WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2016
Today’s Good News And Bad News
From Our Local Political Junkie We’ll Call “Cincy Dave”

Good News for Hillary
After last night, pretty much all is well with the Democrat Party.  Unity seems to be flourishing, with a few exceptions among die-hard Bernie supporters.   Hillary was officially nominated by the usual roll call vote, which was re-arranged to put Vermont last, so that Bernie could ask the convention to nominate Hillary, which they did.   There certainly were no backstabbing speeches in the manner of Ted (Sore Loser) Cruz.  It looks like the efforts by the Trump forces to pour gasoline on the fire didn’t work, and may have even backfired.  

As far as Democrats are concerned, internally, the DNC email issue is over with, however, there is still the FBI investigation as to who was behind the hack and subsequent leak.  The Russians are strongly suspected, and evidence is mounting. The investigation may last a long time before they find out the whole story, if indeed they ever do. Probably Putin, Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and Trump are hoping they don’t. Anyway, any evidence short of proof is often enough in politics, so the Democrats are going to run with it, while the other side tries to dismiss any suggestion of it. It will be fun to watch. “Putin’s Candidate” could become a bumper sticker.

The highlight of last evening was a long speech by The Big Dog about how he met Hillary, how long it took him to get her to agree to marry him and basically their whole life together since then.  He detailed a huge number of the things she had worked on to help various groups of people large and small, far and wide.    However, he did leave a couple of things out of the life story, mainly his affairs and his impeachment, but you could understand that, since he really didn’t want to embarrass her any more than he has already done. Additionally, daughter Chelsea was in the audience.  She is expected to speak on Thursday.

As expected, he gave a big endorsement of Hillary’s ability to work with Republicans and Democrats alike, and said that her opponents had created a “cartoon caricature” of her to run against because they couldn’t run against her accomplishments or experience. He never mentioned Trump by name and only vaguely alluded to him once or twice.  This was in contrast to other speakers, who had a good time talking about what kind of a person DJT is.  Warts and all, The Big Dog is still a good speaker and he has too much political savvy to engage in name calling.  He is still one of the best politicians ever, and is a huge asset to the campaign.

Tonight’s convention schedule features speeches by President Obama and VP candidate Tim Kaine.

Bad News for Trump
Trump Campaign Stiffs Freedom Girls.    The father of one of the USA Freedom Kids, who performed at a Trump Rally, and whose video of it went viral, plans to sue the Trump Campaign for breach of contract.  He says they never got paid or received anything that was promised to them.   Given Trump’s history of stiffing contractors and workers, that is not so surprising, but stiffing supporters and kids can make news.  Here is the story:  The odd thing is that, even after being screwed over by the Trump Campaign, the father doesn’t know who he will vote for, or at least he says he doesn’t.  Maybe he is still hoping for payment from the campaign and doesn’t want to burn any bridges.  He’d better get in line because he has plenty of company.   

In another, similar story, Trump was ordered to pay $300,000 in legal fees resulting from a lawsuit brought by a mom and pop paint store that Trump stiffed.   The paint was used on Trump’s National Doral Miami Golf resort.  Here is that story:   One would think that a smart politician would just pay off the paint store to bury the story, but DJT apparently doesn’t think like anyone else. He believes that all publicity is good publicity.

Good News for Trump
As we noted before, national polls mean little, but state polls, which do have some meaning, are starting to come out.   A poll for Missouri shows Trump with a 10 point lead over Hillary. In recent presidential elections, Missouri has been close but, as a former slave state, usually goes to the red team anyway. This year, it may be a lost cause for Hillary and she might just as well save her time

and the campaign’s money by forgetting about it.  Whether Trump wins Missouri by 500 votes or 500,000, it results in the same number of Electoral Votes for Trump.

Good News for Hillary
For the opposite reason, Hillary seems to be pulling out of Colorado.  She is holding a sizeable lead there and probably thinks it is in the bag, pulling TV ads and not scheduling appearances, saving time and money.

Another poll signifying nothing.   
NBC has a new national poll called the NBC News|SurveyMonkey (really) Weekly Election Tracking Poll that shows Clinton leading by 46 to 45 percent. We guess they use real monkeys to pick the numbers in this one, so you can depend on it about as much as any other poll using monkeys, robots or whatever.

News Flash
Finally, here’s a great news story. John Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan, is getting out of the nut house after 35 years. What political consequences this has, if any, are unknown but we have always been fascinated by the fact that he avoided prison by claiming that he was crazy, while the government claimed he was sane.  However, after the court agreed that he was crazy and sent  him to an asylum, both the prosecution and defense completely reversed their arguments.    In order to keep him in, the government has argued for the past 35 years that he is crazy and in order to get him out, Hinckley’s lawyers argued that he is sane.    So maybe he is sane now, but Jodie Foster probably should double up on her security system, and politicians, including those owned by the NRA, should check to make sure his name is on the ATF background list.