Post and Courier:
‘New day in South Carolina’: House votes to take down Confederate flag
Greg Sargent:
Trump’s comments — he referred to undocumented immigrants as drug dealers and rapists — have been properly condemned by some of the GOP candidates. But as Graham suggests, they are a reminder of a lingering, deeper fundamental difference between the parties that could prove crucial to deciding the Latino vote and the 2016 outcome. Broadly speaking, many Democratic officials think undocumented immigrants have something positive to contribute to American life, and many Republican officials don’t. Or, even if they do, they are just not willing to countenance legally integrating them — because of their previous lawbreaking — under any set of workable conditions.
Paul Waldman:
It’s important to understand that there’s no consensus even on the right about how much attention to give to Lopez-Sanchez’s case. Most of the Republican candidates are treading carefully so far. While they oppose the “sanctuary city” policies that meant that Lopez-Sanchez wasn’t turned over to immigration authorities when he had been arrested for lesser crimes, they haven’t yet tried to use this case as a bludgeon to attack Democrats. (The unsurprising exception to this is Donald Trump; meanwhile, for the record, many Democrats have said that a sanctuary city policy should still have allowed someone like Lopez-Sanchez to be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
Francis Wilkinson with some inconvenient facts:
Donald Trump's squawking on Mexicans roiled the Republican presidential field in late June and dominated the news. It took a while for leading candidates, including the most pro-immigration voices in the field, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, to repudiate Trump. (Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose inability to nail down an immigration stance has become comical, never quite got there.)
The 2016 Republican nominee for president will almost certainly not make a fuss about deportation policy, regardless of past positions. In all likelihood, facing a difficult road with Hispanic and Asian voters, he will support legalization of long-settled undocumented immigrants. Citizenship remains an unsettled question. But the era of deportation is coming to an end.
Dylan Byers:
Donald Trump, clickbait
Reporters insist he has no shot, but news outlets, led by CNN, can’t get enough of him.
WaPo:
The head of the Republican National Committee, responding to demands from increasingly worried party leaders, spent nearly an hour Wednesday on the phone with Donald Trump, urging the presidential candidate to tone down his inflammatory comments about immigration that have infuriated a key election constituency.
Jeb Lund:
The party has run so long on nativist anxiety about foreigners plundering lady liberty, stealing jobs and slowly strangling the republic to death that the next step is just calling immigrants rapists, thieves and murderers. And thanks to years of purity testing in Republican primaries, after trying to ignore the issue for weeks, the remaining candidates have only two options left: try to join or outflank Trump to the right or try to non-ignore ignore him by writing him off as “inappropriate.”
The rest of the world can just call Trump an idiot, a man with few ambitions outside of being Trumpy, whose remaining strands of what one might call policy are wisps of spun sugar extruded by hot air, reminding everyone of the tacky coif that sits atop his blanched Smithfield Ham of a face. The Republican Party can’t even luxuriate in ad hominem. Yeah, they could call him an empty suit and a bozo, but that stops working the moment anyone notices that he sounds like a slightly loaded version of themselves.
Brian Beutler:
The Republican party has had well-documented difficulty making inroads with minority voters since the 2012 election. It’s probably more accurate to say that since the 2012 election Republicans have been engaged in a quiet and unresolved debate amongst themselves over which of the following three strategic reforms to pursue:
1) Making genuine, substantive concessions to minority voters.
2) Making symbolic and rhetorical concessions to minority voters, without making significant changes to the GOP’s substantive agenda.
3) Making no concessions to minority voters whatsoever, while working to increase the GOP’s already impressive margins among white voters.
Tim Alberta:
A growing chorus of Republicans, nervous that Trump is hurting the GOP's brand ahead of 2016, are scrambling to neutralize him. To that end, the most aggressive suggestion came from GOP mega-donor John Jordan, who told the Associated Press this week that Republican leaders should find a way to ban Trump from participating in the primary debates.
It's the only surefire way to prevent Trump from stealing the show in Cleveland on August 6 and turning the first Republican debate into a circus.
But it's not going to happen: The 2016 primary debates will be the product of a partnership between the Republican National Committee and individual media outlets. The RNC is free to suggest qualification criteria for the debates—such as a cap on the number of participants—with the aim of keeping the event orderly and beneficial to the party. But the final guidelines are determined by the broadcasting network, and if a candidate qualifies, nothing can be done to exclude him or her.
S. V. Date:
Maybe money can't buy happiness, but it sure can buy the framework of a presidential campaign.
Just ask Donald Trump. The real-estate developer-turned reality TV star has never formally run for political office before, yet has put together a New Hampshire operation using a pretty simple plan: purchasing one off the shelf, in this case by hiring top staff away from Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity.
Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, had until January run AFP's national voter-registration effort. Trump's New Hampshire state director, Matt Ciepielowski, moved over from a similar job at AFP. Even Trump's New Hampshire headquarters is located in the same brick office building as AFP's New Hampshire office in Manchester. (Asked if the group is supporting Trump, Greg Moore, the director of AFP New Hampshire, was unequivocal: "No. Absolutely not.")
Gallup:
As South Carolina officials prepare to vote to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds, a diminished majority of Americans, 54%, down from 59% in 2000 and 69% in 1992, now view the Confederate flag as "a symbol of Southern pride" rather than "a symbol of racism." Democrats' views have shifted from a solid 61% majority viewing the flag as a symbol of Southern pride in 1992 to just 32% holding that view today. Republicans' views are largely unchanged.
NY Times:
The South Carolina House opened debate Wednesday on the fate of the Confederate battle flag, with political leaders of both parties hoping to do what would have been politically impossible only weeks ago and remove the flag from its perch near the State House.
Lawmakers had been expected to consider more than 20 amendments put forward to stop the rush to remove the flag and send it to the nearby Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. But soon after debate started on Wednesday morning, about two dozen proposed changes were withdrawn.
That offered the possibility of a faster resolution than some had expected, but enough amendments were pending that it remained unclear how the day would play out, legislative officials said.
The Conversation:
Dumb or dumber? Jim Carrey’s anti-vax antics expose the tactics of internet cranks
Nate Cohn/Upshot:
Bernie Sanders is surging. He trailed Hillary Rodham Clinton by as much as 50 points in the polls a few months ago, but he has pulled within 10 points in New Hampshire, according to some surveys. He has doubled his support in Iowa over the last month. The signs of his support are palpable: Last week, about 10,000 people attended an event in Madison, Wis., and he announced that he raised $15 million in the first three months of his campaign.
But the Sanders surge is about to hit a wall: the rank and file of the Democratic primary electorate.
No disrespect intended, but this is what a solid number of analysts think, matched by polling.
But Mrs. Clinton still holds a huge lead among moderate and conservative Democrats — white and nonwhite alike. Whether Mr. Sanders can close the gap among these voters will determine the seriousness of his candidacy and whether he can pick up more delegates in other primaries. There aren’t many reasons to expect he will break through, and he certainly isn’t doing it yet.
And more:
Mr. Sanders could hope to do even better than Mr. Obama among liberals, but realistically there are limits. Mrs. Clinton is a liberal Democrat by any measure. Her favorability ratings among “very liberal” voters remain very good; the Quinnipiac poll, for instance, put them at 88 percent favorable and 8 percent unfavorable. Her advantage among women also helps. And this is leaving aside any of the other plausible reasons — electability, experience — for preferring Mrs. Clinton.
Give it an open mind read. Think of it least as a window on the thinking of the analysts and why they say what they say. Don't read it as the final word. A lot can change between now and the end of the primaries.
Ed Kilgore:
Obama, Dean, McCarthy: What Presidential Candidate Does Bernie Sanders Most Resemble
Some Democrats hope Sanders can thread the needle of “keeping Hillary honest” and moving the Democratic Party elites closer to “the base” on financial and trade issues, without helping produce the Republican victories that spoiled previous moments of Democratic self-renewal in 1968 and 1972 and 1984 and 2004 (and for that matter, 1896, 1900 and 1904, the Bryan trifecta of prophetic but unsuccessful campaigns). The high stakes Democrats are increasingly perceiving in 2016 could, however, undermine the high spirits Bernie is presently inspiring. At some point, early-state caucus and primary voters may be affected by watching their Republican neighbors snake-dancing to the polls full of excitement at the prospect of demolishing Obama’s and Clinton’s accomplishments before turning their jack-hammers on the broader edifice of the New Deal and Great Society.
Post and Courier was live tracking all the delaying amendments form the Confederate battle flag defenders. It's quite a sight.