“We’re not going to talk about that today.”
— President Trump, quoted by CNN, when asked about gun violence during his visit to the site of the Las Vegas mass shooting.
“We’re not going to talk about that today.”
— President Trump, quoted by CNN, when asked about gun violence during his visit to the site of the Las Vegas mass shooting.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is “considering” running for president, The Hill reports.
Said Cuban: “Yes. Considering, yes. Ready to commit to it, no.”
“Top Senate Republicans said Wednesday they are open to considering legislation banning devices that were reportedly used to gun down scores of people in the worst mass shooting in modern American history,” Politico reports.
“No Republican has yet joined Democrats in endorsing a bill targeting bump stocks, but their comments suggest a potential shift in the party’s typically hard-line opposition to gun control measures.”
You are reading the free version of Political Wire.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has reached no conclusion on whether anyone around President Trump was part of a Russian effort to influence the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reports.
Said Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): “The issue of collusion is still open.”
“Mr. Burr had expressed a desire this summer to conclude the probe by the year’s end. But on Wednesday, he all but conceded that with so many avenues of investigation still open that would not be possible.”
Bloomberg reports the panel “has hit a wall” in its investigation of an unverified “dossier” purporting to have compromising information on Trump because former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the report, hasn’t agreed to be interviewed.
Jonathan Swan: “While there’s plenty of speculation that Tillerson will resign or be fired by Trump, I’ve heard nothing from any senior officials to corroborate those rumors.”
Said one senior administration official: “I think his saving grace may be that Mattis and Kelly have his back and there’s not a great desire for further shuffling in the cabinet at this time.”
However: “Not denying he called the President of the United States a moron ends any chance of him being a credible representative of the administration around the world.”
Brian Beutler: “Trump is a uniquely dangerous and unfit president in many ways, but he tempts liberals to paint the Republican leaders who preceded him in an afterglow of decency and high-mindedness that is hard to detect if you go searching for it in the recent past.”
“Through a process of both forgetting and cohort replacement, the unremitting awfulness of the George W. Bush presidency—particularly its early years—has been rewritten in a faction of the liberal imagination as a kind of golden age when political debate was more honest and fact-driven. Things are in some ways worse now, but if that era ever existed, it predated George W. Bush by many years.”
The Washington Post says How the Right Lost Its Mind by Charlie Sykes “is a sort of What Happened for conservatives.”
“The culprits are not James Comey, Vladimir Putin or a reality television opponent, but the return of ‘crackpotism’ on the right; the fecklessness of conservative media, political and religious figures; and the rise of a distorted worldview in which Trump’s overwhelming character flaws mattered little to a base that behaved as though civilization was in play in his election.”
“It is a sanitized image of conservatism, no doubt, but Sykes seems heartfelt in his lament. The insanity he purports to chronicle — on the book cover, the title is stitched across a red baseball cap — did not begin in 2016 or 2015, or even during this young millennium. Sykes reminisces about the mid-20th century, when his hero, William F. Buckley Jr., was casting out Birchers and Ayn Rand devotees from the conservative movement… But today’s conservatives have failed to do the same.”
Roanoke Times: “Radford University and Virginia Tech turned over documents containing personal information, including names, addresses and cellphone numbers of about 40,000 current students, to progressive political group NextGen Virginia, which is working to boost voter turnout among college students in the Nov. 7 election.”
“NextGen Virginia requested the public information through Freedom of Information Act requests sent to every state-supported college and university in Virginia to obtain cellphone numbers of current students.”
“I just think that common sense has to prevail. But until that happens, until other people feel the same, we’re at a stalemate and that’s a shame.”
— Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), quoted by the New York Times, on Republicans refusing to consider any gun control legislation.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson refuted a report that said he was on the verge of resigning from his Cabinet post over the summer, CBS News reports.
Said Tillerson: “I have never considered leaving this post.”
He did not address the claim in the report that he called President Trump a “moron.”
Update: Stephanie Ruhle stands by her report: “My source didn’t just say he called him a moron. He said he called him an fucking moron.”
“Republican leaders are backing away from a proposal to fully repeal an expensive tax break used by more than 40 million tax filers to deduct state and local taxes amid pushback from fellow lawmakers whose residents rely on the popular provision,” the New York Times reports.
“The state and local tax deduction is estimated to cost $1.3 trillion over the next decade and its repeal is central to paying for a sweeping tax rewrite unveiled last week by Republican lawmakers and administration officials. But elimination of the provision has emerged as a flash point in the nascent debate over the plan, with Republicans in high-tax states worried about backlash from residents who could see their tax bills rise.”
Peggy Noonan on Morning Joe: “There is a sense that society is collapsing — the culture is collapsing. We’re collapsing in crime. The world is collapsing. Crazy people with bad haircuts have nukes. Everything is going bad — terrorism, etc. They want to be fully armed on their hill, at home… They’re Americans, and they want to go down fighting.”
Thomas Friedman: “If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim… If only he had shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ before he opened fire… No one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and ‘politicize’ Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies. No, no, no. Then we know what we’d be doing. We’d be scheduling immediate hearings in Congress about the worst domestic terrorism event since 9/11.”
FiveThirtyEight: “Opposition to gun control laws is now a default position of the Republican Party, and guns as an issue has become one of the most polarized topics in modern American politics. More than that, it’s become a defining issue — which party people choose to identify with is inextricably intertwined with their relationship with guns and gun policy.”
“Just 22% of self-identified Democrats chose protecting gun ownership rights over limiting gun access, compared with the 76% of Republicans who did. This 54-point gap is about as wide as you’ll see on any issue.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) talks about the GOP’s tax reform plan — and what the House Freedom Caucus will do — with Chris Riback on the latest episode of Political Wire Conversations.
Subscribe via iTunes or Google Play to get new episodes automatically downloaded to your phone.
“President Trump suggested that the government debt accumulated by bankrupt Puerto Rico would need to be wiped clean to help the island recover from the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria,” Bloomberg reports.
Said Trump: “We are going to work something out. We have to look at their whole debt structure. You know they owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street. We’re gonna have to wipe that out. That’s gonna have to be — you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave good-bye to that.”
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.