Nate Silver Predicts Hillary Clinton Wins Election

This morning on ABC's “Good Morning America,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver predicted that Hillary Clinton will win the presidential election against Donald Trump.

Clinton has a 79 percent chance of winning, compared with Trump's 20 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. 

Silver called 49 states correctly in the 2008 presidential election and got all 50 in 2012.  

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Clinton leads Trump in Arizona in latest poll

A new poll shows Hillary Clinton running ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona, where a Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state only once in the last 64 years.

A survey by Phoenix-based OH Predictive Insights found Clinton taking 46.5 percent support over Trump at 42.2 percent.

Mitt Romney defeated President Obama in Arizona in 2012 by 9 points.

“It’s shocking to think that a Democratic presidential candidate would carry Arizona if the election were held today, considering that every statewide office in Arizona is held by a Republican as well as significant majorities in the Arizona House and Senate,” Wes Gullett, a partner at OH Predictive

Insights, told the Phoenix Business Journal. “Arizona should be a reliable red state.”
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One way or the other we will pay for Con Man Donald's presidential dreams

Back in March, The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi pointed out that Donald Trump was paying himself to run for president. This was controversial at the time. Now it’s simple fact.

We've had candidates run for president before for reasons little larger than fame and matching funds. Al Sharpton's 2004 campaign—also advised by longtime Trump ally Roger Stone—comes to mind. But the Reverend Al's outsized ambitions seem quaint and comparably honest next to Con Man Donald. 

The details of the Federal Election report are alternately hilarious and depressing. For a certain kind of political nerd, paging through disbursements offers insight into the mundane day to day of a presidential campaign. Their airplane tickets and meals at random restaurants in Iowa and New Hampshire, there is $15,000 here and $2,500 there, paid to consultants and staffers (hint: the part-time consultants always make more money than the full-time staffers).

But what you see with Con Man Donald is out‑of‑control expenses that have little or nothing to do with the basic operational responsibility of running a presidential campaign. Instead, we see $423,000 paid in rental fees to his estate/club Mar-a-Lago (which he could have just gifted as a self-funded candidate rather than charged back to the campaign), and $394,000 spent on Trump-branded jets. He spent over $200,000 on hats and $35,000 on a New Hampshire-based online ad company called Draper-Sterling, but nothing on building swing state organizations or television ads. The whole operation is like Trump’s hair— a few gilded threads spun together to give the impression of substance when there is plainly nothing underneath.

The final evidence of the ugly truth underneath Con Man Donald’s campaign is this: much of the money that Trump has bragged about pouring into his campaign is a loan. It will be reimbursed by donors and U.S. taxpayers if Trump accepts matching funds, which looks like a financial necessity after months of unforced organizational errors and the RNC taking in a pathetic $11 million in May, after Toxic Trump won the nomination.

That's right America; you're going to pay for Con Man Donald's presidential dreams, one way or the other. (Full Story at Daily Beast)

Major companies dropping their sponsorship of GOP convention

Several major companies revealed this week they will be dropping their sponsorship of next month’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Donald Trump is expected to be officially nominated as the party’s presidential candidate.

Wells Fargo, UPS, Motorola, JPMorgan Chase, Ford and Walgreens all told Bloomberg they  won’t sponsor this year’s convention, despite helping to fund the last GOP summit in 2012.  (Continues)

Trump accused of destroying email evidence 10 years ago

In 2006, when a judge ordered Donald Trump's casino operation to hand over several years' worth of emails, the answer surprised him: The Trump Organization routinely erased emails and had no records from 1996 to 2001. The defendants in a case that Trump brought said this amounted to destruction of evidence, a charge never resolved.

Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld was stunned. “He has a house up in Palm Beach County listed for $125 million, but he doesn’t keep emails. That’s a tough one,” he said, according to transcripts obtained by USA TODAY. “If somebody starts to put forth as a fact something that doesn’t make any sense to me and causes me to have a concern about their credibility in the discovery process, that's not a good direction to go, and I am really having a hard time with this.”

Now, a decade later, Trump regularly hammers Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for using her own email server while she was secretary of State and deleting emails from that server that she deemed to be private. In a war of tweets with Clinton a week ago, Trump wrote, “And where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?” On the CBS News program Face the Nationearlier this month, Trump said, "What she did is a criminal situation. She wasn't supposed to do that with the server and the emails."

The Trump campaign and his lawyers have not responded to requests for comment on this story. (Full Story at USA Today)

Dramatic shortfall expected as donor dismay about Trump takes a toll.

Donald Trump’s top financiers are slashing their fundraising expectations and warning the GOP’s presumptive nominee could find himself massively out-gunned by Hillary Clinton.

In interviews, over a dozen major Republican Party donors and fundraisers who’ve signed on to help Trump raise money said they expected Trump to net only a fraction of his original $1 billion goal, perhaps netting less than a third of that.

Trump himself is already starting to distance himself from the $1 billion goal, telling Bloomberg News that he doesn’t need that much to win. But his refusal to commit to raise even half of that reflects reluctance among the GOP’s benefactors to collect cash on his behalf. Many of them say he might have trouble raising even $300 million.

That would almost certainly leave Trump at a steep disadvantage: Clinton is widely expected to hit the $1 billion mark, as President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney did in 2012. And it could have serious ripple-effects, leaving Republican down-ballot candidates, who are dependent on the national party to mount a well-funded turnout operation, in the lurch.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle, though, is that Trump is reviled by much of the donor class, who consider him as an unpredictable bomb-thrower. Many say they simply don’t want to have anything to do with him.

“He isn’t personally loved by most of the Republican donors. When you compare Mitt Romney to Donald Trump, Donald Trump says all these outrageous things. People are really concerned about what he’ll do as president. There’s just a lot of negativity about Trump as a person,” said Dale Dykema, a major GOP contributor who recently contributed to the RNC and who is supporting a Trump super PAC. “When he comes out with these crazy things, like with the judge, people just want to turn off.”(Continues at POLITICO)

The Trump University judge was just following the law

Trump has been blasting U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel for having an “inherent conflict of interest,” because of his Mexican heritage and Trump’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Curiel, who is presiding over two of three lawsuits against Trump and Trump University, was born in Indiana to parents who emigrated from Mexico. But the presumptive Republican presidential nominee continues to rail against the judge for biased, negative and unfair rulings.

In particular, Trump points to Curiel’s use of a procedural move — a summary judgment — as evidence:

I should have easily won the Trump University case on summary judgement but have a judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who is totally biased against me.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2016

Whether Curiel is biased is a matter of opinion, not one we can fact-check. But we took a look at what exactly a summary judgment is, and whether the judge’s decision was anything out of the ordinary, as Trump suggests. As usual, Trump’s campaign did not respond to our request for comment.

The Facts

Trump University marketed its seminars and mentorship packages that cost up to $35,000 as opportunities for “students” to learn tricks of the real estate trade from mentors and instructors said to be “hand-picked” by Trump.

Both cases before Curiel are class-action lawsuits from former students, claiming fraud and demanding their money back. One lawsuit was filed in 2010 by students in California, Florida and New York,  and the other in 2013 by a plaintiff who alleged he was misled and upsold to pay for an $35,000 upgrade.

Trump is named as a defendant in both lawsuits, and has filed for a motion for summary judgment in both. Last year, Curiel ruled on the motion in the 2010 lawsuit. The motion in the 2013 lawsuit is pending a court hearing next month, as noted in this explainer by the Popehat blog.

A “summary judgment” is a procedural move that allows a judge to dismiss a case before going to trial. If summary judgment is granted, that means the judge found there’s “no genuine dispute of material fact” that requires a full trial. So all the judge is deciding is whether the two sides agree or disagree on facts — a pretty low bar.

When a judge grants a summary judgment, it’s usually for a narrow and straight-forward issue, said Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California, Davis School of Law.

For example, a judge may grant it if someone is suing a defendant who has immunity from that specific lawsuit. Or a judge may grant it if someone was bringing an asbestos lawsuit against a manufacturer — but the manufacturer wasn’t making any products during the time that person claims they were injured.

“In any kind of complex factual case, it’s very hard to get summary judgment,” Johnson said. “The [Supreme] Court has made it clear that only in certain, limited cases, will summary judgment be granted. … We have a Constitution that requires civil cases to be submitted to a jury if there’s enough fact and dispute – and that’s a pretty important right to most people.”  (Continues at WaPo)

Romney needs to jump in!

There’s a meme floating around the Internet: If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a boat and it capsizes, who wins?

America.

A year ago, it was almost unthinkable that the Republican Party’s presidential nominee would be the bombastic real-estate mogul, especially given the party’s deep bench and the strength and talent of its field.

As many pundits have explained, Trump’s views and past statements belie the claim that he is Republican at all.

The Republican and Democratic parties are both in turmoil, sharply divided over the candidates who have survived the primary season.

And come November, American voters will face a choice between two of the most dishonest, disliked and corrupt candidates in modern political history.

Which is why the calls for a third-party run are not only compelling, but such a candidacy may represent the only acceptable choice for millions of Americans.

While many anti-Trump conservatives began floating the idea of an independent run after Trump started collecting delegates, support has increased in recent weeks.

Several names have been suggested, including an unabashed Trump critic, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and former Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, both Republicans.

But the most probable candidate for a third-party claim is Mitt Romney.

Criticized for his stiffness and capacity for making politically tone-deaf comments, Romney did not garner enough enthusiasm in his own party to defeat a strong incumbent.

But he quickly proved that charisma is not the equivalent of leadership or wisdom.

In the ensuing years, Romney has become a respected party elder, in part because, as writer David French explains, he’s been vindicated by events.

While he was roundly mocked for his declaration that Russia posed the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States, Romney correctly predicted the failure of Obama’s “reset” strategy with Russia and the subsequent rise of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps more important, Romney possesses integrity, a virtue lacking in both front-runner rivals.

In March, Romney addressed the Republican Party passionately, detailing why Trump was not acceptable to represent it in the general election.  (Full article)

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article80459627.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article80459627.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article80459627.html#storylink=cpy

Is he unaware that everyone has the technology to call him on his BS?

I’m going to make a confession about Donald Trump. I have no idea what causes him to do this thing where he just boldly states that he never said something that he very obviously said before. There are at least several possible explanations, though.

The first is that he is just experiencing the ravages of age. Trump is exceptionally old for a Presidential candidate and they say the memory is the first thing to go. It’s entirely possible that Trump literally does not remember that he said that Japan should get nukes. I don’t know why someone doesn’t remind him that he said it before he goes out and claims that he never said it, but

Trump isn’t surrounded by competent people, so that’s pretty much all the explanation you need.

The second is that he is just unaware of the fact that he has cameras on him all the time now, and that anyone with access to the Internet can easily go back and find him contradicting himself. So maybe the answer is not advancing dementia, but rather that he thinks he can get away with it because he’s just unaware that everyone has the technology to call him on his BS these days.

The third is that he assumes that no one will care, and that this assumption is based on how his followers to this point have behaved. Certainly, the 43% of Republican voters who voted for him in the primary have not shown any sort of willingness to be swayed with facts, or to care about the fact that Trump is a pathological liar, but Trump’s assumption that this will translate to the general election is a bold one, indeed. (Continues with video included)

Analysis finds 3,500 lawsuits, unprecedented for a Presidential nominee

Donald Trump is a fighter, famous for legal skirmishes over everything from his golf courses to his tax bills to Trump University. But until now, it hasn’t been clear precisely how litigious he is and what that might portend for a Trump presidency.

An exclusive USA TODAY analysis of legal filings across the United States finds that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits.

The sheer volume of lawsuits is unprecedented for a presidential nominee. No candidate of a major party has had anything approaching the number of Trump’s courtroom entanglements.

Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at least 50 civil lawsuits remain open even as he moves toward claiming the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in seven weeks. On Tuesday, court documents were released in one of the most dramatic current cases, filed in California by former students accusing Trump University of fraudulent and misleading behavior.

The legal actions provide clues to the leadership style the billionaire businessman would bring to bear as commander in chief. He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force. He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners. He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers and other vendors. (Continues at USA Today)