging her most difficult campaign yet as she seeks a fifth term.”
Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller have an interesting discussion on the Bulwark Podcast about the Democratic convention.
Tim Miller: “I wanted to share one thing that we discussed after the show was over. Both of us we were caught off guard by how emotionally attached we were last night to this candidacy. We had sort of expected to feel this reluctant, begrudging support for the Democratic nominee, to have been left in a tough spot between one normal bad choice and one existentially bad one. But that isn’t what happened. Joe Biden has me energized. And frankly, that he has both Charlie and I reflecting on whether maybe in the past we were just…in the wrong…”
President Trump’s lawyers are appealing a subpoena compelling the president to release his financial and tax records to Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance with the 2nd circuit appeals court, NPR reports.
“If they lose there, imagine this: Trump asking the Supreme Court to intervene next week, in the middle of the Republican National Convention.”
“As President Trump seizes the national spotlight next week for the Republican convention, Joe Biden’s campaign and other top Democrats are planning to mount an aggressive counter-effort to showcase the stark contrast between the two men and the two campaigns,” the Washington Post reports.
“Democrats are preparing to release videos each day highlighting what they view as Trump’s biggest failures.”
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R) told CNN: “I won’t be voting for President Trump.”
Kanye West will not appear on the ballot in Ohio as an independent candidate for president due to “mismatched paperwork,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.
Marianna Treviño-Wright, who was branded a “butterfly freak” by Steve Bannon and three others arrested for fraud and money laundering when she tried to block their wall on the Mexican border, told the Daily Beast: “I just wish them well in their cavity searches.”
Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) accidentally broadcast himself yelling “fuck, fuck, fuck” when he thought his video feed into a Senate hearing was not working.
In a newly-discovered video clip from a 2019 “We Build the Wall” telethon, Steve Bannon jokingly brags about being on a “million dollar yacht” with Brian Kolfage, who Bannon quips paid for the yacht with “all that money” from donors.
Both men were arrested yesterday — Bannon was actually on a yacht — and charged with fraud and money laundering.
“Let me be very clear. There is no place for QAnon in the Republican Party. I do not support it and the candidate you talked about has denounced it.”
— House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), on Fox News.
Steve Bannon went on his podcast to call his arrest yesterday a “political hit job” after he was charged with fraud relating to a fundraising campaign aimed at supporting the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Said Bannon: “I’m not going to back down. This is a political hit job.”
Foreign Affairs: “Since 2007, there has been a remarkably sharp trend away from religion. In virtually every high-income country, religion has continued to decline. At the same time, many poor countries, together with most of the former communist states, have also become less religious. From 2007 to 2019, only five countries became more religious, whereas the vast majority of the countries studied moved in the opposite direction.”
“The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. Near the end of the initial period studied, Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishingly sharp decline.”
“Demand for guns and ammunition is accelerating in the US ahead of November’s election, driven by consumer concerns about protests and civil unrest and by Americans seeing hunting as a socially distanced leisure pursuit during a pandemic,” the Financial Times reports.
President Trump unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against Joe Biden hours before Mr. Biden was to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, predicting “mayhem” if his rival won the general election in November, the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “At stake in this election is the survival of our nation, it’s true. Because we’re dealing with crazy people on the other side. They’ve gone totally stone-cold crazy.”
When Hillary Clinton was asked by MSNBC about her former Republican colleagues bowing to President Trump, she said it’s like they a had “a lobotomy or something.”
She continued: “They just have given up their principles, their values, their backbone to following Trump, regardless of where he leads, which they know, and I believe they know is, you know, unconstitutional, often illegal, reckless, wrong, whatever adjective you want to use. So I can’t explain it… I give credit to people like Mitt Romney who do stand up and speak out. But I wish that there had been more like Margaret Chase Smith, who was the first Republican senator who spoke out against Joe McCarthy back in the early 50s, you know where is that kind of leadership and it really saddens me that it seems to be absent.”
A federal judge on Friday denied President’s Trump’s bid to temporarily block a ruling allowing a subpoena for his tax returns and other financial records, CNBC reports.
Trump’s lawyers now have six days to convince an appeals court to grant the stay, but he is quickly running out of options to avoid giving Manhattan DA Cyris Vance the requested records.
Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press that he would be “vehemently opposed” to any attempt to pardon former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, after the president suggested he might consider it.
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
