Google interest in candidates during and after debates
Carol Giacomo:
New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, has cast his lot with Republican presidential candidates, other hardliners and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in declaring his opposition to the nuclear agreement that President Obama and five other world leaders negotiated with Iran. Given Mr. Schumer’s wrong-headed and irresponsible decision, Democrats may want to reconsider whether he is the best candidate to be their next leader in the Senate, a job he desperately wants.
I think the deal survives a veto and Congress won't override it. But nothing about this endears me to Schumer.
Hunter Walker:
Hillary Clinton isn't onstage to defend herself, but she still managed to mock many of the candidates appearing in the first Republican presidential debates on Thursday night.
Clinton's campaign set up a press filing room for reporters covering the debates at her headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. The walls of the room were covered with posters showing past statements from several of the Republican candidates praising Clinton.
There were quotes from front-runner Donald Trump, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, and former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Check out all five of the posters below.
Politico:
Donald Trump is finally in a feud with someone Republican primary voters care about: Megyn Kelly.
Unlike undocumented immigrants, John McCain or Rosie O’Donnell, the Fox News anchor enjoys a rabid following among the network’s viewers, who happen to make up the core of the Republican primary electorate. So picking a fight with Kelly — as Trump did when he chided her during a tough debate question about insults he’s lobbed at women, dissed her in the spin room, and tweeted his complaints about her — carries risks that Trump’s other feuds do not.
For example, menstruation insults...
Above gif courtesy of @darth
Damon Linker:
Between those moments (conception and birth) lies a developmental continuum that confounds any and every effort at strictly rational systematization. An abortion at six weeks is worse than one at four weeks. Eight weeks is worse than six. Twelve is worse than 10. And so forth, as we approach fetal viability — at which point, what was once a medical procedure with minimal moral import becomes a matter of murder.
I know that Ross Douthat and many other pro-life friends don't see it this way. I respect and admire their consistency, even as I find it hard to understand how they could possibly believe it, and even as I think it sometimes drives them to approach the issue of abortion in a needlessly extreme and counter-productive way.
Because, you see, having convinced themselves that every abortion at every stage of pregnancy is murder, pro-lifers can't help but show relative indifference to the other person involved in the moral calculus: the pregnant woman. She's the one looking to hire a contract killer to murder her own child, after all. At six months. At three months. At six weeks. At four weeks. The morning after. The timing doesn't matter. There's always a homicide victim and a perp.
Pew:
Over the past year, there has been a substantial rise in the share of Americans — across racial and ethnic groups — who say the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites, and a growing number of Americans view racism as a big problem in society.
NY Times editorial:
For years, voter identification laws have been sold as a sensible antidote to fraud at the polls. Many people, including Supreme Court justices, have bought that fallacious line, even though in-person fraud is essentially nonexistent.
Now, slowly but surely, such laws are being revealed for the racially discriminatory, anti-voter schemes that they are.
On Wednesday, a federal appeals court panel unanimously agreed that Texas’ voter ID law had a discriminatory effect on black and Latino voters, and therefore violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was the first time a federal appeals court had ruled against such a law. It was also a sign that the Voting Rights Act remains functional, despite the 2013 Supreme Court decision that cut out a key provision requiring federal oversight of jurisdictions, like Texas, with histories of racial discrimination.
Two from
Dan Diamond,
first:
The first official Republican debate on Thursday night was fascinating, gripping television.
It was also incomplete.
Speaking on FOX News, leading Republican candidates like Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio all took shots at the Affordable Care Act … but they left out cruical context on how the law is actually working.
Here are three key numbers that were overlooked at the GOP debate — and are incredibly important to understanding the state of health care in America.
1) The nation’s uninsured rate has plunged by at least 37% since the ACA took effect
2) Repealing Obamacare would raise the deficit by $130 billion — at least
3) Eleven GOP governors have said yes to Medicaid expansion
Second:
After Donald Trump announced his latest bid for the presidency, I reached out to get details on Trump’s plan to replace Obamacare, and posted that interview on FORBES last week. But for many FORBES readers, the most eye-catching part of the interview wasn’t Trump’s plan for health care.
It was what the Trump campaign said about unemployment.
“Mr. Trump believes that the real unemployment rate is over 18%, not the reported 5.5%,” a spokesperson told me.
Trump’s distrust of the government’s job statistics isn’t new. In July, he even suggested that the U.S. unemployment rate could be as high as 40% — well above what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found.