Elizabeth Warren Goes Off On 'Loser' Trump

The rise of Donald Trump is a battle for the soul of the Republican party

The rise of Donald Trump is a battle for the soul of the Republican party

"After Mitt Romney failed to beat a vulnerable Barack Obama in 2012, a chastened Republican party arrived pretty quickly at the answer to their electability problem.

They were the party of old, angry white men, and in a much-heralded Washington DC press conference in March 2013, senior officials released an “autopsy report”concluding that to win back the White House, the party needed to appeal to young voters, women and minorities.

Three years later, Donald Trump, who is historically unpopular among every one of those demographics, is the frontrunner for the party’s nomination. To paraphrase David Byrne, how did the Republican party get here?"

Extended interview with Michelle Alexander | MSNBC

Extended interview with Michelle Alexander | MSNBC

Obama: Trump Doesn't Know Much About Nuclear Weapons, or the World - NBC News

Obama: Trump Doesn't Know Much About Nuclear Weapons, or the World - NBC News

It’s Probably First Ballot Or Bust For Donald Trump At The GOP Convention | FiveThirtyEight

Trump’s delegate problems stem from two major issues. One is his lack of organization: Trump just recently hired a strategist to oversee his delegate-selection efforts; Cruz has been working on the process for months. The other is his lack of support from “party elites.” The people who attend state caucuses and conventions are mostly dyed-in-the-wool Republican regulars and insiders, a group that is vigorously opposed to Trump. Furthermore, some delegate slots are automatically given to party leaders and elected officials, another group that strongly opposes Trump, as evident in his lack of endorsements among them.



It’s Probably First Ballot Or Bust For Donald Trump At The GOP Convention | FiveThirtyEight

Judge strikes down Mississippi's ban on same-sex adoptions | MSNBC

A federal judge struck down Mississippi’s ban on adoption by same-sex couples Thursday — making the practice legal nationwide.



“We are obviously thrilled with today’s ruling, but our clients are beyond ecstatic,” said Roberta Kaplan, lead attorney in the case for the Campaign for Southern Equality, a North Carolina-based activist group, which represented four Mississippi couples in the suit along with the Massachusetts-based Family Equality Council.



Judge strikes down Mississippi's ban on same-sex adoptions | MSNBC

Sanders, Trump, and the Rise of the Non-Voters - The New Yorker

Perhaps this explains some of the surface similarities of their supporters. Several weeks ago, Henry Brady, the dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, tried to make sense of new data from the American National Election Survey, an academic group that did extensive surveys of voters in the early primary states, along the lines of much more detailed exit polls. Brady grouped each voter’s responses according to the candidate that voter supported, and then plotted the candidates by ideology, from Sanders on the left to Cruz and Trump on the right. The graphs kept resolving into an elegant U-shape: For many questions, the responses of Sanders voters most resembled those of Trump voters. They were the youngest, and the least educated. On certain issues—“xenophobia, racism, nationalism,” Brady said—they occupied opposite extremes. On others, the differences between them were slight. “Trump voters are almost as worried about economic inequality as Sanders voters,” he said, and more worried about it than anyone else.



Sanders, Trump, and the Rise of the Non-Voters - The New Yorker

Cuba After Obama Left - The New Yorker

Cubans in the audience shouted “Viva, viva,” as if to acknowledge the shared triumph of Obama’s visit and the reconciliation under way between the two nations.Or so it seemed. Later that day, in a meeting with a friend who is a longtime loyalist of the Revolution, I asked her what she had thought of Obama’s speech. She wrinkled her nose. “Well,” she began. “He said a lot of nice things, and he was very polished, but let’s see what the reality is.” I noted that Raúl himself had applauded Obama in the Teatro. He hadn’t signalled any doubts, and indeed he had accompanied Obama to the Cuba-U.S. baseball game afterward; we had all seen the two of them chummily seated together, talking animatedly. Later, Castro, who had not been at the airport when Obama arrived, had seen him off, walking him to the foot of the stairway of Air Force One. So what was the real issue worrying her? My friend shrugged. It had all been a bit too much, she said. She couldn’t really explain.

My friend’s reaction was an early hint that Cuba’s deep state, in the form of its Communist Party hard-liners, was unhappy. Their pushback came swiftly, during that evening’s televised broadcast of a program called “Mesa Redonda” (“The Roundtable”), in which several apparatchiks sat around humorlessly dissecting the implications of the Obama visit. On Wednesday, Granma, Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper, ran an editorial titled “What Obama Says and Doesn’t Say,” in which the writer pointed out that Obama had used a teleprompter during his speech—“something the people can’t see”—and questioned the sincerity of his intentions.

Cuba After Obama Left - The New Yorker

NYTimes: Learning From Obama

NYTimes: Learning From Obama

"Like many political junkies, I’ve been spending far too much time looking at polls and trying to understand their implications. Can Donald Trump really win his party’s nomination? (Yes.) Can Bernie Sanders? (No.) But the primaries aren’t the only things being polled; we’re still getting updates on President Obama’s overall approval. And something striking has happened on that front.

At the end of 2015 Mr. Obama was still underwater, with significantly more Americans disapproving than approving. Since then, however, his approval has risen sharply while disapproval has plunged. He’s still only in modestly positive territory, but the net movement in polling averages has been about 11 percentage points, which is a lot."