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Stunned TV Hosts Reacted in Real Time to Trump

August 15, 2017 at 11:53 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

New York Times: “For a few visceral minutes on Tuesday, television’s partisan lines dissolved as dumbfounded anchors reacted on-air — some in clearly personal ways — to Mr. Trump’s fiery remarks, in which he seemed to cast equal blame on white supremacists and the demonstrators who marched against them during the weekend’s deadly clash in Charlottesville.”

“Like many of Mr. Trump’s dramatic moments, Tuesday’s impromptu question-and-answer session unspooled on cable television. But as the president’s exchanges grew testier, ABC and CBS cut into regular programming to carry the news conference, adding millions of households to the audience.”

Lewandowski Accused of Threatening His Neighbors

August 15, 2017 at 11:45 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Neighbors of President Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski say he harassed them in a land dispute and threatened to use his ‘’political clout’’ to make their lives ‘’a nightmare,'” the Boston Globe reports.

Moore and Strange Advance to Runoff in Alabama

August 15, 2017 at 10:18 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL) will advance to the Senate primary runoff to fill the seat left open by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.


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Bonus Quote of the Day

August 15, 2017 at 8:58 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Those assholes can go back to their cave, we don’t want them in this country.”

— Sen. Cory Garnder (R-CO), quoted by the Daily Beast, on the white supremacist groups who organized the violent protests in Charlottesville.

Federal Judges Invalidate Two Texas Districts

August 15, 2017 at 8:56 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Federal judges invalidated two Texas congressional districts Tuesday, ruling that they must be fixed by either the Legislature or a federal court,” the Texas Tribune reports.

“The judges found that Hispanic voters in congressional district 27, represented by Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX), were ‘intentionally deprived of their opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.’ Congressional district 35 — a central Texas district represented by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) — was deemed ‘an impermissible racial gerrymander’ because lawmakers illegally used race as the predominant factor in drawing it, the judges wrote.”

KKK Leader Says He’s Glad Woman Died

August 15, 2017 at 8:41 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Justin Moore, the Grand Dragon for the Loyal White Knights of Ku Klux Klan, said he was glad that a woman died in Charlottesville when a car drove through a crowd, the Charlotte Observer reports.

Said Moore: “I’m sorta glad that them people got hit and I’m glad that girl died. They were a bunch of Communists out there protesting against somebody’s freedom of speech, so it doesn’t bother me that they got hurt at all.”

He added: “I think we’re going to see more stuff like this happening at white nationalist events.”

Fox News Deletes Video of Driving Through Protests

August 15, 2017 at 8:34 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Fox News and the Daily Caller deleted posts that encouraged people to drive through protests with their cars, CNN reports.

“Originally published by The Daily Caller and later syndicated or aggregated by several other websites, including Fox Nation, an offshoot of Fox News’ website, it carried an unsubtle headline: ‘Here’s A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road.’ Embedded in the article was a minute-and-a-half long video showing one vehicle after another driving through demonstrations. The footage was set to a cover of Ludacris’ Move Bitch.”

A Hedge Against Impeachment?

August 15, 2017 at 8:22 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

When President Trump’s decried racism as “evil” yesterday and blamed white supremacist groups for the violence in Charlottesville, he was just reading from a TelePrompter. We know now it’s not what he believes.

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Firing Bannon Won’t Change Trump

August 15, 2017 at 8:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Ryan Lizza: “To be sure, though he enables and reinforces Trump’s ugly nativism, Bannon is hardly the deft, Rasputin-like manipulator he is seen as in American pop culture. He was adamantly opposed to the strike on Syria, and Trump ignored him. He has learned that Trump recoils from advisers who are seen to be controlling him.”

“If Trump finally pushes Bannon out of the White House, the nationalist policy project will be all but dead. The new chief of staff, John Kelly, is far more moderate on immigration and has pushed Trump to abandon the idea of a physical border wall. Economic policy will be fully under the control of Cohn, and the heretical idea of raising taxes on the wealthy will have no champion. Trump himself has always been more animated by the xenophobia of Bannonism than by its populist economic views. A Trump White House without Bannon will be no more radical in its coddling of far-right groups—today Trump showed again that he needs no encouragement—but it will be more captured by the traditional small-government agenda of the G.O.P. Bannon hoped to destroy.”

Quote of the Day

August 15, 2017 at 5:50 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

— President Trump, at a news conference at Trump Tower.

Trump Again Blames ‘Both Sides’

August 15, 2017 at 4:34 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

President Trump insisted that he did nothing wrong on Saturday when he declined to specifically condemn Nazi and white supremacist groups, asserting that “before I make a statement, I like to know the facts,” the New York Times reports.

In a long, combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower, the president repeatedly rejected a torrent of bipartisan criticism for waiting several days before naming the right-wing groups and placing blame on “many sides” for the violence that ended with the deaths of a young woman after a car crashed into a crowd.

Premiums Will Skyrocket If Trump Ends Payments

August 15, 2017 at 2:53 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

A new Congressional Budget Office report finds “premiums for the most popular health insurance plans would shoot up 20 percent next year, and federal budget deficits would increase by $194 billion in the coming decade if President Trump carries out his threat to end certain subsidies paid to insurance companies for the benefit of low-income people,” the New York Times reports.

“The subsidies reimburse insurers for reducing deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs that low-income people pay when they visit doctors, fill prescriptions or receive care in hospitals.”

Caitlin Owens: “President Trump has threatened repeatedly to stop making the payments, but for now the issue remains unresolved. Lawmakers from both parties have actively discussed funding the subsidies in some kind of stabilization package over the last few weeks and will attempt to do so next month.”

A Trump Deal for Mueller to Look At

August 15, 2017 at 2:49 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow tells Adam Davidson that at least one of the president’s business dealings should be “out of scope” to special counsel Robert Mueller.

One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention. But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as “red flags” for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump.

The waterfront lot where the Trump Tower Batumi was supposed to be built remains empty. A groundbreaking ceremony was held five years ago, but no foundation has been dug. Trump removed his name from the project shortly before assuming the Presidency; the Trump Organization called this “normal housekeeping.” When the tower was announced, in March, 2011, it was the centerpiece of a bold plan to transform Batumi from a seedy port into a glamorous city. But the planned high-rise—forty-seven stories containing lavish residences, a casino, and expensive shops—was oddly ambitious for a town that had almost no luxury housing.

Why It’s Wrong to Commemorate Robert E. Lee

August 15, 2017 at 1:11 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Josh Marshall: “What is Robert E. Lee known for? This is what I mean by the margins of the debate. Lee is known for one thing: being the key military leader in a violent rebellion against the United States and leading that rebellion to protect slavery. That’s it. Absent his decision to participate in the rebellion he’d be all but unknown to history. He outlived the war by only five years. There’s simply no positive side of the ledger to make it a tough call. The only logic to honoring Lee is to honor treason and treason in the worst possible cause.”

“Lincoln and his war cabinet had little question what Lee deserved. Look at Arlington National Cemetery. That’s Lee’s plantation. The federal government confiscated it and dedicated it as a final resting place for those who died defending the United States. It is a solemn, poetically rich, final and ultimately righteous verdict on his role in our national life. The entire project was very much by design: to punish Lee and shame him in public memory for betraying the United States… The generals… wanted to be certain the Lees would never be able to reclaim their estate. Making it into a hallowed national cemetery was a good way to accomplish that.”

Justice Kennedy In the Middle Again

August 15, 2017 at 12:42 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Economist: “Why is Justice Kennedy hanging around for another year? Maybe he would like to put in a full three decades before hanging up his robe. Maybe he isn’t anxious to give Donald Trump an opportunity to replace him. Or maybe the dazzling array of cases coming to the Supreme Court in the term beginning on October 2nd is just too tantalizing to watch from the sidelines. Whatever his motivation, Justice Kennedy is likely to be the central player in a number of the most contentious disputes he and his eight colleagues will hear when they return from their summer break.”

“The first blockbuster comes on the second day of the term when the court hears Gill v Whitford, a challenge to partisan gerrymandering that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says is ‘perhaps the most important’ of the term and that Ian Samuel, co-host of First Mondays, a podcast about the Supreme Court, told listeners may be the ‘most important of your life.'”

Democrat Runs with Pledge to Vote Against Pelosi

August 15, 2017 at 12:37 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Paul Davis (D) announced his entrance into the race for the Kansas 2nd congressional district with a promise that if elected, “he does not plan to vote for Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the current House Democratic leader and former speaker of the U.S. House when Democrats last held the majority,” the Kansas City Star reports.

Said Davis: “This is a broken Congress right now, and I think the leaders of both political parties bear responsibility for that. And I think that we need new leadership in both political parties.”

Koch Network Has Surprising Influence Over Trump

August 15, 2017 at 10:48 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“During the presidential campaign, about the only common ground between billionaire conservative Charles Koch and Republican nominee Donald Trump was a colorful disregard for each other. Koch complained the choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton was like opting for cancer or a heart attack. And Trump bashed big-money donors, deriding his Republican rivals as ‘puppets’ who went knocking on Koch’s door for backing,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Not surprisingly, the Koch network largely sat out the 2016 presidential election and, Trump went on to win without them. Normally such a high-profile snub would carry a steep political price, shutting doors to the new administration.”

“But in recent months, Koch’s sprawling network of conservative advocacy groups has exerted surprising influence in the Trump administration, scoring some early accomplishments and pushing its priorities to the top of the White House agenda.”

Not-So-Sweet Home Alabama

August 15, 2017 at 9:39 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

As many voters know, elections are often choices between the lesser of evils.

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Word of the Day

Balanced Ticket: A balanced ticket is a paring of political party candidates designed to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate.

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan 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.

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