Latino GOPer’s advice: Trump’s Key to Victory
Hector Barreto, who headed the Small Business Administration under President George W. Bush, says moderate and conservative Hispanic voters could help push Donald Trump to victory. Writing at FoxNews.com, he points to polls showing such voters with a positive impression of Trump — and even that 40 percent of those who feel negatively say they would consider voting for him over Hillary Clinton. “Across the board,” he writes, voters in a sample by the Latino Coalition “are focused on national security and the economy” — especially “moderate and foreign-born Latinos (who, incidentally, self-identify as ‘conservative’ at higher rates than U.S.-born Latinos).” They’re also business-minded, concerned about red tape, taxes and the effects of ObamaCare.
Media critic charges: Journalists Fear the Truth on Race
John Ziegler, writing at Mediaite, says reporters refuse to report accurately on racial matters “because nothing can get them in more trouble than being seen as racist, even if all they are really doing is stating facts.” He points to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which last week apologized for a front-page headline about the Dallas police massacre — “Gunman Targeted Whites — that the paper acknowledged “was not inaccurate.” But when protestors started picketing, they were “almost immediately placated with a meeting and a prominently published apology” for a “very insensitive” headline. And, he adds, “Amazingly, the newspaper’s editor didn’t even try to pretend that this wasn’t what happened.”
A columnist’s lament: Campaign Debates a Waste of Time
Never mind that pundits had pretty much the same complaints 25 years ago: Jeff Jacoby bemoans the “degrading cage matches that have passed for debates in the present election cycle.” One problem is the “declining moral caliber” of the candidates. But the real problem, he argues in the Boston Globe, is that “in real debates, the foremost objective is to convince those listening to alter their view. In presidential debates, it is to deflect ‘gotcha’ questions and to score political points by embarrassing another candidate or rebuking the moderator.” What to do? He suggests modeling future debates on the widely popular Intelligence Squared forums that air online: “Nearly every debate is lively, respectful, stimulating, absorbing, and informative.”
From the right: Obama, the Anti-Cop President
Barack Obama “had a unique opportunity to speak about values and virtues” to disaffected African-Americans — but chose instead to stoke “grievance and resentment over supposed victimization by all authority,” writes Myron Magnet at City Journal Online. And that, he says, led the president to begin “sniffing out evidence or racism everywhere and demonizing the police.” His remarks after the Dallas anti-cop attack, Magnet charges, were “among the most irresponsible and incendiary” by a president ever. By agreeing with Black Lives Matter rhetoric that there’s a problem with police behavior, Obama was essentially “blaming the police for their own deaths.”
Clinton-watcher warns: Bill & Hil Getting Rich Off Turkey
This could quickly get embarrassing: Ira Stoll at HeatStreet notes that The Podesta Group, which is headed by Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, registered in May as a lobbyist for a group supporting Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-imam blamed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for the aborted military coup in Turkey. In fact, notes Stoll, Gulen allies have contributed to both the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Global Initiative, “as well as between $500,000 and $1 million to the Clinton Foundation.” But she’s also raising money from Erdogan allies. Will her Turkey policy be set on “American interests and American values,” he asks, or by “enrichment-by-influence-peddling”?