The Candidates Are the Issue
Friday, November 4, 2016
Vol. 5, No. 309
E Minus 4: Forget about education, income inequality, national defense, healthcare, the wall, tax cuts, and tax hikes. Forget about all of it. There are only two issues in the final days of the presidential election: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The attacks are direct and personal. Both sides say that if the other wins it will be catastrophic for the country. The Trump campaign released a commercial saying, “’Hillary Clinton is under FBI investigation again – after her emails were found on pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Think about that.”
The Trumps sent out the candidate’s wife Melania yesterday to present a softer edge and introduce her as a potential First Lady with a social improvement agenda for America. Mrs. Trump said she would fight to stop cyberbullying. This was on the same day Donald Trump tweeted, “#CrookedHillary is unfit to serve.”
One of Clinton’s latest ads strings together several of Trump’s stupidest pronouncement, concluding with “I would bomb the shit out of them.” On screen are the words, “Just One Wrong Move,” recalling the days of the Cold War.
While putting on a confident face as her lead narrows, Clinton may be fighting for her political life.
Polls in New Hampshire show a potentially fatal weakness for Hillary Clinton with her lead down to about 2-3 percentage points among reliable polls.
Political analysts, like baseball announcers, love statistics — “The last time there was a 7th inning grand slam in the World Series …” But among the numbers runners, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blogs says that if Clinton wins all her “firewall” states but loses New Hampshire, the election could be tied at 269 Electoral College votes, throwing the resolution to the Republican Congress.
Silver writes, “Or maybe not — if Clinton also lost the 2nd Congressional District of Maine, where polls show a tight race and where the demographics are unfavorable to her, Trump would win the Electoral College 270-268, probably despite losing the popular vote.”
They’ve got Mail: CBS News reports that the FBI has found emails related to Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State on the laptop belonging to Huma Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Some of the emails are not duplicates of messages previously reviewed by the FBI, but there’s no determination yet whether they are pertinent to the feds’ email investigation.
Final Days: Barack Obama, who could probably win the election easily if he was running, has been on the road making final pleas for Hillary and the legacy of his healthcare reform. During a rally at Florida International University he said, “You watch the press conference and you realize, they got no plan. It’s not like, they don’t even have a pretense of a plan. They don’t even have a semblance of a plan. Not even a hint of a plan. Not even a remote — not even a — there’s no plan. Nothing, zero, nada. You can’t just be against something. You gotta be for something.”
So far they have shown that no, they don’t.
Higher Ed: The Education department is fining Penn State University $2.4 million for failing to report accusations that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was molesting children. Federal law requires schools to report campus crimes and potential dangers. Sandusky, now 72, is serving a 60-year prison sentence.
Locker Room Talk: Harvard University announced that it is cancelling the rest of its men’s soccer season because the players had traded sexually explicit evaluations of the recruits for the women’s team. University lawyers investigated after the college paper, The Harvard Crimson, published a story about it. A document rating the women players was called “The Scouting Report.”
Harvard men’s soccer has a season record of 10-3-2 overall and was leading the Ivy League, 4-0-1.
Stronger Things: One of Donald Trump’s commercials called “Stronger” that touts how Trump would be strong on national defense features a picture of a World War II battleship that’s now a museum.
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