Politics

Trump’s military parade diverts $2.5 million away from national parks – Business Insider

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Trump’s military parade diverts $2.5 million away from national parks – Business Insider

Roughly $2.5 million allocated for the National Park Service will be diverted to fund President Donald Trump's "Salute to America" Fourth of July celebration, two unnamed sources familiar with the matter said, according to a Washington Post report published Tuesday. The funds were reportedly diverted from entrance and recreation fees generated by the National Park Service. Denis Galvin, a former Park Service deputy director, told The Post that the Fourth of July celebrations at the National Mall in Washington, DC, normally cost the Park Service around $2 million.

I bet it will be one hell of a party! 🎆

NPR

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Trump’s July 4th Speech Isn’t Supposed To Be Political, But May Still Be : NPR

President Trump has a history of treating nonpolitical events like they're campaign rallies, especially if there is a large crowd on hand. His Fourth of July speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial will be just such a setting.

A White House official who declined to be named said the speech will be about celebrating America, the flag and members of the military — not political. But all assurances about what Trump will say or do need to be taken with a grain of salt. Tanks, Flyovers And Heightened Security: Trump's 4th Of July Ups Taxpayer Cost Politics Tanks, Flyovers And Heightened Security: Trump's Fourth Of July Ups Taxpayer Cost

Asked Monday whether he thought he "can give a speech that can reach all Americans," Trump said yes, he thought he could. But 17 seconds into answering the question, the president launched into an attack on Democrats, whose ideas for health care would "destroy the country."

Even before he utters a single word, Trump's decision to deliver a speech on the National Mall on the Fourth of July injects a political figure (and a deeply polarizing one at that) into what has traditionally been a day where presidents have stayed away.

A political speech could also cause legal problems for the Trump administration. Walter Shaub, a former head of the Office of Government Ethics and now with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wrote that Trump's event could quickly fall afoul of ethics laws and laws preventing the spending of government resources for political purposes if Trump or others on the stage start attacking Democrats or talking about his reelection campaign.

Supreme Court gerrymandering decision could devastate NY Republicans | NCPR News

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Analysis: Supreme Court gerrymandering decision could devastate NY Republicans | NCPR News

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision allowing state legislatures to gerrymander political districts along blatantly partisan lines was made by the court’s conservative justices, on a narrow 5-to-4 ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

Translation? If you have enough political power, your party can draw the lines designed to favor your candidates as aggressively as you want. It’s a standard that Republicans have fought to defend. But as is often the case in politics, this victory for conservatives represents a double-edged sword. The precedent could be devastating for New York’s already beleaguered Republican Party.

Trump Says He’s ‘Never Had a Glass of Alcohol.’ These People Say Otherwise. – VICE

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Trump Says He’s ‘Never Had a Glass of Alcohol.’ These People Say Otherwise. – VICE

Donald Trump often claims that he does not now nor has he ever imbibed alcohol, explaining that he wanted to avoid the fate of his alcoholic older brother Freddy, an airline pilot who died at 43 in 1981. It has always seemed unlikely that Trump, who has regaled other writers with raunchy tales of partying in the 1970s at Studio 54, never tried an intoxicant. But sobriety has been part of the persona he peddles. Let everyone else get sloppy, the subtext goes. He wants consumers of the Trump brand and would-be lenders to believe he always keeps it together.

Well informed Voter

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I didn’t know who to vote for in the primary. So I voted for the candidates I had never heard of before, had no lawn signs and sent no mail. I like voting for dark horses.

Republicans and Democrats Don’t Understand Each Other – The Atlantic

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Republicans and Democrats Don’t Understand Each Other – The Atlantic

Unfortunately, the “Perception Gap” study suggests that neither the media nor the universities are likely to remedy Americans’ inability to hear one another: It found that the best educated and most politically interested Americans are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers. Americans who rarely or never follow the news are surprisingly good at estimating the views of people with whom they disagree.

On average, they misjudge the preferences of political adversaries by less than 10 percent. Those who follow the news most of the time, by contrast, are terrible at understanding their adversaries. On average, they believe that the share of their political adversaries who endorse extreme views is about 30 percent higher than it is in reality.

Perhaps because institutions of higher learning tend to be dominated by liberals, Republicans who have gone to college are not more likely to caricature their ideological adversaries than those who dropped out of high school. But among Democrats, education seems to make the problem much worse. Democrats who have a high-school degree suffer from a greater perception gap than those who don’t. Democrats who went to college harbor greater misunderstandings than those who didn’t. And those with a postgrad degree have a way more skewed view of Republicans than anybody else.