He opened his mouth and for once, the truth jumped out. And that’s not something I’ll say often when talking about a Republican. This is the exception to the rule.
In an interview with Sean Hannity Tuesday night, the man who will likely take over as House Speaker when John Boehner officially leaves at the end of October, confirmed what everybody already suspected – that the so-called ‘Benghazi Committee’ was formed by Republicans to damage the credibility of Hilary Clinton.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Kevin McCarthy proudly asked on the Republican propaganda machine called Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping, why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member on the committee, said McCarthy’s comments were just further evidence that the Benghazi Committee was a waste of taxpayer money.
“This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public: the core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi Committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an even-handed search for the facts,” Cummings said in a statement. “It is shameful that Republicans have used this tragedy and the deaths of our fellow Americans for political gain. Republicans have blatantly abused their authority in Congress by spending more than $4.5 million in taxpayer funds to pay for a political campaign against Hillary Clinton.”
With so much of the interesting political maneuvering happening on the right, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there will be Democratic debates in the fall, and they could be just as interesting as the Republican candidate-a-thons.
While Hillary Clinton still leads in every match-up with one or the other GOP candidate, she’s being pressed by Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire. Bernie’s doing his best to electrify the base with his talk about tighter government control of banks and higher wages and corporate child care centers and things that the US should already have but doesn’t because the right believes that Americans feel better by earning these things individually and that if you can’t afford them then it’s your fault. Sucker. And now Joe Biden is thinking about a run. He would most likely be a very good president if he could get beyond the verbal improvisations that have haunted him in campaigns past. Yes, there are other candidates running–Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee–but they are having a difficult time breaking through a national media that can only handle a few at a time.
In a twist, this election could see the Democrats painted as the older party, with Hillary, Bernie and Joe all much older than their Republican counterparts. In addition, there’s a bit of a rift going through the left as the Warren-Sanders far left-wing battles with the establishment, more centrist views of the Hillary, and perhaps Biden, wing. There’s been so much attention over the past few years about the yawning divide on the right, that a leftish split is certainly news and could be a potential problem unless the party unites in time for the convention, and that’s pretty much what I would expect to happen.
Hillary’s e-mails are making people nervous and the right will shout Benghazi whenever they get the chance, but on the main issues she seems to have most of the country on her side. Her recent confrontation with Black Lives Matter activists shows her empathetic and realistic, and her contrasting views with Republicans on marriage equality, gender equality, wages, education, climate change and foreign policy experience show her more forward-looking than any of the Republicans who only seem to be able to run negative campaigns.
Democrats need to be careful about being overconfident based on the Obama electoral map, with Ohio, Florida, Nevada and Colorado possibly presenting some serious challenges. Overall, though, demographics do provide the party with an advantage the Republicans will find difficult to overcome.
It’s August and the Back to School sales are ramping up in earnest, at least here in the nor’east. The sales started in July for the more southerly US climes, but that’s because they’re already back in the classrooms. In any event, it’s time once again to be thinking about education, and the issue is now near the top in this presidential election.
One of the more popular articles making its way around electronica is this one that essentially summarizes the findings of John Hattie, an educational researcher who’s written a slew of books on best practices. He suggests that achievement standards, focusing on smaller class sizes, and pouring more money into the educational system are not the answers and have little effect on student performance. He also questions school choice as a viable public policy. Of course, politicians on the right and left will pick and choose what they want from his message, with Democrats wanting more money and Republicans wanting more accountability, as if the two were completely opposite.
Educational access, attainment and benefits have been tied to the relative wealth of families and communities for the better part of United States’ history, so it should be no surprise to anyone that we are presently confronted with a system that’s as fractured as our income gap. Schools in wealthy communities tend to perform better than those in less wealthy and poor communities and the willingness of politicians to spend money where it should be spent (key concept) lends itself to schools where teachers can teach and students have every opportunity to learn.
Most of the Republican candidates for president support the free-market, pro-corporate model for schools, and the results have been disappointing at best to demoralizing at worst. Governors Scott Walker (falling in the polls) and Chris Christie (can you fall below zero in you polls?), have done more to demonize public school teachers than the other candidates and promise to do the same to the rest of the country if they are elected. Jeb Bush supports the Common Core standards, which really isn’t going to endear him to any particularly large constituency, but he’s also against public unions. The other candidates want local and state standards, which have not worked in the past and will not help student performance in the future.
The Democrats want more money for universal pre-school and aid to schools in poor and depressed areas of the country. Hillary Clinton has also recently unveiled a higher education policy that focuses on student debt. She would probably never get $350 billion over ten years from a Republican Congress, but her plan would put pressure on the right to relieve millions of students from crushing loans that are sapping their economic prospects. The Republican candidates have joined her in trying to address the debt issue, but right now the best we can say about them is that they’re market-oriented, including Marco Rubio’s plan to have wealthy investors essentially buy an interest in your future earnings in return for their investment in your education. I wonder if he’s also going to provide students with a free saddle so that your investor can sit on your back.
Given the years of blame and economic hardship that teachers have had to endure, it’s no wonder that there’s a shortage. And given the attitude that many national and state leaders have about teachers, it’s no wonder that qualified students are looking at other fields of endeavor. The truth is that we pay a great deal of lip service to wanting a highly qualified, well-trained teaching staff at every school, but the best and brightest are not stupid; they see what’s going on in education and are increasingly turned off to it. And since we don’t have the best and brightest going into government, the solutions will be doubly difficult to come by.
He has commanded the crowds as huge numbers show up at his campaign events and now Bernie Sanders, the Democratic candidate running for president in 2016, has taken the lead away from Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.
A new poll shows Bernie Sanders with an apparent lead over Hillary Rodham Clinton among likely Democratic voters in New Hampshire, adding to his momentum in the nation’s first presidential primary state.
Sanders, the independent senator from neighboring Vermont, tops Clinton, the former secretary of state, 44 percent to 37 percent, in the new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll.
The survey, taken Aug. 7-10, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7 percent, meaning Sanders’s lead is not considered statistically significant by pollsters.
It will come as no surprise that many in the conservative world are buying into this piece of propaganda. It was first posted by conservative elite, Dinesh D’Souza on Twitter and on his Facebook page, and has since been shared my other eager Republicans who will stop at nothing to save the confederate flag.
Here is the Twitter post from Dinesh, showing Hillary Clinton posing with the confederate flag displayed in the background.
But here is the real photo of Hillary Clinton. Notice the obvious absence of a confederate flag!
But as usual, facts mean nothing to this group of Republicans as they shared all jumped into a frenzy sharing the fake image of Clinton with the photoshopped flag!
Realizing the photo was a fake, Twitter users took it a step further using Dinesh D’Souza himself, posing next to some questionable artifacts. This tweet took the cake!
Now, when Mitt Romney ran for president the first time and got defeated, then ran the second time and got defeated, defeat was not the only thing that stuck to Mr. Romney, his uncanny ability to flip flop and be untrustworthy also stuck. So with that uncanny ability to be fake, Romney is calling out Hillary Clinton as being fake, just just like he is.
“When you see her on a stage or when she comes into a room full of people, she’s smiling with her mouth but her eyes say, ‘Where’s my latte?'” Romney said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“It just doesn’t suggest she believes everything she’s saying,” he continued, calling her performance “jarring.”
Romney faced similar criticism during his own runs for President for flip-flopping on multiple hot-button issues, struggling to connect with working-class voters, and saying things like he enjoys hunting “small varmints, if you will.”
“At this stage, what does she really believe?” he said on Monday. “I think people wonder, can they really trust Hillary Clinton?”
Ready for the summer? Well hold on because the next 15 days will be key to determining the shape of the presidential race.
First up is Jeb Bush. The smart one. The able one. The one who thinks through his actions before taking them. The one with the long-term policy proposals that are not exactly aligned with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The one who is daddy’s favorite.
The one whose brother absolutely ruined the Bush name. Dang.
Jeb is not a bad candidate and he’s making an effort to separate himself from George W. The extent to which he can do that will determine whether he successfully fends off more base-friendly candidates like Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Right now, it looks like many Republicans are wary and might be looking elsewhere. If Jeb can raise enough money and scare off some other candidates, he can win, but he’ll have to convince many right wing voters of his commitment to their cause.
Governor Chris Christie is also getting ready to announce his run fresh off a victory courtesy of a New Jersey State Supreme Court ruling in his favor on the landmark state worker’s pension and benefits bill he negotiated with the Democratic legislature in 2011. He’s running on his ability to work with the opposite party, but the problem is that he’s repudiated his own law and the court ruled it to be unconstitutional. Now the Democrats have sworn not to negotiate further with him. Will he mention any of this?
Of course not. Christie will shamelessly repeat that he can work with Democrats, but that train has left the station. Plus, he has the Bridgegate scandal to answer to and a problem making himself stand out from the rest of what will probably be a 15 candidate field. His first job is to make sure that he’s polling high enough to be included in the first GOP debate in August. He’s good in debates and in front of crowds, so I wouldn’t count him out yet. But he’s got a tough race ahead of him.
Hillary Clinton also began her push for the presidency yesterday. She gave a good speech and is clearly focusing on the middle class and income inequality. She’s a bit farther to the left than her husband, but the Democratic Party is also more liberal these days. Her problem is similar to Jeb’s in that we know a great deal about her and her past. She has a clearer road to the nomination, but she does need to be mindful about giving too much to the Sanders-Warren wing of the party.
And don’t forget that we have two big Supreme Court decisions yet to be announced between now and June 30 on marriage equality and ACA subsidies. By July 1 we’ll have a good idea of how the candidates will need to adjust their messages in light of whatever the court decides.
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told USA Today that Clinton, who has so far refused to say where she stands on the deal, will have to say where she is – and warned if she doesn’t stand with them on the issue, she may lose out on their endorsement.
“She’s going to have to answer that,” he said. “I think she won’t be able to go through a campaign without answering that and people will take it seriously and it will affect whether they vote for her or don’t vote for her.”
Trumka warned that if Clinton does back the 13-country deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership “it will be tougher to mobilize working people.”
He also said it’s “conceivable” that the 12 million-member AFL-CIO might not endorse a presidential candidate “if both candidates weren’t interested in raising wages and creating jobs.”
So Ja Rule went on Fox Business to promote his new credit card venture, but Fox had other things in mind. Inquiring minds needed to know, and the sooner Ja Rule could tell us about politics and the 2016 presidential election, the sooner we can all get on with our lives.
Asked for his analysis of the 2016 political field, Rule offered, “I like Hillary, but you know, it’s crazy because I also think Jeb is a good candidate as well.”
There is an undying fascination with the right wing over a possible Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016 and death. Recently, I highlighted a story about someone attacking the tombstone of Hillary Clinton’s deceased father and now this – using the arbitrary of a dead man to ask voters not to vote for Mrs Clinton.
A North Carolina man’s obituary asked two things of friends and family: instead of sending flowers for the funeral, give the money to charity — and don’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The family of 81-year-old Larry Upright added the political message to the obituary announcing the Kannapolis man’s death and burial last week, according to WSOC-TV.
Upright’s daughter, Jill McLain, said the rock-ribbed Republican was passionate about politics. She said that recollection prompted his family to ask obituary readers to reject Clinton’s presidential bid.
Ted Cruz is the same Republican who organized the last shutdown of the American government, a move that cost this country $24 billion according to Standard & Poor’s. Standard and Poor’s also said the shutdown equaled $1.5 billion a day for the 16 days shutdown the doors to some government agencies stayed shut. If the shutdown had continued, as Ted Cruz clearly wanted it to, America would be no more.
Cruz’s daddy – who had no criticism about his son’s government shutdown – is now all of a sudden saying “you might as well kiss this country goodbye” if Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016. Again, this man had nothing do say when his son cost this country $24 billion!
Speaking to a Teaparty group in Georgia, Rafael Cruz said,“If we did it then, you bet we can do it again. And let me tell you, if we have someone like Hillary Clinton elected in 2016, you might as well kiss this country goodbye, this country’s gone. We are fighting for the survival of America.”
Again, this man had nothing to say about the destruction of America when his son shut down the government and cost the nation $24 billion in 16 days!
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