[EDITORIAL] Donald Trump's unpresidential campaign: Our view

An important part of the modern presidency is the ability to deal coolly with tough questions from the White House press corps and diplomatically with other world leaders.

But in recent weeks, Donald Trump has been acting more like the angry, impulsive president portrayed byDwayne Johnson in Saturday Night Live's "The Rock Obama" skits. Trump has attacked two of the nation’s most popular and influential television journalists, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and Univision’sJorge Ramos. And he has lashed out against the governments of China and Mexico.

USA TODAY

Donald Trump is 'bold, provocative': Opposing view

Despite these outbursts — or perhaps because of them — Trump has risen to the top of polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, confounding pundits and deeply worrying the GOP establishment.

What his actions haven’t done, however, is position him to win the presidency, or to govern effectively were he somehow to get elected. In fact, they have done just the opposite by offending many of the people whose support he would need, needlessly provoking fights with important nations and generally coming off as unpresidential.

Are American voters really looking for a president who spends his evenings sending out nasty and petty tweets about journalists rather than, say, working on ways to defeat the Islamic State? That’s exactly what Trump did when Kelly — whom he criticized for her "unfair" questions during last month's first Republican debate —  returned from a summer vacation.

Are Americans really looking for a president whose security detail temporarily ejected a journalist (Ramos) who was attempting to ask about his unworkable immigration plan? Or a president who barred Des Moines Register reporters from some of his events because he didn't like an editorial? (The Register, like USA TODAY, is owned by Gannett.)

The answer is almost certainly not. America once had a president who became consumed with compiling enemies' lists and vilifying his opponents. His name was Richard Nixon.

The point is not that journalists such as Kelly and Ramos need any special sympathy or protection. It’s that a president, a nominee, even a front-runner for the nomination once the field has narrowed, has to do more in the face of hostile questioning than simply resort to name-calling.

Tough questions test a candidate's coolness under fire. They can provide more information about what's on voters' minds than a candidate might receive from sycophantic aides. They go with the territory.

If there was one lesson from President Obama’s 2012 re-election, it was that the next GOP candidate would have to do better with women and minority voters, particularly Hispanics. Trump's comments about Mexican immigrants have left him with an abysmal 14% approval rating among Hispanic voters, according to Gallup. And his ad hominem attacks against Kelly and a career full of chauvinistic comments about women are hardly likely to endear him to female voters.

Positions such as building a massive wall along the Mexican border or imposing a tariff on Chinese goods are designed to rile up frustrated, angry voters. They will not help enact actual policies or deliver results. The Islamic State isn't going stop its reign of terror because President Trump sends out some insulting tweets about its leaders.

Trump knows that in a splintered race for the GOP nomination, he can maintain a lead with as little as 20% support in the polls, which he can get to by saying outrageous things and by proposing impractical policies. But the further along he gets in the process, the more his antics will work against him.

Via: USA Today

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[COMMENTARY] Do what it takes to stop gun violence

Last Wednesday, my daughter Alison was brutally struck down in the prime of her life by a deranged gunman. Since that time I have stated in numerous interviews I have done with local, national and international media that I plan to make my life’s work trying to implement effective and reasonable safeguards against this happening again.

In recent years we have all witnessed similar tragedies unfold on TV — the shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona, the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut and churchgoers in South Carolina. We have to ask ourselves: “What do we need to do to stop this insanity?”

In my case, the answer is, “Whatever it takes.”

I plan to devote all of my strength and resources to seeing that some good comes from this evil. I am entering this arena with open eyes. I realize the magnitude of the force that opposes any sensible and reasonable safeguards on the purchase of devices that have a single purpose: to kill.

That means we must focus our attention on the legislators who are responsible for America’s criminally weak gun laws — laws that facilitate the access dangerous individuals have to firearms on a daily basis.

Legislators like Congressman Bob Goodlatte, who represents Roanoke, Virginia, where this atrocity took place on live television. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Goodlatte has had more than two years to bring up universal background check legislation and other gun violence prevention bills in his committee. He has refused to lead on this issue and has done absolutely nothing to help contain the carnage we are seeing.

On the other hand, Goodlatte had no problem cashing his check from the National Rifle Association during the 2014 election cycle. Shame on him.

But the issue of controlling gun violence is also being hampered by our elected officials on the state level. For example, Virginia state Sens. John Edwards, who represents Roanoke, where Alison and Adam Ward lived, and Bill Stanley, who represents the district where the shooting took place. Edwards’ district also contains the Virginia Tech campus, so he is fully aware of how easy it is for dangerously mentally ill individuals to acquire guns in Virginia. Yet he has been a constant opponent of sensible gun reforms like expanded background checks during his 15-plus years in the Virginia Senate, breaking ranks constantly with his colleagues in Virginia’s Democratic Party.

Via: Courier Post

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Obama’s gun law enforcement at work: sell 55 illegal guns, get one year probation

When Shannon Miles walked up behind Harris (TX) County Deputy Sheriff Darren Goforth and pumped 15 9mm rounds into him he did so with a weapon he was not allowed to possess. Via Houston Chronicle:

Court records reveal that Miles had a lengthy criminal history. His first reported arrest came in February 2005 for failing to identify and giving false information to police officers. He would be arrested six more times by 2009.

In July 2005 he was arrested by Harris County Sheriff’s deputies for criminal mischief. On Oct. 2, 2005, he was arrested again by Harris County and held for eight days for resisting “arrest, search or transport.”

In 2006 he was arrested for “discharging or displaying” a firearm. He pleaded guilty and was held for 10 days. On May 3, 2007, Jersey Village police arrested Miles for evading arrest. Nine days later he was arrested again for criminal trespassing by Harris County deputies. On Jan. 29, 2009, Miles was arrested for preventing or obstructing officers duties by using force against the officer.

In addition he had been declared mentally incompetent for committing a violent assault:

A man charged with murder in the ambush of a suburban Houston sheriff’s deputy had a history of mental illness and was once declared mentally incompetent, according to authorities and his former attorney.

…

Miles was found to be mentally incompetent in October 2012 and he was sent to North Texas State Hospital in Vernon, Texas.

How does this happen? How does someone who is barred from possessing a firearm suddenly get one? Via the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel we get some insight:

In giving probation with no jail time to a Milwaukee man charged with 55 counts of buying firearms with fake identification and dealing them without a license, a federal judge delivered a message:

…

Dontray Mills, 24, purchased a total of 27 firearms, mostly handguns, between December 2012 and April 2014 and pleaded guilty to one of the charges on April 22, 2014, after an ATF investigation. As a result of the conviction, Mills will never again be able to buy firearms legally.

On Wednesday, he was sentenced. As part of the plea bargain, prosecutors agreed with the one year of probation.

Via: Red State

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Could This Be the Scandal That Finally Sinks Hillary Clinton?

Yeah, I know.

Those of us who have been watching politics for the last quarter of a century have asked this question time and again, as the Clintons wriggled out of a dozen different kinds of shady behavior. And each time we think something’s finally going to take them down, they skate. It’s kind of like being a Cubs fan: maybe next year.

But there are five reasons why Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal could finally be the one.

1) It’s not about Bill.

People like Bill Clinton. I don’t really know why; he’s always struck me as a smarmy used car salesmen. But people actually do buy used cars from questionable characters, and the general public somehow likes Bill Clinton and wants to cut him some slack. Sometimes there’s just no accounting for these things.

But Hillary is not Bill. She can’t do that thing where he responds to a scandal with finger-wagging outrage at the unjust accusations one moment, and humble, lip-biting contrition the next, and people buy it. She seems cold and distant, and her lame attempts to laugh off the scandal as a non-issue don’t make her seem buoyantly confident. They just make her seem contemptuous and out of touch.

There are plenty of people—Democratic Party activists, mostly—who have a vested interest in making excuses for Hillary. But she doesn’t have the kind of mysterious charisma that gets her a free pass with the general public.

2) It’s about a real issue.

There were some real issues behind the previous scandals, as we wasted a lot of time explaining to anyone who would listen, which wasn’t many people. But the most famous issue on which the Clintons skated—Bill’s dalliance with a White House intern—seemed like it was all about his personal sex life, not matters of state. So who cared, really?

This scandal is about national security. It’s about Hillary Clinton casually, recklessly mishandling something that was central to her job as Secretary of State: protecting the secrets of the United States. That’s why the latest revelation is so important: that her unsecure homebrew e-mail server was not merely the passive recipient of classified information sent to her by others, but that she used it to 766 Comments containing classified material.

3) It’s about something concrete.

The biggest Clinton scandal by far is the way the family cashed in after Bill left office, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in speaking fees and consultancies, far beyond the actual value of any work they provided—money that is obviously being laid down in an attempt to secure access and favors from the Clinton family. And all of that money has been washing around between Bill and Hillary and their foundation, which seems to operate mostly as a family slush fund.

But the thing about influence peddling is that it’s vague and hard to pin down. That’s why people do it. Everybody knows the rules of the game: give money and you get access, you get an ear eager to hear your concerns—but there is never any explicit quid pro quo, no smoking gun that can send anybody to jail. So critics are left pointing to overall patterns that seem suspicious, but it can all just be brushed off as coincidence.

The e-mail scandal is specific and concrete. It’s about a server and a hard drive. It’s about a specific classified message sent at a particular time from a particular e-mail account. It’s a lot harder to explain away.

4) It’s something people have been prosecuted for.

It’s hard to turn back once you’ve made a witch hunt out of mishandling classified information. Too many people have been prosecuted for that under this administration. Most famously, prosecutors went after General David Petraeus for keeping physical notebooks with classified information in his home—which is actually more difficult for our enemies to steal than the contents of a server, which can be hacked remotely. While you might be able to get someone to construct an argumentabout how that case is totally different from this one, it’s a distinction that isn’t going to hold up.

5) It turns Hillary’s big accomplishment into a big liability.

Secretary of State is the only executive office Hillary Clinton has ever held. When she lost the Democratic primary in 2008, this was the position she wanted as her stepping stone back to the presidency. It was an office in which she could rack up experience doing something that seems presidential—dealing with foreign policy—without having to take responsibility for whatever Obama messed up in domestic policy.

This scandal takes the one big thing Hillary Clinton has done in the past ten years to demonstrate her credentials to run for president, and it turns that one big asset into a big liability. It turns her tenure at the State Department into something she cannot mention without raising questions about all the classified information she potentially laid bare to Russian and Chinese hackers.

When it comes to actual prosecution, the Clintons are masters at getting off on a technicality, claiming that they didn’t really violate the strict letter of the law because it all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. And you know they can afford flesh-eating lawyers who will work every angle for them if this goes to court.

But we also know just how ambitious the Clintons are. We know that the real punishment for them isn’t prosecution or prison. It is being denied access to power. All this scandal really has to do is to make Hillary Clinton look unfit to be commander-in-chief.

After all, nobody can keep getting away with this stuff. It’s all got to catch up with them some time.

Doesn’t it?

Follow Robert on Twitter.

Via: The Federalist

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Federal Court: Illegal Immigrant And Convicted Felon Can’t Be Deported Because He’s Transgender

A federal appeals court has ruled that an illegal immigrant and convicted felon can’t be deported back to Mexico because he identifies as a transgender woman, which leaves him vulnerable to torture back in his home country.

Edin Carey Avendano-Hernandez was born male in Mexico, and claims to have been raped by his brothers and suffered other torments. In 2000, he illegally entered the U.S. and took up residence in Fresno, California. Avendano-Hernandez also started taking female hormones and began living openly as a woman in 2005. In 2006, he committed two separate drunk driving offenses, the second of which injured two people and resulted in a felony conviction. After serving a year in jail, he was deported back to Mexico in 2007.

Back in Mexico, Avendano-Hernandez claims to have been subjected to more harassment from family and neighbors and to have been raped by members of the Mexican army. He illegally entered the U.S. again and, after being arrested, petitioned for sanctuary in the U.S. under the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), arguing that deporting him would violate the CAT because he would more likely than not experience torture at the hands of Mexican authorities.

An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) both rejected Avendano-Hernandez’s arguments on the grounds that he had committed a serious crime (felony drunk driving) and was not likely to face official torture.

Now, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals says Avendano-Hernandez must be allowed to stay in the U.S., because he “more likely than not” will be tortured if returned to Mexico.

Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, an Obama appointee, chastised immigration officials for improperly handling Avandano-Hernandez’s gender identity.

“The [judge] failed to recognize the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation, refusing to allow the use of female pronouns because she considered Avendano-Hernandez to be ‘still male,’ even though Avendano-Hernandez dresses as a woman, takes female hormones, and has identified as woman for over a decade,” Nguyen’s decision says. “Although the BIA correctly used female pronouns for Avendano-Hernandez, it wrongly adopted the [judge’s] analysis, which conflated transgender identity and sexual orientation. The BIA also erred in assuming that recent anti-discrimination laws in Mexico have made life safer for transgender individuals while ignoring significant record evidence of violence targeting them.”

Nguyen cites the repeated sexual abuse Avendano-Hernandez claims to have endured as evidence of de facto torture, and furthermore concludes that these actions were not crimes committed by individuals but were instead endorsed by the Mexican government.

Via: The Daily Caller

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EXCLUSIVE: STATE DEPARTMENT WAITED TWO WEEKS TO BARELY COOPERATE WITH HILLARY EMAIL INVESTIGATION

The State Department waited almost two weeks to barely comply with a judge’s order that it cooperate with the FBI in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email use.

In a September 2 letter obtained by Breitbart News, State Department legal adviser Mary McLeod wrote to FBI general counsel James Baker asking FBI investigators to hand over any information that might be relevant to the nonprofit group Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department. McLeod only asked for information that is not already in the State Department’s possession.

Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the State Department to cooperate two weeks ago. McLeod’s one-page letter, signed a full thirteen days after Sullivan’s order, fulfills the absolute minimum level of cooperation mandated by Sullivan’s order. The State Department did not volunteer to help FBI investigators, but merely to send over any new documents before September 14, when the State Department’s status report about its cooperation in the case is due to Sullivan.

Judicial Watch is not impressed.

“It is jaw-dropping that the Obama State Department would wait 13 days to comply with an urgent August 20 federal court order requiring the State Department to coordinate with the Justice Department and FBI about making sure that documents from the seized Clinton email records are searched and produced in our FOIA litigation,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement provided to Breitbart News.

“The bare-bones September 2 letter itself shows that the Obama administration has zero interest in quickly recovering, searching and producing records it seized from Mrs. Clinton. The Obama administration continues to protect Hillary Clinton by cover-up, delay, and inaction.

Via: Breitbart

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[VIDEO] Police may have video of killers of Illinois cop

Police hunting the killers of an Illinois cop may have caught a break when a resident in the area of the murder turned over security footage that could have captured the individuals responsible.

George Filenko, commander of the Lake County Major Task Force, said during a Thursday afternoon press conference that a “private resident” turned over “home video security footage” Wednesday night that allegedly showed “individuals” in the area where Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz was shot and killed Tuesday morning.

The suspects have been described only in vague terms so far as a black male and two white males. That description is based on what Gliniewicz radioed to his dispatcher before he was killed.

Filenko twice described the development as “significant,” and said the footage had been turned over to the Department of Homeland Security.

“Homeland Security has got advanced equipment,” Filenko said. “This video in particular is on a particular type of hard drive that they have the technology to retrieve it off of.”

Filenko said, in his experience, some home security systems are more advanced than those employed by businesses.

“Some of those are very sophisticated, they’re high-definition security systems,” he said.

While it was initially reported that Gliniewicz was found stripped of his gun, and possibly his pepper spray and police radio, Filenko said Gliniewicz’s gun had been “recovered” and didn’t believe there was now any equipment missing from the scene. While he wouldn’t describe the suspects as “armed,” he still cautioned the public to be wary if they believe they’ve spotted any of them.

“I would consider anybody who murdered a police officer as being extremely dangerous,” said Filenko, who added that there's a "good probability" the suspects are "still somewhere in the area."

Filenko told CNN on Wednesday night that authorities believed the suspects may have been familiar with the area where they encountered and ultimately murdered Gliniewicz.

Via: Fox News

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Obama Pushes Solar Power--In Arctic Town That Sees Little Sun in Winter

(CNSNews.com) – President Obama promoted solar energy to residents of Kotzebue, an Alaskan town located 26 miles north of the Arctic Circle that gets less than six hours of sunlight for 34 days in early December through early January.

“I know you guys have started putting up solar panels and wind turbines around Kotzebue. And because energy costs are pretty severe up here, for remote Alaskan communities, one of the biggest problems is high energy costs,” the president said in a speech he delivered during a three-day tour of the state in which he stressed the dangers of climate change.

“One of the reasons I came up here is to really focus on what is probably the biggest challenge our planet faces. If there’s one thing that threatens opportunity and prosperity for everybody, wherever we live, it’s the threat of a changing climate,” said Obama, the first president to venture north of the Arctic Circle.

“We are the number-one producer of oil and gas. But we’re transitioning away from energy that creates the carbon that’s warming the planet and threatening our health and our environment, and we’re going all in on clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar. And Alaska has the natural resources to be a global leader in this effort,” the president said. 

“So we’re going to deploy more new clean-energy projects on Native lands, and that’s going to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, promote new jobs and new growth in your communities,” he added.

Kotzebue – a town of about 3,000 residents that bills itself as the “Gateway to the Arctic” – is one of 15 major communities in Alaska’s Far North Region that are located north of the Arctic Circle, according to TravelAlaska.com, the state’s official tourism agency.

The Arctic Circle is the boundary for the “midnight sun”, a phenomenon caused by the tilt in the Earth’s axis in which the sun does not set in the summer or conversely rise in the winter.

On December 22, the winter solstice, the sun rises in Kotzebue at 10:12 am and sets at 3:42 pm – for a total of just five and a half hours of sunlight.  During the 34 days between December 3rd and January 6th, Kotzebue’s days are less than six hours long.

In Barrow, the northernmost town in Alaska which is located 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle, there are 67 winter days in which the sun does not shine at all, according to Alaska.org.

Related: Report: Danger of Government-Created Solar Bubble Bursting

Related: Despite $39B in Annual Gov't. Subsidies, Solar Produced 0.5% of Electricity in US

Via: CNS News

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It Is Time to Put the Limit Back in Limited Government

I own a small farm, a berry patch, to be exact, and for the particular type of berry that I grow it is much more profitable to market them as organic.  I grow everything organically out of choice.  However, to market anything as organic the operation must be certified by the government.

So, of course I must spend hours filling out and filling out and filling out forms.  Of course there are fees, filing fees, inspection fees and certification fees.  Then there is the time spent with the inspector at the kitchen table talking, not long, only a few hours out of a busy day.  If you add up the fees and add in a reasonable estimate of the time, I ended up spending more to become certified than I made selling my “Organic” berries.

I put the word organic in quotation marks not because they aren’t organic.  I do it because there is no way the inspector could actually know whether they are or not.  He didn’t test the soil.  He didn’t test the plants.  He didn’t test the berries.  He went exclusively by what I told him, what I documented in my field logs, and in the forms I filed.

We actually do grow everything organically, and as I said we do that because of our own desire to grow, eat, and market chemical free food, not because the government tells us we have to do so.  However, the process the government follows not only encourages fraud, it makes it possible.  Does it seem credible that every farmer everywhere at all times is honest?  Does it seem credible that somewhere there may be a farmer who farms using every chemical available and then just lies about it?  In the end “Organic” means all the proper forms have been filed, all the fees paid, and the farmer told the inspector what he needed to hear.

Here we have one more victory for government regulations that cost the farmer (read consumer) time and money. 

When regulation becomes strangulation economies stumble over the government instituted by the social contract between those governed and those governing.  When regulations carry the force of law, when they read like telephone books written in insurance language held upside down, when they multiply like mosquitoes in a swamp, people begin to regard them and the governance they represent as a hindrance instead of a help.  Have we reached the point where everyone is guilty and the government merely needs to decide when to pick us up?

In the Declaration of Independence the Founders first told us what beliefs their actions were based upon, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Via: Canada Free Press

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Hillary May Just Be Dumb

Hillary is losing her party's presidential nomination to a man who is not even a Democrat and to another man who has not yet entered the race.  How can a candidate who began with such an enormous edge that twelve months ago she was deemed "inevitable" have fallen so far?  The usual explanation is that the Clintons are too secretive, too paranoid, and too much like lawyers.

Consider another possibility: Hillary may be dumb.  We presume otherwise because she went to Ivy League schools and because she belonged to a prominent Little Rock law firm and because she has held a couple of important offices since her husband left the White House.  But we all know the real source of her success: she has been Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton for forty years.

Hillary's undergraduate degree was in political science, a major that requires nothing more of a student than slavish aping of the radical leftist positions of one's professors.  Her admission to Yale Law School was during the heyday of affirmative action, when schools were desperate to find young women to balance the gender quotas.

The jobs Hillary had out of law school were purely ideological positions, first as a staff attorney for the so-called "Children's Defense Fund" and as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Watergate.  Hillary then tried to become a lawyer in the District of Columbia and took the bar exam for that jurisdiction.  She failed, despite the fact that two thirds of those who took the exam passed.  Soon thereafter, Hillary accepted Bill's wedding proposal and moved to Arkansas.

Her first "real" job was with the Rose Law Firm, but did she "earn" that job the way most of us would have?  Well, Hillary was hired a couple of months after her husband was sworn in as Arkansas attorney general.  That continued to be where Hillary worked as her husband was elected again and again as governor of Arkansas. 

Via: American Thinker

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Man Threatens to Kill 'White People' in 'Purge'-Inspired Tweet: PD

A Maryland man is custody after police say he threatened to kill residents in the town of La Plata in a social media post.

Police say 20-year-old Carlos Anthony Hollins posted the threat on Twitter. According to the La Plata Police Department, the tweet read, “IM NOT GONNA STAND FOR THIS NO. MORE. TONIGHT WE PURGE! KILL ALL THE WHITE PPL IN THE TOWN OF LA PLATA.” The tweet also included the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.

• Child Survives Fall From Fifth-Floor Window in Fairfax Co.

"Purge" is a reference to the "The Purge" series. Both the original film and its 2014 sequel depict a night in which crime is legal for 12 hours without any consequences.

Authorities were able to identify Hollins as their suspect and took him into custody. He has been charged with threats of mass violence. 

• UPDATEDKing Cobra on the Loose After Escaping Home in Orlando

The La Plata Police Department says they have added extra officers to patrol in an effort to protect the public. 

Via: NBC Washington

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[VIDEO] 'I have signed the pledge!' Trump rules out a third-party run as he casts his lot with Republicans following talks with party boss

Donald Trump ruled out a third-party run for president on Thursday, announcing in the lobby of his landmark Trump Tower in New York that 'I will be totally pledging my allegiance to the Republican Party and to the conservative principles for which it stands.'

'I have signed the pledge,' he told journalists and supporters. 

Trump's press conference followed an afternoon meeting with Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. 

His campaign announced the event after the RNC began circulating a pledge to its 2016 presidential candidates that would commit them to supporting the party's eventual 2016 nominee.

It also requires them to forgo a third-party bid if they should come up short in the party primary races. 

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'I SIGNED THE PLEDGE!': Trump told supporters and journalists on Thursday that he's 100 per cent committed to runing for president as a Republican

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TOUCHÉ: Jeb Bush fired back at The Donald with a hand-scrawled 'pledge' of his own on Twitter: 'Voted Republican since 1972'

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RALLY: The Trump campaign gathered supporters at Trump Tower on Thursday for the announcement

Priebus, the real estate tycoon said Thursday, 'has been extremely fair. The RNC has been fair.'

'I wanted fairness,' Trump explained. 'I don't have to be treated any differently from anybody else. I just wanted fairness from the Republican Party.'

One of Trump's rivals lobbed a rhetorial hand grenade at him Thursday afternoon. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tweeted a photo of his own 'pledge,' a hand-scrawled and signed note saying he had 'voted Republican since 1972.'

A Bush aide said Thursday that Jeb scribbled the note while taking in news of the Trump event at a Dunkin' Donuts in Meredith, New Hampshire.

Bush has been critical of Trump for a personal history that included an affinity with the Democratic Party and its policy positions. 

Trump said in response to a reporter's question that he wasn't promised anything in exchange for his pledge to the RNC.

'Absolutely nothing,' he said, 'other than the assurance that I would be treated fairly.'

'We don't want anything,' he said he told Priebus.

Trump assured voters that he won't break his word. 

'I have no intention of changing my mind,' he said, adding later that 'I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.'

A Trump spokesman confirmed the meeting with Priebus eirlier in the day but wouldn't tip his hand to indicate whether the billionaire would rule out an independent run.

Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told Politico, 'I don’t think you can "expect" ANYTHING from Mr. Trump.' 

Via: Daily Mail

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Judge Orders Kentucky Clerk to Jail for Refusing to Issue Same-Sex Marriage Licenses

A federal judge in Kentucky has ordered Rowan County clerk Kim Davis to jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses, including to same-sex couples.

Davis, who was found in contempt of court by U.S. District Judge David Bunning, has been the center of controversy recently for citing her religious beliefs in refusing issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples — or any couples, for that matter — after the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states.

David Moore and David Ermold, two Kentuckians who went viral in July for posting a video of Davis refusing to issue them a marriage license, have been denied a license four times. The Supreme Court on Monday denied Davis’ injunction request for an exemption to the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Davis, an elected official, was summoned to court on Tuesday.

Via: Mediaite

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