No Citizenship for You!

2020:  It turns out that the Monmouth University Poll showing a three way tie between Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and former VP Joe Biden really was an outlier so much so that Patrick Murray, Monmouth’s polling director, released a statement yesterday acknowledging that the “picture it painted diverged from others," pollspeak for we goofed.  He made that statement after Quinnipiac University and USA Today/Suffolk University released their polls, both of which showed Biden as the top choice of 32% of Democratic and independent voters who lean Democratic.  Quinnipiac showed Warren in second with 19% and Sanders in third 15% while the USA team found Warren with 14% and Sanders with 12%. Those results were consistent with last week’s CNN poll.  As a result of the polls and their fundraising efforts only ten Democratic candidates have met the qualification criteria for the upcoming September debate meaning that we will be subjected to only one night of Biden gaffes combined with almost everyone but Biden dumping on Biden.  The ten qualifiers include Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Yang and Warren.  Yesterday, after failing to make the cut, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the women’s rights advocate who never really recovered from her role in dethroning former Senator/serial pincher Al Franken  dropped out of the race.  In response, Trump, the serial molester who gets away with everything, snidely tweeted “A sad day for the Democrats, Kirsten Gillibrand has dropped out of the Presidential Primary. I’m glad they never found out that she was the one I was really afraid of!” Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who came close to meeting the criteria but at the end of the day didn’t make the cut, expressed her frustration with the Democratic process by going on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show to kvetch about the process, odd but considering that she’s also canoodled with Syria’s Assad, not a stretch for Tulsi.  By the way, Trump is a bit angry with Fox because a few of its serious reporters have actually been reporting the real news, so he tweeted that he’s now “looking” for a “new News outlet, Fox isn’t working for us anymore.”  In any case there’s still a chance that Tulsi and billionaire businessman Tom Steyer, who spent around $16 million on TV and Facebook ads in an effort to buy himself onto the stage could still make it into the October debate.  In other 2020 news, Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson announced that due to his deteriorating health he plans to step down at the end of the year.  Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp who squeaked out a questionable victory over Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams will now get to pick his successor, or at least his temporary successor. A special election for the seat will be held in 2020.  With Georgia’s other Senator David Perdue up for reelection in 2020, that means that both of the state’s senate seats will be up for grabs. If only the Democrats had a few good candidates, or a few good ones willing to run.  Abrams who stands the best chance of winning was quick to say that she’s not interested in running possibly because she’s hoping to be selected as someone’s vice president, a spot that that Gillibrand also said that she would consider if only someone would ask.   

Storm Clouds:  In addition to throwing shade at Gillibrand, Trump stuck it to Puerto Rico and San Juan Mayor Carmin Yulin Cruz, another one of those “nasty” women he finds so offensive by tweeting ““We are tracking closely tropical storm Dorian as it heads, as usual, to Puerto Rico, FEMA and all others are ready, and will do a great job. When they do, let them know it, and give them a big Thank You — Not like last time. That includes from the incompetent Mayor of San Juan!” It looks like Puerto Rico will be spared the brunt of Dorian which appears to be saving its energy for Florida, but it is worth noting that Mayor Yulin Cruz actually was fairly complimentary of FEMA yesterday, saying that they appeared to have learned a lot from their Hurricane Maria experience.   Former Secretary of Defense Mattis who left the Trump administration in protest after Trump announced plans to withdraw all US troops from Syria, something that he actually still hasn’t done, finally spoke out, just a little, yesterday. In a Wall Street Journal excerpt of his upcoming book, because almost everyone who gets close to Trump inevitably goes on TV and whines and/or writes book, he wrote “I did as well as I could for as long as I could.  When my concrete solutions and strategic advice especially keeping faith with our allies, no longer resonated it was time to resign.” If Mattis was still in the administration, he’d be pulling his hair out right about now.  Yesterday it was reported that Trump, who continues to work at making Vladimir Putin happy, is slow walking the delivery of $250 million in military aid allocated to Ukraine, the country that Putin keeps going after.  As to that whole Trump Russia thing, after a Trump lawyer threatened to take action against NBC for Lawrence O’Donnell’s report that a Russian oligarch had cosigned one or more of Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans, O’Donnell retracted the story.  To be clear, he didn’t say that it had been proven false, rather he apologized for reporting a story that hadn’t gone through “our rigorous verification and standards process,” adding “I shouldn’t have reported it, and I was wrong to discuss it on the air.” That story still has legs.

Immigration Skirmishes: The report that Trump’s been promising pardons to anyone in his administration willing to skirt the law in order to advance the building of his WALL has gone over about as well as expected possibly because Republican property owners on the border might not be all that into having their property snatched away from them via illegal land grabs. For the record, his spokespeople didn’t deny his offer, they just said that he was kidding and should not be taken seriously.  Just more fodder for the 135 or so House Democratic who are now on board for impeachment, an amount that sounds impressive but that still falls short of the 218 votes that Speaker Pelosi would need for impeachment, and Nancy, the ultimate vote counter, never moves forward with a vote unless she’s confident of victory. In other news, because expelling sick kids receiving life saving treatment in the US isn’t enough for this administration yesterday the US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a policy alert saying that some children born to US service members and government employees overseas will no longer be automatically considered citizens of the US. Though the directive was somewhat confusing it’s thought to mean that  children who are adopted by US service members abroad or who are born to service members while overseas who are not yet citizens such as service members who are green card holders will not receive automatic citizenship. Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy, who recently indicated plans to challenge fellow Democrat Senator Ed Markey for his seat because he’s a Kennedy and he really wants to be Senator, responded by saying that even those immigrants willing to fight for this country aren’t spared from Trump’s hate.  He has a point, at least with regard to Trump’s hate.