Immigration

Primaries end, now attention turns to defeating the dangerous demagogue Trump

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The long primary season finally came to an end on Tuesday night with the primary in Washington, D.C. Hillary Clinton easily won with over 78% of the vote.

Screenshot from 2016-06-15 04:46:05

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders met Tuesday night to discuss the next phase of the campaign. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Meet as Their Battle Ends:

Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders met privately for nearly two hours on Tuesday night to size each other up as they started exploring what kind of alliance they might build for the general election battle against Donald J. Trump.

Yet Mr. Sanders chose to withhold his endorsement of Mrs. Clinton, several Sanders advisers said, because he wants her to take steps to win his confidence before the Democratic convention, where his supporters expect him to speak and Clinton advisers hope he will give her his full-throated backing.

Aides to Mrs. Clinton said she had never expected his endorsement Tuesday night. A statement from the Clinton campaign after the meeting described it as “a positive discussion about their primary campaign, about unifying the party and about the dangerous threat that Donald Trump poses to our nation.”

They discussed issues like raising wages and reducing college costs, and “agreed to continue working on their shared agenda, including through the platform development process for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.”

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A rhetorical war of words

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Clinton.2Paul Waldman of the Washington Post reports in the Happy Hour Roundup that some “lefties” had an anxiety attack on Monday when Hillary Clinton seemed to say that she is willing to use the phrase “radical Islamism.” A Clinton aide emails over clarification:

She was calling him out. She insisted today that she won’t declare war against an entire religion the way that Trump has, but she isn’t going to let us be distracted with semantic games. The real question is, what’s your plan? And he clearly doesn’t have one.

If you actually read her quote, it seems likely that Clinton meant to use the phrase more in the spirit of, “I’ll repeat this phrase to show how meaningless it is.” This is hardly the “break” with Obama that is being portrayed. Clinton’s point, in multiple interviews this morning, was that Trump’s formulation (“radical Islam radical Islam radical Islam”) risks being seen as an attack on an entire religion and plays into ISIS’s hands.

Steve Benen adds, Clinton explains, ‘Rhetoric is not going to solve the problem’:

Donald Trump is absolutely convinced that the key to counter-terrorism is religion-specific rhetoric. Somehow, if officials ignore the conclusions reached by the Bush and Obama administrations, and repeatedly use the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” then Americans will magically be safer.

It’s a child-like approach to national security, but according to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, it’s also the pillar of his campaign’s counter-terrorism policy.

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Twitter troll Trump fails his first test of leadership after Orlando

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Last week the editors of the Arizona Republic engaged in a round-table discussion of the question, Is the media to blame for Trump? (“Donald Trump gets more press coverage than other candidates. Our editorial board debates whether that is a problem.” We report, you decide.)

Yada, yada, yada . . . Donald Trump answered that question in the affirmative last week. Trump is laughing in the face of the media, and  mocking them for how easily he can manipulate them and their celebrity-based news coverage. Bloomberg Politics reported Trump Says ‘No Reason’ to Raise $1 Billion for Campaign:

TrumpFascismTrump, who has held just two major fundraising events since agreeing three weeks ago to help the party raise cash, said he would rely instead more on his own star power as a former reality-TV personality to earn free media, and has no specific goals for how much money his campaign needs.

“There’s no reason to raise that,” Trump said about raising $1 billion. “I just don’t think I need nearly as much money as other people need because I get so much publicity. I get so many invitations to be on television. I get so many interviews, if I want them.”

Nowhere is Trump’s easy manipulation of the feckless news media more self-evident than on Twitter, where this Twitter troll lives. The lazy media reports his every tweet as if tweets are news, rather than do actual interviews and Q & A of the candidate. (I am convinced that Twitter is the death of political journalism).

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The trends along Arizona’s border are mixed

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The American economy is expected by optimists to grow 2% during 2016 while to the south, Mexico’s economy is projected to grow 2.4%. During the firstAZ Mex Trade quarter of 2016, Arizona’s exporters shipped merchandise valued at $2.04 billion to Mexico. This amount is below the $2.40 billion that went to Mexico during the first quarter of 2015. If the export pace set in the first quarter holds for the entire year of 2016, Arizona’s exports to Mexico will fall far short of the $9.16 billion shipped in 2015.

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Federal Judge rules that crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio is guilty of civil contempt

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While we’re on the topic of the decades-long GOP culture of corruption in Arizona, how can we not mention its poster boy, the “most corrupt sheriff in America,” crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio?

The Arizona Republic has a breakdown of how much the latest illegal racial profiling case has cost the nativist and racist residents of th state of Maricopa who keep reelecting Arpaio to office. Arpaio profiling case costs taxpayers another $13M:

Babeu-ArpaioTaxpayers in metro Phoenix will have to pick up an additional $13 million over the next year to cover the costs of a racial profiling case that has proven to be the thorniest legal entanglement faced by Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Maricopa County, which has already shelled out $41 million during the past eight years in the case, must keep covering those legal costs until Arpaio’s office is released from the supervision of the case judge — a resolution that is years away.

County officials are expected to tentatively approve the additional spending on Monday. A final vote is set for late June.

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The $41 million spending so far includes $10 million in attorney fees and $5 million for the monitoring staff. It represents only a part of the county’s heavy legal costs over Arpaio’s 23-year tenure.

The county has had to pay an additional $79 million in legal costs related to Arpaio’s office. That figure includes judgments, settlements and legal fees involving things such as lawsuits over jail deaths and the lawman’s failed investigations of political enemies.

Arpaio, who earns $100,000 a year as sheriff and owns more than $2 million in commercial real estate, has never had to pull money from his own pocket to pay for legal costs directly tied to his work as sheriff.

But wait, there’s more!

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