At Friday's rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump pointed out Rep. Bryon Donalds of Florida and called him a "superstar," before adding, "That one is smart. You have smart ones and then you have some that aren’t quite so good." Who are the "some" that he was referring to? Other members of Congress?
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Donald Trump actually said
this yesterday:
"But, uh, the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it: your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child, and you many of these childs 15 years later say 'What the hell happened? Who did this to me?'"
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At the same event, Trump also said he had wanted to
appoint his daughter Ivanka as the "United Nations Secretary," which is not a thing, but then he clarified, sort of, indicating that he meant Ambassador to the U.N. -- the position to which he appointed Nikki Haley. Remember that Ivanka was unable to pass a background check.
(The event was hosted by Moms For Liberty, a far right group, one of whose chapters once deliberately quoted Hitler* in a press release.)
*
Edited to note that, per
this AP story, the Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty said that they quoted Hitler as a warning of what America could become not as an endorsement of Hitler. I guess maybe? But they were thus implying that liberals or the American or Indiana governments are Nazis, because the quote says that those who control what children read control the future. And Moms for Liberty's most famous action is to ban books.
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These are useful thoughts on the Afghanistan withdrawal, which has lately become a point of political contention again because of Donald Trump's political stunt (and his aides' alleged violence) at Arlington cemetery.
Republicans are hoping to make a new Benghazi out of what happened at the Abbey Gate, but Donald Trump is not helping the argument that he was just there to support the parents. Yesterday, he was asked about what happened.
Here's the exchange:
Q: "Should your campaign have put out those videos and photos?"
A: "Well, we have a lot of people. You know, we have people, you know, Tik Tok people, you know, we're leading the internet. That was the other thing, we're so far above her on the internet--"
Q: "But on that hallowed ground, should they have put out the images--"
A: "Well, I don't know what the rules and regulations are, I don't know who did it, and, uh, it could have been them. It could have been the parents. It could have been somebody--"
Q: "It was your campaign's Tik Tok, though, that put out the video."
A: "I really don't know anything about it. All I do, is I stood there, and I said, 'If you'd like to have a picture, we can have a picture.' If somebody did it--this was a setup by the people in the administration, that 'Oh, Trump is coming to Arlington. That looks so bad for us.'"
So Donald Trump is blaming the parents for sharing images of the event, and he's claiming that the Biden adminsitration somehow set him up.
Separately, this
cartoon catches the spirit of what Trump was doing:
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There's yet another gross
video of J.D. Vance bizarrely criticizing childless women. Specifically, he says that a person who strives to achieve gender and racial equality has a "value set has made [her] a miserable person who can't have kids because [she] can't have kids because [they] already passed the biological period when it was possible".
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It's been weeks since Trump promised to release flight records about his (mythical) helicopter flight with Willie Brown and threatened to sue the
New York Times for saying the story was false, and days since he promised to release video of the incident at Arlington. He will never do either. Imagine this stonewalling from Kamala Harris."
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In the possible crucial second Congressional district of Nebraska, a new poll finds Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 47%-42%. (Joe Biden won that district by 6.5% in 2020. Trump won the district over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 2.1%.)
Recognizing the importance of this race, the Republicans who control Nebraska's government recently
blocked a new law that would have restored the voting rights of former felons, and worse:
"On July 17, less than 48 hours before LB 20 was to take effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion stating that the new law was unconstitutional. But Hilgers didn’t stop there; he also declared unconstitutional a 2005 reform law ending lifetime disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of any felony; the 2005 law, Legislative Bill 53, allowed Nebraskans to vote two years after completing their sentences, a waiting period that LB 20 was set to eliminate."
In other words, thousands of people who could vote four, eight, twelve, sixteen years ago, now are longer permitted to so.
Of the seven swing states, if Donald Trump wins the sunbelt states (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina) and Kamala Harris wins the "blue wall" Great Lakes states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania), then whoever wins NE-02 wins the presidency.
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Also in Nebraska's U.S. Senate race, a lot of voters are
undecided: the incumbent Republican, Deb Fischer, only leads the independent, Dan Osborn, by 39%-38%, with 23% undecided. Independents who have decided favor Osborn (but Nebraska overall is Republican, so Fischer is still quite likely to win.)