Earlier today, the Washington Post and ABC News released their latest national poll of the presidential race, conducted last week, from the peak of the Curiel affair to the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Orlando. The numbers for Hillary Clinton aren’t great. The numbers for Donald Trump are unprecedented and catastrophic. Seventy percent of registered voters have an unfavorable view of Trump (including 88 percent of nonwhites), divided between 14 percent who are “somewhat unfavorable” and a whopping 56 percent who are “strongly unfavorable.” For comparison’s sake, Clinton’s total unfavorable rating is 55 percent. New polls from Bloomberg and NBC News show Clinton with a 12-point and a 7-point lead, respectively.

A presidential nominee with this standing doesn’t just lose in the general election; he brings his party down with him, wiping out an entire generation of leaders in one fell swoop. If Trump remains this unpopular through the fall—and if third-party candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein don’t make substantial traction—he could cost Republicans control of the Senate and perhaps even the House.




http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/trump_s_polling_is_catastrophic_what_does_the_gop_do_now.html

Trump wants his voters to see the world through an Us vs. Them lens, but he continues to define an increasing number of Americans as the latter. It’s not a shock, then, that in a new Washington Post/ABC News poll out Wednesday, 88 percent of nonwhites and 77 percent of women said they had an unfavorable view of Trump. (The poll was conducted over a five-day stretch ending this past Sunday.) More surprising—and heartening—is that Trump is also becoming less popular among those groups that he’s trying to rile up with his nativist bluster. His net-favorable rating in the survey was minus-20 among whites, minus-26 among men, and minus-36 among those who never attended college. As the Post’s Greg Sargent points out, one of the only subsets that viewed Trump favorably in the poll is noncollege white men, and even their opinions are mixed, with 52 percent saying they have a positive view and 46 percent saying the opposite.


http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/06/15/new_polls_donald_trump_is_in_trouble.html

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STANISLAUS COUNTY, Calif. (KCRA) —A UPS driver rescues a puppy he witnessed being dumped in the middle of a busy intersection in Hughson in Stanislaus County.

According to Hughson Police Services, the UPS driver saw a car stop on East Hatch Road, a door open and the puppy being dropped in the middle of the street.

The UPS driver quickly stopped and picked up the pup before it could dart into traffic and brought it to a Hughson police substation. The delivery driver was not able to get the license of the car.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/UPS-driver-rescues-dumped-puppy-in-Stanislaus-8213687.php


“I saw a truck from a distance and take off the in the middle of the road, going pretty fast. Dust was flying up and behind the truck I see this little dog running down the center lane,” he said.

The UPS driver quickly stopped and picked up the pup before it could dart into traffic and brought it to a Hughson police substation. The delivery driver was not able to get the license of the car.

“I’m thinking, what can I do? So, I throw it in the truck and parked in the shade and call animal services,” he said. “The guy in front of me saw the guy throw it out the door. So that’s what I told the cops.”

While the unnamed pup gets plenty of tennis balls and some extra TLC at the Stanislaus County Animal Shelter, Harcrow wants his special pick-up to deliver joy to someone else’s home.


http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2016/06/15/ups-delivery-driver-rescues-dumped-puppy-in-san-joaquin-valley/

you’ve ever doubted that breastfeeding shaming is a thing, then you need to see this absolutely appalling video posted by a mom who says she was verbally assaulted by a stranger while feeding her daughter in a Target cafe.

Jessie Maher wrote on Facebook that she was breastfeeding her one-month-old, Zinnia, at a Torrington, Connecticut, Target store when an older man approached her and said, “Can’t you do that somewhere else? That’s fucking disgusting. You are nasty.”

Writes Maher, “I responded with, ‘I am feeding my baby, and I have the right to do it here…walk the fuck away..leave me the fuck alone.’ He responded with, (as he’s walking closer and closer to me and getting louder) ‘you are fucking disgusting…you are fucking disgusting…you are fucking disgusting…you whore.’ [sic]”

That’s when the bold mom took out her phone and started recording, capturing more of the man’s abuse, and eventually a group of wonderful shoppers and Target employees who came to her defense.

In the video, you can see the angry man yammering on about Maher’s breastfeeding to anyone who will listen. He even asks for a refund on what he was buying — because a mom dared to breastfeed in his presence. Get the hell over it, Dude. A few customers argue with him, calling him “rude” and telling him to leave her alone. About halfway through, a woman even comes up to make sure Maher is okay and tells her, “You shouldn’t be ashamed of feeding your baby, okay? He can go the other way. This is a beautiful moment right now, if he doesn’t like it he can go.”


Of course, the best part of the video takes place around the 1:38 mark, when a group of Target employees confront the man and actually stand between him and the breastfeeding mom until he finally walks away. As Fox61 reports, Target’s employee manual actually specifically states that customers may breastfeed openly in all their stores, and it looks like this group really took that message to heart.

Words matter a lot to Donald Trump. They matter so much to him that—in his telling—the very words used by President Obama to characterize terrorism not only helped cause Sunday’s terror attack in Orlando but will result in many others like it. As he explained to CBS News on Monday morning, “What happened yesterday will happen many times over with a president like Obama that doesn’t even want to use the term radical Islamic terrorism.” This is the same message he offered up by way of Twitter on Sunday, when he claimed that the failure of Obama and Hillary Clinton to use that magical incantation should suffice as a reason for Obama to resign from office and for Clinton to drop out of the presidential race. This is a trivial fight over word choice that long predates Trump, but only Trump has taken to suggesting that the word choices of others can disqualify them for elective office.



Word choices generally matter so much to Trump, in fact, that he decided on Monday to pull the Washington Post’s credentials to cover any of his campaign events, because he was displeased with word choice in the headline on an article about him. Indeed, Trump’s tendency to take umbrage at the words of others is almost legendary; only last week he claimed that Newt Gingrich’s criticism of Trump’s racist comments about the judge overseeing lawsuits against Trump University were “inappropriate.”

But oddly, the same Donald Trump who believes that the word choice of others matters so much as to be disqualifying for political office and worthy of instant press censorship holds his own word choices to a very different standard. When Trump engages in hyperbole, or outright lies, or in overt racism, or thinly veiled accusations that President Obama is maybe committing treason, his words have no meaning. Indeed, no small part of the elaborate Trump two step—in which he says something utterly unconscionable and then walks it back fractionally—rests on the assumption that his own words are loose, gauzy nothings that have no real meaning and thus no serious or enduring consequences.

Truth is simply not a part of the Trump reality. Politifact found that 76 percent of the 77 statements it analyzed from Donald Trump were either mostly false, false, or “pants on fire” false. But he doesn’t want that to worry you a bit.

This whole decoupling of words from truth is set forth as a feature, not a bug.
So Trump’s word meaning denial toolkit is almost bottomless: When asked how he could possibly make vulgar, euphemistic references to his hand size at a GOP debate, his defense was that he was “only [making] a joke about my hands.” When asked how he could make grotesque references to Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle, he replied by saying, “Only a deviant would think that.” Having promised to pay the legal fees of a supporter who violently assaulted someone at one of his rallies, Trump denied having said it. Having mocked a disabled reporter on video, he now insists he was miming some kind of one-armed groveling.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/06/how_trump_can_claim_he_doesn_t_mean_what_he_says.html

Officials said that while it's still unclear how many of the 23 Puerto Ricans killed were born on the U.S. mainland or had moved there from the island, they expect many of them to be laid to rest in Puerto Rico in the coming days.
"We have a lot of family members who have lived in the United States for many years but they want their loved ones buried here," Roberto Padua, sub-secretary of Puerto Rico's State Department, which is helping organize the transfer of the bodies, said Tuesday.
The shooting early Sunday at the Pace club in Orlando that killed 49 people has shaken Puerto Rico's gay community and shocked the U.S. territory as a whole.
"This is the worst tragedy for Puerto Rico's LGBTT community in our history," said Pedro Julio Serrano, a prominent local gay rights activist. "It's devastating."


http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Puerto-Rico-mourns-prepares-to-bury-those-killed-8166966.php

Sasha (pictured) has traveled from Hiltonhead, South Carolina. She has been dispatched out of state four times, including to Oregon after the school shooting and to Illinois after a family died in a plane crash

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3641633/Meet-adorable-comfort-dogs-flown-country-support-relatives-victims-volunteers-Orlando.html#ixzz4Bbt0F8hu
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Golden retrievers are commonly recruited for the role, since they tend to be calm and friendly to strangers
Comfort dogs are regularly dispatched to scenes of a shooting or terror attack - including Boston after the marathon bombing, Oregon after Umpqua Community College's school shooting last year, and to Sandy Hook in 2012.

But Orlando will see one of the biggest 'national deployments' of golden retrievers to date as the city - and the nation - reels following the deadliest mass shooting in US history.

Jane Marsh-Johnson, 'top dog handler' for the Lutheran Church Charity's nationwide comfort dog network, told Daily Mail Online she believes dogs have a quality that humans cannot get from one another.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3641633/Meet-adorable-comfort-dogs-flown-country-support-relatives-victims-volunteers-Orlando.html#ixzz4Bbselwuj
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Mike Murphy, a former adviser to Jeb Bush, said of Trump's attempts to "pivot" to The New York Times: “Everybody says, ‘Look, he’s so civilized, he eats with a knife and fork. And then an hour later, he takes the fork and stabs somebody in the eye with it.”

http://www.greensboro.com/blogs/allen-johnson-trump-is-who-he-is-and-that-ain/article_e7e6752c-ba26-5518-9748-04b50f708aa7.html

Clinton won back many of the black voters in South Carolina who had voted against her eight years earlier, plus some. She won 86 percent of the African American vote, a greater share than President Obama. According to the Washington Post, she even mobilized an increase in African American turnout with 61 percent of blacks coming to the polls this year compared with 55 percent in 2008.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, a chief strategist for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and a pollster for Priorities USA Action, the Super PAC supporting her, said the general election polls show even more promising signs for Clinton.

"I think a lot of African American voters see this in part as President Obama's last election and can recognize his legacy is very much at stake in 2016," Garin told TPM. "Usually at this stage in early, pre-election polls, the African American vote often lags anywhere up to 10 points of what it ends up being. In many states she is already performing at the kind of elevated level that President Obama received."

Rep. Cummings said he's "convinced" Clinton can hit Obama's level of support from African Americans, arguing that many black voters see in Clinton a continuation of Obama's legacy, something Clinton's been careful to preserve as she's resisted distancing herself from the President in the primary.

"What endeared African Americans to her was when she bowed out when she knew she wasn't going to have the votes [in 2008] and she was so gracious and so supportive of the President and then when she accepted the opportunity to become secretary of state and was a loyal and very good secretary of state," Cummings said. " African-American people already liked the Clintons so that is a hell of a combination."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/hillary-clinton-reaches-for-obama-s-electoral-victory-with-african-americans

Report: Trump Uses Chris Christie As ‘Manservant’ To Fetch His McDonald’s

Christie] has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events,” Ryan Lizza wrote in the magazine’s June 20 issue. Lizza also said one anonymous Republican source told him a friend on Trump’s campaign “used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order.”

The piece, which traces Republicans coming to terms with Trump as the presumptive nominee, is the latest humiliation for Christie since he became a prominent surrogate for the businessman’s campaign.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-chris-christie-manservant-mcdonalds