New Jersey Governor Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump yesterday. Yeah, that happened.
An unbelievable Pause goes here.
In the meantime, Ohio governor John Kasich is laying out his exit strategy from running a losing campaign for president.
“I will beat Donald Trump in Ohio, and that will be the beginning of a new day,” Kasich told a crowd in Nashville, according to the New York Times.
“Some of the other candidates, if they can’t win their home state, they got to get out, OK?” he added. “If I don’t win my home state, I’ll get out. But you know what? I’m going to win Ohio.”
The remark was a dig at his rival Marco Rubio, who is trailing Trump by 16 points in his home state of Florida, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll.
Ohio goes to the polls on March 15. Another Quinnipiac poll puts Trump ahead of Kasich in Ohio by 5 percentage points, just outside the poll’s margin of error, but the governor has insisted that he will have no problem winning the state.
WASHINGTON - JANUARY 18: Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden listens to questioning during a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee January 18, 2007 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The topic of the hearing was the "Current Assessment of Threats to U.S. National Security." (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Please don’t put ideas in the man’s head. Trump has already proven that he has zero morals!
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden’s pithy line, which he first uttered in a Showtime documentary and repeated to NBC News, underscores a serious issue: The GOP front-runner has vowed to bring back torture if he becomes president, but current and former CIA officials say the agency feels so burned by what happened when its post 9/11 interrogation program was exposed that it would refuse any such orders.
“Multiple investigations, grand juries, presidential condemnations and congressional star chambers have a way of doing that to you,” Hayden, who was CIA director at the end of the George W. Bush administration, told NBC News.
He then offered an even stronger version of his Showtime quote. “Like the man said, if you want somebody waterboarded, bring your own damn bucket.”
Trump said Wednesday he is convinced that “torture works,” so he would bring back waterboarding and “much stronger” methods.
I don’t think this is what the GOP had in mind when they made the calendar and rules that would govern the primaries. The party clearly wanted to make it easier for a candidate to consolidate support and win enough delegates so they could then turn their attention to fundraising and the general election. This enabled Trump to win 44 delegates with only 33% of the vote. Nice job.
In the words of Rick Perry, “Oops.”
In the further words of Howard Dean, “AAAAHHHH.”
South Carolina has to be the loudest wake-up call ever recorded in a modern presidential race and the Republican Party elders clearly have no strategy to stop the bleeding. Trump won a fairly convincing victory and rendered the race for second as the only one worth watching. Now that Jeb! has left the race I imagine that phones will be ringing in the Carson and Kasich campaign offices and the person on the other end will not be shy about telling those candidates that their time is gone and that they should rally their supporters around Marco Rubio as the only person who can save the party from its angry candidates. Unless they want to rally around Ted Cruz, but I can’t see that happening.
Meanwhile, on the left side of the docket, Hillary Clinton all but shut the door on Bernie Sanders in Nevada, winning a solid victory in a state that the Democrats will need in the fall. Word is that Harry Reid made some phone calls to union officials saying that it was fine for them not to endorse a candidate, but could the officials at least urge their members to vote for Clinton. That seems to have worked. Now it’s on the South Carolina on Saturday where Hillary has a commanding lead. A win there and on Super Tuesday on March 1 will probably close out Sanders as a serious contender, though I would not be surprised if he continue his campaign until the end.
The upshot is that the Democrats will probably achieve what the GOP had hoped for; a well-funded nominee who has time to unify the party, make nice-nice with their opponent, and start moving to attract the moderate voters who will likely be the keys to their election.
I know that I’m bucking the conventional wisdom at the moment, but I still don’t see Donald Trump being the GOP nominee. I think the GOP will find a way, or at least die trying, to rally around a candidate that they can control and win. After all, 65% of the party’s voters aren’t voting for Trump. Someone has to be able to harness that between now and June. If I’m wrong, then the GOP is in big time trouble.
But time is running out. Beware the Ides of March.
The Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, says that he is a Christian, and he quoted “two Corinthians” in Iowa trying to get the Christian conservatives to vote for him. But if Trump is really such a Believer as he claims, then he should know the verse that says, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” That verse is found in ‘one Timothy, 6:10‘ – Trump should understand where that is!
“Now, I’ll tell you, I’m good at that – so, you know, I’ve always taken in money,” he said at a rally in Iowa. “I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that, I’m a greedy – I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?
“But, you know what? I want to be greedy for our country. I want to be greedy. I want to be so greedy for our country. I want to take back money,” he added.
Trump also said he would have filed his personal finances with the Federal Election Commission even if he weren’t running for president, because he loves to brag.
“I filed my papers with the federal elections,” he said. “Everyone said, ‘Well maybe he’s not as rich as we think, so maybe he’ll never file,’ but I filed. In fact, I would have filed if I didn’t run, because I want to brag. I love to brag, all right?”
If Trump is so in love with money and greed, and the Scriptures say “the love of money is the root of all evil,” is it safe to say that Trump is evil?
This is what happens when you put a bunch of Republicans in a room – Total and utter Confusion, as no one seems to know which way is up.
Watch, as debate moderators race through the introduction for the Republican presidential candidates. That, coupled with the applause of adoring Republican fans and the mindlessness of the candidates themselves, managed to mess up a perfectly ordinary and otherwise uneventful introduction.
Call it the Cruz Curse, but since Donald Trump lost to the cheating efforts of Ted Cruz in Iowa earlier this week, Trump’s national numbers have been on a steady decline. The first national polling since his Iowa lost shows Trump’s fall from grace, coming in with just 25%. He still leads the pack of Republicans, but not by the HUGE numbers he once had.
Trump remained in first place in the survey, which was conducted by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling and was set to be released later Thursday. He received 25% of the vote from Republican-primary voters nationally. Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tied for second at 21% apiece.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson grabbed 11%. None of the remaining Republican candidates received more than 5% of the vote.
It was a stark contrast from the national survey that Public Policy Polling released in mid-December. That poll found Trump, at 34%, maintaining a large national lead over both Cruz (18%) and Rubio (13%). Rubio seemed to benefit at Trump’s expense with astronger-than-expected showing in the Iowa caucuses, in which he nearly caught up to Trump. His poll standing was up 8 points from December.
I’m not really the type to say “I told you so,” but I indeed told you so on numerous occasions that Donald
Trump would not be the GOP nominee and neither will Ted Cruz.
Trump’s second place finish in Iowa is but the first blow to his campaign, because while he was battering Cruz with ads and withering sarcasm, Marco Rubio, who is no moderate, snuck up on him and finished a very strong third. This gives the GOP alternatives to Trump and my sense is that they will take advantage of that.
Iowa also marked the beginning of either the beginning or the end of some of the more moderate Republican campaigns. Jeb, Kasich and Christie absolutely must come in second or third in the Granite State if they are to have any traction for the rest of the month and to stick around for Super Tuesday. By next week the GOP field should lose Fiorina, Carson and Paul, and their supporters will have to go somewhere. My guess is that they won’t go to Trump or Cruz.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Bernie and Hillary were locked in a tight race that likely serves Sanders better because the polls said he would lose by a small margin. To lose by an even smaller margin, or perhaps to eke out a small win, puts Clinton back a bit going into New Hampshire where Bernie is expected to do very well.
Funny how actual voting can really mess up a narrative. Onward we go.
I predict that the global rise in temperature will show a significant decline on Monday as all the hot air bloviators, pollsters, consultants and media talking heads hold their steamy breath as they await the results of the Iowa caucuses. And why shouldn’t they? The numbers all say that Donald Trump will win the caucuses over Ted Cruz, with the rest of the GOP field barely in their rear-view mirror.
And then of course there’s Iowa’s importance as a…as a…mid-western, um, evangelical-heavy, um…white, um…state. That really doesn’t represent much about America except that the Republicans there seem to have fallen for Trump’s snake oil and Cruz’s smarmy insincerity.
Which is why I think the results will likely be different from the media narrative that’s been written since the fall. I could be wrong, and if I am I will say so because I live in New Jersey and from the governor on down to us little folk, we New Jerseyans always tell the truth and admit our failures and flip-flops.
For what it’s worth, I have been saying all along that neither Trump nor Cruz will be the GOP nominee because both their personalities and their policy prescriptions will not appeal to a majority of either party voters or the electorate at large. Trump has been inconsistent in his message on the stump and hasn’t really come up with specific fixes for the economy, foreign policy or constitutional issues mainly because he doesn’t have many. Calling people stupid or losers or saying that he can fix things because he’s a businessman doesn’t inspire confidence. Cruz, likewise, is running to head a government that he doesn’t even respect. He says he knows what the constitution means and the original intent of the framers, but my suspicion is that they would laugh him out of the room for being a presidential pretender at best.
Trump and Cruz are likely to be first and second in Iowa, but I don’t believe that either one will crack 30% of the vote and the big surprise will come from Marco Rubio, and one of Bush or Kasich, who will do far (far) better than what they are polling right now. I think they could approach 20% of the vote, which would instantly put them in line to be seen as the moderate/establishment savior for the party, and the de facto person to beat in New Hampshire.
For the Democrats, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails have reared their ugly heads again and they will have a slight impact on the race, but I think she will still win the caucuses by about 5 percentage points over Bernie Sanders. He’ll likely poll in the high 30s or lower 40s on Monday, and will go into New Hampshire as the favorite to win there, but I don’t think he’ll do that either. Clinton has too much money and more support among minorities for Sanders to mount a national challenge.
After a very long pre-season, it’s time for political junkies everywhere to get their electoral needles ready for the voting binge to come. The fun starts now.
At an event in Nashua, New Hampshire today, Donald Trump continued his attacks against his closest competitor, Canadian born, Ted Cruz, calling the Republican presidential wannabe, “an anchor baby.”
“Now, Ted Cruz may not be a U.S. citizen. Right? But he’s an anchor baby in Canada. No, he’s an anchor baby. Ted Cruz is an anchor baby in Canada,” Trump told the crowd.
Trump later on lambasted Cruz for saying he didn’t know about various loans he received earlier in his political career.
“But he said he didn’t know he was a citizen of Canada, and he didn’t know about Goldman Sacs loaning him money, and he didn’t know about Citibank loaning him money. Other than that, he’s got a very good memory, okay?”
Roger Ailes failed again when he sent out his top dog to bully Donald Trump into doing the Fox Debate on Thursday. In an interview on Wednesday, O’Reilly did all he could, even trying to bribe Trump with “milkshakes”, to get the Republican presidential candidate to do the Thursday night debate.
Trump, who has been in a no holds barred war with Megyn Kelly since Kelly asked a valid question in a Republican debate back in 2015, has been adamant in his decision to boycott another Kelly moderated debate on Thursday. In the interview, Bill O’ Reilly tried and tried, and failed consistently, even bringing up Trump’s “Christian” faith, to convince him to “forgive” Kelly and “turn the other cheek.”
Trump wouldn’t give. So an exasperated Bill O’ Reilly called Trump a “Buffoon,” although he didn’t come straight out and say, you’re a buffoon. Bill O’ pulled the same trick played by many others in the political media, saying there are some who say Trump is a buffoon. You know, put it out there and hope the words have their intended effect.
More racist talk from the Donald Trump campaign that is sure to raise Trump’s poll numbers among the Republican voters.
The top spokesperson for Donald Trump’s campaign along with Donald Trump himself, have made it their number one mission to haul personal insults at the president. Coming from the opposition party you’ll expect a healthy debate about the best policies for the country. But the Republican Party and its top presidential candidate have no policies, so personal attacks are their only option.
In an interview with CNN, Trump’s spokesperson, Katrina Pierson, already known for calling Obama the “head negro” in charge, took that line of reasoning a step further and referred to the president of the United States as, “half-breed.” Given a chance to walk back that line of personal attack that has absolutely nothing to do with politics, Pierson doubled down of course.
“Would you like to retract that?” the CNN host asked.
“No, not at all,” she replied. “These tweets — I’m an activist and I am a half-breed. I’m always getting called a half-breed. And on Twitter when you’re fighting with liberals and even establishment, you go back at them in the same silliness they are giving you.”
“So, I myself am a half-breed,” Pierson added. “We have entered silly season. Donald Trump is up in the polls. There’s desperate campaigns out there, they can’t take him down so they try to take down the people that are around him. And we’re just not going to get distracted by all that nonsense.”
It’s been one thing after another. Every time you turn around, Donald Trump is saying something else that is sure to capture the short attention span of what we call… the media. And instead of talking about policies, we are left to debate another dumb remark by Donald Trump.
But his latest dumb remark is not like the many others Trump has made. His latest remark is about his supporters and how blinded they are by their own stupidity. Donald Trump, the current leader in the Republican race for president, opened his mouth and basically said that his supporters are so stupid, no matter what he says or does, his followers will still follow.
“My people are so smart, and you know what else they say about my people, the polls? They say I have the most loyal people.
“Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s like incredible.”
It’s not incredible Donald, it’s stupidity. People who would still support someone who “stand in the middle of Fifth Ave and shoot somebody” are incapable of understanding, or unwilling to accept basic human decency. Those people can be called ignorant, they can also be called stupid.
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