Caving

Citizenship:  Yesterday after a long day filled with erroneous news reports that Trump was going to add the much disputed citizenship question to the 2020 census by presidential fiat he surprised almost everyone by backing off.  He did that during a late in the day press conference where he first launched into a defense of citizenship reminiscing back to the day when you could proudly declare “I am a citizen of the United States” and attacking anyone, primarily those obstructive Democrats, the ACLU and the “liberal” judges, who didn’t think that it was important to be able to differentiate between citizens, green card holders and all those illegals who are destroying the American way, or at least his American way. Then to utterly snow his base, he issued an edict to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross instructing him to get his hands on all the data already collected by the Federal government to compile the citizenship information, Trump’s way of making it sound like he won the census war that he didn’t win, judges and Democrats be damned.  To a certain extent he’s right, the government does have a lot of the data that he’s been seeking, he largely hadn’t gone that route in the first place because the motive for including the citizenship question on the census questionnaire was to scare away the participation of households with undocumented residents.  Sadly, he’s probably already scared away a good number of participants just by threatening to include the question and that data that  Mills has now been instructed to amass could be used for nefarious purposes.  It certainly doesn’t help that, as of now, under his direction INS plans to start rounding up “millions” of undocumented migrants on Sunday.  The million number is a gross exaggeration, the actual target is somewhere around 2000 to 3000 of the more recent arrivals from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, few if any of whom are actual menacing criminals, the crowd that the INS should be targeting.  The good news for residents of Louisiana is that pick-ups in their region are being put on hold due to the hurricane, the bad news is that instead they get to drown in some of that climate change associated flood water. Before leaving the podium, Trump turned the microphone over to Attorney General Barr who stuck with the faux celebratory theme by actually congratulating his dear leader for issuing the executive order to his Commerce Secretary.  While Trump’s base may actually believe all this nonsense, the conservative Federalist Society and its leader Leonard Leo who had been one of the most vocal advocates for the question’s inclusion was not amused.  They really, really were counting on Trump getting the citizenship question into the 2020 questionnaire, because undercounting the population of Democratic districts in order to shift more congressional and state seats to Republican districts, together with recreating the courts in their image, is part of their long term plan.   

2020:  The newest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll indicates that with 26% of likely primary voters supporting him, former VP Joe Biden is still the leading Democratic contender for president.  Moreover, despite Senator Kamala Harris’ debate ambush, Biden appears to be more than holding his own with African American voters.  Senator Elizabeth Warren who has jumped head of 2016 progressive favorite Senator Bernie Sanders registers at 19% followed by Sanders and Harris, each with 13%.  Next are Mayor Pete Buttigieg with 7% and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang with 2% each.  All the other aspirants including Senators Booker, Gilibrand, Klobuchar and Governors Inslee, Hickenlooper and Bennet poll at 1% or less, especially concerning for them because though 1% will get them on to the stage for the second debates, scheduled for July 30 and 31, the criteria for the third debates, scheduled to take place on September 12 and 13^th, require a minimum polling level of 2%.  Newest entry Tom Steyer doesn’t show up at all in the rankings largely because he hadn’t announced his candidacy at the time that the poll was taken.  So far twenty of the announced twenty-four Democratic candidates, including all of those who participated in the first debate, less Congressman Eric Swalwell who has dropped out of the race plus Governor Steve Bullock of Montana, have qualified for the second debate. However, the participant list isn’t set yet as enough time remains for one or more of the four remaining candidates, Seth Moulton, Mike Gravel, Wayne Messam or Tom Steyer to jump ahead of one or more of those hanging at the bottom of the list.  By the way, if you don’t recognize the names of those four, you are not alone.  

Social Media:  Yesterday, before publicly caving on the citizenship question Trump hosted a social media summit at the White House.  While representatives from FaceBook and Twitter were not invited the crowd was filled with representatives from a number of conservative sites and denizens of the underworld including Trump’s favorite foreign policy expert and all around despicable character Sebastian Gorka.  Under pressure, the Trump team did rescind the invitation to Ben Garrison, a particularly anti-Semitic cartoonist, but only after unrelenting pushback. Trump gave a meandering, unscripted speech where among other things he falsely suggested there was a deliberate attempt by social media companies to prevent him from gaining followers, alleging that "a lot of bad things are happening.”  With a smile on his face he pretended to chastise the attendees for some of the nasty things that they routinely post on line, mostly the garbage that Don Jr retweets.  He also called for more regulation but by regulation he didn’t mean the bipartisan Honest Ads Act sponsored by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Lindsey Graham to boost the transparency of political and campaign ads posted on social media and the internet because that would make life for those Russian bots more difficult. And separately Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers argued that he should be granted bail because it's not fair to discriminate against rich guys and all those young girls were really prostitutes. So basically it was another normal day.