Showing posts with label Republican Presidential Debate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican Presidential Debate. Show all posts

Sunday, August 9, 2015

[VIDEO] Megyn Kelly Dismisses Debate Criticisms: ‘If You Can’t Get Past Me…’

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly opened up for the first time this morning about all the criticism she and Fox have gotten about last week’s Republican debate, talking with MediaBuzz host Howard Kurtz.
And, basically, she took the high road, not necessarily singling out Trump but instead defending her tough questions and saying, “If you can’t get past me, how are you gonna handle Vladimir Putin.”
She explained that the goal was, for every candidate, to “drill down to their most vulnerable areas and then give them a chance to explain them” because these same things will most definitely resurface in the general election.
Kelly anticipated a few boos (which they got), but said of all the criticism, “It’s okay, I’m a big girl. I can take it.” Furthermore, she made it clear she didn’t want her male co-moderators being her white knights in case she came under attack.
As for supposed “gotcha” questions, Kelly said, “I don’t think that my history as a journalist supports bias on my part towards either party… When Im ticking off both sides, I’m in my sweet spot.”
Kurtz noted at the top he conducted his interview with Kelly before Trump’s ridiculous “blood” remark. And in case you needed a reminder of what Trump said of her before that:
Wow, really bombed tonight. People are going wild on twitter! Funny to watch.

The surgical precision of Ben Carson by Herman Cain

Cuts like a scalpel.

 Ben Carson surprised me a little during Thursday night’s debate – not that I didn’t think he would do well. I had just interviewed him on The Herman Cain Show a few days earlier and I knew he was prepared and ready for whatever questions would be thrown at him.


But I was nevertheless impressed by the surgical precisions of some of his answers. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, since after all he is a brain surgeon. But for a guy who doesn’t have much experience on a stage this big, he really knew how to get down to it.

He would take on Hillary Clinton, he said, by coming against the Alinsky model that assumes people are stupid, and counts on stupid people to serve as the useful idiots that Democrats need in order to govern. Dr. Carson said his approach would not be to try to fool people but to educate them, which demonstrates that he understands something we say on this show all the time: The American people are smart enough to make the right decisions if they have all the facts. As it stands right now, the media don’t give them all the facts so leaders who are interested in the truth are going to have to do it.

There’s a difference between being dumb and being misinformed. The American people are not dumb but they’re misinformed by the mainstream media. Dr. Carson understands this well.

He also had shared a wonderful answer he gave an NPR reporter who wondered why he doesn’t talk about race more often. (Of course, I know only too well about the expectation of white liberal journalists that black men in the public arena need to constantly talk about race, as if we have no business talking about anything else.) Dr. Carson explained that as a neurosurgeon, he sees inside people and gets a clear look at what really makes people who they are.

And it’s not their skin. This will come as news to the liberal media and to the Democrat Party, which are completely obsessed with race and think it is the key to everything in life. But what Dr. Carson understands (as do I) is that what really defines you is what’s inside you – the content of your character and your commitment to know what’s right and do it.

Finally, he answered a question about his presumed lack of political experience by reminding everyone that the greatness of this nation did not result from having lots of politicians around. It came, rather, from the ingenuity of the people in all walks of life. I’ve always found it hilarious in a sad sort of way that the political crowd judges people unworthy of service because they’ve spend their lives as something other than politicians. I thought I would have been a good president precisely because that’s not my background. My achievements have been in the private sector, where they expect results.

By the way, Dr. Carson’s achievements are in the field of science, which I thought the left considered one of the most highly esteemed fields imaginable. Isn’t that why they’re always going around complaining that Republicans are “anti-science”? You can’t very well be a neurosurgeon and be “anti-science.” Unless, of course, all “pro-science” really means is pro-left wing nonsense used to justify the same tired old left wing ideas Democrats have been pushing since time immemorial.




The Republican-Democrat Switcheroo

It’s now official. When it comes to choosing presidential nominees, the Republican Party has become the Democratic Party—and Democrats have turned into Republicans. Cleveland, Ohio, was the place and August 6, 2015 was the date. The unruly Republican field was so multitudinous it had to be broken into double sessions. Meanwhile, the Democratic field essentially consists of one person, a candidate so confident that she spent GOP debate night in Hollywood posing for selfies with Kim Kardashian.
If Will Rogers were still alive, he’d have to reverse his famous quip about not belonging to an organized political party because he was a Democrat. Heading into 2016, Democrats are so squared away they have a nominee-in-waiting whom no prominent Democrat will lay a glove on. The Clintons are headlining the age of Learjet liberalism while Republicans mud-wrestle with The Donald.
Democrats have stopped defending Bill and Hillary Clinton. They just point to her poll numbers, and shrug. Mock federal law by establishing a secret email system? So what? Make Richard Nixon look like a piker by shredding 30,000 of those emails instead of erasing 18 minutes of tape? Who cares? Rake in $100 million in speaking fees from corporate interests and sketchy foreign donors? It’s for a good cause!
Sure, Sen. Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds, but the old Vermont socialist doesn’t dare criticize the front-runner. Neither will former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, another declared Democratic presidential “candidate.” It evokes the GOP’s “11th commandment” popularized by Ronald Reagan: “Though shalt speak no ill of a fellow Republican.” Only this time, it’s Democrats.
The maxim was coined five decades ago by former California Republican Party chairman Gaylord Parkinson, mainly as a way of assisting Reagan’s nascent gubernatorial campaign. Over the years it was honored mostly in the breach by Republicans. Adhering to it in a crowd of 17 candidates is impossible.
Most of them did their best, however. Donald Trump refrained, by and large, from calling his colleagues “stupid” or “losers” Thursday night—although Fox News anchorwoman Megyn Kelly was more than happy to fill the void.
“You've called women fat pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals,” Kelly said to Trump. “Your Twitter account has several…” Trump then interrupted her to ad-lib, “Only Rosie O'Donnell.” It was a quip that made some in the crowd laugh and others squirm nervously, which nicely sums up the main reaction to the loose-lipped billionaire.
He’s still leading the Republican field in the polls, but with 16 other candidates and Trump’s celebrity status, that’s not quite the achievement gleeful Democrats make it out to be. Whatever his ceiling of support might be, Trump is getting close to it. Speaking of which, it shouldn’t have been that easy to get The Donald to admit he’s not really a Republican, which Fox co-host Brett Baier did with the very first debate question.
Who there on the stage, Baier asked, would not agree to support the eventual Republican nominee? What he was getting at was the possibility of a third party campaign by Trump, a gambit that presumably would ensure a Hillary Clinton victory. Trump promptly raised his hand. Give him points for candor, but this is not what a Republican usually says in that situation. It so irritated Sen. Rand Paul—a man who actually would belong to a third party if the Libertarians were a viable national political entity—that he blurted out that Trump epitomized what’s wrong with American politics: “He buys and sells politicians of all stripes.”
When the question of such double dealing arose later, Trump’s answer was intellectually incoherent, if revealing. Health care is a mess because the politicians are bought and paid for by lobbyists, said the populist Donald Trump. A sentence or two later, Trump the oligarch was boasting about buying those same politicians.
But if Trump has peaked—and that’s a big “if”—who came out of Cleveland stronger than they entered? And what’s next for the other candidates? The most immediate worry for the men who participated in main debate is that Carly Fiorina, who starred in the “kids’ table” debate earlier in the day, seems poised to take somebody’s place in the Top 10. It might be Rand Paul’s; it could be Chris Christie’s or John Kasich’s.
Although she has little political experience outside her losing 2010 Senate campaign to Barbara Boxer, Fiorina was simultaneously the toughest on Trump while making the most articulate and direct appeal to his supporters. “Whatever the issue, whatever the cause, whatever festering problem you hoped would be resolved, the political class has failed you,” she said.
With nearly as many contestants as in “The Hunger Games,” certain pairings are inevitable, along with private feuds and side rivalries. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has already ruminated aloud about a Walker-Rubio ticket (or a Rubio-Walker ticket), but a discerning Thursday viewer also might imagine a Jeb Bush-John Kasich pairing, an alliance that would elevate within conservatism concern for the poor. The other possibility is an exacta ticket that you’d announce at the racetrack betting window this way: “All with Fiorina.”  
The takeaway is that 17 is too large a number. There weren’t this many people deciding presidential nominations in the old smoke-filled rooms of lore, let alone that many contenders. Literally.
Heading into the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, the GOP nomination was wide open. On the first ballot 12 Republicans attracted support, the top three being Gen. Leonard Wood, Illinois Gov. Frank O. Lowden and California Sen. Hiram Johnson.
Ohio party boss Harry Daugherty confided to reporters that it would be a deadlocked convention between the top two, and that he planned to break the impasse by offering home state favorite Warren G. Harding as the compromise candidate. “After the other candidates have gone their limit, some 12 or 15 men, worn out and bleary-eyed for lack of sleep, will sit down about two o'clock in the morning, around a table in a smoke-filled room in some hotel and decide the nomination,” he said. “When that time comes, Harding will be selected.”
It happened just as Daugherty predicted. For Republicans, this meant good news and bad. The good news was that they won in November. The bad news was that, in turning to someone they didn’t really know well, GOP bosses ended up choosing a guy who was a scandal machine once in the White House. It’s not a stretch to say, with the release of Warren Harding’s recent love letters to a mistress, that he’s still generating scandals a century later.
What I’m suggesting is that the voters will eventually sort this out, and that their track record is at least as good as that of the wise guys. Also that a political party, Republican or Democrat, which ignores the whiff of scandal may come eventually to regret it, even if they win the next election.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Bureau Chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.


Via: Real Clear Politics

[VIDEO] ILLEGAL ALIEN CRIME ACCOUNTS FOR OVER 30% OF MURDERS IN MANY STATES

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump deserves credit for forcing all 17 Republican candidates to talk about the social costs of illegal immigration, but it is not “Trump’s issue.” We will be making a fatal mistake if we let the media discuss it that way.

As Ann Coulter has pointed out, this is the most critical issue of the 2016 race because this is the issue that will define whether or not there will even be an American nation recognizable as the “home of the free and land of the brave.”
But illegal immigration is not “Ann Coulter’s issue” any more than it is “Tom Tancredo’s issue.” It is America’s issue — not only because it will define America in the 21st Century but because it also defines American elections and who will be voting in elections in 2020 and beyond. It also illuminates the power of the mainstream media to keep issues off the national stage.
Think of illegal immigration this way: If the liberal media can keep illegal alien crime out of the “kitchen table debate,” they can keep any issue out of the debate. And they will if they can get away with it. For those reasons, illegal immigration is much more than an issue of public policy; it is the poster child for media malpractice.
The media’s attempt to suppress public awareness over illegal alien crime and the effects of illegal immigration on American workers’ jobs and wages is nothing less than censorship on a massive scale. We need to start talking about it in those terms and hold the media accountable for the lack of ethical standards.
The mainstream media – including, sadly, major segments of the presumably conservative media, like the Wall Street Journal — are working overtime to keep the American public and the American voters in the dark on the scope of illegal alien crime. The murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco exposed only the tip of a massive iceberg, and the media establishment is desperate to avoid dealing with the iceberg underneath.
Let’s look at a few numbersYou haven’t seen them in the New York Times, Atlanta Constitution, or the Miami Herald, nor have they been featured on NBC Nightly news or CNN. So, the average American is blissfully unaware of them.
  • Between 2008 and 2014, 40% of all murder convictions in Florida were criminal aliens. In New York it was 34% and Arizona 17.8%.
  • During those years, criminal aliens accounted for 38% of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, while illegal aliens constitute only 5.6% of the total population in those states.
  • That 38% represents 7,085 murders out of the total of 18,643.
That 5.6% figure for the average illegal alien population in those five states comes from US Census estimates. We know the real number is double that official estimate. Yet, even if it is 11%, it is still shameful that the percentage of murders by criminal aliens is more than triple the illegal population in those states.
Those astounding numbers were compiled by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) using official Department of Justice data on criminal aliens in the nation’s correctional system. The numbers were the basis for a presentation at a recent New Hampshire conference sponsored by the highly respected Center for Security Policy. You can view the full presentation here:

The Talking Head Election Debate

CNN and the New York Times loved last night’s biased presidential debate. No wonder. Fox News is now just like them

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Americans, or at least roughly half of their country’s population, are looking for a miracle to drag their country back from the cliff edge after almost seven years of a president intent on destroying it.

They found out last night they’ll get no help saving the country from the media, and disappointing to many conservatives, including Fox News.

Fox is crowing today and patting itself on the back that last night’s debate, watched by 24 million people, shattered all records.
“In the estimation of many reporters who cover the political and media beats, Fox News was the winner of the first GOP debate. And with the just-released ratings we can confirm that. 

“A whopping 24 million watched the debate from 9 p.m. ET to just past 11 p.m. ET. FNC drew 7.9 million in the A25-54 demo.
“This is now the highest non-sports cable program of all time, the highest-rated cable news program of all time, and Fox News’s most-watched program ever.
“The 5 p.m. ET debate, withe the 7 lower-tier candidates did very well for Fox News too, drawing 6.1 million total viewers and 1.2 million in the demo, making it the third-highest primary debate ever on cable.”
Bully for Fox. 

But shouldn’t it have been bully for the GOP hopefuls the debate was touted to be about, and even more importantly, bully for long-suffering Americans hoping against hope for that elusive miracle?



Saturday, August 8, 2015

[EDITORIAL] Electing a president is not a game

Think about the acronym POTUS, President of the United States. Now imagine Donald Trump when you hear the phrase POTUS. Is that thought merely surprising or terrifying?
    Polls seem to indicate that at least some are willing to put the destiny of the United States, indeed of the entire world, into “the Donald’s” hands just because they are angry at the political system. Really consider Donald Trump and the kind of president he would be were he to actually be elected.
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    Who among us would feel comfortable giving this person complete control over the nuclear codes. POTUS is, after all, charged with the power to use them. At some point, Donald Trump becomes no joke.
    Now that the primary debate season is underway, Trump is the first choice of 19 percent of GOP primary voters. In reality, that is actually a fairly tiny number of actual persons, but they seem to believe in Trump as the one best able to explain the issues important to a president, and in his dismissal of the debates as just a waste of his time.
    Trump admitted that he has little experience in the exchange of ideas that debates entail. He sees as his strength his unwillingness to control his emotions and to engage only with bombast. In fact, it is those very qualities that have made Trump the centerpiece of these very early days in the presidential election process. 
    Electing a president is more than a game. Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be dismissed with the “you’re fired” catch phrase. Allies, like Germany’s Angela Merkel, are just as unlikely to be reassured by Trump’s assurances that he will “know just what to do.” Trump, however, seems to have convinced himself he is ready to run the country.
    Trump set the rules on his TV show, but he certainly will not be able to do so in the debates or the campaign months ahead. We will now see whether he can operate without his own rules. On Thursday night, Republicans opened the first part of their process for showcasing their candidates for the office of president. A Trump true to his outrageous form is preferable for entertainment purposes, but for the good of the country, a more controlled Trump is a better outcome.

    The debates are intended to give the public an opportunity to learn what choices we, as voters, will be offered. Up to the debates, Trump has certainly been clear about what kind of leader he will be. In the end, however, it is not the Donald but we, America’s voters, who must take responsibility for the momentous decision of who will be POTUS, the most powerful person on the planet.

CARLY HAS MEGYN’S BACK IN THROWDOWN WITH TRUMP

Carly Fiorina, the only female Republican presidential candidate, has spoken up in defense of Megyn Kelly, after the Fox News Channel anchor was the target of some combative criticism by Donald Trump.
As Breitbart News reported, Trump was unhappy with some of the questions Kelly asked him when she was moderating Thursday evening’s GOP Debate, and in an appearance on CNN Tonight Friday, said that Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Many interpreted this comment as inappropriate or even sexist.
Late Friday evening, Fiorina posted two tweets stating clearly her objection to Trump’s comments and support for Kelly, saying “Mr. Trump: There. Is. No. Excuse.” and that she stood with Kelly:
Mr. Trump: There. Is. No. Excuse.

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