Sunday Funnies

Hair Furor faceplants ahead of RNC

Brutal unforced errors going into Cleveland.

(Thursday night) there was chatter - half tongue-in-cheek but not totally - about whether Trump's decision to postpone his vice presidential announcement wasn't simply some gambit to gain advantage from the massacre in Nice but an effort to play for time and possibly back out of his apparent decision to place Mike Pence on the ticket. That couldn't possibly be true. Not really. But it's Trump. So who knows? Now of course we find out early this afternoon that it was true. [...]

(By Friday afternoon) there were already multiple reports from credible journalists that Trump was up late into Thursday night trying to find a way or find out if there was any way he could back out of his offer to put Pence on the ticket. Now, late in the evening there's this even more detailed version of events in the Times. Trump was some mix of miffed at the leaks, unimpressed by Pence, unable to let the other guys down easy and looking for some way out of the Pence box. He just couldn't find it. On its own terms, this turn of events perfectly captures the mix of unsteadiness, cynicism and derp that characterizes everything about the Trump campaign. But the bigger story isn't so much that it happened as that it was leaked, so quickly, and at such a devastating moment for Pence and the ticket. 

Quite unpresidential.  Somewhat worse than this ...

The last-minute plea for $6 million from Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson to rescue the Republican convention has erupted in controversy, as four of the five signatories to the letter from party organizers never saw it before it was sent and major donors flagged serious errors that forced the convention hosts to apologize to one of the GOP’s most influential financiers.

The episode has opened a window into a host committee that is scrambling and still millions shy of its fundraising target, only days before tens of thousands of Republicans arrive in Cleveland, as it acknowledges for the first time that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has put a damper on donations.

The letter, obtained by POLITICO on Thursday, outlined two dozen major corporations — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Duke Energy and Apple, among them — that it claimed had backed out a combined more than $8.1 million in pledged donations in recent months.

But on Friday, Emily Lauer, a spokeswoman for the Cleveland 2016 host committee, acknowledged to POLITICO that the list of lost donors in the letter to Adelson was inaccurate — and that the committee has now reached out to Adelson’s aides to apologize.

I just don't understand why people think Trump is going to pull off an Electoral College upset ... unless they know Hillary Clinton better than me, and believe she is capable of screwing herself worse than this.  Which is certainly possible but increasingly unlikely.

Borris Miles or Senfronia Thompson for SD-13?

In a true 'lesser of two evils' matchup tomorrow morning at the CWA hall, I must confess that I'll be slightly less unhappy if Miz T prevails, but I don't think she will.  Unless there is a backlash against him that has flown under my radar, I expect to be calling my statehouse representative, Borris Miles, Senator.

Miles has been an extremely frustrating guy to support based on his -- 'erratic' is the kindest word I can use -- behavior since being elected to the Texas House.  He's hard to dislike personally, however.  Thompson has been, as the Chronic board noted in their fulsome endorsement, top-shelf as a legislator and a representative for her House district, but more of the people voting in this election live in Miles'.  And they love the guy, warts and all.

By the way, the Chron overlooked or ignored this unflattering NYT article from 2011 about Senfronia's skill at playing both sides, even when it comes to morally ambiguous issues.

My main question about this race centers around a projected whip count: the numbers of precinct chairs in HD 146 (Borris') versus HD 141 (Senfronia's) that are within SD-13's boundary lines.  I pulled the list from each House district's website and compared them to the Senate district's and counted 41 of Miles' and 18 of Thompson's.  Accounting for the fact that these chairs aren't necessarily sure things for their respective reps, that there are vacancies among the precincts, and that somebody's numbers -- mine or the state of Texas' -- might be off, Miles still likely has a 2-1 base vote lead over Thompson going into Saturday morning's election.

With 95 precinct chairs (or so) doing the electing -- and let's just say ten fewer than the 58 votes Miles is claiming -- he has enough to declare victory on the first ballot.  I do not think he'll win on a first ballot with four or five names on it, but he should prevail on the second.

That's my prediction; let's see how right or wrong I am.

RNC circus plans coming together

These elephants and clowns are going to be some kind of entertaining.

A night highlighting the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya. An appearance by onetime football star Tim Tebow. A presentation detailing former President Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.

Donald J. Trump, the presumptive nominee, has been promising a different kind of Republican National Convention, and plans obtained by The New York Times show that he is eager to put his showbiz stamp on the party’s gathering, even as he struggles to attract A-list talent.

If there's not enough room on their TiVO to record the whole thing, maybe they'll offer a DVD for five hundred bucks or so, a contribution perk like PBS does.  Saul Relative to how much the rubes can get fleeced for.

The list, which is subject to change, as obtained by The New York Times:

Monday, July 18: A Benghazi focus, followed by border patrol agents and Jamiel Shaw Sr. (who became an outspoken advocate for tougher immigration laws after his son was killed in 2008 by an undocumented immigrant). Sen. Tom Cotton, Rudy Giuliani, Melania Trump, Sen. Joni Ernst and others.

Tuesday, July 19: A focus on the economy: Dana White, president of U.F.C., the professional fighting league; Asa Hutchinson, governor of Arkansas; Michael Mukasey, the former United States attorney general; Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a vice-presidential possibility; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; Tiffany Trump and Donald Trump Jr.; and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Wednesday, July 20: Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (who tangled on television with the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper after the Orlando, Fla., nightclub massacre); Eileen Collins (the first woman to command a space shuttle mission); Newt Gingrich; Sen. Ted Cruz; Eric Trump; professional golfer Natalie Gulbis; and the nominee for vice president.

Thursday, July 21: Tebow; Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee; Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma; Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman; Gov. Rick Scott of Florida; Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel; Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a private-equity real estate investor; Ivanka Trump; and lastly the presidential nominee himself.

These are the prime-timers; the full list includes Speaker Paul Ryan, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, more senators and Congress critters, and B-list conservative celebrities such as Marcus Luttrell.

There is some news to be gleaned here.

(W)hat is striking, as much as who is on the list, is who is not. Several figures Mr. Trump had said he would invite to speak, like the boxing promoter Don King and Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, were not included. Neither was Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, a hugely popular figure in the key state of New Hampshire.

And this.

Even as they finalized the list this week, Mr. Trump’s campaign aides and party officials were also working behind the scenes to stave off any challenges to his nomination on the convention floor next week.

Yeah, that.  Stands as much chance of happening as Bernie Sanders being nominated by the Democrats.  The delusions really bloom in this heat, don't they?

(T)he chance that Mr. Trump’s opponents could muster enough support to deny him the nomination is remote. The biggest hazard that Mr. Trump and the leaders of the Republican National Committee are trying to contain is how messy the process could become — and how much damage his campaign could sustain.

Starting on Thursday morning, delegates will begin to debate a series of proposals to change the party’s rules. Those proposed changes could include a provision that would allow delegates to vote their consciences in selecting the Republican presidential nominee, instead of voting in accordance with the outcomes of the primaries and caucuses in their states, as most state party rules require.

If you're not too busy playing Pokemon Go, you might check your Twitter feed late morning and see if anything develops along these lines.  News might break, after all.

Seriously, though, about the convention.

The conventions used to be crucially significant news events, so the news media covers them extensively. A couple of hours’ worth of primetime speeches are on network television, and several hours more are shown on cable news channels.

Because the convention will be televised, lots of important politicians from around the country want to come speak at it. Because lots of important politicians will be there, lots of lobbyists and interest group leaders are there to stage events too. That further increases the convention’s appeal to the media, which find it to be a target-rich environment for interviews, and the extensive national media attention gives further incentives to political influencers, stars, and wannabes to show up.

The extensive media attention itself makes the conventions significant campaign events. In their book The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter, Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson show that polling leads are considerably more predictive after conventions than before. Usually the party that holds its convention first gets a "bounce," and then the party that goes second gets its own "bounce." The net effect of those two convention bounces is a significant political event that meaningfully drives the outcome in November.

This is why you don't fret polling until the kids go back to school, folks.  Two things you should do in mid-to late August: slow down in school zones and start to give the polls more credibility.  Also see this; trust Nate Silver to let you know when it's time to freak out. 

All that said, the upshot of turning conventions into a week-long display of party unity is that they are pretty boring. Any one speech can be quite interesting on its own terms. But the vast majority of them simply blend together, recitations of the same key beats over and over and over again in slightly different tones of voice.

This is what makes the idea of a Donald Trump convention so exciting.

For one thing, many of the key party luminaries whom you’d normally expect to be featured speakers aren’t supporting him. Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush won’t be speaking. Neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich has endorsed Trump yet, so we won’t have that party unity display either. A huge raft of GOP elected officials are skipping the convention, and it’s not entirely obvious that a young up-and-coming Republican politician really wants to keynote this event.

At the same time, while Trump has no real knowledge of or interest in American public policy, he does have extensive experience in the field of reality television.

Normally parties nominate a presidential candidate with the opposite portfolio of skills (Ronald Reagan had demonstrated proficiency in both policy and Hollywood), which is probably wise from a governing standpoint but has led us to a dreary dead end in terms of conventions. By the same token, while Trump would likely be a disastrous president he could be an excellent convention organizer.

Since modern conventions are essentially just long television shows with no real political content, it seems natural that politicians would stage boring ones while the star of NBC’s The Apprentice could stage an amazing one.

If he pulls it off, the Dems will once again clutch their pearls and faint.  For the price of that entertainment value, I'm counting on it.